Describe your journey to discovering "the experimental mindset."

I divide my life in two separate chapters. In the first one,  I had a very linear approach that was driven by traditional definitions of success. I did my best to do well in school, got a good job at Google and then tried to climb the corporate ladder, getting a promotion, working on the best projects possible. From an external standpoint, I should have been happy, but I wasn’t. I was feeling empty inside. I was both bored and burned out.

I left my job at Google thinking that I should try to do something different, not realizing that I was following yet another script of success. I decided to start a start-up. But again, I didn’t find happiness by following an idea of success that everyone around me was following. It was only when my start-up failed that, for the very first time in my life, I didn’t have a clear idea of what I was supposed to do next. I finally asked myself, what is it that I want to do? What would make me happy?

I went back to the drawing board. What were topics I would be excited to explore, even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain. I had always been fascinated with why we think the way we do and feel the way we feel.

So, I decided to go back to university. I completed my graduate studies and I got a PhD in Neuroscience. Throughout this journey, I decided to learn in public: I started a newsletter, and every week, I would pick a topic that I had discovered in my studies and would take those Neuroscience insights and turn them into practical tools for people to apply to their life and work. This ‘tiny experiment’ of starting to write online and sharing what I was learning in public was the beginning of my work of trying to understand how we can live more experimental lives.

Why is the experimental mindset so important?

A mindset is a default way of seeing the world, so our mindsets influence so many things in our lives: our decisions, our relationships, the way we think and even the way we feel. When we’re not aware of our mindsets, they can impact the direction of our life without us even realizing it.

Being aware of your mindsets is the difference between living a conscious life where you’re making choices in accord with what you actually want versus being on autopilot and having those mindsets subconsciously drive all of your decisions. The great thing about mindsets is that they can change. But the first step is to make them conscious.

What are some of the mindsets that hold us back?

There are three subconscious mindsets that get in the way of us living happy, conscious lives: the cynical mindset, the escapist mindset and the perfectionist mindset.

The cynical mindset is when we have lost all curiosity and ambition in life and we actually sometimes even make fun of earnest people who still have a high level of curiosity and ambition. When we’re cynical, we feel like there’s no point in trying. We’re in survival mode all the time, so we just sit on the sofa doomscrolling, going through all the negative news, being stuck in the cycle, and maybe even spend a lot of time and energy debating the negative news with other people.

In the escapist mindset, we’re still curious, but we have decided to let go of our ambitions. We’re trying to do everything we can to escape our responsibilities. That can take the form of retail therapy, binge-watching or dream-planning our next vacation, instead of doing something right now to change our lives.

In the perfectionist mindset, we try to escape uncertainty through work. So, we have high ambition, but low curiosity. That might look like self-coercion, overworking ourselves or toxic productivity. Our goals are driving all of our decisions. We feel like if we manage to achieve that goal, if we manage to be successful, then we’ll be happy.

You can picture these three subconscious mindsets on a four-by-four metric, where the two variable factors are curiosity and ambition. In the case of the cynical mindset, it’s low curiosity and low ambition. For the escapist mindset, it’s high curiosity but low ambition. And with the perfectionist mindset, you do have high ambition, but you have decided to let go of your curiosity.

These mindsets are actually very fluid, and they might change depending on our situation and different triggers in the moment. This is actually really good news, because it means that these mindsets are not fixed personality traits. We can become aware of them and make the decision to change.

What mindset should we strive for?

There is a fourth alternative to the three mindsets, which is called the experimental mindset. This is a mindset where your curiosity and your ambition are both high. You’re open to uncertainty. You see it as an opportunity to explore, to grow and to learn. When you have an experimental mindset, instead of chasing linear goals that give you the illusion of certainty, you’re open to designing experiments. Instead of trying to get to a specific outcome, you might start from a research question. Anytime you don’t understand something, it doesn’t create fear, it creates curiosity.

Having an experimental mindset means seeing failures as data points that you can learn from. It means being open to making mistakes because you know you’re going to learn from them. It means embracing the fact that you might not have a plan, that you don’t know what’s coming. And this is great. It means that you can design your life in a way that is conscious and connected.

How can we cultivate an experimental mindset?

The experimental mindset is based on the scientific method. You start by observing your current situation and the world around you. Then you ask a research question and design a tiny experiment to collect data, which you can then analyze. Based on the results, you can decide what your next step is.
 
To design an experiment, you need to commit to curiosity. A great way to do this is to design what I call a "pact." This is a commitment device where you choose one specific action and decide on a duration and you say, "I will perform this action for this specific duration of time." Make sure that you’re keeping your experiment tiny enough by choosing a duration that is reasonable — something you can actually achieve.

A pact is purposeful. It needs to be something you care about. A pact is actionable. This is something that you need to be able to do right now. You decide on the duration, the number of trials, and then you say, "I’m going to do this for two weeks," or "I’m going to do this for one year."

Pacts are different from new year’s resolutions. This  is not something ambitious that you decide on at the beginning of the year and that you’re likely to abandon. It’s something small and achievable that you can start doing at any point during the year.

The difference between a habit and a pact is that with a habit, you’re very clear that this is something that’s going to be good for you. And so you commit to it for an indefinite amount of time. Whereas with an experiment, you’re not quite sure whether it’s going to work for you or not. You’re testing something out. And so you might say, "I will go to bed at the same time every night for two weeks and then will I decide whether I want to turn it into a habit." Making a pact is really just about learning something new. It’s not about being successful or getting to a specific outcome.

How do you analyze the collected data?

Once you’ve completed your pact and gone through the data collection phase, you can finally look at the data. I encourage people, while they’re running pacts, to take notes. It can be very simple, a few bullet points on your phone, something in your journal — but keep track of whether you did it or not and how it felt. Based on that, you can make the decision to either persist with your pact; pause it if it’s not something you want to continue; or pivot, which means making a little tweak and changing something before you start your next cycle of experimentation.

What are some tiny experiments anyone can do?

You can run tiny experiments in all areas of your life. In work, for example, you could say, "I’m going to write an internal newsletter every week for the next six weeks where I share the most interesting links that I find with my colleagues." In relationships, you could say, "Every Sunday, I’m going to sit down and send a note to a good friend I haven’t spoken to in a while." And when it comes to your health, you could say, "I’m going to go for a walk for 20 minutes for 20 days to see how I feel at the end of that experiment."

With an experiment, you’re not making any assumptions as to whether this is going to work for you or not. A habit that a friend has — for example, going for a run three times a week — might not be good for you. Maybe when it comes to your health and body movement, you prefer dancing or something else. That’s why it’s interesting to run an experiment before committing to a habit. When it comes to running, for example, you could say, "I’m going to run three times a week for three weeks, not for the rest of my life. And at the end of the three weeks, I will decide whether this is what I want to keep doing."

Why should we commit to curiosity?

In essence, committing to curiosity ensures that you will live your life, not the life that other people expect you to live. Curiosity keeps us adaptable and nimble in an ever-changing world. It ensures we stay open to new possibilities. And frankly, it makes life a lot more fun.

This article began as a video on BigThink.com and originally appeared in the Winter 2026 issue of Rotman Management magazine.