#41 How tiny experiments can help you design a better life with Anne Laure Le Cunff

Your success is just completing cycles of experimentation where the only objective is not to climb a ladder, but to learn something new. As long as you learn something new through each experience that you have, this is growth.

Welcome to Humble Mind. We are a social learning community with a passion for connection and conversation about the kinds of ideas and questions that help us to realign our purpose, our values, our mission, both in work and life. I'm very excited today about our conversation with our guest, who is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is a neuroscientist. She's an author, she's an ex-Google wizard, and she's also the founder of Ness Labs, whose newsletter is read by more than 100,000 people every week. She also has a new book called Tiny Experiments, which helps you to realize a path to living a more experimental life, embracing a sense of curiosity, play, maybe even a bit of fun and intentionality when it comes to designing the kind of life that you want to lead. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, welcome to the Humble Mind podcast. Great to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me.

Awesome. Yeah, very, very excited. Shout out again to Kimberly, our community member who, who, yeah, proposed the wonderful idea of getting you on. I've just started reading your new book. Thanks again for that. Advanced copy that you, that you shared, Tiny Experiments. But I have also been consuming quite a few podcasts just about you and your story, the things that you're saying, your, your life so far. And I think if it's okay, just to give a bit of context to kind of how, you know, you've arrived where you are now with your mission and the very important message I feel that you're sharing with the world, it'd be great to maybe hear just a little bit about you know, your story at Google, because it seemed like you had it all, and then something completely changed for you. I'd love to hear just you unpack that a little bit for us to kick off.

Yeah, I kind of think about my life and my career in terms of two chapters. The first one was very linear in the sense that I was very focused on being successful, and that definition of success was based on what success is supposed to look like in a traditional sense of the term. So getting promoted, working on cool projects working at a well-known company. So I tried to do my best in school. I tried to get a good job. I started working at Google. I worked first in London and then in Mountain View in Silicon Valley. And although from the outside, I probably looked quite successful, good salary, amazing team I was working with, interesting projects. I actually felt quite empty on the inside. I didn't really feel like I was connecting to the work in a way that felt personal. I also felt like I knew exactly what success was supposed to look like. Like someone had told me how to play the game to a point where you don't have a lot of the excitement of figuring it out. And so I was both working quite hard and being dangerously dancing with burnout, but also being a bit bored at the same time and feeling quite empty. So that was the first chapter of my life, which I know now a lot of people have experienced. This dichotomy between being successful on the outside, but not feeling quite fulfilled on the inside is actually quite common. And I'm now in a, a different chapter, which I, is the second chapter. Hopefully there will be many more chapters, but currently the second chapter, which is a lot more experimental where I'm not trying to cling to a specific destination, a specific definition of success. I'm really trying to explore what I'm interested in, trying to follow my curiosity. I'm trying to see what kind of projects will help me connect with interesting people and explore interesting questions. And I have no idea where I'm going, but that's what I like about it.

Awesome. I love that. There's so many things I love about that. I'm curious though, because sometimes something has to break in order for you to really pay attention to it and fix it. And whether or not that's just a crazy phenomenon or maybe something that's backed by neuroscience, maybe you can tell us. But, you know, it seems that we only really kind of start to pay attention or listen to the signs when, you know, there's not just a stop sign, but there's someone, you know, kind of forcing you and letting you know, look, you cannot go any further here. Do you think that you'd be here today on this path that you're on now if you didn't have some of those kind of very real, okay, something is about to break kind of moments? Or do you think that might have happened anyway in its own way?

I think it would have happened anyway, but it would have probably taken longer. Having those kinds of life crisis is a way to accelerate change, which can still can feel quite brutal, very uncomfortable, and which is not necessary. I think in my case, I waited until something broke. In my case, it was a health scare and something had to break in order for me to notice that I was boiling very slowly. Like, you know, like the, the image of the frog, right? That's boiling so slowly that it doesn't realize that's what's happening. That was the situation I was in, but then I had that health scare that made me question question everything. And the reason why I had to have that health scare in order to start questioning everything is because I wasn't equipped with any of the tools. I hadn't seen any examples around me of people approaching things differently. And so I thought the way I was approaching work, my relationship to my career, the way I had tied my sense of identity to my success was the only way. To approach life was the only way to grow and to, to live a meaningful life. And this is why I'm doing the, the work I'm doing right now. This is also why I wrote the book. It's because I have discovered since then that there are many tools, many different mental models that you can use to be successful in a way that is unique to you. And that is not following those scripts of success that other people are following or that society is telling us to follow. And I'm hoping that some of the readers can apply these tools without having to go through a health scare or another type of life crisis before they start changing and or at least reconsidering the way they're approaching their lives.

Yeah, that, that would be ideal, right? Absolutely. So maybe let's get into it and some of the stuff that you, you talk about in your book. I love the book's kind of byline or the subtitle, you know, How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. It seems like a kind of a crazy paradox, living free and goals. You know, there's almost a sort of a part of the definition in setting goals is that you're kind of locked into achieving it and that you're not free, right? So how do you approach it and how do you define what tiny experiments are in this case?

I think what's helpful is to think about the different mental models of success that we can have. So in the traditional mental model, you can visualize success almost like a ladder that you're supposed to climb. So it has different levels, different rungs, and you're, you're supposed to go through these levels in order. First you complete a level and then you're allowed to go on to the next one. And that's what you see in most traditional companies where you have a hierarchy and you're supposed to learn everything. You're supposed to learn at one level before you're allowed to be promoted to the next one. Very linear, climbing a ladder. And so that's one mental model. With experiments, the mental model is the mental model of a loop instead, not a ladder you're supposed to climb, but cycles of experimentation. And that, that's very different. And that has a lot of downstream effects in terms of how we manage our success and how we approach our lives and our careers. When you're climbing a ladder and everybody around you is climbing a ladder, it means that you can very easily compare yourself to others. So you can say, oh, I'm, I'm at this level. Why is this person I was in school with at, at this level already? Where are they up there? And I'm still here. Am I being too slow? Uh, am I not being good enough? Not productive enough? Not efficient enough? You also tend to just copy-paste what kind of ladders other people are climbing because this is the definition that you're, you're of success that you're seeing around you. When you change your mental model to a loop, that means that you cannot really compare. There's no leaderboard anymore. You're really just creating your own sandbox, your playground for experimentation. And that means that your success is just completing cycles of experimentation where the only objective is not to climb a ladder, but to learn something new. As long as you learn something new through each experience that you have, this is growth. And that model of growth is very, very different. So to answer your question about how tiny experiments are different from those linear goals, it is this different mental model. And the downstream effect is that you cannot compare your success to the success of others anymore. You're creating your very own definition of success that is based on learning rather than following a script.

It's, it's so big what you said, and I kind of feel I just want to restate it again because we're changing the outcome or the desired effect of what it means to set goals, what it means to aspire to things, to not achieve them, but rather to, to, to continue to learn.— to— so, and that's kind of, you know, there's a lot of growth mindset in there, which is awesome too, but it's also about kind of completely— which I think this is the hard part, and I'd love to hear, you know, your views or some feedback you've had on these ideas as well, because I'm sure you get people on one spectrum who are like, "Oh my God, great!" to others who might love what the words say, but then to actually put that into practice is like, "You really are challenging me and my core beliefs here," because it is about achievement and getting getting the next promotion and getting in front of the next person. And that's just law of the jungle, how things are. But now you're kind of telling me, well, actually, I can define these things for myself on my own, and I can learn from it, and I can get better, and I can iterate. That must send people for a spin sometimes.

Yeah, it's— so there are a few things. First, a misconception or assumption that people might make if they don't read the book and they just hear about living a more experimental life is that living an experimental life is about experimenting with everything. And that's not what I'm saying. Living an experimental life is making sure that you have at least some areas of your life where you're experimenting at any given moment. And it is actually completely okay to have a more linear approach in certain parts of your life. It's if that's intentional. So for example, you might be in a situation where you're the primary caregiver for someone, or you have health issues at the moment, or you have young kids. I don't know what that is, but like you're not in a situation where you can be very experimental with your job. You actually need the stability there. And so you might maybe stick to, if you're a freelancer, you might stick to projects that are quite stable with the same clients and with recurring revenue. If you're an employee, you might just stay at the big company, has a salary that's going to come every month. Having an experimental mindset is making this choice intentionally, saying, actually, I need the stability here, but I'm going to make sure that there are areas of my life where I experiment, whether that's experimenting with my hobbies, my creativity, my productivity, my health, or my relationships, or whatever that is. Having an experimental mindset. Is experimenting in some areas of your life. So that's one thing. The second thing is I tell people that you can actually be successful without experimenting in your life, but the kind of success you will achieve is the kind of success that you can already imagine today. So you can be successful in a very narrow definition of what success is like. So if you want to be successful at a specific job in a very specific career, if If for you, success is becoming director of a specific team at your job or something like that, you can do that. You don't need to be very experimental to do this. Having an experimental mindset is what is going to allow you to look back in 5 years and be amazed at where you are today, because there would have been no way for you to even imagine that doing this kind of work or having this kind of impact was possible. It's really designing your life in a way that is so emergent that there's no way to plan it in advance. You cannot have a 5-year plan for success when you're experimenting. And so you can be successful without experimenting, but it is going to be a very predictable definition of success.

Yeah, absolutely. I love the word emergent you used, and it reminded me of another word, which is the unexpected. And a friend of mine likes to say, you know, the unexpected never lets me down, which I love that as a way of thinking about how these things can surprise us in such new ways, which like you said, allows us to suddenly entertain options that 10 minutes ago, 1 year ago were never even remotely considerable. So it allows us to sort of be surprised. And that's what makes, you know, life worth living. I'm curious because you focus quite a lot the book and a lot of your work and some of the podcasts that I've been listening to with, with, with you, there's quite a lot that you have to say about sort of setting goals and specifically setting better goals. So talk to me a bit about the relationship between how to set better goals and this kind of toolkit that you're providing us with, with experimentation, with thinking boldly, with, you know, having a kind of an experimental mindset when it comes to how we can get better at setting goals.

Yeah, so again, it's kind of helpful to compare the experimental approach to traditional goals. So traditional goals, you're probably familiar with SMART goals. This is the quintessential framework for traditional goals. And SMART goals, linear goals, the traditional approach to goals always starts with the outcome. You have a specific outcome that you want to achieve, and then you design a plan, and then you work hard to get there. That's essentially the idea. With an experiment, a more experimental approach to setting goals, you don't start with an outcome. You start with a hypothesis, almost like a research question. What might happen if we tried this? I have the, the intuition. I have the hypothesis that this might work, that's, that this might be helpful, that this might be a more efficient, more more creative, more productive way of doing things, but I'm not 100% sure. If you were sure, there's no point running the experiment. So that's what's interesting here is that you start from a place where failure is an option. It might be the case that you're wrong, that, that hypothesis is incorrect, and you're going to run an experiment to collect data to see whether you're correct or not. If you're incorrect, that's okay. You learn something new. And so the objective here again is learning. And in terms of tools, the way I recommend designing those tiny experiments, so SMART goals, they, they have this definition that is a PACT, P-A-C-T, which stands for purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable. And a PACT is really a commitment to experimentation. It's a mini protocol and it's inspired by the scientific method. So when scientists design an experiment, they have two ingredients, the two parts of the protocol. The first one is, what am I going to test? And the second one is, for how many trials? That's why you hear scientists say, we're running this experiment with 300 participants or for 6 months. Same with your, with personal experimentation. When you design a pack to say, I will perform this specific action. So I will write a weekly newsletter for 6 weeks. I will meal prep every Sunday for 2 months. I will go for a daily walk for 2 weeks. I will action for duration. And when you run the experiment, the most important part is to withhold judgment until you're done. Just like a scientist is not going to start poking at the data and deciding that they don't really like what they're seeing here and they're just going to stop the experiment. Once you've decided this is my protocol, this is my pact, this is a commitment, I'm collecting the data and only when I'm done, I can look back and ask myself, okay, What worked? What didn't? What might I want to try next? What do I want to tweak? But only when you're done collecting the data. So this is the big, big, big difference between a traditional goal and a more experimental approach to goals is that you're just trying to learn something new. That is success.

Beautifully said. It's ingenious. And because it's so simple, you know, at the same time, and there's something really refreshing about instead of setting these kind of goals which absolutely must happen by X date in this way, otherwise everything is off, about rather making a pact, a kind of a commitment to the process and not the outcome, is so— is, you know, once again, so profound yet so simple. At the same time, there's something also to be said about how it also, I think, puts your expectations in check because you're you're kind of staying detached from the outcome as long as the process is running, as long as the experiment is going. And that's obviously the best way to do it because whether or not it kind of turns out in the way you want it or better or worse, it's okay. It's okay, whatever happens, right? And I think that helps us to sort of stay on track with the commitment to the process, 'cause often we just get overridden by our emotions, which obviously then influences our decisions, which often, don't help, right?

Absolutely. And, uh, the nice thing about that too is that once you've committed to this action, this test that you're conducting, if you miss some trials, if you miss some days or some weeks, that's the T in PACT for trackable. You're tracking whether you've done it or not. Yes or no. That's it. That's all you're tracking here. And that's data too. So if at the end of your experiment you look back and you see that you've missed some of the repetitions, there's no self-blame or self-judgment.

Mm-hmm.

You just look at it and you ask yourself, okay, so I said I was going to do this for, uh, 2 weeks, 14 days, and I missed 3 or 4 days. And you can look back on this and ask yourself, why did that happen? So maybe you missed it because you had a family member visiting and that day was very chaotic and you couldn't do it.

Cool.

That means that I actually really enjoyed the experiment, but you know, sometimes life happens. But if you missed it 3 or 4 days and it was just because you were maybe procrastinating or not that excited about it, that also says something. And again, without self-blame or self-judgment, the thing where a scientist wouldn't really blame themselves is if the data is saying something unexpected, you can look at it and say, huh, interesting. I really thought I would enjoy this, but apparently I'm not. So what do I want to change? Do I want to keep going and tweak my approach? Do I want to do something completely different? Do I want to collaborate with someone else on this thing that might make it more enjoyable? What do I want to experiment with next? That's also part of the experimental mindset, removing this self-blame, self-judgment that we tend to have when we're not doing what we feel like we should be doing.

Yeah, absolutely. It just feels like so much more of an intuitive and a healthy way to go about it. And probably in the long run, I'd imagine helps to deliver better outcomes anyway. So, so, so yeah, I'm, I'm keen to learn more about one of the things that really caught my eye when I started doing some, some research on you and your work was this idea of play. And creativity, because I— and I love that. Um, and I was having a conversation yesterday actually with a friend of mine who— and we were kind of agreeing that sometimes thinking of yourself as an artist or as someone who is inherently creative and then applying your skills to a problem or a business you're trying to run, you know, a product you're trying to launch, helps to sort of change how you feel about the internal process. Which then helps to inform the external process or the external results, how that shows up. So I just love this idea of kind of playing and kind of free-forming. I want to dig into some of your thinking around this, sort of the creative exploration and how, how this sort of flows in to what we're talking about here, setting goals and living ultimately life on our terms. The role of play.

Yeah, it's a It does connect back to being curious. Our sense of play is something we're actually born with. This is how most children learn by playing with things, by creating stories, by having those, those different scenarios, by pushing buttons and seeing what happens and taking those mini risks every day just to, to learn really how the world works and how they can relate to it. And somehow, mostly through traditional schooling and because of the expectations we have from our society to be perceived as someone who knows what they're doing, you know, we, we tend to be paid level of expertise and the answers that we can provide and not necessarily the questions that we can ask. So because of that, as adults, we tend to make less and less room for play, and we tend to try to go for what we think is the most efficient way of learning. So we try to read all of the books and we take notes and we start try to cram information in our minds. And those, those ways of learning are not necessarily bad in the sense that sometimes reading a good book, listening to a good podcast, taking some notes, like that's also a good way to learn. But it is very unfortunate that this has for lots of adults completely replaced play. As a way of learning and growing. So this is something I really encourage people to do. And experimentation is actually a very nice semi-structured way to re-inject a bit more play in the way we navigate the world and the way we navigate challenges. It is really about trying something and seeing what happens, which is a big part of play. Just try it, try it out, see what happens. And a lot of adults could really benefit from reinjecting a little bit of that mindset in their daily life and work.

Yeah, I mean, it all absolutely makes sense to me. And like I said, you know, when, when I can kind of get more in touch with that side of myself, which, which isn't fixed on an outcome, which is, you know, happy to be curious, which also can suspend assumptions as well, you know, not not take everything at face value, but maybe, ah, maybe, maybe I can rethink that. Maybe that doesn't have to be like that. Let's see. Let's just see. That's fine. You know, and then, yeah, the, the real, the kind of the juice flows from there. I'm curious, at the same time, looking at this frame, when you might speak to— obviously you used to work for Google, and I'm sure you have audiences at the very top level still there as well, work with you, uh, you know, when, when you're broadcasting this kind of message at the boardroom, What's, what's the temperature like? You know, how, how, what's the type of response you get? Because I'd imagine at the top level, people are like, sure, you're right, makes sense to me. But at the same time, I've got deadlines, I've got teams, I've got products to sell, I've got things to do, I've got bottom lines to hit. Where, you know, is there a disconnect? I'm sure there is, but how? Yeah, I just want to hear you speak more about that situation when you deliver this message there. How that gets received?

I tend to, yeah, I tend to adapt the way I deliver the message based on the audience and coming from a place where they have already realized that something is quite wrong with the way they relate to work, their career, their, their self-identity, their productivity. And so for these people, actually, it is very, it takes very little, little efforts on my part to convince them to try to start running tiny experiments because they had already noticed that something was not working. And I'm just providing a tool for them to solve or at least figure out their own solution for the challenge that they're facing. And then there's another bucket of people who come to my work. Looking for another way to be more productive, more efficient, to hit those goals, those milestones, and to be more successful. And so for those people, there's first a little bit of unlearning to do before they can relearn how to embrace play and experimentation. And, uh, I tend to really try and help them first reconnect with their own sense of curiosity first, which a lot of them have actually forgotten or pushed aside because it is, it is perceived as a distraction when you're very focused on a goal. You don't want to waste time exploring things that might not lead anywhere, creating space for failure. It doesn't make sense at a rational level when all you want to do is, is be successful. So that's also why I named my book Tiny Experiments. Because for the people in this bucket, it's almost like a Trojan horse where I can say, hey, don't worry, you don't have to change everything. You can keep your productivity systems. You can keep your time trackers for now. You can keep your Pomodoros and whatever it is that you're using and that makes you feel like you're on top of everything. May I suggest that you try one tiny experiment? Around something you're curious about. And then usually that opens the door to more experimentation, more exploration, reconnecting with that sense of play without having to convince them at a higher level of the why, why it is so important to experiment and to play and reconnect with our curiosity. So that's why I have a slightly different approach depending on who I'm talking to.

Yeah, and it makes sense. And, and I— that's absolutely the right approach. Sometimes you've got to meet people where they are right now, you know, with what they have, rather than, you know, speak to them in, in the kind of language that they might perceive as being 5 years ahead, you know. So, so that makes sense. Once again, it's— yeah, it's a great title and it's a great way to do it, you know. Tiny Experiments doesn't feel like you have to give everything up or that you're losing everything or that you have to suddenly implement all of these extra tasks or more on the to-do list or things I don't have time for, but rather, okay, just What happens if, you know, just 5 minutes a day on that? Or, you know, try not to, you know, um, you know, wake up with your, with your phone first thing, you know, scrolling, or whatever it might be. Tiny, tiny little changes that end up making the bigger impact on the journey. Um, one of the, the, the kind of the, the things that interest me as well with what you sent me, um, before the podcast was this was experimenting around vulnerability. That's interesting, um, because it seems to me like a lot of the time when we're trying to make changes in our lives, even though we can see it's a good reason that we should be making this change, even though we are convinced of the methods to do it, even though we might be convinced of, um, you know, what might be waiting for us if we don't make these changes, perhaps life-threatening things, A lot of the time there's still a resistance there, and, and, and it seems certainly in some of the work I've been doing that there's— we're, we really are resisting being vulnerable, either to ourselves or in front of other people, right? Is there a way of kind of learning how to embrace vulnerability, embrace the things that we're not happy about right now and that we're feeling a little bit sensitive about? And maybe is there a way to experiment our way out of that? As well?

Yeah, I think the first step is acceptance because a lot of people, when they're feeling this fear of experimenting and trying new things, they might freeze even more because they're a bit scared of trying something new. So I think understanding that from an evolutionary perspective, it is completely normal that your reaction when you're faced with uncertainty is to want to have control, to feel like you have certainty about what's going to happen and the outcomes. Because when you think back on our ancestors and the environment that they were living in, the more information you had in terms of the threats, the resources, the, the other players in that environment, the more likely you were to survive. Our brains haven't changed that much. So Even in today's environment, we want to feel like we know what's going on. And when we feel like we don't know what's going on, this is very scary. So I would say first step, realizing that this is completely normal to have this resistance. And second, once you've accepted that and, and you've gotten rid of the self-blame that you might be experiencing, you can also remind yourself that as human beings, we have something called metacognition. So other animals can think. If anyone who has a pet, a cat or dog or even a bird, can see that an animal can think. What they cannot do, to the extent we know, is think about their own thinking, observe their own thoughts, observe their own emotions, being able to do this meta-level of thinking and of observing, huh, this is the way I feel right now, or those are the thoughts going through my head and I might want to change these. And so this is actually a tiny experiment that you can design. I, in my community, there was someone who actually did something like that where it was based on the negative talk, self-talk. You could actually pick something that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable, that feels a little bit risky, not too risky, a little bit, and design an experiment around that. And you can make it very, very short. Tiny experiments can be very, very different and experimenting with it and seeing how you feel afterwards, how this has changed you and whether you might want to scale it up a little bit in your next iteration.

It's, it's as you're talking and providing this great advice on, on, you know, on the small kind of steps to take with big things. It also reminds me of this idea of like, A lot of the time when I feel happiest, when I feel, you know, most in my being, I'm curious, I'm feeling creative, it's when I'm paying attention. And I'm paying attention and I'm being attentive to often really small details, uh, the words someone used, you know, the color of the sky at a certain time, whatever it might be, you know, things that I'm kind of just noticing that otherwise I would not have the mental bandwidth to notice.. And those tiny details end up having the biggest impacts, right? And so I just love about this idea of tiny experiments, the tinier the better in a way, because then it allows you to benefit from it not feeling like it's a massive thing that you have to now go and do, but then it forces you to just be attentive on what that outcome might be, because it might be at a very small level at first, at a very kind of subtle level, uh, which forces you to notice, which is, yeah, just great.

Exactly. And, uh, that's also something that I think is really important to keep in mind when you're experimenting is that I mentioned you can decide to scale it up, but you really don't have to. If you start with something very, very small and it works and it brings you joy, then you can keep going. There's no obligation to actually go for something bigger. You can keep on doing that small experiment in noticing, in reframing, whatever it is that is working for you. You can stop an experiment when you're done, when you're done with that first pact. And you say, actually, I did it. Not helpful, not working for me. Great. Let's do something else. That's fine. So that's the great thing too, is that it doesn't have to be It's not a habit in the sense that with a habit, which I find absolutely crazy, we commit to these things for the rest of our lives, even though we have never tried them before. Whereas with an experiment, you just say, I'm just giving it a try and I don't have— it doesn't have to be big. It doesn't have to be for the rest of my life.

Makes sense. And we also get to, once again, expectation, sort of keep those in check along the way. Without, you know, having a sort of a crushing disappointment before it's even had a chance to reveal anything new or useful. So yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a great way. Um, before I come to some of the community who might want to be sharing some, some questions or some thoughts, are there other kind of quick hot takes, anything that's, that's, that we haven't mentioned yet in terms of what should be in that experimental toolkit things that I could start kind of thinking about or doing from tomorrow even that we maybe haven't covered?

I would say the only thing that's quite important that we haven't covered is when you look back on an experiment and when you're analyzing the data, I would highly encourage you to consider both the external and the internal signals of success. We tend to be very focused on the external signals. So if you're experimenting with online writing or anything like that, you might look at the number of likes and comments and subscribers. But it's very important to also look at the internal signals. How did you feel when conducting this experiment? Because you want to avoid falling into that trap I fell into years ago where you're very successful externally, but not feeling quite good internally. So I would really encourage you to do both. And it can even be as simple as drawing two columns where you have the internal signals and the external signals and really using that as a forcing mechanism to not only look at how successful you are on the outside, but how you feel on the inside. Yes.

Yes. Too often we neglect the, the how this makes us feel. So we're optimizing for these kind of external results and things out there instead of just optimizing for our own happiness, right? Do you think that's possibly because there's something hardwired in us that we, that we don't deserve to be happy, that we don't deserve good outcomes to come our way? Is— what do you think about that? Is there maybe a root to that kind of pathology?

It's, uh, it's mostly about the fact that, again, from an evolutionary perspective, being accepted by the tribe And being perceived as useful by the tribe was linked to our survival. So you wanna look like you're contributing something meaningful. This is also why a lot of us have anxiety when we're not working, because deep down we feel like we might be rejected and classified as, categorized as someone who is not contributing to the success of the tribe. That used to mean death thousands of years ago. And so this is still encoded in part of our brains. That's mainly the reason why once we remind ourselves that we, fortunately for at least some people in some societies and probably most of the people listening to this conversation, we live in societies where even if you're not hyper successful, that is not going to be linked to your survival. That gives you a lot more freedom to experiment and try new things. The levels of risk are not the same.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. Food for thought. I wanna come to Christina who had something to share.

Yes. Thank you so much. I'm excited to speak with you today. That comes with a little bit of nervousness, so I'm gonna read my question. Um, I'm wondering your thoughts on adapting a pact for a group situation. So for example, I could have a pact that I'll do a thing for an hour a day every day for this week, and then you can have a pact, I'll do a thing, um, every day, maybe the same thing, and it would be adjacent so we could have social flow, but we're doing separate things. So I'm exploring the thought of adapting the to say something like, we will do this thing, one thing, the same thing together for an hour every day this week. And then that allows me to step within the group or partnership as a participant and not just an observer, which is really exciting because it's about a mindset, not like a social experiment, right? I get to be an observer, and then I could co-regulate the emotional experience for the group, um, and also assist the group with learning the reflection and the metacognition, which is difficult for many people. Um, and so I'm just wondering if you've had any success or thoughts on changing the pact from an I to a we.

I love that. This is basically what I do in the NestLabs community. Everybody is running a different pact, but we have weekly reviews, community reviews, where everybody is doing their metacognition cognitive review using Plus/Minus/Next on their own pact. So all of the pacts are different. I've seen people experiment with literally anything, and the reviews are done together. If you wanna make the most of social flow, which I'm not necessarily doing in the Nest Labs community, what can be really helpful is to at least align the duration and frequency of the pact. So have everybody have a daily or weekly pact, and making sure that is aligned and having your reviews at the same time. And then the thing itself can be very different, can be just something you care about. And if everybody is in the same, even virtual room, working on something they care about, even if that thing is different, you will have social flow. So I love it. I have tried it. It works really, really well. And the nice thing too is that even if are working on trying a different pact, very often other people who are participating have tried a similar experiment in the past, and so can also support each other, provide advice, and say, you know, when I tried this writing experiment or painting experiment or whatever it is, this is something that was helpful for me in the past and might be helpful for you. So you get social flow, and you get also that community type of of support that is also very helpful.

And from a teaching standpoint, like, I work in a homeschool environment. If I'm teaching or bringing along younger minds with the experimental mindset, um, say we're all going to build a robot together today, right? So I would give them their individual packs, and then we would talk about it as a group. Is that similar to what you're suggesting?

So for the definition of a pact that I give in my work, it is more of a repeatable action over a certain duration. So it would have to be over several days or over several weeks. And the format would be, I will, mm-hmm, action for duration. So I will build a new part every day for 5 days, or I will watch one tutorial every day for 2 weeks. So that's really the format of the pact. And so if you want to design a little pact around that, you can even tell them that it has to be about robotics and ask them to come up with a pact that makes them, that is around the project.

Thank you.

Great. I'm, I'm, um, something that— I mentioned in your, obviously in your bio in the beginning, is the fact that you're a fully fledged neuroscientist as well. So obviously a lot of this comes into your work, it supports your work from an evidence-based point of view as well, obviously. Is there ever a kind of a number or a fact or something kind of that you can, you know, pull out a piece of research from your body of work or from, you know, from your background as a neuroscientist that you can pull out, or a favorite fact that kind of keeps you, you know, on track, on mission, that helps to just reset the table and allows you to kind of go, okay, yeah, I'm doing the right thing. This is the right way. You know, is there something from your research that helps to just really back up or kind of keep inspiring you in a sense as well?

Not necessarily a number, but one of my favorite recent studies is one that found that the neural pathways that are activated in impulsivity are very similar to the ones that are activated when we're curious. And so whenever I have the impulse to scroll or do something that I know— scroll on social media or something like that— I'm trying to redirect it to something I would be actually happy to explore, that I would be curious about, and really trying to catch myself in this moment, knowing that the actual activation in my brain is very similar, and my brain can probably not tell the difference at the, at the beginning of the onset of that impulse. And I can transform this into an impulse to know instead of an impulse to be distracted. So that's one of my favorite recent neuroscience studies that I've read and that I keep thinking about all the time.

I'm glad you mentioned sort of technology there, because is there a sort of a point of view that you have when it comes to how technology, I suppose in an everyday sense, our mobile devices, our laptops, the things that we're in front of 12 hours a day, is there a sort of a case to be made for how they can help us to run good experiments or Do they end up getting in the way?

I think technology is especially, uh, especially helpful in terms of analyzing your, your data in the sense that not in the sense of a technical data numbers, right? But I have been using AI sometimes to have conversations in terms of what's working, what's not working, and the underlying emotions underneath my decisions. So after I'm done with an experiment, I can put my plus, minus, next, what went well, what didn't go so well, what I want to focus on next. And I can put that into ChatGPT or Claude, for example. And I can say, can you ask me more questions about this? Are there things I'm not asking, things I'm not noticing? Can you, do you see any patterns in the way I'm describing the results of this experiment? And that has allowed me to go a little bit deeper. And in effect, what this is doing is the same as if you were in a lab with other scientists and you would be discussing your experiments while having a cup of coffee. You have access to that now. You can have this conversation with a fellow scientist and go a little bit deeper on your results. And I think this is a great use of technology. And another way they're linked is that you can actually run experiments to C, to kind of like, yeah, reevaluate your relationship to technology. You mentioned earlier the not touching your phone in the morning, first thing in the morning when you wake up. So for me, for example, I'm currently running an experiment of like, I'm forbidden for the next 2 weeks of even bringing my phone in the bedroom. It's a forbidden zone, the phone, even if I have, I walk into the bedroom to grab something there. I have to leave my phone somewhere else. And so I'm trying to do that. I'm failing sometimes, but I'm only 5 days in with the way you relate to your technology as well.

Can you give us a feel for maybe one or two of the other pacts or little experiments that you're running personally for yourself right now? Maybe some things that are challenging you, maybe you're not doing too well at the moment because it's stretching you in a way. I'd love to hear, you know, what's on your experimental lab desk right now?

Yeah, the one that's really not working right now. I'm trying to go to bed at the same time every evening. And it is really not going well. It's not going well at all. I need to, I'm going to complete it. I also have 2 more weeks to go and I'm paying attention to how I feel and what, might be having an impact. I think watching TV in the evening is really not helping. So I think in the next cycle, I'm probably going to add that I can't watch any kind of Netflix after a certain time and maybe reading books instead. So I see you laughing. Yes. So I think this is not helping. And especially when I find a good show, I'm always like, oh, one more episode. And then it's midnight, 1:00 AM, and I'm super tired. Day after. So that's an experiment that's really not going well, but I'm learning a lot. I'm paying a lot more attention. And this is the point of running these experiments, is that I'm a lot more aware of what I'm doing in the evening and what might be impacting and what might make it challenging for me to go to bed at the same time every evening.

Yeah, yeah. Once again, coming back to the, the kind of the, the finer point of that attention. Drawing your attention to what's in front of you. And ultimately, that might help you to— maybe not next week, maybe not even in 6 months, but eventually that's something that you can conquer. And often it comes down to those really difficult habits, you know, that we're trying to get, you know, like me as well, phone in the bedroom. Oh yeah, it's just— it's just— yeah, it's an absolute paralysis that just kills everything else around it. So And yeah, one day at a time on that. Yeah. Any other final questions from anybody just before we let Anne-Laure go?

If you think about your former colleagues in the tech industry, what feedback, observations, comments have you received from them, both perhaps supportive and perhaps maybe not so supportive? Yeah, a lot of them were actually at my book launch and I was invited to give a talk at Google next week. So it's pretty positive. I think a lot of them resonate with my experience. And, uh, and again, I'm really not saying in my work that you should quit your job. I'm really sharing how I wish I was at the time paying a lot more attention to how I felt and I was experimenting a little bit more instead of being so linear in my mindset. It's been actually really positive. And, um, and I've had a, a couple of people who said that it found them in the, in, at the right time because they were considering quitting their job, but now they feel like maybe they can run a couple of tiny experiments first, see what they like, what they don't like, and make a more informed decision rather than like I did, just listen. When you're burned out, you make very rash decisions too, right? So how can you actually collect a little bit more data before you make those big decisions? So it's been actually very positive and a lot of them are very supportive. Fantastic. I'm so happy to hear that.

And I—

it feels so— I do quite a lot of work with early career professionals and it feels like this is a wonderful mechanism to help them experiment while the world is sort of changing all around them. I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks so much.

Yeah, thank you. Uh, it was awesome. I, I hope we have you back again soon for your next book after that. Uh, you'll always find a warm reception at the Humble Mind community. So appreciate your time. Thank you for being generous with, um, yeah, your time today and your insights. And really appreciate and admire the mission that you're on. Um, and, uh, we'll be watching and supporting. Thanks again.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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