Why it’s Time to Rethink Goal Setting
What happens when you publish 100 articles in 100 days (minus weekends, of course)? Tangibly: 87,959 words, 250,000 page views and 6,000 new newsletter subscribers. And years later, the unexpected ripple effect: a book deal. This is the experience of Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who ran this experiment in 2019 and whose first book, Tiny Experiments, will be out in March. Her theory is that chasing ultra-specific career or financial goals stops us exploring life’s side quests along the way, where more fulfilling, but unforeseen, outcomes could emerge. Here, she explains how to use experiments — instead of rigid KPIs or OKRs — to find your path.
If goals depend on certainty, when life is anything but...
“We have no idea what the world is going to look like tomorrow or in one month, but we design our goals based on those assumptions. In today’s world, with all its uncertainty, you cannot be successful if you cling on to the idea of defining a specific outcome you want in advance. When a scientist wants to make progress, they have no idea where they are going. They start from a hypothesis, design an experiment to test it and, based on the result they get, design their next experiment. They’re making progress, but it’s a series of cycles instead of a straight line.”
...then focusing on the process, not the outcome, can unlock unexpected opportunities.
“You find yourself in this giant playground where you don’t know where you’ll go or who you’ll become — and that means you can become anyone and go anywhere. For people who feel they are not necessarily going to be successful if they don’t [achieve] a very specific outcome, I would argue that you are probably going to be more successful if you don’t have that specific outcome [in mind], because then even bigger things can happen — things you haven’t even imagined. In my case, I began experimenting with a weekly newsletter and that experiment grew into the experiment of writing a book.”
SAMPLE EXPERIMENT
Observation: I struggle to come up with new ideas
Question: How can I boost my creativity when I’m feeling stuck?
Hypothesis: Scheduling time for a completely unrelated activity, like drawing or going for a walk, might create space for fresh ideas.
Tiny Experiments is out now.