1: Alexander Kallaway was just another high school student growing up in Russia.
“He had a quiet life, but the world called to him,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in her book Tiny Experiments.
“What new cultures and customs might he discover if he left this familiar environment?” he wondered. “What skills could he gain by learning from different perspectives?”
So, he figured out how to attend a Japanese university. Next up was business school in Canada. Afterward, he lived in Toronto and began a career in digital marketing.
“Work was going great, but he soon noticed he was missing a core entrepreneurial skill,” Anne-Laure notes. “If he wanted to collaborate with developers, he needed to learn how to code.”
Alex already had student debt, so getting another degree was not an option.
So, he made a decision to teach himself using free online resources.
But he had competing commitments. He had a demanding job and a fun social life.
What if he created an accountability group? Alexander wondered.
So, he “simply committed to showing up and hosting study sessions at local coffee shops,” Anne-Laure writes.
Before long, the group grew in size. There wasn’t a coffee shop big enough, so they began meeting at a co-working space. “What started as a small study group became one of the largest communities of developers in Canada,” she notes.
In time, Alex was offered his first developer position.
“At that point, it would have been easy for him to take things for granted,” Anne-Laure writes. “He had an enjoyable job, made good money, and knew a lot of interesting people.”
2: But Alex sensed his progress was languishing.
Then, he had another idea: “What if he made a public oath to devote at least an hour to coding every day for the next three months—and why not round it up to a hundred days?” she writes.
“This public oath was a pact: a pledge to engage in a particular activity for a predetermined period of time,” Anne-Laure explains. “The #100DaysOfCode challenge, as he came to name it, would serve as a commitment device, encouraging Alexander to code each day after work, even when he’d rather watch TV.”
And that’s what he did.
“By the time the 100 days were over,” she writes, “he had not only become a better coder but had inspired many others to commit to their own challenge.”
Today, Alex is at the heart of a worldwide community of thousands of developers, sharing in a journey of learning and development.
3: So far this week, we’ve explored how to unlearn our cognitive scripts, collect data on our lives, and generate experiments to test.
“The final step,” Anne-Laure suggests, “is to turn our hypothesis into a pact—an actionable commitment we will fulfill for a set period of time.
“A pact is a simple and repeatable activity that will inevitably bring us closer to achieving our authentic ambitions, regardless of the actual result of each trial.”
Here are the components of a pact:
I will [action] for [duration].
A pact “is the fundamental building block of personal experimentation,” she explains, “a self-invitation to try something new and learn from the experience. It’s a call to escape inertia and live in forward motion.”
Why are pacts so effective?
Because they focus “on outputs (e.g., ‘publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks’),” she explains, “rather than your outcomes (e.g., ‘get 5,000 newsletter subscribers in 25 weeks’).”
Our job is simply to get started and show up. And when we show up, we transform our lives into a giant laboratory, one experiment, one pact at a time.
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: What commitment could I make—big or small—that would move me closer to my authentic ambitions if I simply showed up every day?
Action: Create my own pact by choosing one meaningful activity and committing to do it daily for a set period, focusing on the process rather than the outcome.
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