I watched Anne-Laure Le Cunff on a Big Think video on YouTube. It was telling you life isn’t linear and neither should self improvement. We’re told that everything is linear. Progression has a start and an end. Do this to get there then do that. The video affected me.

A lot of self help literature stems from toxic productivity. This is only good for busywork. From these statements I knew this book was going to work wonders for me.

The early book discusses the problems and how to identify your stories. Often we go through stories written by other people but we don’t realise. We run through scripts following our past, the crowd, or our perceived passion. This was the introduction to the theme of experimenting.

We’re all great at recording ourselves and tracking our habits. In doing so we can observe what we enjoy or what we gain energy from and figure out how to drive ourselves. We can take actions on these things and reflect.

The experiments have constraints. They can’t be based on infinite timelines and should be really simple. If you want to paint more your goal should not be to become an established artist but instead to join a painting class for a set number of weeks. These are pacts. The pacts should be lead by our curiosity.

The main takeaways of these pacts should be things that are purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable. These ingredients lead to something tangible which help us reflect.

Time management is replaced by the nonlinear energy management. When we think about our weeks as measures of action or enjoyment we very rarely think about set days. A holiday can last a fortnight but be thoroughly enjoyable as can a single event such as a concert. These are qualitative rather than tracking your hours.

There’s a lot of typical self-help guidance too which is always good to remember. It’s not all rubbish in the wider self-help world so it’s good be pointed towards the helpful parts. Some such examples in this book are trial and error cycles, the persist, pause, or pivot moments to react to feedback either from yourself or from others.

Another good theme that struck me fairly hard in this book was about looking outside yourself. Sometimes the problems we have require an environmental change or a shift in the processes that we don’t enjoy. Not everyone has the luxury to pivot here but it can be liberating to know if you get there that you’ll be able to apply this mindset to your daily life.

The final chapter was a good reminder that experiments can change and should do. If we’re not happy after carrying out our pacts we should change things. Simple but effective.

I thoroughly recommend this book. A great read.