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I’ve had many great conversations while sitting in the hairdresser’s chair.
The other day, I was getting my haircut when my hairdresser told me something her 15-year-old son had said. His words took her completely by surprise. He said:
“Mum, I need to try harder this year.”
I hear those words a lot. Try harder.
I hear them from students who want to do better at school and from teachers who are trying to motivate students (“You need to try harder”).
But what does it actually mean to “try harder”?
The problem is that this advice is too vague and abstract.
If you don’t have a clear picture of what ‘trying harder’ looks like, you’re in dangerous territory because you’re attempting to motivate yourself towards an abstraction.
In the book Tiny Habits, Professor BJ Fogg explains the problems associated with motivating yourself to achieve a vague goal. He writes:
“You’ve probably seen a well-meaning public-health poster in the doctor’s office that shows lots of colourful vegetables with the headline: EAT THE RAINBOW!
At first glance, you think: Yes, I need to eat better food. But then you’re not sure what practical steps to take. How much green and how much red? That means salad and apples, right? It can’t mean mint ice-cream and red licorice, can it? You are motivated to “eat the rainbow,” but maybe you don’t know how. You feel frustrated and end up being a little hard on yourself.”
I didn’t want my hairdresser’s son to feel frustrated and annoyed with himself. He clearly had good intentions.
I asked my hairdresser, “What does trying harder look like for your son? If he’s trying harder, what is he doing?”
She said she wasn’t sure. So, I kept asking questions.
“Does it look like him sitting down and testing himself with flashcards before a test? Taking notes in class? Listening to the teacher instead of chatting with his mates?”
The answer was clear. She said, “Listening to the teacher! He needs to start listening to his teachers.”
I also mentioned that it would help if he learnt his teachers’ names (you’d be surprised how many teachers tell me their students don’t know their names).
Remembering a teacher’s name, staying focused on what they have to say, resisting distractions, taking notes and reading your textbook may sound easy, but these are skills that require continuous practice.
If you’re not used to doing them, they can feel hard.
Even with years of practice under my belt, understanding new ideas still feels hard. These days, reading feels like weightlifting for my mind!
After getting my haircut, for the next 24 hours, I kept thinking about those words “try harder”.
Something was bugging me about it because I felt it wasn’t helpful to tell yourself to “try harder”. . . and then, like a bolt of lightning, the answer hit me: my hairdresser’s son doesn’t need to try harder. He needs to focus on doing a few specific hard things.
By ‘specific hard things’, I mean concrete behaviours he can do right now (or at a specific point in time) to improve his understanding of his school subjects.
For example, if he wanted to start a home study routine, here are some concrete behaviours I’d recommend he try:
- Put your phone away from your body in another room
- Walk or jog for five minutes before sitting down to study
- Draw a picture of a concept you need to understand for an upcoming test
- Test yourself with a deck of flashcards
- Step up to a whiteboard (or grab a large sheet of paper) and use it to explain an idea
These are just a few behaviours that come to mind when I think about “trying harder” with your studies.
Doing these concrete behaviours just once won’t make you go from good to great. But you’ll be surprised by how much meaningful progress you can make in a single, effective study session.
Welcome discomfort into your world
We live in a world where comfort and convenience are increasingly normalised. We expect things, including learning, to be easy.
You don’t have to cook (thank you Uber Eats).
You don’t have to move (thank you car).
You don’t have to experience boredom (thank you social media and Netflix).
You don’t even have to use your brain anymore (thank you ChatGPT and Claude).
By outsourcing tasks that require physical and cognitive effort, we may save time, but there are hidden costs.
What are the hidden costs?
People are losing their skills, destroying their health, and atrophying their brains, all while being flooded with unhealthy levels of dopamine. I’d even go as far as saying that people are losing their lives and what it means to be human.
In every moment, we have a choice: we can do the easy thing that gives us a quick dopamine hit, or we can do the hard thing that gives us a slow and healthy release of dopamine.
Here are some examples of what I’m talking about . . .
When you wake up, you can scroll on your phone or do some physical activity.
At the end of the day, you can order takeaway that is engineered to light up the reward pathways in your brain, or you can prepare a healthy homemade meal.
When you’ve got a spare 30 minutes, you can watch some YouTube or go for a walk outside.
You can use ChatGPT to write your essay, or you can use your brain and build your skills.
You can talk to an AI chatbot and have a friction-free relationship, or you can organise to meet up with a friend.
Every time you choose the hard thing over the easy thing, you build your confidence. You can trust yourself to do hard things and survive them. Over time, as you build your skills, those hard things don’t feel as hard as they once did.
For instance, if the Internet goes down and you’re not dependent on ChatGPT, you know you’ll be okay. You can rely on yourself to think and entertain yourself (thank you brain).
This is why I’m committing to doing hard things this year. I’m challenging myself, and I know I’ll be better for it.
Just to be clear, I’m not talking about self-harm or inflicting extreme pain on myself.
I’m referring to activities that bring up a cringey discomfort and make me think, “Ahhh, I don’t want to do this!”.
These include activities that require sustained focus and/or mental and physical effort, such as writing an article, going for a run, riding my bike to the shops, and meditating.
How can you get yourself to do hard things if you’ve become used to taking the path of comfort and convenience?
The simplest way is to ease into doing those hard things. Turn those hard things into tiny habits.
Here is a list of tiny habits for hard things I’m focusing on doing:
- After I wake up and put on my gym clothes, I will make my bed.
- After I make my bed, I will block myself from accessing addictive apps on my phone and hop on my treadmill.
- After I hop on my treadmill, I will run for 30 minutes.
- After I get ready for the day, I will put my phone on silent mode and place it away from my body in another room (far away from my workspace).
- After I have breakfast, I will do five minutes of meditation.
- After my meditation session, I will spend five minutes making a plan for the day.
- After I finish creating my plan, I will use my brain to write for 25 minutes at my treadmill desk.
- After I finish writing, I will sit down and do 20 minutes of mind mapping.
- When I need to research a topic, I will use Google and Google Scholar (not ChatGPT).
- When travelling on public transport, I’ll put my phone away and try to strike up a conversation with a stranger.
Some of these things may not seem like much, but all of these behaviours require mental and physical effort. Remember, there’s a much easier alternative: sitting, tapping, swiping, and scrolling on your phone.
For instance, I don’t need to chop vegetables and cook my meals. I could eat out or order food to my door. This would save me time and effort (cooking my meals can feel like a part-time job).
But I know I would suffer at some point (physically, mentally, and financially).
Chopping vegetables and cooking take effort, but it helps me cultivate calm. When done with a focused mind (not listening to podcasts or talking on the phone), I really enjoy these activities.
If I were to outsource these activities, I’d be going backwards, because I’d most likely lose my valuable cooking skills over time.
Similarly, writing articles like this one feels hard. But hard doesn’t mean bad. It’s satisfying to focus my mind, wrestle with ideas, and write.
Many of us mistakenly believe that an easy life is a better life. But it’s not. A life where you are constantly pursuing pleasure and taking the easy path can lead to anhedonia.
What is anhedonia?
Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure in things that were once pleasurable (e.g., a homecooked meal or a sunset). Some people describe it as life in greyscale.
It turns out the more pleasure we pursue, the more pleasure we need and the more pain we experience.
It may sound counterintuitive, but pursuing hard things makes you feel more motivated and more positive about life.
As humans, we want to challenge ourselves. We’re wired for it.
Psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke encourages us to take on difficult, even painful, activities as a way of “aligning our primitive wiring with our modern ecosystem”. She writes:
“We are survivors. We’re wired for struggle, especially of physical nature. Yet we live in a world in which we’re largely insulated from pain. And not just pain, but also discomfort of any kind. Everything is supplied to us at the touch of a finger. Now we struggle just to get up off the couch. Our modern ecosystem incentivizes inactivity. Inactivity breeds lethargy. Lethargy breeds anxiety and depression. We must fight against this.”
So, forget trying harder. Work out a few hard things you want to do and focus on doing them instead.
I’ve developed a simple but powerful morning practice that has changed me.
It has made me a calmer, better focused, happier, more mentally flexible, and creative person.
It takes anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes to do this practice, but trust me, this morning practice is time well spent.
It usually feels hard at first, but by the end, I feel strong, confident, and clearer in my thinking. As clichéd as it sounds, this practice helps me be the best version of myself.
What simple morning practice am I talking about?
I’m talking about my movement practice.
Before I do any work (e.g., check my email or messages, read the news, or deliver a presentation), I make myself do some physical activity.
I usually run on a treadmill, ride a stationary bike, or lift heavy weights.
I can’t say I’m leaping out of bed with joy at the thought of exercising. There’s always a little voice in my head that grumbles, “Ugh, do we have to do this?”
But I push forward and lace up my running shoes because I know that by the end, I’ll feel amazing.
Twenty minutes into my movement practice, my husband says he can hear me ‘whooping’ with joy from the other end of the house.
The natural ‘runner’s high’ people talk about is real.
I can relate to Cultural Historian Vybarr Cregan-Reid when he describes his running highs in the following way:
“They are as strong as bootleg whisky. They make you want to stop everyone that you pass and tell them how beautiful they are, what a wonderful world this is, isn’t it great to be alive?”
Discovering the delight in movement
The amazing thing is that a year ago, I couldn’t run for more than a minute without being completely out of breath. Now I can run for 45 minutes nonstop. And I’m hooked.
How did I get here? And more importantly, how can you cultivate a movement practice that leaves you feeling energised, less stressed, and in a great mood?
Do you remember, as a child, running around the playground, swinging on the monkey bars, and playing games like Chasey?
You did these things naturally and effortlessly, and you enjoyed doing them. No one had to force you to move.
You ran for the sake of running. You ran because it made you feel good and fully alive.
This is what movement does for me. It makes me feel excited about life.
I’ve discovered this is the key to building a long-lasting movement practice: you have to find delight in moving your body. And you have to hang in there for long enough for the delight to show up.
You see, the delight probably won’t be there straightaway. Instead, what you’ll usually find is that there’s some discomfort and resistance for the first 10 – 15 minutes of your movement practice.
But if you persist, trust me, the delight will come knocking at your door and sweep through your house like a group of wild party animals.
Just to be clear, you don’t have to run to experience this delightful feeling. Any moderate-intensity physical activity, such as riding a bike, dancing, and swimming, will do the job.
In the book The Joy of Movement, psychologist Dr Kelly McGonigal makes it clear that you can achieve a natural high from any sustained physical activity.
She says the key to experiencing this ‘exercise induced euphoria’ is to put in the time and effort. She writes:
“You just have to do something that is moderately difficult for you and stick with it for at least twenty minutes. That’s because the runner’s high isn’t a running high. It’s a persistence high.”
The thing about movement is that it takes effort. But that effort is what delivers the delight!
When you do hard things for a sustained period of time, your brain rewards you by serving up a cocktail of feel good chemicals, such as dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, noradrenaline, and endocannabinoids.
From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense.
Life for our ancient ancestors was hard work and often dangerous. To survive, they had to forage and hunt for food, find water, build shelters, and run from wild predators.
What would keep hunter-gatherers going when their stomachs were empty and their bodies were in pain?
These neurochemical rewards (e.g, dopamine and serotonin) would keep them going. And keep going they did!
Hunter-gatherers clocked up thousands of steps each day. They were constantly on the move because their survival depended on it.
But here’s what I find really interesting . . .
Despite being incredibly active, hunter-gatherers’ brains were wired for comfort and laziness. This wiring served them well, especially when food was hard to obtain. Conserving energy through sedentary behaviour was a survival trait.
This explains why most of us feel resistance to the idea of physical exercise.
Fast-forward 30,000 years to today: our modern environment is completely different from that of our ancient ancestors, but our brains are still the same (i.e. wired for comfort).
Want food? You can order it with the tap of a button. In our modern world, you don’t have to move much, if at all.
Because of our ancient wiring, some resistance to physical activity will always be there. We just have to push ourselves to do the hard things first (e.g., exercise), knowing that the rewards will come if we persist for long enough.
As you start moving your body, during those first few minutes, you may find yourself thinking, “Why am I doing this? This doesn’t feel good!”
To which, I say: Can you feel your heart pounding in your chest? Can you hear yourself huffing and puffing? Is that sweat dropping off your face and onto the ground?
Fabulous! You’re on the right track. Hang in there. It won’t be long before your mood starts to shift in a dramatic way.
Embracing the full body experience
I have come to love the feeling of my clothes soaked in sweat after I exercise. There was a time when I thought that was gross. But not anymore.
Those sweaty, stinky clothes are evidence that I’ve worked hard. It’s proof that I pushed myself and the feel good chemicals are flowing through my brain and will continue to do so for the next few hours.
In The Official Dopamine Nation Workbook, psychiatrist Dr Anna Lembke explains what happens at a neurochemical level when you do hard things. She writes:
“While engaging in these kinds of painful activities [exercise, meditation, ice-cold water plunges, etc], our dopamine levels rise slowly over the latter half of the activity and remain elevated for hours afterward before going back down to baseline, without ever going below baseline.”
This is why Dr Lembke starts her day by avoiding her phone and doing the hard things first. She said on a recent podcast interview:
“I won’t even go on my laptop until I’ve exercised, eaten breakfast, I’ve read a paper that gets delivered to my house, I’ve made my bed . . . I’ve done all the things I need to do to centre myself for the day.”
Similarly, I equate my movement practice with getting my brain ready for the day and accessing parts of myself that would otherwise lie dormant.
Sometimes movement helps me to experience a wonderful flow state. I feel in tune with my mind and body. Things just feel easier.
But even if I don’t reach a state of flow, moving helps me be more present and show up as the best version of myself in the other areas of my life, such as my work and when I’m with my family.
My movement practice is something I’ve come to genuinely enjoy. It’s not something I need to rush through to tick off a list.
If you’re reading this and thinking “But I don’t like movement” and “I’m not an athletic person”, I get it because I wasn’t always a super active person.
There was a time when movement felt like a grind. I felt clumsy and awkward. It was something I just had to get done.
So, what led to this dramatic shift in how I related to movement?
I shifted from training for my appearance (to stay lean) to training to feel good.
Psychologists would say I became intrinsically motivated to move rather than extrinsically motivated.
When you’re extrinsically motivated, you’re moving to lose weight, achieve a particular look (e.g., the fitness influencer look), or have a sexy body. You’re trying to reach some place in the future, and it often takes you to a place of misery.
A cautionary tale from a bodybuilding champion
In my early twenties, I became friends with a businesswoman who was also a female bodybuilder. I was inspired by her discipline and focus, so when she invited me to attend a Bodybuilding competition, I jumped at the chance. I thought, “Why not?”
I should point out that this was in the pre-social-media era, when you couldn’t easily watch videos of people flexing their muscles online. You had to go to competitions like these, or watch a documentary (rented from a video store), to get a glimpse into the world of bodybuilding.
As we sat in the audience at the Bodybuilding Championships, one perfectly chiselled body after another walked onto the stage and flexed their muscles. I felt inspired.
Without knowing what went into getting visible abs and perfectly toned bodies like these, I remember thinking, “I want a body like that!”
A couple of hours later, the judges announced the bodybuilding champions, and shortly after, the party kicked off as everyone hit the dance floor, including the bodybuilders I had watched strut their stuff across the stage.
At one point, I found myself dancing next to the Female Bodybuilding Champion. She was holding her massive trophy, and I couldn’t help but notice that her face had a pained expression and she was struggling to move and stay upright.
She’d just been crowned Bodybuilding Champion of the Year, so I thought, “Why is she looking so sad and weak?”
I spun around, told her she looked amazing, and congratulated her. I then asked her (shouting over the loud music) how she was feeling. Her answer took me by surprise. She said:
“I’m so tired and hungry. I just want to go home and eat a pizza!”
That’s when I realised she had been starving herself for the competition, and just like that, the idea of achieving a body like hers quickly vanished from my mind.
To achieve the ‘perfect’ look, bodybuilders and fitness influencers often severely restrict their diets, which can be harmful.
In the book How Not to Die (Too Soon), Professor and Personal Trainer Devi Sridhar states:
“For most women, achieving visible abs requires an extremely low body fat percentage (less than 17 per cent, below the 20-23 per cent healthy range), which is often linked to irregular menstruation, brittle nails, feeling faint and disrupted hormone production.”
So, unless you want to feel faint and constantly crave pizza, think twice before setting a goal to look like a bodybuilding champion or a fitness influencer!
When the focus is on aesthetics, you undermine the joy of movement.
In the DW documentary Muscles – More than Power and Pumping Iron, social media influencer and former Bikini model champion Sophia Thiel shared her experience of training to achieve the ‘perfect’ body. She states:
“When you train for the sake of your appearance, it can quickly tear you apart and take away all the joy that the sport normally brings with it.”
Post competition, Sophia found it difficult to maintain her competitive form and stick to her competition diet. Her weight began to fluctuate, and the nasty online comments about her appearance started to take their toll on her mental health.
At some point, Sophia shifted her focus from her appearance to how lifting weights made her feel. She said:
“Today my motivation for working out is very different. It brings a lot more balance to my life. I can deal with stress better. The way I carry myself is completely different, which gives me self-confidence. My sleep and concentration are better too. In other words, training improves my quality of life.”
Making the mental shift, like Sophia did, from wanting to look good to feeling good, is a total game-changer.
But in our image-obsessed world, it’s easy to lose sight of the mind and mood-altering effects of physical movement (spending less time on social media and unfollowing fitness influencers can help with this mental shift).
Harvard Professor John Ratey sums it up nicely when he says physical exercise is like “a little bit of Prozac and a little bit of Ritalin”. It does wonders for your brain (especially your attention and mood) with no nasty side effects.
To sum up
Instead of reaching for your phone first thing in the morning, try reaching for your running shoes, a set of dumbbells, or a yoga mat.
Developing a morning movement practice is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do to benefit your brain and improve the quality of your life.
But the key is to find delight in moving for the sake of moving. You need to persist with the movement for long enough – at least 20 minutes – for your brain to reward you with a dose of feel good chemicals.
When movement becomes inherently enjoyable, you’ll find yourself doing it more often. Before you know it, it will be a non-negotiable part of your day. In the words of Dr Kelly McGonigal, “regular exposure to exercise will over time teach your brain to like, want, and need it”.
Image Credit
Image 6: “2013 Fall Classic Natural Bodybuilding Competition – U.S. Army Garrison Humphreys, South Korea – 28 Sep 2013” by USAG-Humphreys is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
At the start of a new year, I usually feel pressure to set goals.
We are sold this idea that, if you want to go places in life, goal-setting is absolutely essential.
For many years, I enthusiastically attended workshops with other goal-setting enthusiasts, where I wrote long (and overwhelming) lists of goals.
But towards the end of last year, instead of feeling delight at the idea of setting goals, I felt dread.
When I thought about setting goals, there was a little voice in my head that screamed, “Please don’t make me do this!”
So I stopped, and I listened to that little voice.
I’ve learnt that just as you shouldn’t force yourself to wear tight shoes, it’s not always helpful to force yourself to do certain things.
Sometimes you need to try a different approach, which is exactly what I’m doing this year.
I’ve decided to shift my focus from setting goals to running tiny experiments.
It’s a subtle mental shift that takes me from feeling fixed and rigid to curious and playful.
If you’ve ever created a list of goals or New Year’s resolutions, only to abandon them shortly after (and felt demoralised), tiny experiments may be for you.
In this blog, I’ll share what tiny experiments are and how you can use them to have more fun and experience more growth and learning.
Breaking free from traditional goal-setting methods
In her excellent book Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, neuroscientist Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff argues that traditional goal-setting approaches no longer work in these uncertain times. She states:
“The linear way is wildly out of sync with the lives we live today. The challenges we’re facing and the dreams we’re pursuing are increasingly hard to define, measure, and pin to a set schedule. In fact, a common challenge for many people these days is feeling stuck when it comes to their next steps: instead of providing a motivating force, the idea of setting a well-defined goal is paralysing. When the future is uncertain, the neat parameters of rigid goal-setting frameworks are of little help; it feels like throwing darts without a target to aim at.”
Dr Le Cunff argues that the way we set goals is broken. Not only does traditional goal-setting encourage toxic productivity, but it can also leave us feeling dissatisfied, as if we are constantly failing. She states:
“…they [traditional goal-setting methods] create a discouraging perspective where we are far from success. Our satisfaction – the best version of ourselves – lies somewhere in the future.”
She argues a new approach is required that takes us away from “rigid linearity to fluid experimentation”.
Enter Tiny Experiments
A tiny experiment is a fun, low-stakes way to test out a new behaviour and see if it’s for you.
This may not sound revolutionary, but the power of tiny experiments lies in the mental shift they bring.
Instead of pursuing fixed and rigid goals, when you run a tiny experiment, you open yourself up to exploring new possibilities and stepping into the unknown.
In the book Tiny Experiments, Dr Le Cunff lays out a simple process for designing your own tiny experiments.
The process begins by playing a game of ‘self-anthropology’. In other words, you observe your own life and capture those observations by making field notes.
Here are some things to capture in your field notes:
- Things that spark your interest and curiosity
- Things that give you energy and deplete your energy
- Things that bring you joy
- Social interactions and any insights that come from them
For instance, yesterday I went to stock up on supplies from a small bulk foods store. I got talking to the sales assistant, who mentioned that she worked at two bulk food stores in different areas. I asked her if she noticed any major differences in the customers between the two stores. Her answer surprised me. She said:
“The customers up in the hills are less rushed. They are more willing to chat. People here seem in a hurry… a bit more fast paced.”
This five-minute conversation made me realise I don’t want to feel rushed or give the impression I’m in a hurry and have no time for a chat. I want to experience more calm in my life.
That’s the first step when it comes to designing a tiny experiment: gathering a rich source of observations.
The next step is to come up with a research question and a hypothesis (i.e. an idea you want to put to the test).
I know this part may sound serious and scary, but trust me, you don’t need to be a scientist to come up with a research question and a hypothesis to test.
There’s a magical word that can help to kick-start the process: Maybe.
Maybe if I checked my phone only at certain times in the day, I’d feel calmer?
Maybe if I put my phone away 30 minutes before going to bed, I’d sleep better?
Maybe if I exercised for 30 minutes each morning, I’d feel calmer and less stressed?
Maybe if I got up and walked on my treadmill every 30 minutes for 5 minutes, I’d have more energy?
Maybe if I rode my bike and walked more (instead of driving), I’d feel more relaxed and less busy?
These are examples of potential research questions I’ve brainstormed.
The word Maybe is incredibly powerful. When you use the word Maybe in this way, it sparks your curiosity and opens you up to exploring new possibilities.
Once you’ve come up with a question, you then turn it into a hypothesis.
Below is a figure from the book Tiny Experiments that illustrates how to turn an observation into a research question and a hypothesis.
My tiny experiments: Real world examples
Last year, I ran various tiny experiments, several of which focused on cultivating calm.
I had noticed that my days often felt hamster wheely, rushing from one activity to the next. I wanted to feel calmer and more grounded.
With this in mind, I designed the following tiny experiment:
After I finish delivering a presentation, I will lay flat on the couch for 15 minutes and do nothing. I’ll do this for the next 5 days.
So, for the next five days, I conducted my lying flat tiny experiment.
After lying flat for 15 minutes, I’d check in with myself: How do I feel? Do I feel less stressed? More grounded? I also reflected on how I felt at the end of the day.
By doing these quick check-ins, I was collecting data on my tiny experiment.
After I’d completed this tiny experiment, I took a step back and asked myself, “How did that tiny experiment go? Was it a success? Do I want to continue doing this?”
I concluded that the experiment had been a success. I discovered that forcing myself to do nothing was a good way to regulate my nervous system and feel calmer.
But not all of my tiny experiments have been quite so successful.
A tiny experiment that went off the rails
Last year, I ran a tiny experiment that completely backfired.
If I had taken a traditional goal-setting approach, I would have said I had failed dismally and hung my head in shame.
But there is no failure when it comes to running tiny experiments, only growth and learning.
This tiny experiment involved selling clothing on Depop (an online fashion marketplace for buying and selling secondhand clothes).
Tiny Experiment:
I will put up one item of clothing on Depop every day for the next 30 days.
My hope was to earn some extra cash, declutter my wardrobe and extend the life of some of the clothes I no longer wear.
But as I ran this tiny experiment, it became clear it wasn’t working: I was buying more clothes than I was selling!
I’m embarrassed to admit this, but it was Winter time, and I became obsessed with cashmere jumpers (I loved the warmth and soft feel against my skin).
After listing an item for sale, I found myself scrolling through Depop, searching for more cashmere jumpers to buy. I would enter a trance-like state, as if I was using a poker machine.
If I had been selling more items, maybe I could have justified this behaviour, but I was selling very few items. Once postage and fees were factored in, I was earning only $1–$2 per item!
It wasn’t until I bought and put on a jumper that had clearly shrunk in the wash, revealing my belly button in all its glory, that I quickly came to my senses and said, “Enough!”
It was time to get off the consumer treadmill!
I quickly aborted this tiny experiment and deleted my Depop account.
You could say this tiny experiment was a flop. But I didn’t beat myself up about it. As I mentioned earlier, there is no failure when it comes to tiny experiments (only growth and learning), and I had learnt something valuable from this experience.
What did I learn?
I learnt that selling clothes online was a trap for me. It exposed me to all these other beautiful items that were really hard to resist.
I also discovered that taking photos of my clothing items made me appreciate each piece a little more. In the end, I decided to hold on to and wear several items I had taken for granted.
I also learnt that it was okay for me to quit the experiment and try something else. There was no shame in quitting. In fact, quitting was the right thing for me to do.
You always have options when it comes to your tiny experiments. You get to be flexible because nothing is set in stone.
Designing your own tiny experiments
When you are new to tiny experiments, it can feel daunting to design your own experiments from scratch.
I find it helpful to see examples of other people’s tiny experiments. This is why I belong to Dr Le Cunff’s Ness Labs community: a community of people excited about growth, learning, and running tiny experiments.
In this online community, people share their tiny experiments with each other.
Here is a small selection of tiny experiments people have shared with me:
- I will do 10 minutes of tai chi for the next 7 days.
- I will aim to publish one article every month on topics that interest me for the next 6 months.
- I will journal by hand for 10 minutes every morning for the next 7 days.
- I will draw every Sunday afternoon for 3 months.
- I will read for 15 minutes each day for the next 7 days.
- I will attend group fitness classes on the beach from Monday to Friday this week.
- I will write down 3 wins every day for the next 30 days.
- I will not look at social media or doomscroll after 7pm for the next 7 days.
As you can see, these are all small behaviours performed over short time periods. Most of them can be slotted into even the busiest of schedules. This is the power of tiny experiments.
Once you’ve completed your tiny experiment, what’s next?
After you’ve conducted your tiny experiment for the specified duration, you have three choices:
- You can keep doing the behaviour (make it a tiny habit)
- You can stop doing the behaviour (call it quits)
- You can tweak the behaviour
For example, in my experiment of doing nothing, I scaled the 15 minutes on the couch back to just 10 to see if I could still get the same benefits. To my delight, 10 minutes seemed to work just as well as 15 minutes.
To sum up
When you run a tiny experiment, you’re constantly tweaking and refining what you do, which means you’re continuously learning and growing as a person. This helps build momentum and a feeling of success.
At the end of the day, tiny experiments are a fun, low-stakes way to improve your life. With your sights no longer fixated on some far-off destination, you have the freedom to experiment and see what works best for you.