Now that I’ve crossed the arbitrary border of 30, I’ve had a little more time to notice the consequences of the habits I’ve been building over the course of my life. Some of those habits have served me well. Some have made my life better in ways I probably did not appreciate while I was building them. Others have revealed themselves less generously, usually at the moment I would have preferred not to confront them.
To be clear, I am not unhappy. I am enormously grateful for the life I have, for the people in it, and for the opportunities that have come my way through some combination of luck, hard work, timing, and the generosity of others. But I have always been ambitious in a way that makes contentment a little complicated. I do not mean that in a dramatic way. I just mean that some part of me is almost always looking around the edges of my life and asking where I could be better. Better in my relationships. Better physically. Better financially. Better at paying attention. Better at being the kind of person I claim to want to become.
If you’re reading this, I suspect some part of you feels that way too.
Lately, I’ve felt myself becoming more aware of the forces that make it easy to drift through life without really choosing much of anything. The mind-numbing scroll that begins as a five-minute break and somehow ends with us knowing the breakfast routine of a stranger in Denmark. The lazy political rhetoric that appeals to our most divisive emotions and then flatters us for confusing outrage with conviction. The AI-sloppification of everything, which can be useful, of course, but also tempts us to stop exercising some of the muscles that make us most human: judgment, curiosity, attention, taste, and the willingness to sit with an unfinished thought.
This newsletter is my attempt to shake myself, and maybe all of us, a little more awake. Not in the grand, self-important sense. I am not here to announce a personal revolution from my standing desk. I am more interested in the smaller question of how we keep ourselves from becoming fixed too early. How we resist the routines we never seem to consciously chose. How we continue to experiment with the parts of life that matter most: relationships, ambition, travel, work, health, money, taste, and the general pursuit of better.
Why the name “Tiny Bets”? Despite earning my heroic B- in undergrad chemistry, I have always loved the simplicity of the scientific method. You observe something. You form a hypothesis. You test it. You learn from the result and adjust. The whole thing is refreshingly humble. It does not require certainty before action. It only asks that we pay attention, try something, and be honest about what happens next.
If that framework is good enough to help people make breakthroughs in medicine, technology, and our understanding of the world, maybe a humbler version can help us make small breakthroughs in our own lives.
Each week, I’ll propose one tiny bet for us to try together. It will be small enough to actually do, but meaningful enough to interrupt autopilot. Maybe it will ask us to spend differently, move differently, reach out to someone, book the thing, cancel the thing, pay closer attention, ask a better question, or notice where our lives have started to feel more fixed than they need to be.
None of us gets unstuck all at once. We do it by testing our way forward, one tiny bet at a time.
And if you have an idea for a tiny bet that might help the rest of us live a little better, send it my way. I would love for this to become less of a broadcast and more of a shared experiment.