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 age of forty.”
We are intrigued by early success stories because they are unusual. “But the most reliable way to be successful is to try, fail, learn, and try again,” Anne-Laure writes.
“That’s why so many successful startups and scientific inventions are created by people in their forties and older: they’ve put in more reps–they went through more trials to learn from their mistakes.”
2: Yesterday, we looked at the power of making a pact: “I will [action] for [duration].”
One of the reasons that pacts are so effective is that we commit to doing something for a period of time.
“We need enough trials to obtain results we can trust,” Anne-Laure explains. We don’t know if we “would like to live in a city by spending one afternoon there, and we cannot know whether people enjoy our writing by publishing just one essay.
“A good experiment,” she observes, “requires multiple trials to confirm that the results are not just due to chance.”
With creativity, the “serial-order effect” suggests that later iterations will likely be better than earlier ones. This tendency is considered “one of the oldest and most robust findings in modern creativity work,” she observes.
“Put simply, it pays off to iterate,” Anne-Lauren notes. This effect applies to both short-term tasks and activities we undertake throughout our lifetime.
“How many repetitions do we need to benefit from the serial-order effect? Anne-Laure asks. Certainly, the more iterations we do, the more data we will have. We “are unlikely to gain life-changing insights in a couple of days,” she writes.
As John Maxwell once said: “The more we do, the more we fail. The more we fail, the more we learn. The more we learn, the better we get.”
Yet, Anne-Laure suggests: Think tiny.
“What’s the smallest version of this experiment that we can run?” she asks. Because “it’s easy to maintain our pact on your best days, but think instead of your worst days. “For instance, actor and writer Henri Brugere first committed to publishing 250 words of scriptwriting a day. Only once he’d gained confidence in the process did he expand his pact to include videos of himself reading the scripts.”
If we are trying something for the very first time, “a ten-day pact is a good starting point,” Anne-Laure suggests. “This provides enough time to start noticing patterns while not being overly intimidating. If it is something we have experimented with previously, then a one-month pact allows us to build on that familiarity.
“Finally, for activities that are already part of our life but which we wish to engage in more regularly, a three-month pact (or 100 days) helps reinforce and amplify patterns so we can collect better quality data to guide our journey.”
3: “When ‘s scented candles business failed, he learned the hard way that he didn’t enjoy running numbers and balance sheets,” Anne-Laure Le Cunff writes.
During this experience, multiple people praised his ability to think creatively.
So Corin decided to explore his artistic side through a small experiment. He made a pact: “I said, let me paint twenty paintings without trying to create a masterpiece.”
Corin’s “first paintings were far from perfect,” she notes, “but he remained committed to his daily practice, using online tutorials to refine each version.”
“I was just looking for mistakes to learn from,” he recalls. “It came from a place of no ego and the confidence that I would get better over time.”
Three weeks into his experiment, he organized an event where he sold five paintings. “Today his little gallery in Barcelona is a thriving business,” Anne-Laure writes, “with art aficionados visiting from all around the world.”
Corin still paints every day, many times in public from his gallery or at live events around the city.
“Once you have this positive momentum,” he says, “it doesn’t feel like work.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: How can I embrace small, consistent experiments to build momentum and improve over time?
Action: Commit to a small, manageable pact for a new or ongoing project—such as a 10-day or 30-day challenge—and track my progress to learn and iterate.
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