The doctors found a blood clot in my arm, and it was threatening to travel to my lungs.

And my first reaction was to...

That was one moment where I caught myself and felt like something is really wrong with my sense of priorities right now.

Anne-Lor-Lau-Lacomph is a French Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. After

leaving a prestigious role at Google, she founded Ness Labs, pursued a PhD in psychology and neuroscience,

and champions this idea that life is a series of curious experiments rather than a linear path in her

new book, Tiny Experiments.

A scientist doesn't feel like a failure when they get an unexpected result.

And this is something that they can learn from and use to design their next experiment.

And all of this leads to a different philosophy.

I wish I could tell you that I went from this moment of realization

to then starting straight away to experiment more and live more freely, but that's not what happened.

I was working at Google. I had a really good career there. Good salary, good team. I was working on

interesting projects, and I had a health care career there. Good salary, good team. I was working on interesting projects.

And I had a health care where the doctors found a blood clot in my arm. And it was

threatening to travel to my lungs, but they said, don't worry, if we schedule the surgery

pretty soon, it will be okay. So let's do that, right? And my first reaction was to open my laptop

and check my calendar. So I could make sure to schedule this when it would not disrupt any of

the product launches that we had planned with the team. That was the first thing I thought about.

How can I make sure that I'm not disrupting work for others?

So that was one moment where I caught myself and felt like something is really wrong

with my sense of priorities right now. I might be a bit too focused on my career.

...