Highlights
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I love writing, so I made a pact with myself to write and share 100 articles in 100 workdays, drawing on my university studies and personal readings. I wrote about mental health at work, creativity, and mindful productivity. Sharing my work daily was terrifying at first. I felt naked. I was admitting to the world that I was a work in progress, as was everything I wrote. My only anchor was the pact itself. I resisted the urge to clarify my end goal and solely focused on showing up. It wasn’t always easy to do, so I leaned into self-reflection. I took notes and journaled. I watched for signs of burnout and played with various formats—such as shorter articles for when life got busy. Slowly, a path emerged. I finished the 100 articles and decided to keep going. My newsletter grew steadily to one hundred thousand readers. I called it Ness Labs, a combination of the suffix –ness, which describes the quality of being (which you find in words such as awareness, consciousness, mindfulness), and labs, as I wanted it to be a laboratory for personal experimentation. People wrote emails to thank me for helping them turn chaos into creativity, for sharing tools to reduce their anxiety, and for opening doors to parts of their minds they had been afraid of exploring. Others asked if I would ever create a course or write a book.
buen experimento! .n tiny experiments.
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This book isn’t a step-by-step recipe for accomplishing a specific goal. Rather, it offers a set of tools you can adapt to discover and achieve your own goals—especially if these goals fall outside the well-defined ambitions suggested by society. Together, these tools will enrich your life with systematic curiosity—a conscious commitment to inhabit the space between what you know and what you don’t, not with fear and anxiety but with interest and openness. Systematic curiosity provides an unshakable certitude in your ability to grow even when the exact path forward is uncertain, with the knowledge that your actions can align with your most authentic ambitions.
curiosidad sistemática.
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You are about to replace an old linear model of success with an experimental model of personal and professional growth. In this new model, your goals will be discovered, pursued, and adapted—not in a vacuum, but in conversation with the larger world. You will ask big questions and design tiny experiments to find the answers. You will become comfortable with following a nonlinear path, where each crossroads is a call for adventure.
Muy buee ethos y approach para el trabajo en el sistema educativo.
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When we consider our professional future, we seek a legible story, one that provides the appearance of stability, with a cohesive narrative and clear steps to success. If everything goes well, we get hired to provide answers based on our expertise—not questions based on our curiosity. We begin caring about what people think of us and we project an image of confidence, focusing on self-packaging over self-improvement. We welcome anything that provides the perception of control—whether it’s a productivity tool, a time management method, or a goal-setting framework.
parecido a lo que menciona el paper sobre design thinking educación: la curiosidad y creatividad se valora en abstracto, no en la práctica . Pienso que esto respalda la idea de pensar en pblico.
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In the 1960s, American psychologist Edwin Locke was inspired by the work of those ancient philosophers. His goal-setting theory set off a flurry of research into the relationship between goals and performance. One of those goal-setting frameworks, devised in the early 1980s, advocated for specific, measurable, assignable, realistic, and timely goals—which you may have heard of as SMART goals.[*] This framework is still used to this day by thousands of companies around the world and has escaped the sphere of management to permeate the sphere of personal development. All these approaches to goal setting are based on linear goals: they were created for controlled environments that lend to readily measurable outcomes with predictable timelines.
lo cual no suele ser el caso en la vida real. .c
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a common challenge for many people these days is feeling stuck when it comes to their next steps: instead of providing a motivating force, the idea of setting a well-defined goal is paralyzing. When the future is uncertain, the neat parameters of rigid goal-setting frameworks are of little help; it feels like throwing darts without a target to aim at.
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ambition isn’t broken. It is still what it has always been: the innate human desire for growth, a desire that is both universal and highly personal. People aren’t broken, either. They still crave creativity and connection. It’s the way we set goals that’s broken.
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Because they conflate ambition with the single-minded pursuit of an end destination, traditional methods of pursuing goals have an effect counter to their intent: they create a discouraging perspective where we are far from success. Our satisfaction—the best version of ourselves—lies somewhere in the future.
mindset
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We research the perfect productivity tool instead of simply asking how we feel. We work while sick. Anything to avoid slowing down on the treadmill of success. This emphasis on speed over sustainable progress leaves us mentally drained and, ironically, less productive.
La importancia de entender la sensación de desgano más que empujar para atravesarla a lo bruto. Permite que las medidas dean pertinentes.
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Our collective focus on the ladder of success is what gave rise to the proverbial rat race of modern life: if only we can climb one more step—if only we can get that promotion, give that big presentation, grow our online audience, hire a team, buy that house—then we will finally feel at peace. Our goals are often not even our own; we borrow them from peers, celebrities, and what we imagine society expects from us. French philosopher René Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire: we desire something because we see others desiring it. In other words, our goals mimic the goals of others.
el deseo del deseo.
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so instead of inspiring audacious next steps, our goals spark anxiety (What if I don’t succeed?), apathy (Why care when the journey ahead is all mapped out already?), and anger (Why am I forced to play this game?).
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our brain is uncomfortable in the in-betweens. We are wired to quickly label situations as good or bad, an evolutionary mechanism designed to protect us from unknown risks. Safe or not? Friend or foe? Secret passage or dead end? However, this instinct can become problematic when a clear answer isn’t readily available. Our neural activity intensifies in such situations, indicating a state of heightened arousal. Just like a sentry on high alert, the brain prepares for potential threats. Uncertainty becomes fuel for anxiety. In fact, uncertainty has been found to cause more stress than inevitable pain. When we don’t know what’s coming, we overthink every possibility and we conjure worst-case scenarios. Although we would like to relinquish control and soar through the skies, we often find ourselves suffering from Response 1: uneasiness, or even white-knuckled terror.
impulso a la categorización. vi un libro dedicado a esto. qué tan ciergo será y cuáles son las implicancias?
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These are not personality types. Rather, they’re shields we raise in the face of uncertainty. We can shift between them depending on our circumstances. And those defense mechanisms are perfectly normal. They’re part of a cognitive process psychologists call compensatory control. When confronted with a stressful experience, our first instinct is to remove the stressor. And when we cannot eliminate the source of stress, we urgently seek activities that restore our sense of control—anything to compensate for our helplessness.
Porque la sensación de incertidumbre y falta de control es percibida como tóxica por la mente.
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As Amelia Earhart once said: “The most difficult thing is the decision to act.” Though we may not have all the information at hand, we can choose movement instead of stagnation, exploration instead of paralysis. And when we do, the sky is just the beginning. This is the promise of an experimental mindset.
Relacionar con los sistemas del rat tickler.
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Relying on a mental model of traditional goal setting means the focus is on linear progression toward a predefined outcome. Each rung represents a measurable achievement, a predictable step along a planned trajectory, which leaves little room for surprise or serendipity. When we shift to a “loop” mental model, the journey follows iterative cycles of experimentation, with each loop building on the last. Our task becomes to widen each loop by nurturing our creativity and leaning into promising tangents instead of dismissing them as distractions.
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When we are operating with an outcome-based definition of success, progress means ticking off big, hairy, audacious goals. When we shift to a process-based definition, progress is driven by incremental experimentation.
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Our direction emerges organically as we systematically examine what captures our attention instead of fixating on an artificial scorecard.
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When people ask me what I do for a living, I tell them I breathe—I’m a professional breather. We create those false transitions, we make it all look like it’s separate, just like we separate a garden, from a state, from a country, and ourselves from nature. I didn’t go from fashion to gardening to being a humanitarian. As a gardener, I was already a humanitarian. When I’m designing, I’m still a gardener. I’m still creative. And I’m still a father. Even if you go from being a doctor to being an author. For me, this is about freedom. It’s all already within us.
un buen respaldo a la idea de generar un sistema integrado de reflexión y producción de contenidos, sin establecer límites artificiales entre mis intereses para satisfacer las supuestas necesidades de la audiencia.
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Screenwriter Leslie Dixon, who wrote Mrs. Doubtfire, says there is only one rule of screenwriting: “Does the reader want to turn the page?” When we fixate on finding one singular purpose, we rule out the side quests that help us grow the most. Your life doesn’t need to follow predictable acts and arcs. The best stories are full of surprises, with colorful characters and unexpected plot twists. To avoid recycling old stories, we need to break free from the scripts we write for ourselves.
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In a seminal 1979 study, cognitive scientists asked participants to describe the components of a particular “scene,” such as going to the doctor. Participants largely produced the same responses, mentioning similar characters, props, and actions, as well as the order in which these actions should occur: checking in with the receptionist, reading magazines in the waiting room, getting their name called… Since then, researchers have expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions, and decision-making—from work to relationships and education—giving rise to a branch of cognitive science known as Cognitive Script Theory.
cognitive script theory. esto también aparece en el campo de la memoria. parece ser una estrategia para disminuir los costos de la predicción.
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The popularity of the Epic script is largely due to survivorship bias, when we mistake a successful subgroup as the entire group, overlooking those who failed.
sesgo del sobreviviente
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The Epic script also implies that following your passion will automatically lead to success, which makes any difficulty much harder to manage. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck and colleagues found that mantras like “find your passion” increase the likelihood that people will give up on their newfound interest when they run into inevitable hurdles. As they write in the paper: “Urging people to find their passion may lead them to put all their eggs in one basket but then to drop that basket when it becomes difficult to carry.” By making you dream too big, the Epic script can keep you from performing small but meaningful experiments that could open unexpected doors. It may also lead you to opt for needlessly risky experiments when a smaller, safer version of the same experiment would have yielded sufficient data.
mindset
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Alvin Toffler, the futurist who coined the term information overload in the 1970s, wrote that the illiterate of our times will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.
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The beauty of shifting from linear goals to experiments is that you don’t have to force your decisions to fit into any notion of who you thought you were or wanted to be. You are allowed to go off script. You can have multiple passions. You can make progress without a fixed purpose.
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In the words of the twentieth-century economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.”
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Like a scientist, you can now use your observations to formulate a hypothesis. It all starts with a research question. For example, if you observe that you’re feeling energized when discussing certain topics, you might ask yourself: How can I incorporate more of this into my daily life?
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Notice how different each question and its corresponding hypothesis are from linear goals. In the work-related examples above, the ultimate aim is not to become a successful public speaker or graphic designer. Rather than an attempt to reach a fixed destination, testing a hypothesis is an opportunity for growth. You are simply exploring your potential, driven by genuine curiosity, asking yourself: What might I find on that path? Once you have a hypothesis, you can design an experiment and turn your life into a giant laboratory for self-discovery.
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By unlearning your cognitive scripts, collecting data on your life, and brainstorming potential hypotheses to test, you have already reawakened your perception of what is possible. Thanks to your field notes, you are now ready to design an experiment that doesn’t fall into the trap of linear thinking. The final step is to turn your hypothesis into a pact—an actionable commitment you will fulfill for a set period of time. A pact is a simple and repeatable activity that will inevitably bring you closer to achieving your authentic ambitions, regardless of the actual result of each trial. It follows a simple format: I will [action] for [duration]. The pact is the fundamental building block of personal experimentation, a self-invitation to try something new and learn from the experience. It’s a call to escape inertia and live in forward motion. What makes a pact so effective is that it focuses on your outputs (e.g., “publish 25 newsletters over the next 25 weeks”) rather than your outcomes (e.g., “get 5,000 newsletter subscribers in 25 weeks”). It gives you the confidence to get started because there is no bad result or wrong choice. You just need to show up.
Pacto vendría a ser como la condición experimental.
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We have very little control over how we feel, which is why it’s hard to force ourselves to feel motivated. A pact solves this challenge by emphasizing doing over planning. As psychologist and philosopher William James explained: “Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.”
LAs acciones están más directamente disponibls a nuestro contr que las emociones, poreso hace sentido intentar con aquellas pra incidir en estas.
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Notice the specific number of repetitions. Committing in advance to a specific duration for your experiment has an obvious advantage: it forces you to wait until after a pre-agreed number of iterations before making a decision. This will make you less likely to abandon your pact because of one particularly challenging week. You can remain confident even when facing unexpected hurdles along the way. Confidence isn’t a quality we are born with or something that magically happens; it’s built through action. To create confidence, you need to get started. Every time you act, you bet on yourself and gather evidence that you can do what you set out to do. Repeated trials are an essential feature of experiments. You need enough trials to obtain results you can trust. Imagine you and your friend are playing darts and want to know who aims better. You can’t claim to be the best dart player based on a single throw. You need to throw the dart multiple times to see if you consistently hit the bull’s-eye or if it was just a lucky shot. Similarly, you cannot decide if you would like to live in a city by spending one afternoon there, and you cannot know whether people enjoy your writing by publishing just one essay. A good experiment requires multiple trials to confirm that the results are not just due to chance.
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This tendency for later responses to a creative problem to be better than earlier ones is called the serial-order effect, which is considered “one of the oldest and most robust findings in modern creativity work.” Put simply, it pays off to iterate.
serial order effect. Interesante si cierto, estudiar. Puede ser un muy buen mecanisml para explicar la mejora mediante práctica deliberada en este ámbito
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In the words of John Maxwell: “The more you do, the more you fail. The more you fail, the more you learn. The more you learn, the better you get.” But this works only if you actually complete each loop, so keep your commitment realistic.
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a pact has a specific number of trials (e.g., write 100 articles) and is driven by curiosity (e.g., trial a writing career). Failure is a valuable source of data to help us adjust our path or even altogether abandon the pact if it’s not a good fit for our ambitions.
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There is overwhelming evidence that New Year’s resolutions don’t work. A survey of over 31 million activities by the team at Strava found that most New Year’s resolutions are abandoned by January 12, which they called Quitter’s Day. New Year’s resolutions fail because people overcommit to a bunch of lofty aspirations. The human mind has a love/hate relationship with effort. We are drawn to the idea of it, yet we would rather not have to put in actual effort. This phenomenon is known as the effort paradox. Because we mistakenly believe that we would be happier after overcoming a greater challenge, we tend to select difficult paths precisely because they require more effort—even if it means we are more likely to fail! In contrast, a pact consists of one simple action repeated over a predetermined amount of time. Many internet challenges, such as The100DayProject or 100DaysOfCode, for instance, last less than a third of a year—a more reasonable commitment than most New Year’s resolutions.
la paradoja del esfuerzo. Buen insumo para oeesar el desarrollo de hábitos.
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When I worked at Google, we had OKRs, which stands for Objectives and Key Results. Other companies use KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators. These are all designed to achieve specific targets. Instead of the outcome, a pact focuses on the output. Success is showing up, regardless of the end result.
Diferencia entre output y outcomes.
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“People say you need to set SMART goals,” he told me. “But I never set goals that are outside of my control. I just need to publish one or two videos every week.”
importante considerar en el diseño de proyectos.
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The overconfidence effect, in tandem with the planning fallacy—in which we consistently underestimate the time, resources, and effort needed to finish a project—can trick us into thinking we are more capable of completing a task than we actually are. This can lead us to bite off more than we can chew. If you are hesitating between two versions of a pact, think tiny: What’s the smallest version of this experiment that you can run?
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As you will learn in this book, once you approach life with a spirit of playful experimentation, there will be infinite opportunities to explore interesting paths—and so there’s no rush to get started with all your ideas at once.
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Ultimately, choose your pact based on your curiosity. Remember to let go of previous choices, societal expectations, and top-down assumptions. What excites you? What do you want to learn?
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Many new possibilities will open when you switch from a linear mindset to an experimental mindset and focus on showing up rather than perfecting everything.
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The trouble is when our productivity-minded culture comes to the rescue with a seemingly obvious solution to answer that question: time management. During the same decade that Your Life in Weeks was circulating, and often in the same circles, the obsession with personal productivity skyrocketed. Having combined time scarcity with an efficiency mindset, many people in these circles have developed an anxious urge to pack as much as possible into each remaining box, akin to what Germans call Torschlusspanik, the fear of time running out.
Fenómeno cultural con efecto en las neurosis individuales.
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All the people who responded said that focusing on relentless execution had led them to the same place: burnout.
Nos pasa en GE, interesante aplicar este framework para probar mecanismos que nos permitan trabajar de manera más satisfactoria y sustentable.
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we need to understand why so many of us see time through the lens of productivity instead of that of curiosity.
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we treat every square of time as a resource to exploit efficiently. This takes the form of getting the most done in the shortest amount of time, constantly working toward the completion of linear goals. This definition assumes that time is a commodity, which is evident in our language. We spend time, invest time, save time, and budget our time. For an activity to be worth our time, it must lead to a tangible outcome. Within that quantitative frame, productivity is seen as a virtue and curiosity as a distraction.
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Whatever the trigger, this toxic form of productivity becomes a hidden motive that influences our choices and actions, pushing us toward constant output while downplaying the value of rest, reflection, and meaningful engagement.
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The shift from a quantitative view of time to a qualitative one is the first huge step toward a healthier approach to getting things done and finding a meaningful answer to how to make the most of our weeks. The Greeks valued this qualitative view deeply, so much so that they had a second word for time: Kairos. Kairos expresses the quality, not the quantity, of time. It recognizes that each moment is unique, with a unique purpose, rather than a fixed unit to be mechanically allocated. Sometimes the Greeks used the word Kairos even more specifically, as an opportune time for action, an opening, the perfect moment.
Kairós
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Kairos moments, like pêche à pied, are what I call magic windows: those periods of creative flow that often occur when we are immersed in activities that capture our full attention, when we spend time with loved ones, or when we are engaged in self-reflection. If you’ve ever felt like an instant was suspended in time, as if your sphere of consciousness was immune to the world’s chaos, you know what I am describing here. Kairos is when you feel like this moment, right now, is perfect. Kairos captures what the traditional view of productivity ignores—that the value of time depends on the situation.
Por esto me molesta el cambio de contexto atencional, porque inhibe la aprición del Kairós.
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To live in Kairos time, we need to shift the focus from what we do with our time to how we experience each moment—what you might call mindful productivity. It’s a simple idea, that making the most of our time isn’t about doing more but about being more: more present, more engaged, and more attuned to the quality of our experiences.
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heed and honor your body’s signals. Yawning frequently or feeling mentally foggy are cues from your body that you need a rest. Instead of pushing through with caffeine or other stimulants, take a power nap or a short break.
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We fancy ourselves adept multitaskers, but studies show that our performance drops dramatically when we attempt to focus on more than one thing at a time. That’s because the human brain has an attentional bottleneck impacting both perception and action. In short, our efforts to get more done actually slow us down.
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You can think of working memory as the mental workspace where you process and manipulate information. Using your working memory is akin to juggling several pieces of information, holding them in mind while you make decisions, solve problems, and have conversations. There’s a limit to how many balls you can keep in the air at once. As Dr. Bill Cerbin, professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, says, “Humans are endowed with remarkable cognitive capacities, but one area where we are seriously limited is working memory.”
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Sequential focus isn’t the same as time-blocking, where you segment your day in advance with predefined tasks. Rather, sequential focus leans into the ebb and flow of your cognitive capacity, prompting you to evaluate constantly: Given my current attention and working memory, what is the most sensible task to undertake right now?
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Above all, avoid the allure of multitasking. It might feel productive, but dividing your focus is a surefire way to lower the quality of your work. Focus your entire attention on one activity. Close all other apps, leave your phone in another room, and make sure people around you know that you are in focus mode—for example, by closing the door or wearing your headphones.