I’m currently reading this book, taking notes.
Pact: Commitment to Curiosity
Chapter 1 - Why Goal Setting is Broken
Linear goal setting is broken because it ignores uncertainty, is often discouraging, causes competition and isolation, and fosters Toxic productivity.
A lack of linear goals is not the same as a lack of ambition.
Life is made of cycles of being lost and finding ourselves again.
Chapter 2 - Escaping the Tyranny of Purpose
- The cognitive scripts which dictate how we should behave are strongly embedded and not always obvious to us. The scripts mix Cultural narrative and Concernful activity as Habit, directing our subconscious that set goals possibly more consistent with what we need to do socially, than what is truly best for us as an individual.
- Field notes that record the activities, thoughts and emotions of my day will help me understand the bounds I’m working with and the cracks that can be leveraged open by the selection of my next experimental activity. It reduces the risk of blindly selecting something because I’m running the sequel or conformer scripts. Combined with journalling I’ll be able to achieve this with a greater fit. To date I’ve been too haphazard and will have only landed on experiment selection by accident.
- The conformer script supports the Concernful activity of wanting to be liked by others. I’ll set the goals they want me to set (think parents wanting children to be doctors or join the military) and everyone, including me, will be happy. We know that to be a lie. My goals have to be my goals and the conformer script can sabotage that.
- The sequel script directs us to behave consistently now with how we have behaved in the past. Le Cunff (2025), Tiny Experiments uses the example of usually being quiet in a group of friends makes it easy to be quiet in the future and difficult to be otherwise. I’m seeing a lot here that impacts our learning, but the sequel script more than anything is an Enemy of learning.
Chapter 3 - A Pact to turn Doubts into Experiments
- Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable = PACT.
- A pact is the completion of a simply activity for a set number of cycles. The result of each trial is unimportant in itself. What is learned along the way is what’s necessary to achieve authentic ambitions.
- A pact takes the form “I will [action] for [duration].”
- The focus is on output generated by the action, rather than the goal-driven outcome. It’s emergent success from deliberate experimentation.
- I don’t quite have this right in That’s not a project though I had the sense of it, and in Mapping my time better: a year of intentional choices I absolutely have a focus on outcomes rather than output. The first is “dot his and results will follow”, whereas the second is “aim for this result.” I set my first pact on 2026-04-08 which is to simply categorise the theme of my work day for until Thursday next week. The action is noting a key characteristic of the day with the goal to learn more about how I work and react to what happens around me.
- I can control simple actions by either doing, or not doing them. The emotional decision is taken out of my hands. However, as actions accumulate, emotional strength will follow.
- The decision/learning happens only after the set number of actions is complete. I don’t have to decide beforehand. If it’s going bad or good does not matter. What matters is the prescribed decision point when I know I’ll have gathered the information I need. This sounds powerful and exciting!
- Multiple loops reduce the risk a result of any single loop is chance. As I loop more, I will naturally develop more creating problem solving (I’m not bouncing around as much). This is the serial-order effect and important to developing creativity.
- Part of my learning will be how long to set a pact for. The goldilocks pact. Go short for something I’m unfamiliar with, longer where I’m already comfortable. If unsure, go shorter.
- Pacts are different from Habit. A habit exists to change behaviour and is unbounded in duration.
- Give up my preconceptions. Success is showing up, not the result of an individual action.