It was September 2022.  Eliud Kipchoge set a new all-time world record for the marathon in Berlin.

“What many people do not know about one of the fastest marathoners in history is his habit of keeping a detailed diary,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

“This diary is not just a log of his physical training,” Anne-Laure notes, “it also … continue reading

1: What are our assumptions about time?

“The ancient Greeks had not one but two words to speak of time,”  Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

The Greek word Chronos refers to quantity.

“This is largely how most of us in the modern world relate to time,” Anne-Laure writes. “It is the time of clocks and calendars, of productivity tools … continue reading

1: Startup success is often associated with young entrepreneurs.

The data says otherwise: “The odds of a founder in their fifties reaching a successful exit are almost double those of a founder in their thirties,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

“Similar patterns apply to creative breakthroughs in science,” she notes.  “The peak productivity of a scientist occurs around the … continue reading

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. … continue reading

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

1: If self-renewal is our goal, the biggest challenge isn’t a lack of time or money.  It’s figuring out where to begin,  Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments.

We may ask: “Should I … continue reading

“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 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 doing things.” –John W. Gardner

1: Imagine we are going to visit our doctor.

We already … continue reading

1: Our brains are uncomfortable with the in-betweens.

“Imagine, for a moment, that we are traveling alone on a long-leg airline flight with no onboard Wi-Fi,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes in Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

“There we are at 30,000 feet, suspended in the sky, transitioning from one place to another, neither here nor there,” she writes. “The places and people who normally … continue reading