Tiny Experiments

June 16, 2025

Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.

~ Mae Jemison, American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut

Commit to Curiosity

1. Why Goal Setting is Broken

We were all born with this sense of adventure. It's in children's nature to experiment and explore the unknown.
If everything goes well, we get hired to provide answers based on our expertise- not questions based on our curiosity. We begin caring about what people think of us and we project and image of confidence, focusing on self-packaging over self-improvement.

No goals, just vibes ~ Amil Niazi

Linear goals stimulate fear.
Linear goals encourage toxic productivity. Many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.
Linear goals breed competition and isolation. Linear goals promote an individualistic mentality that can make us view potentioal collaborators as competitors.
Our goals are often not our own; we borrow them from peers, celebrities, and what we imagine society expects from us.

BETWEEN STIMULUS AND RESPONSE

For uncertain situations, instead of Responding with Discomfort, fear and helplessness choose to Respond with Delight, calm and curiosity.
The more we flex our curiosity muscle, the more uncertainity transforms from something to escape to somewhere to explore.

2. Escaping the Tyranny of Purpose

THE SHACKLES OF COGNITIVE SCRIPTS

As we mature we progressively narrow the scope and variety of our lives. Of all the interests we might pursue, we settle on a few. Of all the the people with whom we might associate, we select a small number. We become caught in a web of fixed relationships. We develop set ways of ding things. ~ John W. Gardner

Are you following your past or discovering your path?
Are you following the crowd or discovering your tribe?
Are you following your passion or discovering your cusiosity?

AN ANTHROPLOGY OF YOUR LIFE

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those who brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds ~ John Maynard Keynes

Field notes:

Insights: Your moments of curiosity, random thoughts, new ideas, and questions that spark your interest. 8 Energy: What gives or drains your energy ?

Mood: Emotions during or after an experience.
Encounters
Do you feel yearning toward something different?
Turn questions into hypotheses, then design experiments around it:

3. A Pact to Turn Doubts into Experiments

DESIGNING A TINY EXPERIMENT

Purposeful: When each experiment is purposeful, there is not need for a grand life purpose.
Actionable: A good experiment is based on actions you can reliably perform.
Continuous: Repeated trials are an essential feature of experiments
Trackable:

4. A Deeper Sense of Time

Your Life in Weeks - Tim Urban

Seeking the approval of parents or professors can turn into seeking the approval of peers through overscheduling, workaholism, and busy bragging--or regularly boasting about one's busyness.
Within that quantitative frame, productivity is seen as a virtue and curiosity as a distraction.
Deep down, we know this -- that time is elastic, that some moments last for what seems like an eternity while others come and go in the blink of an eye.

Whenever you see me somewhere succeeding in one area of my life, that almost certainly means that I am failing in another area of my life. ~ Shonda Rhimes

Any attempt to avoid mistakes altogether would be fruitless.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass. It's about learning to dance in the rain. ~ Vivian Greene