224: Unabridged Interview: Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Hello friends, Lee Seacamp here. You're listening to No Small Endeavor. This is our unabridged interview with neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Anne is a recent author of a lovely book entitled Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. I must admit I have been goal-obsessed at various times in my life, and as I say in the broadcast piece, a little bit overwhelming to myself sometimes with my work perfectionism. So I find Anne-Laure course book immensely helpful. She poses a challenge to our sort of what she calls linear goal thinking with a new kind of possibility of tiny experiments. And rather than trying to have your whole life figured out, your whole trajectory of your life sorted out, you just employ a bit of curiosity about yourself, and then you go about doing some tiny experiments in your life. That opens up new possibilities for things like procrastination or other ways in which we find our minds doing things we wish they wouldn't do. That the let go of the self-blame, and then just employ a bit of curiosity, seeing what we can learn about ourselves. I've already put Anne-Laure's tiny experiments into practice. I'm on my second tiny experiment, indulging a great deal of curiosity, and I find this immensely helpful, and I hope that you enjoy this interview. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Hey friend, if you didn't know, I started a newsletter a while back that comes out every 2 weeks. I have been delighted to hear from so many of you about positive response to the newsletter. We call it the No Small No Small Endeavor notebook where I riff on themes and topics related to our podcast, giving you additional material for thinking and doing in your own quest to make sense of what it might mean to live a good life. Join us by going now to nosmallendeavor.com and sign up there. Again, go to nosmallendeavor.com to sign up now for our free No Small Endeavor notebook newsletter. You know, it can be hard sometimes to quiet your mind at night with all that to-do list for tomorrow running through your mind. But Boll Branch sheets can help you truly unwind with a softness so extraordinary that your whole body just relaxes into sleep. Boll Branch's Signature Sheets are made free from toxins with the finest 100% organic cotton. They feel buttery soft just right out of the package, and they come with a 30-night worry-free guarantee. They're ethically crafted by expert artisans who earn fair wages. And if you're looking for a new set of sheets, then go check out Boll Branch. You can tell the quality immediately, and that sweet color selection, it made me happy to put our new Boll Branch sheets on our bed. Feel the difference an extraordinary night's sleep can make with Boll Branch. Get 15% off plus free shipping on your first set of sheets at bollandbranch.com/nse. That's Boll Branch, B-O-L-L andbranch.com/nsc to save 15% and unlock free shipping. Exclusions apply.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff is an award-winning neuroscientist and entrepreneur. She's the founder of Ness Labs, where her weekly newsletter is read by more than 100,000 curious minds. Her research at King's College London focuses on the psychology and neuroscience of lifelong learning, curiosity, and adaptability. Previously, she worked at Google as an executive on digital health projects, and her work has been featured in Rolling Stone, Forbes, Financial Times, Wired, and more. Today we'll be discussing her new book, Tiny Experiments, which provides a guide for living a more experimental life.

Welcome, Anne-Laure.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm excited about this conversation. And I've been fascinated with the idea of seeing your life as a realm of experiment. I think the first person I ever heard speak of this was Gandhi in his autobiography. I don't know if you've ever come across that, but he talks about that in his autobiography of taking this approach. I'm excited to hear and discuss the things that you've learned about all this from a scientific kind of perspective. But before we go into some of that, I would love— listeners just heard the introduction I gave of you, but I would love for you to kind of give us your own elevator pitch speech for what you do and what you care about. How would you put that in a kind of succinct paragraph, perhaps?

I'm a neuroscientist and a science communicator. I think that would probably sum it up in the sense that I conduct research in the lab at King's College London, but I also spend a lot of my time trying to translate research into tools and techniques that people can use in their everyday life and work. And the bulk of my work is specifically around how to translate the scientific method, the way we conduct experiments as scientists, to everyday life challenges.

So you had some rather sobering life experiences, as I understand it, that led you into the work that you're doing. Would you kind of describe how you ended up doing what you're doing now?

I started my career at Google about, oh, I don't even know. That was a long time ago, but that was my dream job right after university. First job working with really smart people on really interesting projects. And because of that, I became really obsessed with being successful, keeping up. I would say yes to absolutely every single project that people were asking help with. I had this discovered that there was an actual rubric at Google telling you how to be successful, what you were supposed to do in order to be promoted. And, uh, I was religiously looking, studying at this rubric and trying to figure out how I measured up against it and, uh, trying to really diligently check all of these boxes until one day I was brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, getting ready to go to work, and I noticed that my arm my arm had turned purple. So I went to the Google infirmary. We had that on campus. And I showed the nurse my arm and she said, you have to go to the hospital straight away. So I went to the hospital in Stanford and the doctor looked at my arm and said, you need to get surgery as quickly as possible. You have a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs. And what did I do in that moment? In the doctor's office, I opened my laptop and I said, one second, I need to check my calendar. You know, sometimes you do something that is so absurd that you have this kind of out-of-body experience. You see yourself do the thing and you feel like, am I really, am I this person doing this? That's how this moment felt for me. It felt so ridiculous that my priorities were so out of whack that my to-do list, my project launches were more important than my health. And that's really what, that was the seed that made me start reconsidering whether I had my priorities in order.

Were you able to see that in that very moment, or was it upon further later reflection that you began to see the absurdity of that?

It took a little bit longer. That really was just a seed of reflection. And, uh, the moment really where I made the decision to leave Google and to try and figure out what I actually wanted to do with my life instead of trying to succeed at completing this entire rubric was not something as dramatic. It was a few months later. I was back home in France. Visiting my family for Christmas and someone asked me, how's life? And I don't know why in that moment, it was the first time that for a very long time I actually listened to the question and I actually asked myself, how's life? And the truth is it wasn't bad, but also I had lost a lot of the excitement and the curiosity that I used to have as a child. I was so obsessed. With this linear definition of success, climbing the ladder, getting the next promotion, working on the next project that I had very little room for exploration and for figuring out what I actually wanted out of life.

Hmm.

Yeah, that's lovely. Um, so then you go on and, uh, after some time later, as I understand your, uh, timeline, You have one experiment with a startup, and— but you go on in time to do a master's and a PhD work in neuroscience, applied neuroscience, neuroscience and psychology at King's College there in London. Uh, why do you think it was those particular fields, that particular discipline of neuroscience, applied neuroscience, that especially drew you in?

It actually connects back to when I was a child. I had always been fascinated with why we have the thoughts we have, why we see the world the way we see it. A question I was fascinated with was, is the blue I'm seeing the same blue you're seeing? And the fact that there was no way of actually verifying this. So when I finally found myself in a place where I admitted that first, I was lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do once you removed that blueprint, that rubric for success. And second, I decided to see this as an opportunity. I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, what is something I'm actually curious about? If nobody was watching, if the traditional definition of success was out of the equation, what would be something I would actually be excited to explore and study, to get up in the morning and just learn more about. And so for me, it was the brain, it was the mind— why we think like that, what we feel like that, why we, we are like we are in the world.

So in your Tiny Experiments book, you're, you're calling us, um— I love your line of the call to have courage to be curious. So talk to us a bit about that.

A big reason why we like having plans is because it gives us this illusion of being in control. So if you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that our brains have evolved to favor certainty. We actually really like it when we feel like we know what's going to happen. Our ancestors who were living in the jungle felt like the more information they had, the more likely they were to survive, whether It was knowing where the resources were, what was that strange noise in the bushes, who were their friends or enemies in the tribe. And so today our brains haven't evolved that much and, uh, we feel the same. We think that if we have a plan, if we have a vision, then we're going to succeed and we're going to be safe. And so it takes courage to say, I'm not quite sure if this is going to work out., but I feel curious enough that I'm going to give it a try. And whatever the outcome, I will learn from it. I will grow from that experience. I will use that knowledge to then maybe try something else. So that's why I say that it takes courage to be curious.

Yeah. I mean, I, I think, um, I've moved beyond a lot of this, but I think earlier in my professional life, I often felt paralyzed because of the lack of certainty. And I think I would wait and I remember telling myself, well, if I just knew which one of these approaches was gonna work, then I would get to it. But since I couldn't know, right? And I didn't have the certainty, I felt this sort of paralysis by that. And so I find this a very compelling sort of approach of saying, just put that to rest and set that aside. And lean into this sort of, sort of curiosity. Uh, I saw on your social media post you did recently that you said that curiosity activates the brain's reward system like food and sex. So this is fascinating. So discuss that for us.

Yeah, so the same dopaminergic pathways— that's how we call them— are activated whether we're craving sex or food or information, which is really interesting because it shows that our brains considers these things as essential for our survival.

Yeah, that's just remarkable. Um, so why do you think, um, given that our— from a neuroscientific perspective, we have this sort of need for information Where does that tension come from between curiosity and certainty when it would seem natural that curiosity would simply be a most sure route to knowledge that the brain really wants? Some sort of certainty, right? Curiosity, I guess, is seeking some sort of certainty.

Life didn't used to be so overwhelming as it is today. So curiosity in an environment where information and resources are scarce is actually really helpful. This is what is going to allow you to venture just a little bit further and see what's going on over there in that area you have never visited yet, which might have more resources. In today's world, there is so much information. The pace of life is so fast and everything is changing so rapidly. That we feel like curiosity almost becomes this very uncomfortable feeling and we might, we feel like it's safer to retreat to certainty. So where in nature there was a really good balance between certainty and curiosity, in today's world, there is a temptation to focus on trying to have this illusion of control again, feeling like we have certainty rather than making space for curiosity. Curiosity feels almost riskier in a way.

So in your book, Tiny Experiments, you're calling us in to fundamentally reconfigure how we think about goals, or as, you know, as, um, I guess it was Inc. magazine put it, you're calling us to abandon goal setting. So describe to us the alternative that you're posing, uh, to the what you're calling linear goals, an alternative sort of approach.

I describe linear goals as the type of goals where we think that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan. The, I think, most well-known framework for linear goals are the SMART goals. A lot of organizations have used them and they're very popular because again, they give you the sense of control where you know exactly what you're going to accomplish. It's going to be measurable. You have a timeline for it and just again, show up and do it and you'll be successful. I tell people that it is actually a lot more effective in today's high information, high uncertainty world to use experiments instead. So the biggest difference between a linear goal and an experiment is your relationship to success. With a linear goal, you have a very binary definition of success. You have an outcome in mind and either you reach that outcome and that's success or you don't, and that's failure. With an experiment, you don't start with an outcome in mind. You start with a hypothesis. You wonder whether this thing is going to work or not. And whatever the outcome, as long as you complete the experiment, as long as you learn something new and knowledge is generated, then that is success. And the promise of experimenting is that although it might look a little bit messy because you don't really know where you're going, you are going to grow. You're going to grow in ways that are very hard to predict in advance, but you are going to grow.

So I, I can imagine, um, some kind of immediately finding certain objections in the sense that, you know, let's say from a business perspective, a business endeavor, well, there's certain kind of key performance indicators, which are precisely linear goals in effect, which are required to allow the business to have a sort of success or to maintain it some sort of viability as a business entity. How do you see that? Do you see your approach as something that can sit alongside more traditional linear goals, or are you seeing these as a replacement for that kind of approach?

This is actually a question I get quite often, especially from people who work in bigger companies and who have been relying on some form of linear goal in a way or another in order to track success in their organization. So a misconception when I, I talk about living a more experimental life and developing an experimental mindset is that some people might think I'm saying experiment with everything all the time. And that's not what I'm saying. What I'm telling people is that there should always be some space for experimentation in whatever area of your life that you have, whether in business or in your personal life. Linear goals can work really, really well if you already have a very clear idea of how to be successful. And then you actually just need to do it. And that is the case in some areas of some businesses where you have a very clear sales process. You have a pipeline already. You have written some really good scripts. What you need is for your sales team to show up and actually pick up the phone, talk to customers, and you have those KPIs, those performance indicators, those OKRs, whatever you want to call them, that are very linear. And that makes sense. What I argue though, is that in the long run, if you want to make sure that your business stays performant, you should always have at least a little bit of resources dedicating to experimenting with new ways of doing things where you're not quite sure that's going to work. And at some point, if you've experimented enough with these things and they actually work, these can become processes that are repeatable. And that can become a little bit more linear. But an organization that only relies on linear goals, I think, is not going to survive in the long term. This is not sustainable.

Yeah, I found fascinating as well in the section where you're talking about curiosity, you encourage us to think of yourself as an anthropologist with your own life as your topic of study. Anthropology requires— and then you're quoting somebody else— The open-mindedness with which one must look and listen, record in astonishment and wonder that which one would not have been able to guess. So that's a very compelling invitation. And I think that one of the things that I have seen repeatedly in the years that we've been doing this Wendeavor is how often this invitation to step back and actually look at our lives, actually do some study about our lives, some consideration of our lives, and how infrequently I think we tend to do that because we're so distracted. But this is this sort of invitation to say, "No, really, if you're going to do well, then that means stepping aside and asking, 'Well, what do you even mean by doing well?'" And how do you— and your stuff on metacognition that I want to talk about here in a moment, but thinking about how we think, thinking about how we live, and giving ourselves the space to do that. So I find that a very compelling invitation. So any commentary on that?

Thank you. I think one reason why this exercise I invite people to do, uh, in the book is so popular is because I don't tell people do that all the time. I think a lot of people are already convinced of the benefits of self-awareness and introspection, whether that's journaling or mindfulness or whatever technique that you want to use. But the pushback that you get a lot is, I'm busy. I have so much to do. When do you want me to find the time and energy to do this? And so what I tell them is to only do it for 24 hours. And you can do that at any point in your life where you have this feeling that something needs to change, but you're not quite sure what that is. And so for 24 hours, you can pretend that you're an anthropologist with, again, your own life and work as the topic of study. Something that's very important in an anthropologist's work is the lack of judgment. There's no judgment. They're just observing. So for 24 hours, the idea is not to try and find a solution or to figure out what the problem is. It's really just to observe your life. What do you care about? How do you spend your time? How do you spend your energy? Are there moments where you find yourself having conversations with someone and you wish it would last forever? Or maybe you're in a meeting and you wish you could go and hide somewhere in the corner. All of these are important data points that an anthropologist would record in their notebook, again, without any judgment, just as interesting observations. And I guarantee you that if you spend 24 hours just observing, just observing, you will notice patterns. You will notice things that you do in an automated way. Just because a routine has settled or because your colleagues are doing it in that way, or your family's been doing it that way. And so you're doing it in this way and you never really questioned why. And that's really the power of self-observation. You notice how you do things and then you can start questioning, okay, but why am I doing these things? And do I want to do them differently?

Yeah. Yeah.

That's so fascinating. Well, knowing that we were having this interview today and, and having yesterday read some passage where you were talking about rather than immediately focusing upon getting something done, pause to allow yourself to observe the sort of emotional tapestry that you have with regard to whatever it is that you're experiencing. So I actually have just come off of a week of vacation in the Northeast, northeastern part of the United States. Then I came home very quickly, turned around and drove to my hometown in Alabama for a— I'm not going to tell how many years, but it was a lot of years— high school reunion. And in small-town Alabama, And I decided, since I hadn't been there very much for a long time, just to spend 3 nights there in a bed and breakfast and just go visit places I have not visited for many decades. And then I got home and I was so glad to be in my own bed after a long time. And I— but I woke up at 2:30 in the morning and I could not go back to sleep. And I'm sitting thinking, I have a lot of work I have to do this week to get caught up. And I've got this interview coming up this morning. I've got all this other kind of stuff I've got to do. And of course, I just could not go back to sleep. So I finally got up and remembering your advice, I thought one of my practices is journaling. And I thought, why don't I just give myself the opportunity just to see what I observe and to talk about my sort of emotional experience of the last several days, which has been very intense and in lovely and beautiful ways. But I— so I journaled for, I don't know, an hour maybe. And then finally, I was able to go back to sleep. And so it's this remarkable sort of thing of saying, why don't we just give ourselves a break, you know, and allow ourselves enough space and time to make those sorts of observations? So I don't know, you want to unpack any more of that?

Well, those experiences are uncomfortable, right? When you're— you can't sleep, you're in bed, you're feeling all of that anxiety. And so The temptation is just to ignore them, push through, use our willpower to say, you know, it's not that bad. Why am I feeling this way? It's okay. Go back to sleep. There's a lot of self-blame when our mind is not behaving in the way we want it to, because we feel like, again, we're losing control. And it's even more uncomfortable when the part we're losing control of is ourselves, right? We feel like I should at least be able to control myself. So again, a lot of self-blame. And the first step really is to remove that and to stop saying something's wrong and to then say, okay, clearly my brain is trying to send me a signal. And so instead of pushing back and saying, shut up, I'm trying to get back to sleep. Maybe I can listen. And that's what you did with the journaling. And mindfulness practices can look very, very different for different people. Journaling is one of them, but having a long conversation on the phone with a friend who's in a different time zone, that's a mindfulness practice as well. Going for a walk, dancing on your own in your bedroom, like no one's watching. And fortunately no one's watching. That's also a mindfulness practice. And so investing a little bit of time in figuring out and experimenting with different ways to reconnect with yourself whenever you find yourself in those uncomfortable emotional experiences. So you can really practice listening to those signals from your brain instead of trying to ignore them. I think that's a very worthwhile investment to make.

So you suggest similarly that procrastination might be a way our brain is sending us a signal. That rather than beating ourselves up over procrastination, maybe we just begin to treat it as a form of communication, which again, I find very compelling. It's actually something that I've learned from my own experience. But I think I was that classic case, right, of where anytime I would procrastinate, I'd beat myself up. And I don't know, finally, I don't know, 5, 6, 7 years ago, I started something. Some things happened and I realized, oh, I think my procrastination was trying to tell me to pay more attention to this. But you do this in a very helpful way. So maybe unpack some of that for us.

Any kind of resistance, including procrastination, is a signal from your brain. And in the book, I picked procrastination because I think it's one of the most fascinating forms of resistance. It's something we all experience, and somehow there is a lot of shame around it. You never see anyone walking into their manager's office and saying, hey boss, sorry, I didn't finish that presentation. I was procrastinating, although this is such a common thing to happen, right? And, um, in the book, I, I explain that we would all gain from actually listening to our procrastination. So next time you procrastinate, instead of blaming yourself and trying to push through, say, hello, procrastination, you're back. What are you trying to tell me? And I share a very simple tool I call the triple check that allows you to have a bit more of a structured conversation with your procrastination if you're not sure where to to start. So you ask the question, tell me, where is the problem coming from? Is the problem coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, which doesn't mean it's conscious, right? But at a rational level, you don't think you should be working on this task in the first place. So maybe the task is not aligned with the overall ambitions of the organization you work for. Maybe this task is outdated. Maybe it's badly designed. Maybe someone else should to do the task, but at a rational level, you're not even convinced you should be doing this thing. And so you procrastinate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, this doesn't feel like it's going to be a lot of fun. And so you procrastinate. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills, the right knowledge, or the right support network, maybe. In order to complete the task. And so you procrastinate.

So what do you, uh, let's say you go through that exercise and you identify the source of the procrastination. What, what next then?

That's the great thing about being systematically curious about any source of resistance in this way is that then you can also systematically find a solution. So let's say that you found that the problem was coming from the head. In that case, go back to the task itself, go back to the drawing board. So if you're working with your team, you could say, hey everyone, I've been procrastinating on this thing for the past couple of days, and it's because I'm not really convinced this is the right approach. Do you mind if we get together for 20 minutes and we have a little brainstorm together and just let's figure out, is this the right approach? Is there a better approach? How can we do this? Or if you figure out that you're not the right person to do it, then delegate, delegate to someone else. Or these days I can say this, delegate to AI, maybe AI should be doing this so you can focus on something more creative and where that's more interesting. If you found that the problem was coming from the heart, then make it fun, make it more enjoyable, redesign the task so you look forward to it. And that might look like, grabbing one of your favorite colleagues and say, hey, let's do a little coworking session, or go to your favorite coffee shop and sit there while you complete the task, or create a little reward for yourself. Make it fun. And if you found that the problem was coming from the hand, then raise that hand, ask for help. So that could be mentoring, that could be coaching, that could be just again grabbing your team and saying, hey, I've actually never done this before. Can someone show me how to do it? Or if you're working on your own, watching a video tutorial and, or taking an online course. Once you've identified that the problem is purely practical, instead of being paralyzed, then you can find a solution and you can move forward.

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So this whole sort of, this whole sort of approach of taking an experimental mindset, experimental approach, pairs nicely in your work with this call to intentional imperfection and the dangers of perfectionism. And again, this is another kind of— I'm a recovering perfectionist in certain areas of my life as well. So it's another place I found very helpful. But describe to us how one might go about practicing intentional imperfection.

Well, let's just look at perfectionism first. It is— when you look at what it is, it, you know, it's trying to be absolutely perfect across the board all the time, which fits with your earlier conversation about certainty.

At least for me it did. There's a sort of quest for certainty that linked up with a perfectionism in a certain area of my life, which really hobbled me professionally as a younger, younger academic. Because I— and I think this is one of the things that academics, um, kind of get schooled into us in graduate school days, right? Because you— that's, that's the, the beauty of the nuance and the beauty of the footnote is you're always looking to protect yourself from any sort of charge of imperfection, right? And you have to be certain with all this kind of stuff. And so it takes, it takes a long time to kind of work our way out of that, I think. But any, I'm sorry, but go ahead with it.

No, I think this is such a good example. And, uh, almost every single profession has a, an equivalent of that, of that footnote, right? And it might be purely political in the way you present your projects. I know that at Google, for example, there were a lot of projects that actually didn't work out really well. But if you listen to the presentation after the you would have thought that it went great because you can kind of change which were the metrics we were looking at. And so if you pick the metrics carefully, you can tell a story where the project was a success. Because of that, there were so many learning opportunities that we lost because instead of feeling comfortable saying, hey, it didn't go perfectly, this is what we can learn. Instead, everybody was trying to make it look like they knew what they were doing and everything worked out exactly as intended. And I think A lot of people, you don't have to be in a big company like Google to see that. A lot of people see that in lots of different situations, and it is a shame. At a personal level, and this is more what I wrote about in that chapter in the book about intentional imperfection, I do worry about the impact that this can have on our mental health in the sense that we set for ourselves those impossible standards. Then we don't manage to actually reach them, and we never question the way we set those standards in the first place. We question ourselves or a sense of self-worth. Intentional imperfection is really, as it says, the idea of intentionally saying, I am not going to be able to reach perfection across every single area of my life at every single given time, but I can decide in advance and say, you know what, this is where I'm going to slightly drop the ball so I can focus on that other part. What's great about that is that first, for yourself, you have more clarity and you can focus on what really matters in the moment without worrying about that other aspect of your life because you've decided that you're not going to be perfect across the board. Second, in terms of communication with the people around you, if you tell your spouse at home, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, I have this really big presentation coming up, and so I'm not going to be as present and helpful in the next 2 days at home because I'm going to be very focused on that. But if there's something you really need from me, do let me know because I might be a bit distracted. I might be really focused on work. I don't want you to feel like you're doing everything. So tell me if there's something really important, and this way I know I'll have to pay attention. So this way you're also managing expectations and it becomes more of a partnership with the people around you rather than you trying to be perfect across the board and then disappointing yourself and others in the process. And at a self-awareness level, self-knowledge level, it is also a great way to have this compass to see what is actually important to you. If you notice over the course of several that every time you have the choice between work or being with your children, you choose being at work, you can ask yourself, is that really what I want? Or do I need to kind of rebalance my compass here and refocus on what I think is important? Or equally speaking, equally, if you notice that every time you choose your children, that's also an interesting signal. Should you reorient your work so you can have even more time with your children since this is what you've been favoring? So intentional imperfection can also serve as a compass to direct your life in a more intentional way over the long term.

It seems too that there's a sort of, um, leaning into imperfection that catapults learning. Um, in that when I think that I have to master something or do it perfectly, it just hobbles progress, it seems. And if I instead lean into saying, why don't I just hop in and start working on this and see what happens and be okay that I'm not the best? I don't know. Is that a fair assessment? Is indeed there some sort of relationship between more rapid learning and more rapid growth in a pursuit if we lean into mistake making?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, first it connects to what I was saying earlier when I gave the example of when I was working at Google. If you accept that you're probably never going to be perfect, then it allows you to also have a healthier nonjudgmental relationship with your mistakes and say, huh, interesting, interesting mistake. I didn't see that one coming. I thought I would be able to do it and that didn't work out. What can I learn from this? So you're going to learn from your mistakes. Second, it's also going to make you more comfortable at the prospect of potentially making mistakes when trying something new. That's another problem with perfectionism is that because you're so scared of doing something wrong, you might not try new ways of doing things. You might stick to what you feel you know enough that it's going to go perfectly, and so you're stunting your own growth when you do that.

That— it reminds me of a conversation my wife and I had years ago when we were in a season of doing some marriage counseling. And at the time, we were talking with the therapist about parenting, and she said, remember the 85% rule. And I said, "What's that? What's the 85% rule?" And she said, "If you do it right 85% of the time as a parent, that's good enough." And she said, "Then the 15% of the time you screw up, two things can happen with that. One, you can teach your kids they don't have to be perfect. And two, you can teach your kids how to apologize because you will apologize for the things that you didn't do right in that 15% of the time." And I just thought that was so brilliant, right? It transformed the way I thought about parenting and it transformed the way I kind of thought about my life of, you know, a lot of good can come from our mistakes if we have the courage to be curious about what can come from those mistakes, I think. So, that relates as well to this challenge that you have for us about paying attention to our cognitive scripts, the stories that we tell ourselves in our mind. So, help us with understanding the importance of that.

Research into cognitive scripts started in the late '70s. And, uh, the reason why I love this research is because it's so simple. It's so simple the way they designed it. Anyone can understand. So what they did is that they simply asked people, if you were in that particular situation, how would you act? How would you behave? What would you do? Describe to me the actions you would take. And what they found is that most people, if you put them in a specific situation, will behave in a very similar way. Hmm. And those are called cognitive scripts. They are like patterns of behavior that we have implicitly agreed upon as a society, or the correct way to behave in a certain situation. Cognitive scripts can be very helpful in a lot of situations. So if you go to a restaurant, nobody ever actually told you that you're supposed to walk in there, wait at the front, and that a staff member is going to come and ask you how many people. Then you're going to tell them, and then you're going to walk to your table. You didn't have a lesson from your parents about that. You just know, you just know that you've observed it happen enough times that you just know. If you go to the doctor's, the doctor, you know you're supposed to wait in the waiting room. That's why it's called like that. And then someone's going to call your name and they're going to go in the doctor's office. If the doctor walked out of their office and asked you to get undressed in front of everybody in the waiting room, you would probably be quite confused, right? Because they would've gone off script. They would not be following the cognitive script we all agreed on. So cognitive scripts, very common, not necessarily bad. The issue is that we also follow those scripts in a lot of other areas of our lives that are a lot more important than finding a table at a restaurant. And those areas include our career choices, our relationships, the way we communicate, the way we dress, where we live. We follow these scripts based on our education, the people around us, the values that we have. And we don't realize that a lot of our decisions are based on those invisible scripts. And this is where we start having a problem because those decisions are not necessarily what we want. They're just following a script.

So give us some examples of what, how one might go about questioning our scripts and cognitive scripts and an example of finding one that might not be helpful to us and what, what one might do about that.

I actually created 3 buckets of cognitive scripts that after working with a lot of people trying to uncover them, I think are quite helpful. So those are not found in the research literature, but I found, I found them time and time again. And so those buckets, I think, are helpful to think about them. The first type of scripts I call the SQL script. And this is the script you follow when you think that whatever decision you make today needs to make sense based on the decisions you made in the past. And so this is the kind of script you follow when Maybe after university, you only look for jobs that are aligned with what you studied in college. Or maybe after you quit a job, you only look for jobs that are aligned with what you did. This is the reason why also we rewrite our resume every time we look for a new job to make it look like it has a nice narrative. It makes sense, right? Each chapter follows the previous one and tells a nice story. And because of this script, we limit ourselves in terms of what we might want to explore. We might not even look at this job that we might love, but makes no sense based on what we did in the past, right? So that's the SQL script. The second big bucket is what I call the crowd pleaser script. And this is the script we follow when we make decisions based on what we think is going to please the people around you. And the people, the people around us. Those people might include your spouse/partner, your parents, your friends, your colleagues. And this is when you might go for the, you know, the nice job, for example, that pays well and where people are going to tell you, oh, you did great. You did great. This is such a nice job. This is where you're going to go for the promotion, although maybe you don't even want that promotion, but you know that people are going to be so proud of you. This is also very common, especially in, uh, second generation people where maybe their parents helped them in terms of paying for their studies and really supported them. And so because of that, they might only look for jobs like being a lawyer or a doctor or those kinds of things where they know their parents are going to be really happy and proud. So that's the crowd pleaser script. And again, very limiting in terms of the choices we make. The last type of script, I think, is the most insidious one because that's a script that is celebrated in our society where we say, follow your passion, find your purpose, whatever you do, you need to be excited. You need to think about it from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep and it needs to change the world. This is the type of script people follow when they say, I need to start a startup. Not a small business, it needs to be a startup. And again, it needs to change the world. This one, I think, is very dangerous because first, a lot of people end up putting all of their eggs in the same basket. And when they drop that basket, all their sense of identity shatters. Who am I now that I don't have this startup? The other problem is for anyone who hasn't found their passion, and that's a lot of people. These people think that their life doesn't have meaning yet. And the last problem is that some people who might have several passions feel like those are not good enough. They still haven't found the big one. And so because of that, a lot of people are chasing this illusion of having a big passion, the one big passion that's supposed to drive you for the rest of your life, making themselves miserable. When in reality, you can have several passions at the same time. You can have a bunch of small passions. It doesn't have to be one big one. And, uh, you can also stop feeling passionate about something and move on to the next adventure. That's completely fine as well.

So this awareness of cognitive scripts, um, allows us then at least some space to step back, ask ourselves, according to which of these kinds of scripts might I be operating? And at least at a minimum makes a space for an alternative sort of approach, a freedom, if you will, to say, and maybe I want to explore this, or maybe I want for this, which goes back to the experimentation, I suppose, with our lives.

Yes, that's, uh, it's always about experimentation, but it's also always about intention. So with those scripts, it might be that you discover that you're following the crowd pleaser scripts right now. And it might be that once you discover that, you say, you know what, actually, I'm actually really grateful that my parents supported me through this. And, uh, I might not want to be a lawyer for the rest of my life, but right now I find it intellectually stimulating. I like my colleagues. My parents are happy. I'm going to keep going with this for the next few years and then we'll see. The difference now is that you have made your script conscious. And so it's not a cognitive script anymore in the sense that it's not an invisible script that is directing your decisions. Now you have regained a sense of agency. You say, that's what I wanna do right now. I might change my mind, but that's what I wanna do right now. And so this is really the power of, again, self-observation. You make the unconscious conscious.. And when you do that, you can make more intentional decisions.

So this is, I, I suppose, one specific case of what you call metacognitive growth, where we're, we're thinking about our thinking in certain, uh, kind of diverse areas of our lives. So kind of make the case for why you think we ought to care about metacognitive growth.

So metacognition, as I said, means thinking about thinking. What's really interesting is that We believe that we are the only animal that is capable of doing this. So anyone who has a pet, if you have a dog or a cat, you know that they're able to think. That is not the question. They can think, they can plot, they can observe you. That is, uh, so that's not the question. What we think, what we believe only humans are able to do is thinking about thinking, observing our own thoughts. Asking ourselves, why did I think that? So that's metacognition. Why did I think that? By observing your own thoughts, you can then change your thoughts. And by changing your thoughts, you can change your behavior. And by changing your behavior, you can grow. That's the idea of metacognitive growth. Observing the why behind your behaviors, injecting that self-awareness that heightened intention so you can keep on growing. And the idea again here is not to have a perfect plan. It's not to decide, here's how I'm going to be successful. Here's the ladder I'm going to climb. The idea is to keep on observing yourself and to keep on tweaking and iterating, creating those growth loops where every time you try something new, again, whatever the outcome, you commit to being curious and you commit to learn from the experience and to then extract that knowledge and apply it during your next cycle of experimentation.

It does seem that metacognition, uh, thinking about our thoughts, uh, observing ourselves thinking, feeling, it, it seems like a superpower to me. Um, and yet it's a superpower that that I didn't really begin to really pay attention to until later in my life when someone said, hey, this is like a superpower. You should pay attention to this. Why do you think, given that this is something that's so distinctive about being human, that it seems to me it's gotten very little attention and yet it's so powerful? Why might that be the case?

Well, first, I think the name is not very sexy. Metacognition is a mouthful. And so if you tell people people about metacognition, you know, they might feel like, what is that thing? Sounds complicated. Second, unfortunately, it is kind of put into the same bag as any kind of mindfulness practice where people feel like it takes a lot of time, which is not the case because again, metacognition is really taking that little second to just observe your own thoughts. And so it's more of a practice whenever you're doing something and it feels a little bit automatic. You can train yourself to create that little pause and say, oh, why am I thinking that? Why am I doing that? And then it becomes more and more natural. And then the last reason why I think it hasn't been very popular is that it can actually be uncomfortable. You know, when, when you start asking yourself, why do I think that? You can uncover patterns. You can uncover memories also. That can be a little bit uncomfortable. And so for a lot of us, it's just easier to not look too deeply.

Yeah, yeah. And, and at the same time, I also think that without that kind of attention, uh, we do get kind of trapped, right, in those cognitive scripts or in these sorts of repetitive, ruminative, ruminating thoughts or whatever the case may be. I, I don't know, just again, as I was sharing earlier about my my trip to my hometown, childhood hometown, I used the excuse that I was there for a high school reunion to talk my way into the high school that was kind of closed up for the summer because I just wanted to walk around and see, and this school hasn't changed in all these decades. And so I was actually standing, our high school was actually built in the round around the basketball gym. And so it's this fascinating kind of building and kind of odd but fascinating architecture. And so I was standing on the basketball court where a lot of fascinating things had happened in my high school years. You know, I was reminiscing about being in the high school band and playing at this one particular spot, or I was thinking about doing a valedictory address at my commencement, you know, over on that side of the gym. And so I was thinking about all these things, and then all of a sudden I realized in thinking about my thinking I realized I had acute heartburn, and it just came out of nowhere because there was no stresses around me, you know. But all of a sudden, I'm right back in high school with all of this heartburn. And, and I, I share that simply to say, one, I mean, it's fascinating that again, as so many have noted, you're right, our bodies carry memories, and all, all of a sudden you can be right back in, back in them. Which was a common experience for me as a high school kid to have heartburn. But more it's a sort of because people like you have taught me to pay attention to what you're feeling, what you're thinking, I was able to take a space of saying, "Wait a second, I'm feeling heartburn and it's irrational and I don't have to feel this heartburn." And it gave me some space from the heartburn, right? And so I think that I just so much appreciate this kind of work of saying you can take some time to ask yourself these questions. And again, like you said, you don't have to invest a lot of time. Time, but the little bit of investment there has serious payoffs, it seems to me. So imagine somebody's listening and they say, okay, well, what do I do with all this, right? Maybe give us 2 or 3 minutes here as we close on how someone might launch out into very practically doing a mini experiment in their own lives.

Think about how to design an experiment. So when a scientist designs an experiment, they only need to know two things: what they're going to test and the trial period. So that's why when you read research papers, they say, we conducted a trial for 6 months, we conducted a trial for this period of time. When you design your own tiny experiments in life, it's the exact same. You need to know what you want to test and the trial period. I call this a pact because it is a commitment to curiosity and you need to have an action and a duration. I will action for duration. My book is called Tiny Experiments for a reason. I highly recommend that you keep the duration quite short at the beginning. So keep it tiny and it can be very simple. I will not bring my phone in my bedroom for the next 2 weeks. I will journal every morning for 5 minutes for the next 5 days. I will go on a walk every evening after dinner for the next week. I will action for duration. That's it. That's how you design a tiny experiment. In that process, stay curious, observe your responses, practice metacognition. Notice when you think something and ask yourself, why do I think that? Huh, interesting. What can we learn from this? Let go of any outcome because the idea here is just to learn whatever happens. What you wanna do is to complete the experiment. And at the end, just like a scientist, look back and without any kind of self-judgment, ask yourself, okay, how did that work? What went well? What didn't go so well? And if I wanted to do this again, what would I change? That's it. That's how you design a tiny experiment.

Well, thank you. Uh, that's, uh, all super helpful. You've given us so much to think about and your work is very much a gift to us. We're grateful. Been talking to Anne-Laure Le Cunff on her new book, Tiny Experiments.

Thank you, Anne-Laure.

Great to be with you.

Thank you for having me.

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Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible: Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Carriet Harmon, Jason Cheesley, Sophie Byard, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Audrey Griffith. Our theme song was composed by Tim Lauer. Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together. No Small Endeavor is a production of Tokens Media, LLC and Great Feeling Studios.

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