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How to Find Your Purpose (with Tiny Experiments)

2025-03-04 · Book summary (Book Club) · Ali · recording, 22:27 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Goals, purpose and life design · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book, Family, His medical past, His own products discussed, Sponsor segment present

Drawing on Anne-Laure Le Cunff's book Tiny Experiments and his conversation with her, Ali gives five strategies for feeling lost: recognise the Red Queen effect and time anxiety, identify invisible scripts, embrace liminal spaces, escape the tyranny of purpose, and run tiny experiments instead of linear goals.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Feeling lost and behind; five strategies from Anne-Laure Le Cunff; introduction

  • ★★★ For anyone feeling lost or behind in life, Ali shares five strategies he has found helpful from neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of Tiny Experiments. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Anne-Laure Le Cunff (quoted): Anne-Laure Le Cunff says we are in perpetual transformation: the person you are today differs from the person you will be tomorrow, and the uncomfortable passage between states is just what life is. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Ali's main work in early 2025: with his wife and their team he is building a series of productivity apps they wish existed; he has made videos on his channel since 2017. — 00:00:58 · Izzy Sealey, Feel-Good Productivity (book)

00:01:27 — Strategy one: recognise the Red Queen effect and time anxiety

  • ★★ The Red Queen effect, named after the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, is the modern feeling of running ever faster on the treadmill of life while still falling behind. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Time anxiety, a term Ali takes from Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is the sense that you are late in life, have not done enough yet, and that your peers are doing better and living more interesting lives. — 00:02:04
  • ★★ Ali has felt time anxiety at various points of his life: applying to medical school, as a medical student, and now as an author who feels he should promote his book more and an entrepreneur whose apps are not growing fast enough. — 00:02:33 · Feel-Good Productivity (book)
  • ★★ Time anxiety stems from social comparison, Ali says: we watch a giant leaderboard of friends and colleagues who already have the career, the salary or the family, and compare our timelines. — 00:03:02
  • ★★ With social media such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, Ali says, we no longer compare our lives only with the people around us but with everyone in the world, and the algorithms show us people far ahead rather than normal lives. — 00:03:31 · YouTube, Instagram, TikTok
  • ★★★ Against comparison, Ali advises recognising that everyone feels behind, even billionaires he has spoken to whose neighbours have more billions, and that you can never win the comparison game once you play it. — 00:04:00

  • ★★★ Instead of asking how to catch up, Ali advises asking why you feel you are in a race at all, with the prompt: what would your life look like if you didn't feel in such a rush? The prompt gives him a feeling of liberation. — 00:04:30

    “what would your life look like if you didn't feel like you were in such a rush?”

00:04:59 — Sponsor read for Spotter Studio

00:06:26 — Strategy two: identify your invisible scripts (sequel, crowd pleaser, epic)

  • ★★ Cognitive scripts, Ali explains, are little stories stored in our brains that tell us how to behave, in what order and in what situation, such as waiting before opening your mouth at the dentist. — 00:06:26
  • ★ Ali says the idea of cognitive scripts was first identified by scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson in the 1970s. — 00:06:56
  • ★★★ Cognitive scripts have a darker side, Ali says: they can hijack the most important decisions of our lives, about school, career or relationships, so that we live by someone else's screenplay without realising it. — 00:07:41
  • ★★ The sequel script is deciding today based on what we did yesterday, Ali says: after university you consider only jobs aligned with your studies, and a management consultant considers private equity, investment banking or an MBA. — 00:08:10
  • ★★ The crowd pleaser script, Ali says, is choosing what will make everyone around you happy, especially your parents, such as a career you are not that excited about, out of a need for external validation. — 00:08:40
  • ★★★ The epic script, which Ali says hit him hardest, is the idea that whatever you do with your life must be big, like a Hollywood movie, so we make ourselves miserable searching for our passion and purpose and feel like failures without one. — 00:09:09
  • ★★★ For the last few months Ali has grappled with the epic script: having done YouTube and written a bestselling book, he is content, just married with a child on the way, and wants to spend time with his family. — 00:09:38 · Izzy Sealey, Feel-Good Productivity (book), YouTube
  • ★★ Ali also wants to build software and feels pressure that his next thing must be even bigger than the last, as if making productivity content for the rest of his life would be lame. — 00:09:38
  • ★★ What helped Ali with the epic script was having a name for it: recognising the subconscious script that his next thing must be bigger, even at the risk of decisions out of line with his own values. — 00:10:07

00:10:49 — Strategy three: embrace liminal spaces

  • ★★★ The one idea Ali would keep from Tiny Experiments is the liminal space: an in-between time in your life with no clear rules, no definition of success and no recipe to follow. — 00:10:49
  • ★★ Our automatic reaction in a liminal space, Ali says, is to cross it as quickly as possible and get back to safety. — 00:10:49
  • ★ The word liminal comes from the Latin limen, threshold: in a liminal space you stand at the doorway between who you were and who you are becoming. — 00:10:49
  • ★★ Liminal spaces can be physical (an airport, a lift, a waiting room), physiological (puberty, or becoming a mother, as his wife tells him) or emotional (the gap after university before a first job). — 00:11:39 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★ It is totally normal, Ali says, for the uncertainty of a liminal space to feel really uncomfortable: you do not know your role, where you are going or how big the space is. — 00:12:09
  • ★★ Uncertainty once meant danger, and the brain's survival mechanism against it backfires in modern life, Ali says: in a liminal space, such as just after quitting a job, its primitive regions are wired to rush to something certain. — 00:12:38
  • ★★★ The key point of Anne-Laure Le Cunff's book and their conversation, Ali says, is that we should try to embrace a liminal space rather than escape it. — 00:13:07
  • ★★ On a plane, Ali says, you can panic at having no control, or take it as an opportunity to be disconnected from the world, with no wi-fi, to read, journal or watch a silly film: the two reactions to a liminal space. — 00:13:36
  • ★★★ Ali calls his conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff a couple of months earlier genuinely transformative: torn between the software, another book, YouTube or something bigger, he realised he was in a liminal space. — 00:13:36 · YouTube
  • ★★★ Ali's main takeaway: in a liminal space, rather than rushing to a decision, it is totally okay to stay with the uncertainty and get comfortable with it, since much personal growth and finding what we authentically want comes from those spaces. — 00:14:05

00:14:35 — Strategy four: escape the tyranny of purpose

  • ★★ Ali cites a graph in Anne-Laure Le Cunff's book of how often books use the phrase "find your purpose": hardly at all over the last 200 years, then everywhere in the last 20. — 00:14:35
  • ★★★ Ali relays Anne-Laure Le Cunff's argument that finding your purpose arose as a way to reject the rigid traditional career, but the search for one true purpose is equally restrictive: we swapped one cognitive script for another. — 00:15:04
  • ★★ Ali feels constant pressure to identify the one thing he is supposed to do for the rest of his life, a message of books he likes such as Gary Keller's The One Thing and Greg McKeown's Essentialism. — 00:15:33
  • ★★★ Treating purpose as a destination, a fixed end point after which everything makes sense, is another case of the arrival fallacy, Ali says: the belief that once we find our purpose we will be happy. — 00:16:02
  • ★★★ Purpose, Ali says, is something you live every day that changes and evolves with you, a question you keep exploring and rediscovering all your life rather than a treasure found once and for all. — 00:16:31

  • ★★★ Instead of asking what your life's purpose is, Ali suggests asking: what gives my life meaning right now, in this season of life? — 00:17:01

    “what gives my life meaning right now in this season of life?”

  • ★★ In this season of his life, Ali says, what gives his work meaning is making helpful YouTube videos and building productivity apps he wants to use every day and that hopefully millions of people can use. — 00:17:30 · YouTube

  • ★★★ Ali will become a dad in a few months, and then, he says, maybe what gives his life meaning will be spending time with his wife and daughter. (hedged) — 00:17:30 · Izzy Sealey

00:17:59 — Strategy five: run tiny experiments

  • ★★★ Ali's fifth strategy, from Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, is to run tiny experiments: when you feel lost, shift from linear goals to experimental goals. — 00:17:59 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ A linear goal, Ali says, has a very clear milestone and a binary definition of success: you get into medical school or the job, or your startup succeeds, or you don't. — 00:17:59
  • ★★ The problem with linear goals, Ali says, is that they are all or nothing and put a lot of pressure on us. — 00:18:28
  • ★★ Ali thinks linear goals are fine in many circumstances: he has one to grow his team's productivity apps, because building them is what he is actively working towards in this season. — 00:18:28
  • ★★ Ali and his wife have formed a small family business around building their productivity apps, working with friends and their team. — 00:18:58 · Izzy Sealey
  • ★★★ Where you feel lost and unsure of your path, Ali says, linear goals make less sense: set an experimental goal that starts from a hypothesis ("what if we tried this?") and collects data for a set period, such as publishing videos, writing a newsletter, meditating or a regular bedtime. — 00:18:58 · experimental mindset

  • ★★★ In an experiment whatever happens is data, Ali says: there is no failure when the only objective is to see what happens; if it works you keep going or scale up, if not you learn for the next experiment. — 00:19:27 · experimental mindset

    “there's no failure when the only objective is to see what happens”

  • ★★★ If you have not yet figured out your path or career, Ali advises asking not what big thing you must do but what tiny experiment you might run to get more data. — 00:20:01 · experimental mindset

  • ★★ Anne-Laure Le Cunff structures tiny experiments as PACTs, Ali says: purposeful (exciting and meaningful to you), actionable (concrete), continuous (simple enough to repeat for the whole experiment) and trackable (a clear yes or no to whether you did it). — 00:20:30
  • ★★★ Unsure as a doctor whether to quit medicine for YouTube or do both, Ali ran a tiny experiment of part-time medicine, two hospital shifts a week for a few weeks, and found he did not enjoy them compared with his business, books and channel. — 00:20:30 · experimental mindset, YouTube
  • ★★ The point of tiny experiments, Ali says, is to reduce the pressure: you need not find the right thing immediately, and the data you gather becomes a process of self-discovery. — 00:20:59 · experimental mindset
  • ★★ Ali recommends Anne-Laure Le Cunff's book Tiny Experiments, which he calls wonderful, for its detailed strategies on carving out one or several tiny experiments in your life. — 00:20:59
  • ★★ In a liminal space, Ali says, you do not commit wholesale to a new path: you stay, embrace the discomfort and run tiny experiments until you reach a new phase, and after a few years the cycle may start again. — 00:21:39 · experimental mindset

00:22:08 — Journaling playlist and sign-off

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Mentioned

Central: Anne-Laure Le Cunff · cognitive script · experimental mindset · liminal space · linear goals · Red Queen effect · time anxiety · Tiny Experiments · tyranny of purpose

Also: People: Gary Keller · Greg McKeown · Izzy Sealey · Robert Abelson · Roger Schank

Works: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland · Essentialism · Feel-Good Productivity (book) · The One Thing

Organizations: Instagram · TikTok · YouTube

Concepts: arrival fallacy · crowd pleaser script · epic script · PACT (concept) · seasonality · sequel script · social media · upward social comparison

Also centred on liminal space: Are you in a liminal space?

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