Tiny Experiments

I recently read this book called "Tiny Experiments" (as the title of this essay suggests) by Anne Laure Le Cunff, which compelled me to write this essay. It highlights the linearity of our thinking in almost every action that we take after our time as toddlers. The basic premise of this book is to acknowledge this linearity first, to move towards a non-linear "growth" path. Now, the growth here does not necessarily mean a particular specific goal that you wish to have achieved, but more of embracing uncertainty along the way by holding onto systematic curiosity. 

Leaving aside the first few years as a toddler when we learned to speak the mother tongue and the basic locomotion and perhaps, up to a few classes of early geometry, we generally accumulate the linear inertia through a big part of education, social and communal customs, and career growth ladder. This continuity from "education to cherry picking of a single career" inherently creates a sense of mindful momentum, whereas from a slightly different perspective, it appears to be a mindless commitment. Therefore, one needs to unlearn this cognitive script first. 

For those of you who have a graduate-level understanding of Nonlinear mechanics very well know of importance of Newton's solver in a variety of problems. For those who are reading it for the first time, this bunch of jargon, other than Newton, let me help you understand that. Imagine you and your friend (naive hiker) are mountain hikers who wish to climb down the "unknown" mountain from the apex. Your friend thinks that it's easy to go straight down to the bottom point by gliding down on the snow, assuming that your friend is sure of the bottom point. But, it's a risky deal because the moment you glide down, you are generally relying on the forces of nature, in this case, gravity and frictional forces (in terms of energy, a play between potential, kinetic, and dissipative energy), and also assuming linearity between the apex point and the bottom point. However, you are a slightly experienced terrain-aware hiker who understands the risks associated with such a maneuver and hence, decided to take small steps with an idea of the bottom in mind rather than a specific point in mind. By taking those small steps, you ensure the linearity between subsequent steps without having a specific bottom point in mind. These subsequent small steps avoid the risk associated with the prior approach and will free you from the stiffness associated with the "fixed top to fixed bottom" approach. Anne argues that in a linear setting, the fixity between the start to goal is sacred and any perturbation is treated as a loss-making deviation, whereas in reality, with a "nonlinear mindset," such perturbation may represent new growth opportunities.