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Tiny Experiments
What It’s About
You don't need the perfect plan to start moving. When Anne-Laure Le Cunff realized her carefully mapped-out career at Google was leading her down the wrong path, she rebuilt her life through small, time-bound experiments instead of five-year plans. Discover how to reconnect with your curiosity, build momentum through tiny pacts, and trust that knowing just your next small step is enough.
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Tiny Experiments: Summary
One morning, Anne-Laure's arm turns purple. It doesn't hurt much. It just looks strange, darkening under the skin like a bruise that came out of nowhere. She sees a doctor and ends up in the hospital, where a Stanford clinic finds a blood clot in her arm that could break loose and travel toward her lungs at any moment. She needs emergency surgery, right away.
The trouble is, Anne-Laure doesn't have time for right away. She works at Google in a global role on the digital-health team, and her team has a big company retreat coming up. So she asks the doctors to push the surgery back until her team is traveling to the event, and she doesn't dare tell her manager. Keeping the project on schedule matters more to her than the emergency signal her own body is sending. The surgery goes well, she recovers fast, and she heads straight back to her desk. But something inside her has shifted: from then on, her work feels mechanical.
A few months later, after a fast-moving year in San Francisco, she flies home to Paris for Christmas. Someone at the family table asks her, "How's life?" She gives the answer she's rehearsed: everything's great, work is wonderful, San Francisco is beautiful. This time, though, she hears her own voice as if from the outside, and she realizes she hasn't actually thought about what's true in years. She's burned out and bored to death. From the outside, meanwhile, she's living exactly the life most people would say they dream of.
She quits on her first day back at the office.
