Summary

Introduction: The Crisis of Cognitive Overload and the Maximized Brain

In our rapidly evolving modern world, many individuals experience profound cognitive overload. This phenomenon is driven by two primary factors: a desperate urge to hoard information to make sense of rapid societal changes, and a relentless pressure to maintain extreme levels of productivity to keep pace with these changes. To cope, we construct elaborate systems, stick rigidly to exhausting routines, and manage endless task lists—often at the expense of our mental health.

Compounding this stress is the digital "leaderboard" of social media, which fosters perpetual self-comparison. We constantly question whether we are fast, productive, or ambitious enough. This state of mind births what neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff terms the Maximized Brain: the subconscious belief that any goal we pursue must be executed in its largest, most ambitious form. For example:

• Instead of simply exercising, we commit to going to the gym every single day.

• Instead of writing a simple daily page, we resolve to write a novel.

• Instead of testing a creative side project, we try to build a high-growth startup.

This maximalist approach is highly fragile. It routinely leads to overwhelm, emotional burnout, and eventual abandonment because the friction of the goal is simply too immense for our primitive brains, which have not evolved since prehistoric times.

The Four-Quadrant Mindset Matrix

Mindsets act as the default filters through which we view the world, subconsciously driving our choices, relationships, and emotions. By mapping the two core drivers of personal growth—Curiosity and Ambition—on a coordinate matrix, Le Cunff identifies three restrictive subconscious mindsets and one empowering alternative:

• The Cynical Mindset (Low Curiosity, Low Ambition): Driven by a constant state of survival, individuals in this mindset have lost interest in exploration or self-improvement. They frequently engage in self-soothing or avoidant behaviors like "doom scrolling," consuming negative news cycles, and debating these current events endlessly with others while mocking earnest or curious individuals.

• The Escapist Mindset (High Curiosity, Low Ambition): These individuals retain a strong sense of wonder but have entirely abandoned their personal or professional ambitions to dodge the weight of responsibility. This mindset manifests as seeking temporary relief through retail therapy, binge-watching, or planning elaborate fantasy vacations instead of taking active steps to improve their daily lives.

• The Perfectionist Mindset (Low Curiosity, High Ambition): Characterized by self-coercion, toxic productivity, and overwork, perfectionists try to conquer life's inherent uncertainty through sheer labor. They are entirely driven by fixed outcomes, falsely believing that happiness is a milestone deferred until a specific goal is conquered.

• The Experimental Mindset (High Curiosity, High Ambition): This is the ideal alternative. In this state, uncertainty is viewed not as a threat, but as an open invitation to learn, play, and grow. Failure is reframed from a personal deficit into a valuable objective data point.

Because these mindsets are highly fluid and context-dependent rather than static personality traits, individuals can intentionally transition toward the Experimental Mindset through conscious self-awareness.

The Anatomy of a Tiny Experiment: The PACT Framework

To cultivate an experimental mindset, Le Cunff proposes substituting intimidating, high-stakes goals with Tiny Experiments based on the scientific method. This cycle begins with basic observation, moves to formulating a research question, designs an experiment to gather data, and concludes with an objective analysis to decide the next path forward.

To formalize these experiments, individuals commit to a PACT—a highly structured commitment device characterized by four key attributes:

• Purposeful: It must align with something the individual genuinely cares about, imbuing daily actions with micro-purposes rather than demanding a grand, intimidating "life purpose."

• Actionable: The task must be immediately executable without requiring outside permission, additional resources, or complex preparations.

• Continuous: It must be practiced regularly over a pre-determined timeframe (e.g., daily for two weeks, or weekly for two months). Setting a fixed duration prevents the Maximized Brain from quitting prematurely when initial results are uncomfortable.

• Trackable (Not Measurable): It avoids complex key performance indicators (KPIs) or objectives and key results (OKRs). Tracking is binary: did you perform the action today, yes or no?

Distinctions from Other Frameworks

• PACT vs. New Year's Resolutions: Resolutions are typically overly ambitious, highly rigid, and prone to early abandonment. A PACT is small, highly achievable, and can be initiated at any point in the year.

• PACT vs. Habits: A habit is an indefinite commitment to a behavior pre-determined to be beneficial. A PACT is a temporary diagnostic tool designed to test if a behavior actually suits the individual before they commit to making it a habit.

Data Analysis: Balancing External and Internal Signals

When analyzing the results of a PACT, one must weigh two distinct data pools:

• External Signals: Objective metrics such as financial returns, career progression, audience growth, or traditional markers of success.

• Internal Signals: Subjective emotional data, including energy levels, enjoyment, anxiety, and fulfillment.

To illustrate this balance, Le Cunff shares her personal experiment with becoming a YouTuber. She committed to a PACT to write, film, and publish one video per week until the end of the year. Externally, the experiment was highly successful, yielding high subscriber counts, positive feedback, and collaboration offers. Internally, however, Le Cunff felt intense dread and anxiety when filming, which triggered severe procrastination on filming days. By prioritizing internal data alongside external success, she confidently ended the channel, choosing instead to focus on her thriving newsletter.

Navigating Uncertainty and the Power of Affective Labeling

Modern society is marked by rapid technological and cultural disruption, leaving individuals with an deep-seated sense of instability. In response, our brains seek artificial control by consuming endless streams of information, mistakenly conflating raw information with actual knowledge.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the human brain is hardwired to fear the unknown. In primeval environments, unexpected noises or unfamiliar foods represented lethal threats. Today, this translates into intense neural activity when facing uncertainty. Studies show that human beings experience significantly higher levels of psychological stress when facing uncertainty than when anticipating known physical pain. This is why we often prefer receiving immediate bad news over waiting in suspense; bad news grants a comforting illusion of control.

Affective Labeling as a Neural Intervention

To shift from fearing uncertainty to collaborating with it, Le Cunff recommends Affective Labeling—the practice of putting exact words to complex emotions.

• Neurological Impact: Affective labeling downregulates activity in the amygdala (the brain's primitive center for unconscious emotional processing) and increases activity in the prefrontal cortex (the seat of rational, logical thinking).

• The Landscape Technique: If finding a precise word for an emotion is too difficult, individuals can describe their internal state as a physical landscape (e.g., "a stormy day over a dark forest" or "a steep, scary cliff overlooking a beautiful sea").

By processing our emotions before attempting to solve the objective problems of a life disruption, we protect our long-term mental health and clear our cognitive space to make better decisions.

Embracing Liminal Spaces

Liminal spaces are transitional phases of life where the old reality has dissolved but the new one has not yet formed. Because the brain craves clear, binary classifications (e.g., safe vs. dangerous), these periods feel highly uncomfortable. Le Cunff illustrates this with the airplane metaphor:

• Anxious Avoidance (Response 1): Trying to escape the transition by sleeping, drinking alcohol, or waiting anxiously for the flight to end.

• Mindful Agency (Response 2): Embracing the disconnection from daily routines (such as having no Wi-Fi) as a pocket of freedom to read, journal, reflect, or let the mind wander.

True freedom resides in the brief gap between a stimulus and our response. Pausing to choose our reaction rather than relying on automatic, fear-based defaults builds the confidence needed to adapt to a changing world.

Deconstructing the Three Subconscious Cognitive Scripts

Cognitive scripts are internalized behavioral patterns that dictate how we assume we should behave in specific scenarios. While useful for routine tasks (e.g., knowing the order of events when visiting a doctor or dining at a restaurant), they become highly damaging when applied to major life choices. Le Cunff identifies three dominant scripts that restrict human potential:

• The Sequel Script: The subconscious assumption that our future choices must maintain narrative continuity with our past. This script compels individuals to stay in careers solely because they match their university majors, or to repeatedly date the same type of person to maintain behavioral patterns.

• The Crowd Pleaser Script: Making major life decisions designed to satisfy the expectations of parents, partners, peers, or colleagues, prioritizing their comfort and validation over personal fulfillment.

• The Epic Script: The culturally celebrated belief that a meaningful life must be marked by grand ambitions, massive impact, and monumental success. This script stigmatizes simple, present, and deeply connected lives, falsely insisting that putting all of our emotional eggs in one high-stakes basket is the only path to validation.

The Epic Script has gained immense popularity due to Survivorship Bias on social media, where the exceptional successes of a few passion-driven founders are broadcasted, while the thousands who followed the exact same path and failed remain completely invisible. This has led to a 700% surge in the use of the phrase "find your purpose" in literature over the last twenty years.

Breaking Free

To break free from these scripts, one must identify the word "should" in their daily internal monologue, as it is a prime indicator of an active cognitive script. By replacing "should" with "might" (e.g., "What might I explore today?" instead of "What should I do?"), individuals open up possibilities for curiosity-driven choices. Le Cunff offers three core diagnostic questions to evaluate these scripts during any life transition:

• Am I following my past, or am I discovering my path? (Counteracts the Sequel Script)

• Am I following the crowd, or am I discovering my tribe? (Counteracts the Crowd Pleaser Script)

• Am I following my passion, or am I discovering my curiosity? (Counteracts the Epic Script)

Reframing Procrastination & Mindful Productivity

In a society shaped by post-industrial work moralization, productivity has been elevated to a measure of personal virtue, while procrastination is viewed as a character flaw. This cultural dynamic has fueled a massive commercial productivity industry of time-tracking software, structured templates, calendars, and wearable devices.

Le Cunff challenges this view, arguing that procrastination is not a sign of laziness, but rather an invaluable neurological signal. She introduces the Triple Check Tool to diagnose the root cause of procrastination across three dimensions:

• The Head (Rational Block): You are not logically convinced that the task is worth doing.

• Remedy: Redefine the strategy or brainstorm alternative approaches with colleagues.

• The Heart (Emotional Block): The task feels boring, painful, or thoroughly unengaging.

• Remedy: Redesign the experience to make it enjoyable (e.g., working from a favorite coffee shop or co-working with a colleague).

• The Hand (Practical Block): You lack the necessary tools, skills, or resources to execute the task.

• Remedy: Raise your hand and request targeted training, coaching, or mentorship.

If a task aligns across the Head, Heart, and Hand, but procrastination persists, it indicates systemic or environmental barriers that require either direct communication with stakeholders or removing oneself from that environment entirely.

The Second Arrow of Suffering

Le Cunff connects this to the Buddhist parable of the Two Arrows:

• The First Arrow: The initial negative event or difficult emotion (e.g., the act of procrastinating).

• The Second Arrow: The self-inflicted shame, guilt, and anger we experience for feeling that initial emotion.

While the first arrow is often an unavoidable part of human life, the second arrow is entirely optional. Eliminating self-blame allows us to address the root causes of our work blocks with clear, scientific curiosity.

Mindful Productivity and Magic Windows

Traditional productivity treats time as a series of rigid boxes to be packed with tasks. Mindful Productivity shifts this focus from time to energy, managing our physical, emotional, and cognitive resources. This approach centers around identifying and utilizing our Magic Windows—those natural daily periods of deep focus and effortless flow where time seems to slip away. By answering three key questions, individuals can structure their workdays around these natural energetic peaks:

• When is my Magic Window?

• What specific tasks belong in this window?

• How can I protect and keep this window open?

The Practice of Self-Anthropology

For action-oriented individuals, the hardest part of any new venture is simply starting, because they focus heavily on final outcomes. To overcome this friction, Le Cunff introduces the concept of Self-Anthropology: treating your own life as an ongoing field study.

By stepping back and documenting your daily existence with the objective curiosity of an anthropologist, you begin to question deep-seated assumptions and identify areas ripe for tiny experiments.

The 24-Hour Self-Anthropology Exercise

To practice this, spend 24 hours recording objective observations in a notebook or phone, taking note of:

• Fluctuations in energy levels and mood throughout the day.

• Which conversations and social encounters left you feeling energized or drained.

• Daily cognitive insights from articles, podcasts, or thoughts.

• The direct emotional and behavioral outcomes of your tasks.

Moving from Observation to Experimentation

• Observe: Identify patterns (e.g., "I notice that I feel highly energized when presenting my ideas at work, but I also experience brief spikes of performance anxiety beforehand").

• Hypothesize: Formulate testable solutions (e.g., "Perhaps taking a brief public speaking class, working with a performance coach, or simply volunteering for more internal presentations will build my confidence").

• Experiment: Select a single hypothesis and design a brief, structured PACT (e.g., "I will volunteer to give one short team presentation every two weeks for the next business quarter").

• Evaluate: At the end of the set timeframe, collect and analyze both internal and external data points to decide whether to persist, pause, or pivot.

By adopting this continuous cycle of self-observation and low-stakes experimentation, you can shed the burdens of perfectionism and linear success, designing a life of genuine agency, agility, and curiosity.

Transcript

Part 1: The Experimental Mindset

I'm Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I'm a neuroscientist and the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.

Are we all experiencing cognitive overload?

A lot of us are currently experiencing cognitive overload, and there are many reasons for that. One of them is that the world is changing fast, and we're trying to hoard as much information as possible to understand what's going on around us. Another one is that we're trying to be as productive as possible in order to keep up, again, with this world that keeps on changing. Because of that, we try to build systems. We try to stick to routines, and we try to go through very long lists of tasks, often ignoring our mental health in the process.

In essence, there is a lot more to think about on a daily basis, but our brains haven't evolved. They're still the same that they were thousands of years ago. We're all staring at a giant leaderboard with social media where we can see how other people are progressing, their success, and where we keep on comparing ourselves to each other. This creates anxiety because we keep asking ourselves: How am I doing? Am I doing better? Am I being fast enough? Am I being productive enough? Am I being ambitious enough?

What is the maximalist brain?

What I call the maximized brain, or the maximalist brain, is this belief that we have that whatever we do, it has to be the biggest, the most ambitious version of this goal. When we want to exercise, we decide that we have to go to the gym every single day. If we want to start writing, we decide that we're going to start writing a book. If we want to explore a new project, we decide that this has to be a startup.

The problem with the maximized brain is that it very often leads to overwhelm and burnout, and sometimes just completely abandoning our projects because they're just too big. Tiny experiments offer an alternative to this maximized approach where instead of going for the bigger thing, you go for the thing that is most likely to bring you discovery, fun, enjoyment, and that is based on your curiosity rather than an external definition of success. When you're running a tiny experiment, you're not trying to do something big; what you're trying is just to learn something new.

How did you discover the experimental mindset?

I divide my life into two separate chapters. In the first one, I had a very linear approach that was driven by traditional definitions of success. I did my best to do well in school, and then I got a good job at Google, and then I tried to climb the corporate ladder, getting a promotion, working on the best projects possible. From an external standpoint, I should have been happy, but I wasn't. Instead, I was feeling empty inside. I was both bored and burned out.

I left my job at Google thinking that I should try to do something different and not realizing that I was following yet another script of success. I decided to start a startup, and again, I didn't find happiness there by following this idea of success that everyone around me was following. It's only when my startup failed, and for the very first time in my life I didn't have a clear idea of what I was supposed to do next in order to be successful, that I finally asked myself: "What is it that I wanted to do? What would make me happy even if I forgot about the traditional definition of success?"

And so I went back to the drawing board, and I started thinking about what I was curious about—again, not based on traditional definitions of success. What were topics I would be excited to explore even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain. I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and why we feel the way we feel. So I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience. I completed my graduate studies and I got a PhD in neuroscience.

Throughout this journey, I decided to learn in public, and this is how I started my newsletter. Every week I would pick a topic that I had discovered in my studies in university, and I would take those neuroscience insights and turn them into practical tools that I would write about in the newsletter to help other people apply them in their life and work. This tiny experiment of starting to write online and sharing what I was learning in public was the beginning of my work of trying to understand how we can live more experimental lives.

Why is mindset so important?

A mindset is a default way of seeing the world, and our mindsets influence so many things in our lives. They influence our decisions, they influence our relationships, they influence the way we think, and even the way we feel. When we're not aware of our mindsets, they can impact the direction of our life, the path that we're taking, without us even realizing it.

Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life where you're making choices in accordance with what you actually want and going where you actually want to go, versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions. The great thing about mindsets is that they can actually change, but the first step is to make them conscious.

What are the mindsets that hold us back?

There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy, conscious lives. These three mindsets are called the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset, and the perfectionist mindset.

• The Cynical Mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life, and we're actually sometimes even making fun of earnest people who still have this high level of curiosity and ambition. When we're cynical, we feel like there's no point trying because we're in survival mode all the time. So things that we might be doing instead include doom scrolling, sitting on the sofa going through negative news, being stuck in this cycle, and then maybe even spending a lot of time and energy discussing and debating those negative news with other people.

• The Escapist Mindset is when we're still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. We're trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge-watching, or dream-planning our next vacation instead of doing something right now to change our lives.

• The Perfectionist Mindset is when we try to escape uncertainty through work. We have high ambition but low curiosity. That might look like self-coercion, overworking ourselves, and toxic productivity. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful, then we'll be happy.

You can picture those three subconscious mindsets on a 2x2 matrix where the two different factors are curiosity and ambition:

• Cynical Mindset: Low curiosity, low ambition.

• Escapist Mindset: High curiosity, low ambition.

• Perfectionist Mindset: Low curiosity, high ambition.

Those mindsets are actually very fluid and they might change depending on our situation, different triggers, and different ambitions that we might have at the moment. This is actually really good news because that means that these mindsets are not fixed personality traits. We can change them by becoming aware of them and then making the decision to change our mindsets. This is something we can achieve.

What mindset should we strive for?

There is an alternative to those three mindsets, which is called the Experimental Mindset. This is a mindset where your curiosity and your ambition are both high. In an experimental mindset, you're open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow, and to learn.

Having an experimental mindset helps us completely reimagine our relationship to ambition and to goals. When you have an experimental mindset, instead of chasing those linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you're open to designing experiments. Instead of trying to get to a specific outcome, you start from a research question. Anytime you don't understand something, it doesn't create fear; it creates curiosity.

Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from. It means being open to making mistakes because you know you're going to learn from them. It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don't know what's coming, and this is great. It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected.

How do you cultivate an experimental mindset?

The idea of cultivating an experimental mindset is based on the scientific method, and this is very simple. First, you start by observing your current situation by looking at the world around you. Then you ask a research question, and you design a tiny experiment to collect data which you can then analyze. Based on those results, you can decide what your next step is. What's great about that is that even though you don't know where you're going, you can trust that you're going to grow through each cycle of experimentation.

To design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity. A great way to do this is to design what I call a PACT. This is a commitment device where you say, "I am going to run this experiment." The way it works is that you choose one action, you then decide on a duration, and you say, "I will perform this action for this specific duration."

Why does it look like that? There are several reasons:

• The first one is that when a scientist designs an experiment, they decide in advance on the number of trials. You don't simply stop in the middle if the results don't really look like what you expected. You collect all of the data, and once you have all of that data, you can analyze it and decide what the answer is.

• The second reason is that it allows you to notice when you're falling prey to the maximized brain. You can make sure that you're keeping your experiment tiny enough that you're actually going to complete it by choosing a duration that is reasonable, something you can actually achieve, so you can collect all of the necessary data.

A PACT is:

• Purposeful: It needs to be something you care about. What's great is that when each PACT you design has purpose imbued into it, you don't need to have a grand purpose in life.

• Actionable: This is something that you need to be able to do right now. You don't need extra resources. You don't need help from other people. This is something you can try straight away.

• Continuous: This is something that you need to do regularly. Again, you decide on the duration and the number of trials, and then you say, "I'm going to do this action for two weeks," or two months, or one year.

• Trackable, not measurable: You don't need complicated metrics. You only need to be able to say whether you did it or not. Did you do the action? Did you perform it? Yes or no? That's the only tracking you need.

A PACT is not a New Year's resolution. This is not something that you decide on that is very ambitious at the beginning of the year and that you're going to abandon. This is something small and achievable that you can start doing at any point during the year.

A PACT is not a habit either. The difference between a habit and an experiment is that with a habit, you're very clear that this is something that's going to be good for you, and so you commit to it for an indefinite amount of time. For example, you say, "Starting today, I'm going to go to bed at the same time." Whereas with an experiment, you're not quite sure whether this is going to work for you or not; you're going to test it. So you're going to say, "I'm going to go to bed at the same time every night for two weeks, and only then am I going to decide whether this is good for me or not and whether I want to turn it into a habit."

And a PACT is not a KPI, an OKR, a performance metric, or whatever people call them in the corporate world. It's really just about learning something new. It's not about being successful or getting to a specific outcome.

How do you analyze the collected data?

Once you've completed your PACT and you've gone through the entire duration of that data collection phase, you can finally look at the data. I highly encourage you, while you're running your PACT, to take little notes. It can be very simple—a few bullet points on your phone, something in your journal—just to keep track of whether you did it or not and how it felt. Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your PACT as is because it works for you, pause it if you feel like that's not really something you want to keep going with, or pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation.

A lot of us tend to only pay attention to external data or internal data when we're analyzing our experiments. For example, we might only look at the external metrics of success or only at the internal feelings that we might be experiencing. But both are very valuable in order to make the right decision when it comes to your next steps.

The external signals might show you whether this is something that is worth pursuing in terms of financial success, career, or any ambition that you might want to explore. But the internal signals are also very important. There's no point being successful externally if it feels horrible to work on this project. Equally, if it feels really good but you have no way to sustain yourself with this project, it might be worth reconsidering the parameters to find a way where you can have an overlap between external success and internal positive feelings and emotions.

How have you personally employed the experimental mindset?

Let me give you an example. I designed an experiment where I wanted to explore whether I wanted to become a YouTuber. This was something I had noticed a lot of friends around me doing, and they seemed to have a lot of fun. That piqued my curiosity enough that I wanted to give it a try.

So I designed a PACT, and I said, "I'm going to publish a video every week until the end of the year." It was a very simple PACT, which I completed. Every week, I published a new video. At the end of my PACT, I looked at the data. External data was pretty good: looking at the traditional metrics of success of a YouTube channel, I got to a good number of subscribers and received a lot of positive comments. People seemed to like the videos, and I even had some people reaching out and asking if we could collaborate together.

But looking at the internal data, I actually did not enjoy producing these videos. Every week when I had to sit down in front of the camera, I was dreading it. I love having face-to-face conversations with people and seeing their reactions in real time, but just looking at a camera with no feedback whatsoever was very uncomfortable for me. As a result, every week I was procrastinating for so long. Every time I had to film a video, I felt deeply anxious, and I was not even able to work on anything else on those days where I was supposed to film.

This is a typical example showing why it is so important to consider both the external and the internal signals before making a decision. Based on this, even though the YouTube channel was fairly successful in such a short amount of time, I decided to stop. I realized that I was not going to be a YouTuber, and I preferred to keep on writing my newsletter.

What are some tiny experiments anyone can do?

You can run tiny experiments in all areas of your life.

• In work, for example, you could say, "I'm going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks where I share the most interesting links that I find."

• In relationships, you could say, "I'm going every Sunday to sit down and send a note to a friend I haven't talked to in a while."

• And when it comes to your health, you could say, "I'm going to go for a walk for 20 minutes for 20 days to see how I feel at the end of that experiment."

With an experiment, you're not making any assumptions as to whether this is going to work for you or not. A habit that a friend has—for example, going for a run three times a week—might not be that good for you. Maybe when it comes to your health and body movement, you prefer dancing or something else. That's why it's interesting to run an experiment before committing to a habit. When it comes to running, for example, you could say, "I'm going to try that. I am going to go and run three times a week for three weeks, not for the rest of my life, and at the end of the three weeks, I'm going to decide whether this is what I want to keep doing or if I want to experiment with another way to move my body."

Why should we commit to curiosity?

In essence, committing to curiosity is ensuring that you're going to live a life that is intentional—that you're going to live your life, not the life that other people are expecting you to live. Curiosity keeps you adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world. It ensures that you stay open to new possibilities, and frankly, it just makes life more fun.

This all might sound philosophical, but there's actually a lot of neuroscientific research showing that when we experience a thirst for water, the same parts of the brain activate as when we experience a thirst for information. So when we say, "I'm thirsty for knowledge; I want to learn more; I want to know more," we couldn't be more right. Thinking about your own mindsets and developing this self-awareness is really just a way to direct this curiosity towards the things that you actually want to do with your life.

Part 2: The Illusion of Certainty

Why is there a feeling of uncertainty in the world?

The pace of technological and societal change has accelerated massively. We feel like we cannot rely anymore on those traditions and institutions that used to give us a sense of stability. It's become increasingly difficult, or maybe even impossible, to know what skills we should invest in in order to build the careers of the future. To make it worse, we have infinite access to information, which makes us feel like if we just keep on reading, listening, and watching, we might get that key information that is going to finally give us this sense of elusive certainty.

This modern environment is anxiety-inducing. The problem today is that it's become really, really hard to know the difference between information and knowledge. Information is just a piece of data; it could be valid, it could be not valid, it could come from any kind of source, and it could be based on different contexts and circumstances that we're not aware of. By consuming all of this information, we might actually not take action to go out into the real world and collect our own data and our own knowledge, which would be much more helpful in order to make our decisions.

The less control we have, the more we seek it, and that might take a lot of forms. For example, trying to consume as much information as possible just so we feel like we have a sense of clarity as to what is going on. That could also look like sticking to the safe path—the more obvious one where we feel like we understand all of the parameters—or sometimes that could even look like doing nothing because we're too afraid to do something dangerous.

How are uncertainty and anxiety linked?

Uncertainty fuels anxiety. Research shows that when we experience uncertainty, our neural activity intensifies. Our brains are basically on high alert, getting ready for any threat that we might face, and that happens even when there's no actual danger.

In studies, uncertainty has been found to cause more stress than individual pain. The reason why is because when we know we're going to experience pain, we can mentally prepare for it. Whereas when we're facing uncertainty, the doubt of not knowing what kind of pain or what level of pain we will face is actually more stressful than knowing exactly what's going to happen. This is also why we prefer getting bad news over waiting for an answer. Bad news feels better because now we know; even if it's negative, we feel like we're in control.

Why did our brains evolve to fear uncertainty?

Our brains are wired to fear uncertainty, and that makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. When you think about the conditions in which our species started, the more information you had, the more likely you were to survive. A weird noise in the bushes or a new food that you'd never tried before—all of these could be lethal. So anytime you find yourself in a situation where you feel like you don't understand everything that's going on, or where you feel like you don't have all of the information, your brain is trying to get to a solution.

Obviously, this was very useful in the jungle, but not so much in our modern environment. We try to get to an answer as quickly as possible, which means we sometimes go for the most obvious one rather than the most interesting one. It might even reduce our ability to connect with other people, because we feel it is better to stay with people that we understand and people we know rather than trying to connect with strangers, because strangers could mean danger, uncertainty, fear, and anxiety.

How should we approach uncertainty instead?

Instead of fearing uncertainty, we should learn to collaborate with it. What that looks like is seeing uncertainty as an opportunity for learning and for growth. When there is no uncertainty, when we know exactly what we're doing, that means we're not growing anymore. So we should actually seek uncertainty, embrace it, and every time we face it, say, "Hello, welcome back. Let's work together."

All scientists know that real growth requires both trial and error. If you keep on repeating the same trial and everything works as expected, it means that you're not growing; you're not learning anything. You're just repeating the same thing that you know is working already. It's only through errors that you can adjust your path, try new approaches, and discover that some of your assumptions were wrong. This is why all scientific experiments are just cycles of trial and error, and this is modeled after nature. This is how nature evolves, and this is how we can evolve. By making sure that we try new things, make mistakes, and learn from them, we can grow in our personal and professional lives.

What is the linear model of success?

A linear model of success is based on a fixed outcome that we try to get to. It implies that first you do A, then B, then C, and then you'll be successful. There are lots of problems with a linear model of success. One of them is that it assumes that you know where you're going, which might not always be the case. Another one is the assumption that wherever you want to go right now is where you will want to go a few years from now. Things are changing very fast, our world is evolving, and you should allow yourself to change the direction of your ambitions as the world changes.

Another problem is that linear goals breed toxic productivity and unhealthy comparison. When we're all climbing similar ladders in parallel next to each other, we might compare ourselves to each other, looking to the right and to the left and asking, "Is this person being faster? Is this person working harder? Is this person being more successful?" This creates toxic productivity when we overwork ourselves just trying to climb those ladders as quickly as possible.

This can create a sense of ambivalence toward goals. It feels so exhausting to keep on climbing this ladder with no certainty at all that we might get to the top or that we might get there fast enough. This exhaustion from constantly comparing ourselves to each other has led some people to adopt a new mantra: "No goals, just vibes."

How can we go from linear success to fluid experimentation?

To break free from this goal-obsessed life, we need to go from rigid linearity to fluid experimentation. That means letting go of the focus on the outcome and instead embracing the joy that we can find in the process. Instead of focusing on climbing the ladder, we should try to design cycles of experimentation. Instead of focusing on certainty, this is all about focusing on curiosity. Breaking free from this goal-obsessed life and developing an experimental mindset is all about going from outcomes to processes, from ladders to growth loops, and from certainty to curiosity.

How can labeling emotions help manage uncertainty?

Affective labeling means labeling your emotions. It really just means putting words to feelings, and it's incredibly helpful because it allows you to better connect with and understand your emotions so you can manage them better. Affective labeling allows us to reduce activity in the amygdala, which is involved in unconscious emotional processing, and to increase activity in the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in rational thinking. This allows us to better manage our emotions.

What's great about affective labeling is that it's very simple, doesn't cost anything, and you can do it straight away whenever you want to better regulate your emotions. It's really just about picking a word to describe your current emotion. If you can't find the right word, there is research showing that describing a landscape is also a great way to practice affective labeling. You could say, for example, that "it's a stormy day over a dark forest," or you could say that "it's a scary cliff over a beautiful sea." That's a great way for you to describe your emotions when you cannot find just one word that captures exactly what you're feeling, acting as a way to map out your emotional landscape.

Whenever we face a disruption in our life, it's very tempting to try and immediately solve the objective consequences—the actual problems that arise from that disruption—and completely ignore the emotional experience of that disruption in the process. Affective labeling is really about making space for that emotional processing before you deal with the objective consequences.

The reason why this is important is twofold:

• First, this is going to be better for your mental health in the long term. By processing these emotions as you go through them rather than ignoring them, you're going to be more connected to yourself and experience better mental health.

• Second, this is also going to help you better solve the actual problem. When your mind is clear and you have processed the emotions, you will be able to think about the actual consequences in a more efficient way.

This practice is particularly useful for people who like to feel like they're in control and who tend to hide their emotions underneath something else rather than connecting with them. This might look like hiding an emotion underneath a more manageable, surface-level emotion that we are more familiar with. For example, if we're sad, we're just going to say that we're a little bit angry or a little bit disappointed about this, when really the core emotion is sadness. Or sometimes that might look like hiding the emotion under thinking, logic, and the rational brain, where we convince ourselves that we are looking for a solution, being proactive, and dealing with the problem, so everything is fine and we're not feeling anything too complicated or unmanageable.

Why do humans struggle with transitional periods?

We struggle with liminal spaces and transitional periods because our brains really like to be able to categorize situations as safe or dangerous as quickly as possible. When we can't do that, it feels very uncomfortable. We want to get out of this transitional space, get back to safety, and get back to a sense of clarity.

Imagine that you're on a plane 30,000 feet up in the sky with no Wi-Fi. There are two different responses that you can have:

• Response 1: You feel anxious. Because of that, you might try to sleep the entire time to ignore that you're on the plane. You might drink alcohol to dull some of the anxiety, and in general, you just want the flight to be over as quickly as possible.

• Response 2: You feel like, "This is great—no Wi-Fi, nobody can contact me. This is freedom." You might decide to watch a movie that you've been meaning to watch for a long time, crack open a book you wanted to read, journal, or just let your mind wander, really enjoying that space of transition that is outside of your daily routine and outside of the sense of certainty that you normally have as you go about your daily life.

There's a famous quote that has been attributed to a lot of different psychologists, including Viktor Frankl, which says: "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." What that means is that whenever we find ourselves in a situation or face a trigger, there is a little gap before our response, and in that gap lies the freedom to make a choice. Are we going to go for the automatic response—the one we have no control over—or are we going to pause and ask ourselves, "How do I want to respond to this situation?"

Every time we use that freedom, every time we pause and ask ourselves, "What do I actually want to do?", we prove to ourselves that we have agency and that we are able to make our own choices. That doesn't mean it is always the correct choice. In many cases, there is no such thing as making the right choice because we don't have all of the information and things are changing so fast. But at least we know that we don't have to go for the automatic response. Ultimately, that means living a life not of rigid control, but of agency, experimentation, and exploration. This allows us to build confidence in our ability to adapt as the world changes around us.

Part 3: The Three Cognitive Scripts That Rule Your Life

How do we discover our purpose?

When you ask happy people how they discovered their passion, if they give you an honest answer, they'll tell you they stumbled upon it. What we can learn from that is that finding your passion and finding your purpose in life is not really about seeking it, obsessing over it, or applying a step-by-step plan to figure out what it is. Instead, it's about following your curiosity, experimenting, exploring, trying new things, and trusting that you will figure out what makes you excited to wake up in the morning.

What is a cognitive script?

A cognitive script is an internalized behavioral pattern that tells us how we're supposed—or at least how we think we're supposed—to act in certain situations. They can be very helpful for routine tasks and decisions in everyday life. Cognitive scripts were first discovered in a seminal 1979 study where researchers found that people follow very similar scripts in similar situations, such as going to the doctor or dining at a restaurant. Since then, researchers have found these cognitive scripts in all areas of life.

For routine, everyday decisions, cognitive scripts are actually very practical and useful. For example, you know that when you go to the doctor, you're supposed to wait in the waiting room, and then someone is going to call your name, and then you're going to go into the doctor's office, and this is where you're going to start telling them about whatever the issue is. You know in which order you're supposed to do all of those different actions. That's great, it's useful, and it's a pretty good thing that you don't have to overthink it every time you go to the clinic.

The problem with cognitive scripts is when we use them to make the more important decisions in our lives, in our careers, and in our relationships. Instead of asking ourselves, "Is that really what I want to do? Is that my decision?", we let our choices be driven by those stories that we have internalized—by those scripts that tell us how we're supposed to behave in a given situation.

What is the sequel script?

One of these scripts is the Sequel Script. That's the script where we feel like we've always behaved in a certain way, so we're going to keep on behaving in the exact same way. We feel like the narrative of our life needs to make linear sense.

This is the script that makes people choose careers that are aligned solely with whatever they studied at university. This is the script that makes people keep on dating the same kind of people they've been dating before, and this is, in general, the script that makes us repeat the exact same behaviors and patterns that we've had in the past.

In relationships in particular, what's very interesting is that we want the "sequel" to connect to whatever the previous experience was. This might mean dating the exact same type of person, or choosing the next person in response to whoever we were dating before. They might look like the complete opposite, but the truth is we still picked this person based on a sense of continuity with whatever the previous experience was before.

With the sequel script, it's quite obvious why it limits the possibilities that we might explore in life. Because we feel like whatever decision we make next needs to make sense in relation to the decisions we made in the past, we ignore a lot of the more left-field, unexpected decisions that could be brilliant opportunities for growth, exploration, and self-discovery.

What is the crowd pleaser script?

Another cognitive script that rules our life is the Crowd Pleaser Script. This is the script where we make decisions based on whatever is going to please the people around us the most. Quite often, those other people are our parents. We might make decisions based on whatever is going to make them feel like we are safe and successful.

But the audience for the crowd pleaser script can also be your friends, your partner, or your colleagues. What you don't realize when you follow the crowd pleaser script is that you're not making decisions based on what you want and what would make you happy, but rather based on what will make others around you happy.

What is the epic script?

Finally, there's the Epic Script, and this one is very insidious because it's actually celebrated in our society. It's the script that says that whatever you do, it needs to be big, it needs to be very ambitious, and it needs to be highly impactful. Anything less than that is considered a failure.

The epic script is an extreme version of the idea of following your dreams. Because of that, it has created a form of stigma around having a small, simple life—a life that is focused on just being happy in the moment, being present, being connected, and exploring your curiosity. It makes us worry: "If I don't have those external signs of success, if I'm not following some grand passion, then am I really living a meaningful life?" This is the anxiety-inducing question created by the epic script.

When you think about it, this is a very myopic definition of success where we try to put all of our eggs in the same basket. We choose this one thing, and we say, "If I succeed at this, then I'm successful in life." The problem with this is that if we fail at this particular project or this particular goal, we feel like we have failed at life entirely. The other problem with putting all of our eggs in the same basket is that sometimes the basket just becomes too heavy, and we drop it altogether.

Our modern, hyper-connected online world has made the epic script unfortunately very popular. We have become overly obsessed with finding our purpose. Mentions in books of the phrase "find your purpose" have surged 700% in the past two decades alone. We see all of those success stories of people who have found their passion and are very happy as a result. We see the entrepreneur who followed their passion and was highly successful, but we don't see the thousands of other ones who tried the exact same thing and failed. This is called Survivorship Bias, and it's very unfortunate how nowadays we are basing all of our decisions—and even our self-worth—on that incomplete information.

What should we do when we notice we are following a cognitive script?

Once you have identified the cognitive scripts that rule your life, you can actually break free from them. It starts by seeing them as stories we tell ourselves rather than truths that we need to follow blindly.

A really good way to do this is to stop for a second every time you hear yourself saying, "I should do this." The word "should" is actually a really good signal that there might be a cognitive script at play. Once you've identified the places and situations in your life where you're using that word "should," you can decide to replace it with another word: "might."

• "What might I want to do instead of what I should do?"

• "What might I want to explore?"

• "What might I want to experiment with?"

If you want to start writing your own scripts in life, there are three questions that you can ask yourself while designing your next experiment:

• Am I following my past, or am I discovering my path?

• Am I following the crowd, or am I discovering my tribe?

• Am I following my passion, or am I discovering my curiosity?

Those three questions together allow you to embrace the liminal space we're all in, to make friends with uncertainty, to start experimenting more, and, very importantly, to deal with those three powerful cognitive scripts that underlie a lot of our decisions on an unconscious level.

Part 4: In Defense of Procrastination

Why does procrastination have a negative connotation?

Procrastination has become a bit of a dirty word, and that's because we have just been through hundreds of years of moralization around productivity and work. Being productive has come to mean that you are a good, useful, helpful contributor to society. In a way, we have all agreed to tie our self-worth to our productivity, and so not being productive means that you're being lazy, you're not contributing, and you're not being helpful to society.

Because of the efficiency worship that we developed in the industrial age, we now see procrastination as a character flaw rather than what it actually is: a signal that is worth listening to. This has propped up an entire industry of productivity, whether it's online courses telling you how to manage your life and your time to make the most of every single minute, templates to track all of your tasks, wearables to tell you whether you've been using your time correctly, or calendars ruling the way we spend our day. Even if at a personal level you don't feel like productivity is the most important thing you want to optimize for, it's very hard to resist the sirens of our society telling you, "You must be more productive."

As a result of this society that keeps telling us we need to be productive to be a good person, whenever we find ourselves procrastinating, we just try to ignore it. We push through using sheer willpower, and we feel self-blame and self-judgment. Instead, there's a very simple tool that you can use whenever you experience procrastination—a tool that is based on self-discovery, on thinking like a scientist, and trying to understand what the signals are.

What is the Triple Check Tool?

This tool is called the Triple Check, and it's about asking yourself: "Why am I procrastinating? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand?"

• The Head (Rational): If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be working on that task in the first place.

• The Heart (Emotional): If it's coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't think this is going to be fun or enjoyable to work on.

• The Hand (Practical): If it's coming from the hand, it means that even though at a rational level you feel like you should be working on this, and at an emotional level you feel like it looks like fun, at a practical level you feel like you're not equipped with the right tools or you don't have the right resources in order to get the job done.

How can the triple check inform what we do next?

What's great about the triple check tool is that it's not just a tool for diagnosis; it also tells you what to do in each of those situations:

• If the problem is rational, coming from the head, it means that you might want to redefine the strategy. Maybe reach out to your colleagues and tell them, "Hey, I'm not quite convinced this is the way we should go about this. Do you want to go and brainstorm together and see if there's a better approach that we could use?"

• If the problem is emotional, coming from the heart, you might want to redesign the experience so it's more fun. That could look like going to your favorite coffee shop, or grabbing a colleague and saying, "Hey, let's do a little bit of co-working while I work on this task."

• If the problem is practical, coming from the hand, where you feel like you don't have the right tools, resources, or skills, then raise that hand. Ask for help. Tell the people you're working with that maybe you need a bit of mentoring or coaching, or you need to take a course in order to be able to do that task.

Sometimes you'll go through the triple check—head, heart, hand—and everything feels in alignment, yet you're still procrastinating. In this case, it might be worth looking outside of yourself for systemic barriers. That means having honest, sometimes difficult conversations with other stakeholders, redesigning your environment if it is not conducive to you being focused and productive, or sometimes completely removing yourself from that work environment and doing something else, because you might not be able to change that situation every time.

What are magic windows?

Your magic windows are those moments of high productivity, creativity, and focus where you feel like there is zero effort involved, time is flowing, and your attention is completely locked onto the task that you're working on. Whether you've noticed it or not, we have all gone through those kinds of magic windows in our lives. Those are the moments when you look at the time and you feel like, "Where did it go? What happened?" Maybe you were lost in a conversation with a friend, maybe you were working on a creative task, or maybe you were taking a walk. Those are your magic windows, and what's amazing is that once you learn to identify them, you can start becoming a bit more intentional and opening those magic windows at will during your daily life.

What is mindful productivity?

You might think that mindfulness and productivity are antithetical and don't really belong together. But when you go back to the very definition of mindfulness, it's really about paying attention to your experience in the present moment without self-blame or self-judgment. Mindful productivity is about cultivating this awareness in the way you work and direct your focus. Mindful productivity is really about answering three key questions:

• When is my magic window?

• What belongs in this window?

• How can I keep that window open?

What is mindful productivity's most valuable resource?

The traditional definition of productivity only focuses on time as the most important resource, and the assumption is that every minute is a little box that you need to fill with as much stuff as possible in order to be productive. With mindful productivity, you consider other very important resources: your physical resources, your emotional resources, and your cognitive resources. That really means thinking about your emotions, your energy, and your executive function. Practicing mindful productivity requires you to change your perspective on what the most important resource is, shifting from time to energy.

How does managing emotions influence productivity?

We have a very negative relationship with procrastination. If you go online trying to find solutions for how to deal with procrastination, you're only going to find articles that tell you how to "beat" or "defeat" procrastination—very violent language. But instead, if we start seeing it as a useful signal, it allows us to better connect with the emotions surrounding that procrastination and to understand that this is really just our brain trying to send us a message. By reconnecting with these emotions instead of trying to ignore them, not only are we going to understand ourselves better, but we will also better understand our relationship to work and become more productive in the process.

What does death by two arrows mean?

In Buddhist philosophy, there is a concept called "death by two arrows" that tries to explain some of the sources of human suffering. The way it works is that whenever we experience a difficult event or emotion, that's the first arrow. In the case of procrastination, when we procrastinate, that is the first arrow. But then there's a second arrow, which is the shame and the self-blame that we experience because of that initial experience.

What's very important to know is that second arrow is completely optional. We don't have to add a second layer of suffering to the difficulties and the challenges that we are facing in the first place.

What's the hardest part of knowing what to do next?

The hardest part of knowing what to do next is often simply getting started. The reason why is because we focus too heavily on the outcome rather than the process. By not focusing on the outcome and instead designing a tiny experiment, you can let go of any rigid definition of success. You let go of that binary result you're looking for, and instead focus on a research question—a hypothesis that you might have, something that makes you feel curious and that you want to explore. Whatever the outcome, whatever the result, if you learn something new, that's progress.

How can we practice self-anthropology?

A great way to start reimagining what your life could look like is to practice what I call Self-Anthropology: becoming an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study. Just imagine an anthropologist who goes somewhere to study a new culture. They know nothing about this culture and everything is new to them, so what do they do? They take their notebook out and they start taking field notes. They ask questions like: Why are people doing things the way they're doing them? Why do they care about this? Why is this thing so important to them?

You can do the same thing with your life. As a little exercise, you can say that for the next 24 hours, you're going to treat your life as if you were an anthropologist. Take a notebook or use your phone and start taking little notes. Observe what gives you energy and what drains your energy, the conversations that you enjoy having, and the projects that you like working on. Just by doing this, you are going to start questioning a lot of your scripts, a lot of your assumptions, and a lot of your goals, and you're going to open a window for experimentation.

There's no fixed rule when it comes to what you can include in your field notes. It should really be guided by your curiosity, but here are some ideas for inspiration:

• Include insights that you have during the day after reading or listening to something.

• Capture your mood.

• Capture your energy levels.

• Capture the results of encounters and conversations with other people.

Just like a scientist, you need to first start with observation. It can be really tempting when we're a "doer" and we like to get things done to jump straight into designing the experiment, but it's important to have that initial phase of observation.

Let's walk through an example of how this works:

• Observe: Let's say you observe that you get a lot of energy from giving presentations at work, but also a little bit of performance anxiety.

• Hypothesize: In the second step, you need to formulate a hypothesis. Maybe you would benefit from taking public speaking classes. Maybe you would benefit from being coached. Or maybe you would benefit from just practicing more and giving more presentations at work. The great thing is that you can just pick one of those hypotheses and start testing it; the other ones will still be there if you want to try them later.

• Experiment: You pick one of them, and that's the last part where you design a tiny experiment. You say, "I'm going to commit to this action for this specific duration." In this case, you could say, "I'm going to commit to giving a presentation every two weeks at work for one quarter."

• Analyze: At the end of the quarter, you look at the data. You see how you felt at an internal level, but you also look at the signals at an external level: Did my colleagues enjoy it? Did that bring me new projects? Was that something that was valued inside of the company?

Based on those external and internal signals, you can confidently decide whether you want to keep going, stop, or tweak your experiment for the next cycle.