(2025-03-11) Konik On Testing Hypotheses Instead Of Setting Goals

EleanorKonik: On Testing Hypotheses Instead of Setting Goals. I picked up Tiny Experiments on a whim. Yes, that’s an affiliate link, yes I hope you buy the book, the whole point of this essay is going to be “this is genuinely the best self-help—sorry, Personal Success in Business—book I’ve ever read.” (personal development, goal-setting)

the core idea behind Tiny Experiments — that we should let go of toxic productivity, that we should get away from the paradigm of “setting goals” and embrace the paradigm of “running small experiments,” really appeals to me in a way that I think would benefit anyone from small children to business leaders to retirees. (little bet)

Fundamentally, Tiny Experiments offers a way to reframe goal setting in a way that sidesteps counterproductive emotions like shame, not because they aren’t legitimate, but because they aren’t helpful.

doing science in the old-fashioned sense of “identifying problems, making hypotheses, running experiments, and seeing what happens.” (see Effective Entrepreneur)

I’ve just never been particularly ambitious.

I’m not the kind of tiger-mom’d overachiever she seems to be directing the most targeted of her advice toward. I was a fairly self-directed learner from an early age

At one point, Anne-Laure posits that not knowing where to start is the biggest barrier for most people. This may be a bubble effect, but in my own life and that of my friends, the problem isn’t not knowing what to do, it’s not getting off my butt to do it!

One of my favorite lines was:
The problem with procrastination is not that you’re being lazy. The problem is that you’ve shot the messenger.

when I find myself stuck writing an article, or unenthusiastic about dinner, or reluctant to exercise, typically “powering through” results in significantly worse results than taking a moment and really thinking (critically, carefully) about what is interfering with my enthusiasm, and then taking steps to mitigate those unconscious concerns.

In his wonderful newsletter Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni exhorts us to build a fleet and change the world, a lovely metaphor for doing small scale independent science instead of Big Safe Science:
"the best way to explore is to have many ships going in all different directions"

Also from Adam:
"getting good at identifying interesting problems, gathering data on them, and writing up your findings in accessible language is a pretty marketable and widely applicable skill"

She has gentle pushback on framings like the 4k weeks of the ~average human life because some moments matter more than others, some moments stretch out or speed up or are simply impactful.

Reframing our lives not as a series of time blocks in which we have limited opportunities to get things done is important for living anything resembling a good life.