Tiny Experimenters
Breaking the Toxic Productivity Cycle One Test at a Time
Welcome back, friends.
Welcome to the 48 new subscribers—thanks for joining! Each issue of Path Nine is packed with meditations on work, productivity, tech, and entrepreneurship.
It’s been a while since my last newsletter, but as you’ll see, it’s been a busy year of experimenting. Today I’ll share a bit about what’s been going on, a book (and mindset) that has me really excited, and an app to go along with it.
Alright, let’s dive in.
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I’ve been on a pretty wild ride for the last 12 months. Life has been every shade of vibrant and chaotic.
This past year, I’ve hit exhilarating peaks and endured deep troughs.
I said a final “goodbye” to the house I always dreamt of—a vision that unraveled.
Walked away from the place where I built that house and moved back to Seattle.
Stepped down from my role at Tiny, feeling worn down and itching for something different. I plunged into the world of fractional consulting, working with startups and founding teams.
But the true transformation came with the birth of my first child.
She’s redefined my world.
Sometimes, it’s her infectious laugh and warm smile that turns the grey days into gold. Other days, it’s her late-night cries—teaching me patience, the hard way, one sleepless hour at a time.
But with all change comes challenge.
For the ambitious, slowing down feels like turning off the freeway and directly into a school zone.
Anyone who’s scaled the career heights knows the struggle. There’s this internal pressure to outdo your past achievements. Even after making the conscious shift to step back from the grind, that anxious ambition sits, not-so-silently, waiting for me to get back in the game.
But I didn’t step back this past year just to catch my breath—I did it to reevaluate my relationship with work and ambition. To understand why parts of it felt unnatural, even unhealthy. The signs were there, I just needed to take a look.
The fleeting moments of success, gone as soon as they arrive.
The hollow feeling of a “win.”
The relentless moving of goalposts.
The sprint that morphs into an endless marathon.
It’s that toxic productivity mindset—where every achievement only fuels the next chase.
Too often I convinced myself:
Just spend enough time thinking about the next step or goal, and you’ll be golden. Everything will click into place.
But that finish line never materialized. Instead, I typically end up over-analyzing decisions and getting stuck in analysis paralysis.
Ironically, when running a company, I don’t agonize over decisions. I execute. I embrace an experimenter’s mindset. Yet, when the decisions are about me or my life, the experiments feel weighted.
Professionally, easing off the gas can feel like steering directly into the crash.
Aspire for that promotion? Keep grinding—your peers are closing in.
Want to build your dream home? Log more hours, stack the funds, and build.
Traditional definitions of success often feel limiting. When everyone climbs the same ladder, we become competitive, isolated clones. And when we’re clones, creativity suffers. Authenticity gets stifled.
But what if we flipped the script? What if we lightened the load? Could a change in mindset really change how we engage with ambition? What if we spent less time analyzing and crafting, and more time experimenting?
Life as an Experiment
Over the last year, I’ve been experimenting without even realizing it. Every big change, every difficult decision—it’s all been a series of small tests, some successful, some not. But nothing has made me more aware of the necessity of experimentation than becoming a parent.
Parenting is just a series of tiny (get it?) experiments.
Everything you do to get a baby to stop crying? An experiment.
Everything you think you’re doing right or wrong? Also an experiment.
One day, rocking her to sleep works. The next day, it doesn’t. One moment, she loves a certain food. The next, she spits it out in protest.
It forces you to abandon rigid expectations and embrace flexibility. You try, you learn, you adjust. There’s no way to “win” at parenting—only to iterate. It’s an endless series of tiny experiments.
The more I recognized this, the easier it was to see that life itself is just a series of ongoing experiments. The problem is, we’re stuck trying to plan our way to a perfect life. We treat choices as permanent and failures as fatal when, in reality, they’re just feedback loops.
This realization made me more receptive to Anne-Laure Le Cunff's new book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.
Embracing an Experimental Mindset
Anne-Laure, a neuroscientist and entrepreneur, challenges the traditional linear life approach, marked by rigid goals and predefined milestones. Instead, she advocates for viewing life as small, meaningful experiments. She encourages a flexible and curious growth mindset, trying different methods, observing results, and adapting. This approach turns uncertainty into a learning opportunity, rather than a source of anxiety.
In 2023, I had a chance to sit down with Anne-Laure to discuss what would eventually become Tiny Experiments. During our call I shared my journey with toxic productivity and my path to a more fulfilling creative, entrepreneurial life. Over the last week or so, I’ve been pouring over the ideas and insights shared in the book. It’s so clear that her emphasis on curiosity as a compass is a powerful way to find authentic paths aligned with our values. I loved this little reflection about how a scientist would think about the results of an experiment:
When a scientist conducts an experiment and they don't get the results they expected, they don't go, 'Oh, shame! I'm such a failure!' They go, 'Huh...interesting! What is going on here?'
The experimenter leans into four key steps to unlock more curiosity in work and life:
Observe: Assess the current state
Hypothesis: Formulate a research question (ex: “I believe that doing X will yield Y”)
Test the hypothesis — repeat the action long enough to get sufficient data
Analyze the results
Only once you have completed the full test should you analyze the results and draw your conclusions.
This mindset encourages us to see setbacks as learning opportunities.
Inspired by these insights, I found value in letting go of rigid outcomes and following my curiosity, which eased the pressure of constant achievement and opened new avenues for creativity and growth in the years ahead.
Tiny eXperiments: A Tool for Experimentation
Tiny Experiments encouraged me to recalibrate—to focus on what’s right, right now. It made me realize how much we overcomplicate things. How often we stand in our own way.
We just need to execute, without overthinking.
As the saying goes online, “You can just do things.”
As cliche as it sounds, it holds water.
Want to build an app? Nothing is stopping you. No need for permission. No need for lofty long-term goals. Just a willingness to experiment.
So, in true Tiny Experiments fashion, I built a Tiny eXperiments app to help document experiments and support those embracing an experimenter’s ethos.
With the app you can:
Create and track experiments
Share your experiments (or keep them private)
Record your progress on each experiment
Join other experimenters on their journey
You can share experiments in public to increase your accountability:
Followers can cheer you on along the way or even join you in the experiment.
The idea for this app actually came to me years ago, but the book gave me the push to make it real. I’ve always believed in testing new ideas and finding ways to improve. When we treat life as an experiment, we add a childlike curiosity that makes the world more vivid.
We start asking better questions:
What do I hope to learn from this experiment?
How will completing this help me grow?
What can I take away from the results?
Anne-Laure’s book served as a catalyst for my own creativity. It reminded me to build Tiny eXperiments and reawakened the builder in me.
It helped me just let go of outcomes and follow my curiosity.
If there’s one thing to take away from Anne-Laure’s Tiny Experiments, it’s that when we free ourselves from the shackles of traditional scripts passed down to us, we open ourselves up to a life filled with curiosity, authenticity, and connection.
Here's to tiny experiments, and all of the tiny experimenters.
And, in case you missed it…
Here’s a few related posts I’ve written that people enjoyed:
Until Next Time!
That’s it for this week. As always, if you like the content, please do me a favor and like, share, subscribe — this newsletter runs on overpriced whiskey and reader engagement.
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Book a 1:1 Consulting Call with me. During the call, we’ll do a deep dive into whatever issues you’re facing—from growth to validating business ideas to automating and/or delegating work.
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Thanks for reading, and see you soon,
— Kevin K. (@kkirkpatrick)