Writing a Pact From Tiny Experiments, and Where It Falls Short

“I will meditate for 10 minutes every morning for the next 10 days.” That sentence, quoted in a Next Big Idea Club summary of Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book, is what she calls a pact. It contains an action and a duration. It does not contain a result, and that omission is the whole proposal.

The book is Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World, published by Avery (Penguin Random House) on March 4, 2025, 304 pages, with the audiobook read by the author. Penguin’s blurb frames it as an argument against linear goals: “Life isn’t linear, and yet we constantly try to mold it around linear goals.” Le Cunff left Google for a PhD in neuroscience and founded the Ness Labs newsletter, where most of these ideas first appeared.

What exactly is a pact?

A pact, in Le Cunff’s own template on Ness Labs, is “I will [action] for [duration].” The Next Big Idea Club summary calls it “a simple, time-bound commitment to exploration and experimentation.” Her published examples include making lunch for under $5 every weekday for five weeks, publishing ideas on a topic in 300 words a day for 30 days, and applying to five local meetups to give a talk over five days.

The contrast with a goal is where the book earns its title. In the summary’s words, “With a tiny experiment, you’re not trying to achieve a specific outcome. You’re just trying to learn something new,” and “as long as you complete the experiment and collect all the data, you’ve experienced growth.” A goal says “become a successful writer.” A pact says “write 300 words a day for 30 days” and treats the result as data.

Two caveats on what I could confirm. Several secondary summaries describe the pact as tracked with a simple tick or a yes/no, and as fitting an acronym (purposeful, actionable, continuous, trackable). I could not find either in the Ness Labs pages or the publisher material I opened, so treat those as readers’ summaries of the book, not as quotes from it. I also have not read the book itself, only the publisher page, the Ness Labs articles and the Next Big Idea Club piece. Her older 2019 Ness Labs article on “mindframing” uses a related four-step cycle (pact, act, react, impact), and the experimenter-type article on the site keeps the same four phase names.

Where pacts beat goals

Pacts are good at exploration. If you do not know whether you like running, or writing at night, or cold outreach, a result-shaped goal punishes you for finding out. “Run a marathon” turns a three-week taste test into a pass/fail on your character. A pact of “run for 15 minutes, five mornings a week, for three weeks” cannot fail in that way. Either you ran or you did not, and what you noticed is the output.

They also fix a quiet problem with outcome goals: the outcome is partly out of your hands. Applying to five meetups is within your control. Being accepted by one is not. Le Cunff’s fear-related example on Ness Labs works because filling in an online form “is manageable” and the thing you dread, a rejection, is allowed to be just another data point.

For most people the real gain is smaller than the philosophy. A pact shrinks the first step to something you would be embarrassed to skip.

Where pacts fail

A pact is a promise to yourself, and nothing in the template says who notices a broken one.

Think about what the structure leaves out. There is no outcome to disappoint you, so a missed day carries no sting. There is no deadline pressure, because the duration is yours to set and, in practice, to shorten. And the detachment that makes the method kind also removes the thing that gets you out of bed on day six. Le Cunff’s recommendation of writing the pact down, in a journal, a note to a friend or a public post, is the part of the method that adds a witness, and it reads as optional.

This is the gap between exploring and following through. If the pact is “try morning pages for 10 days” and you quit on day 4, you learned something useful, but only if the log is honest. A tick-list you alone grade is the weakest form of data. People round up. Researchers know this about self-report, which is why I wrote about video proof beating self-reports in a different context.

Pacts also fit badly with the cases where an outcome is the point: a visa deadline, a certification exam, a thesis due on the 15th. There the “no attachment” stance is a luxury. Use a goal, and put a pact inside it as the weekly action.

How to write your first pact

1. Start with curiosity. Ask what you would like to find out, not what you would like to have. “Can I write for 20 minutes before opening my phone?” is a question. “Finish the novel” is not.
2. Use the sentence. “I will [action] for [duration].” Pick an action you can repeat and that needs only what you already have. Make the duration short enough to feel slightly silly. Ten days is plenty.
3. Fix the tick in advance. Decide what counts as done for a day, in terms a stranger could judge. “Wrote for 20 minutes with the phone in another room” beats “worked on writing.”
4. Name the person who sees the tally. One person, one date. Send them the sentence today. This is the step the book’s template makes easy to skip, and it is where most pacts quietly die.
5. Review, then choose. After the last day, read the ticks and your notes, then repeat, adjust or drop. Do not grade the result.

If you want a fuller template for stating your question and decision rule before you begin, the preregistration walkthrough covers that side. A pact is lighter: it fixes the action and the length, and leaves the verdict to you after the fact.

The checker is the missing piece

Picture a pact of “wake at 6:30 for ten days to see if mornings suit me.” On day three the alarm goes, you are warm, and nothing is at stake except a tick you would have given yourself anyway. DontSnooze is a narrow answer to exactly this scene, for wake-up pacts only: your friends are the ones who would see a miss, so the tick is not yours alone to grade.

Not every pact needs that. A pact about reading or sketching might do fine with a friend who gets a text on day ten. But the more a pact depends on doing something at a moment you would rather not, the more it needs someone or something outside your head to say whether it happened. Who that is matters; for a look at how friends can help or hold back, see the crab bucket myth post.

Le Cunff’s insight, as far as I can tell from the sources I read, is that many of us confuse a goal with a first step and then punish ourselves for the gap. Pacts remove the punishment. The part she leaves to you is the witness.