The goal you set is for a world that won't stay still
Pick a five-year goal and march straight at it — that's a ladder. But what you'll want, and where the reward actually sits, keeps drifting while you climb. A loop takes one small step, looks at where things moved, and re-aims. Same effort, two very different places to land.
Below, the faint line is where the reward actually is — it wanders, because the world and you both change. The ladder commits at the start. The loop re-aims every step. Press play, then shift the world and watch which one copes.
The ladder isn't lazy or foolish — it's committed. That's the problem. Commitment to a fixed target is only as good as the prediction underneath it, and we are famously bad at predicting what we'll want. The loop never predicts very far. It just keeps a tight, honest contact with the present and lets the destination emerge.
“We don't go in circles; we grow in circles.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · Tiny Experiments
The loop has a shape: Pact → Act → React, then you decide — persist, pause, or pivot — and go round again. Each turn is cheap, so you can afford a lot of them. Which raises the obvious worry: doesn't running this many little trials mean failing constantly? That's Game Two.
How to make a promise that's almost impossible to fail
A SMART goal grades you on the outcome: lose 10 kg, hit 10k subscribers, ship the launch. But the outcome leans on a hundred things you don't control. A PACT grades you on the output — the action you actually take — which is entirely yours. Le Cunff's four words: Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable. Written as one sentence: “I will [action] for [duration].”
So the trick isn't grit. It's moving the finish line onto ground you own. A small, repeatable, binary action — did I show up, yes or no — is something you can almost always honour, whatever the world does. Failure all but disappears, and what's left is data.
Which is why the resistance you feel before starting isn't a verdict — it's a signal. Le Cunff borrows a three-part check: Head (is this the right thing?), Heart (does it pull me?), Hand (can I actually do it?). When all three light up, she calls it aligned aliveness — and the procrastination melts. Tap the ones that are true:
“It's almost impossible to fail when you see everything as an experiment.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · Tiny Experiments
Why many small bets beat one big one
Here's the punchline the first two games were built for — and it's the same one the sibling essay makes about markets. A tiny experiment has a capped downside (it's small and reversible — you can stop) and an open upside (it might just work, or open a door you couldn't have planned). Run a lot of them and the math turns convex: your worst case stays flat while your best cases pile up.
Notice the slider's left edge. Run zero experiments and the downside is perfectly safe — and nothing ever happens. Le Cunff's warning about hoarding options: it's “like spending your whole life filling up the gas tank without ever driving.” Optionality only pays if you spend it. The convexity isn't in having the experiments. It's in running them.
“When we fixate on finding one singular purpose, we rule out the side quests that help us grow the most.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · Tiny Experiments
Stop predicting the path. Run it.
The world drifts, so loops beat ladders. The finish line you own can't make you fail. And a pocketful of small, reversible bets compounds into the one big thing you could never have planned for. Three games, one conclusion — and, as the neuroscientist says, it's almost impossible to fail when you see everything as an experiment.
“Replace the old linear model of success with a circular model of growth, in which goals are discovered, pursued, and adapted — not in a vacuum, but in conversation with the larger world.”
Anne-Laure Le Cunff · Tiny Experiments
The ideas here are Anne-Laure Le Cunff's, from Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (2025) and her writing at Ness Labs — the PACT (“make a PACT instead”), the growth loop, the Triple Check (after Hugo Kehr), and the bridge to optionality she draws in “The optionality fallacy,” where she meets Taleb's antifragility head-on. The interactive games are my own toy models — deliberately simple, directionally honest. Its sibling, It's Just Math, makes the same convexity argument for money.