The Experimental Mindset

Have we become too goal-centred? As a culture?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff thinks so.

A former executive in Google’s “digital health” department, Ms. Le Cunff couldn’t help noticing that some of the most goal-driven people she knew didn’t seem particularly happy – even after they’d achieved their goals. Something about the formula was faulty. Her curiosity finally got the better of her, and she quit and retrained as a neuroscientist, eventually penning the book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

So, chasing goals is bad? Not always, iho. The strategy works great when there’s an explicitly defined outcome and a clear path to get there. But many of the things that make for a rich life don’t lend themselves to approach. Often the better tack is to cultivate what she calls the “experimental mindset.” Where you’re not thinking about metrics at all. There’s no pass/fail, or 10,000-steps-or-bust. There’s not even a “done” at the end of it. There’s just learning, and growth. Growth is really what it’s all about, Alfie. The experimental mindset is a lens you can apply to every dimension of your life – your work, your relationships, your studies. Is this person/place/thing enlarging or diminishing me? If the former, lean in; if the latter, back off. What emerges is what she calls “growth loops.” Even though you don’t quite know where this thing is leading, you will grow through each cycle of experimentation. After each mini-experiment, the lessons learned “help you iterate through life, rather than sticking to a broken plan.”

Of course this made me think about the Big Day project and the way it has evolved over the years.

The showpiece Big Day (still in the shop window) seems like a goal-driven pursuit if ever there was one: bicycling from Vancouver to Seattle in a single day. But thinking about it now, Seattle was a destination, I knew I was shooting for, but I never articulated that, nor would the outing have been a failure if I didn’t make it. The challenge was simply to choose some mode of human locomotion and see how far you get in 24 hours – or before you gas out, whichever comes first. It was about how it feels to do that, and how it feels to have done that. The goggles of the experimental mindset were firmly in place.

A decade later, they still are. As I try stuff, I think, What’s working here? What about this is giving me energy? What’s holding my attention (i.e. suppressing my ADD tendencies)? People tell me the Big Days they’ve attempted likewise deliver the same not-so-quantifiable payoffs. It could be that the mini-experiment unlocks some buried urge to pursue this thing as a hobby; or maybe the one kick at the can was enough. I can imagine that the long-planned Big Unicycle Day will go that way. If I can learn to ride a unicycle in a day (big if), there’ll very likely be at least a little bit of unicycling in my future. If I can’t, there almost certainly won’t be. This is useful information to have. At the end of your one-day trial, you kind of know if there’s something there.

So really, Big Days aren’t so much goal-driven as goal-investigating. Reminds of how the lion-tracker Boyd Varty put it: “I don’t know where I’m going but I know exactly how to get there.”

Or as Paul McCartney used to say, “You strum a chord and see where it takes you.”

(photo: YY Teoh, for Unsplash)