A Scientific Approach to Self-Improvement
- Mike Lamb
- Jan 28
- 6 min read
How are your New Year’s resolutions going? Have you joined the gym yet? Enjoying the new, healthier diet? Finished your first book of 2026?
If you’re still on track – well done you! If not, take some comfort in the fact that you’re far from alone.
An analysis of over 30 million activities on sporting app Strava found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by the second Friday of January.
Why resolutions rarely stick
Let’s be honest, this isn’t a surprise. We’ve failed at enough New Year’s resolutions over the years to know that they’re a pretty ineffective way of trying to change your life.
But why do so many of our “new year, new you” aspirations end up shelved not long after the Christmas decorations?
Decades of behavioural economics research show there’s a gulf between intention and action – between doing that thing we know is good for us (going out for a run), and what we actually feel like doing on a cold, wet Wednesday morning (hitting the snooze button followed by some aimless scrolling).
Our annual tradition of starting the year by overcommitting to big, long-term goals is practically a blueprint for failure.
So, what should we do? How about… almost the exact opposite?
Instead of big and long-term, think small and time-limited.
Instead of setting goals and resolutions, carry out experiments.
Instead of just focusing on success, embrace failure.
That’s the thinking behind Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, the 2025 book by French neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
It’s a fitting topic for the first iluli video of 2026. Here is a five-minute explainer on how it works, followed by some fascinating insights from the book and a step-by-step guide to conducting your own tiny experiments:
The big benefits of thinking small
James Clear’s multi-million-selling Atomic Habits is one of the most influential self-help books of the past decade (I wrote about it in more detail in an iluli blog post a couple of years ago).
The big idea is to focus on the small stuff and remember that consistency beats intensity. Little changes are easier to stick to and, if they become habits, they add up to something much bigger.
Rather than committing to a big goal like running a marathon, Clear suggests you make it a daily habit to put on your running shoes at a particular time – say, after work. Chances are, once your trainers are on, you’ll feel like you may as well go for a run.
This feels sensible enough. But what if, after giving it a go, it turns out running just isn’t for you?
From habits to hypothesis
While Atomic Habits is all about helping you stick to a behaviour, Tiny Experiments can help us learn if it’s something we actually want to keep doing.
Rather than obsessing over milestones, goals and targets, Le Cunff argues that we should see life as a series of experiments. Find out what works for you through trial and error – an approach she’s applied to her own life…
Le Cunff is now a neuroscientist at King’s College London, but that would probably have come as a surprise to her younger self. Early in her career, she talked her way into an interview at Google during a chance encounter on an aeroplane. After a few years in the “dream job”, burnout led her to quit. She then tried her hand as a startup founder. When that didn’t work out, she changed course again and retrained in neuroscience.
The problem with resolutions and long-term plans, argues Le Cunff, is that they assume the world is predictable and controllable:
All these approaches to goal setting are based on linear goals [...] The linear way is wildly out of sync with the lives we live today.
Instead, she suggests, “think of yourself as an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study.”
Start small. Develop hypotheses. Carry out experiments. Analyse the results. Learn from them and go again.
Le Cunff unpacks this in more detail in this talk she gave to Google:
How to run your own tiny experiment
In the iluli video, we explored one key building block of Le Cunff’s approach – the PACT. But there’s more to Tiny Experiments than that. Here’s a five-step guide to conducting your own.
Take notes. What does the world’s fastest marathon runner Eliud Kipchoge have in common with a lab scientist?
When Kipchoge and his team were preparing for the first-ever sub-two-hour marathon, they treated training as a big experiment. They documented everything: his mood, the weather, how his trainers felt that day, the smallest details about every aspect of his preparation and recovery. These observations informed subtle tweaks that propelled him to his record-breaking run.
Comprehensive field notes are an essential component of any scientific inquiry, and they’re central to Tiny Experiments too. Keep a notebook. Jot down quick notes with a timestamp whenever something significant crosses your mind or catches your attention: ideas, social encounters, shifts in mood or energy. As Le Cunff puts it:
“Don’t try to capture everything. Use your curiosity as a compass.”
Form a hypothesis. Before long, your notes will become a valuable dataset. Review them and look for patterns and themes.
The next step is to form a hypothesis. Le Cunff recommends starting with a research question. If you noticed your best night’s sleep last week came on a day you went for a run, you might ask yourself: how can you make more time for running during the week? Then think up a potential answer you can put to the test – this is your hypothesis. Le Cunff’s advice is:
“Don’t over-think it. Formulating a hypothesis is an intuitive process based on your past experiences and present inclinations. It should simply be an idea you want to put to the test – an inkling of an answer to your research question.”
Make a PACT. To put your hypothesis to the test, make an agreement with yourself that “I will do X for Y”. For example, “I will run twice a week for one month.” Le Cunff calls these PACTs because they should be Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous and Trackable. It should be something you’re excited to try, that’s based on outputs rather than outcomes. Something you can repeat on a regular basis and can easily say whether you’ve done it or not.
Crucially, it’s not a habit. Habits are open-ended and driven by a specific goal. PACTs are time-limited experiments.
Evaluate. This is the key bit that we often miss. What if, instead of waiting until New Year’s Eve to reflect on how things are going and what we might want to change, we did this every week? This doesn’t need to take long. Le Cunff suggests a simple framework to capture what you learn from experiments:
Plus: What went well?
Minus: What didn’t?
Next: What will you try next?
Iterate. Now it’s time to update your hypothesis and design your next experiment. If you loved running, then great – stick with it. Maybe even go a little bigger. Or perhaps you learned that running’s not for you and it’s time to try something else – swimming, zumba… goat yoga?! Le Cunff has another three-step process for this:
Persist: Run the experiment again.
Pause: Put it on hold.
Pivot: Tweak the experiment to generate new insights next time – for example, running with a friend.
Embracing failure and rethinking “purpose”
The more you repeat this cycle, the more you learn. When scientists conduct an experiment, they glean as much from failures as from successes. This is the beauty of Tiny Experiments: no matter how each one goes, the results are always valuable.
If we embrace trial and error, we accept from the start that the path to progress isn’t a straightforward line from A to B. Thinking about our own lives like this can be incredibly freeing: perfectionism gets replaced by playfulness, anxiety by curiosity, leaving us in a better state of mind to explore the wealth of options available.
This approach isn’t just helping us achieve our goals; it’s giving us a better way to identify what they might be.
When Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues researched the impact of mindset on motivation, they came to a striking conclusion: “Find your passion” is terrible advice. People who believe they need to identify and pursue a single passion tend to “put all their eggs in one basket”, at the expense of exploring other opportunities. And, when the inevitable challenges arise, they’re more likely to give up – much like those well-intentioned New Year’s resolutions.
Le Cunff believes that many of us have become conditioned to find our “purpose” and chase goals that have been defined by others – societal expectations, our families, friends and colleagues – without stopping to question whether they’re right for us. It’s a philosophy that echoes the existentialist idea that purpose isn’t discovered, but defined by the choices we make. Tiny Experiments offers a scientific approach that might just help us make better ones.
Recommended links and further reading
Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World book by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Le Cunff’s Ness Labs website has lots more free online resources and a learning community
Adopting “Atomic” Habits (iluli blog)
How to Make Resolutions That Might Actually Stick – a conversation between iluli favourites David Epstein and Tim Harford (Range Widely Substack)
Two words to avoid when making your New Year’s resolution (BBC)
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