Anne-Laure Le Cunff walked away from a global lead role at Google to study the brain, and came back with a bestseller arguing that goals are mostly a trap

There is a version of this story that is a straight line, and it is impressive enough on its own. Global marketing lead for Google Fit. A PhD in psychology and neuroscience from King's College London. A postdoctoral fellowship, funded by UKRI, studying the neuroscience of curiosity. A newsletter with 130,000 readers. A bestselling book from Penguin Random House. Any two of those would make a career.

The reason she is worth a page is that it was never a line. She left the Google job, which is the job people spend a decade trying to get, to go back to university and sit in lectures. Then she built a newsletter about how minds actually work while doing the degree. Then she turned that into a book whose central argument is that the thing everyone told her to do, pick a goal and march at it, is mostly how people end up somewhere they did not choose.

Ness Labs

The newsletter started as notes. What she was learning about attention, memory, motivation and decision-making, written up for people who would never read the papers. It grew because it did the thing most productivity writing does not: it cited the research, said what the research could not support, and never pretended a study about undergraduates was a law of nature.

A hundred and thirty thousand people now get it every week. It is the rare newsletter that has become more careful as it has grown rather than less, which is what happens when the person writing it is also submitting to peer review.

Tiny Experiments

The book landed on 4 March 2025 and went straight onto the bestseller lists. The pitch fits in a sentence: stop setting goals and start running experiments. A goal is a verdict waiting to happen. An experiment is a question with a time limit, and whatever comes back is information rather than a judgement on your character. Try the thing for a month, with a hypothesis, and look at what actually happened.

It sounds gentle until you try it, at which point it turns out to be a fairly radical way to organise a life. It is also, not coincidentally, a precise description of how she got here. Leaving Google was an experiment. The PhD was an experiment. The newsletter was one. She is the person who ran the method on herself before writing it down, and the method worked, and now she studies why in a lab.

The next experiment is already running: a fellowship on the neuroscience of curiosity, which is the closest thing to a scientific study of the instinct that got her out of the building in the first place.

Uncertainty can be a state of expanded possibility and a space for metamorphosis.

The thesis of Tiny Experiments, in her own words