Anne-Laure Le Cunff & Susan Dominus - Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

Good afternoon, I'm Lonnie Stonich, the Executive Director of FAN, a nonprofit that presents programming exploring human development across the lifespan. I'm so excited to welcome you to today's conversation between Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Susan Dominus. Thank you for joining us. FANS YouTube channel has an archive of nearly 400 videos of past events, so be sure to subscribe to the channel to get updates when new recordings are posted. And now moving on to our introductions for today. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a neuroscientist, writer, and founder of NessLabs. She'll tell you what that means. What does NessLabs mean? An educational platform at the intersection of science and self-development. She holds a master's in applied neuroscience and a PhD in psychology and neuroscience from King's College London, where she researches the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity at the ADHD Research Lab. Anne-Laure created NEST Labs to translate scientific insights into practical tools for knowledge workers, and she writes a newsletter on experimental thinking, systematic curiosity, and mindful productivity, reaching more than 120,000 readers every week. I am one of those readers. I love the newsletter. Her work has been featured in Wired, Science News, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Big Think, and Financial Times, and more. We're thrilled to be welcoming Sue Dominus back to FAN. We love this woman. We hosted Sue this past spring in support of her book, The Family Dynamic: A Journey into the Mystery of Sibling Success. She has worked for the New York Times since 2007, first as a metro columnist and then as a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine. In 2018, Sue was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its reporting on workplace sexual harassment, and her article about menopause in the magazine won a National Magazine Award in 2024. And now let's welcome Anne-Laure Le Cunff and Sue Dominus to FAN.

Thank you so much for having me here today, Lani, for this great opportunity. And Anne-Laure, it's so great to meet you, having read your book and followed your work for so long.

Thank you so much. I'm very excited about this conversation.

Um, so I thought I would start by, um, I'm going to ask you two questions to start. One is just very quickly, if you could explain to readers what the title is referring to when you talk about tiny experiments. Let's just ground everybody in your basic passion, you know, that animated the book. And then once you've explained that, maybe you could— or you can combine these two things. I think people would be interested to hear how you yourself ended up approaching, um, your own, um, fairly ambitious goals with this particular approach of tiny experiments. In other words, what happened in your life that led you to this path?

So the book Tiny Experiments is really about the idea of replacing big, rigid, linear overwhelming goals that we very often tend to copy-paste from other people based on traditional definitions of success or based on what we think our success should look like with tiny experiments instead. And the big difference between a goal and an experiment is really, again, the relationship to success. When you have a goal, you have a binary definition of success. You say, this is where I wanna get. And if I get there, great. If not, that's failure. When you experiment, you don't start from that place of wanting to control the outcome. You start from a place of curiosity. You say, huh, I wonder what would happen if I tried this, and whatever the outcome, I will learn from it, and I can trust that I will grow even if I don't know exactly where I'm going. And so that's the entire philosophy of the book. It's really based on developing this experimental mindset that is all about having a more playful, more positive relationship to uncertainty, a little bit like a scientist. In terms of how I got to this, this idea, this concept, and, uh, this principle for living a better life, whether that's your personal or professional life, it was a little bit squiggly. It wasn't a very linear process, which is kind of meta when you look at the topic of the book. I am, I think about my life in terms of, of two main chapters. The first one was very linear. I had a very precise definition of what success was supposed to look like. So I did my best to go to a good school. To have good grades, to get a good job. And once I was in that job at Google, I did everything I could to understand how to climb the ladder, how to get a promotion, how to get to work on the best projects, et cetera, to the point, frankly, of obsession, where I would spend a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of attention trying to figure out how can I be successful. Sometimes, kind of like, you know, canceling social plans or, or not taking care of myself or, you know, not considering my mental health because for me, being productive, being efficient, being successful was the most important thing. The chapter I'm in right now, and we can talk a little bit more about the transition from one to another, is a lot more experimental. I went back to school to study neuroscience when everybody was telling me, what, you, you don't do that. Uh, you know, you don't do that in your late 20s and your 30s. That's it's too late to go and study something that takes so long.

I think you need to tell the audience about leaving Google. I mean, even leaving— yes, big step.

Yeah, so I, I talk in the book, I talk about awakening experiences. I think everybody has had those, right? When something happens in your life that makes you realize that maybe your priorities are a little bit out of whack. And sometimes That thing that happens has nothing to do with work specifically. It can be, you know, in my case it was a health issue. In other cases for people, it can be a breakup, it can be moving cities. So I, as I said, I was obsessed with work at Google, doing pretty well, but that was my one obsession until one day I was brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, getting ready to go to work, and I noticed that my entire arm had turned purple.

Yes.

So I went to the Google infirmary because we had that.

Amazing.

Yeah. And the nurse had one look at my arm and said, you need to go to the hospital straight away. So I went to the hospital in Stanford. The doctor looked at my arm and said, you need to get surgery as quickly as possible. There's a blood clot. In your arm that's threatening to travel to your lungs. And in that moment, how, how did I respond? I said, one second, I need to check my calendar. And I'm sure you've had these too. You know, it was so absurd what I did, that, that response that I had, that it was, it almost felt like an out-of-body experience when you you see yourself do something where a little bit like watching a movie where you just wanna grab the main character and shake them and say, what are you doing? Look behind you. This is so stupid. So everything, you know, went well. I got the surgery. My arm is still here.

Did you get the surgery right away or did you postpone it until after a project was done?

I did postpone it.

I should say that Anne-Laure writes about this in her book, but it's interesting cuz even now it seems like it's almost a little hard for you to admit it.

Yes, it is because it, it just, it doesn't make sense. Again, if I saw my, my best friend, my sister, my parents do this, or even someone not that close to me do anything like that, I would tell them, what are you doing?

What?

How is that more— how is your to-do list more important than your health? Yeah, but, but at the time, that, you know, it just felt very natural. I just felt like work was such a huge part of my identity that that was the first place where my mind went when I was told that I needed to have life-saving surgery.

And when you talk about, and in your book you talk about how this was kind of a revelation, but almost a hard one to pin down. You went, you had the surgery, when you came back to work, something had shifted. You didn't feel the same passion. And I have two questions. One is, is that because you experienced a life-threatening event or was it about your own response to a life-threatening event? What was the more salient of those two things for you?

It was about the response because I think throughout the year, it wasn't the first time I had a health scare, but I think the other times it happened, I actually walked through them like a zombie and didn't even realize what was happening. It was really the first time where Somehow this one, something, it almost interrupted the zombie mode, the automatic mode where you don't really realize you're behaving in a certain way without thinking about why you're behaving in that certain way. So it was definitely about the response. This is, this is also why I think it is so important to pay attention to your own responses. Very often we just go with whatever default response we have. And that's okay. A lot of these are survival mechanisms, but there's a lot to learn when we take a second to observe what the response is, where does it come from? And more importantly, is that the response we really wanna have in that situation?

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Is that the person that we want, whom we want to be?

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about, um, in a way what we've, when you talk about this big life change that you made, um, it, it wasn't tiny. It was actually pretty big. And, um, One of the things that I love about the book is it does have this almost like Greek philosophical tone to it, which is about acceptance and instead of seeing adversity as your curse, as seeing it as something to get curious about. And I think that idea, I mean, ideally we feel that way about everything, even about people who are challenging us or have really different points of view. But I guess I have to start by asking you just to talk a little bit more about, so not everybody is gonna, you know, read your book and realize I now have to quit my job and start over in some other different way. So let's start small and actually talk about what are some examples of small, tiny experiments we can make in our own lives as we are, most people feel their full potential is not being realized one way or the other. So what are tiny experiments people can, engage in, in their own lives to try to tap into those other possibilities?

I, I'm so glad you're asking this question because I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions about my work. When people hear about my story and haven't had the opportunity yet to read the book, people might think that I'm saying, quit your job, go and follow your passion and do something completely different. My hope with this book is that people don't have to go through such a big lifequake as I did in order to make those changes. And this is why the book is called tiny experiments, not big life-changing experiments. I do think they can be life-changing because when you keep on experimenting, your life is going to change, but it doesn't have to be this big, scary, overwhelming change. And you can absolutely experiment while being in a job that is in a bigger corporation or institution. Experimentation is really about carving out a little bit of space, a little a little playground for you to try new things, to see if you might like to do things in a little, in a different way, right? And so in the book, I explained that if you want to run a tiny experiment, you actually only need to know two things. Very simple. First, you choose an action that you want to experiment with. And second, you choose a duration. And that's very important because this is not a habit. You're not committing to this for the rest of your life. You're just saying, let me try this for this duration. That's it. And this is not a goal because you're not trying to reach a specific destination. If you try it for that duration and at the end of it, the outcome is, oof, I hated this, never again. This is great. Now you know you've learned something new about yourself, about your work, about your career. And so this is really the essence of what a tiny experiment is.

And it's not just about the thing that you're doing, which is trying something for a preset determination. It's really about a massive mind shift away from telos, you know, goal, and much more towards process. Is that accurate, would you say?

Yes, uh, which is funny because I had an entire paragraph about the concept of telos in the book, uh, which was cut before publication.

Oh, interesting.

Because they said that there were too many Greek words already.

Oh, I loved all of it. More Greek, bring it on.

Yes. So I love that it came to mind when you read it because it was definitely a central idea when I was talking about designing experiments in contrast to that very goal-oriented mindset that we might have in our societies nowadays. So yes, absolutely, it is really more about shifting your focus from the outcome in the future, from this illusion of control really that those goals are giving you, where you feel like, hey, I have a vision, I have a plan, I'm going to execute on it, and I'm going to get there, versus starting from a place of curiosity, starting from a hypothesis, a research question, saying what might happen What if I tried that? And having the mindset, again, this experimental mindset of relating to the result in a way that is completely neutral without any kind of self-judgment or self-blame if things don't go to plan. A little bit like a scientist when they're faced with something they don't understand, when an experiment doesn't go to plan or there's data that is confusing, they don't say, 'Oh, I'm such a bad scientist. I'm going to change careers. I'm terrible. I'm a bad human being.' They, no, they, they look at it and they say, 'Huh, interesting. What can we learn here?' There's, um, almost a sense of juiciness around uncertainty that scientists have. And so the book is really about developing this mindset and relating to uncertainty in a way which, again, is a lot more generative, a lot more playful.

Yeah, I actually, as I was reading the book, I thought to myself that in a different world, it could have also been called Against Certainty because it's really encouraging people to make peace with uncertainty and not see it as a threat. What are the ways that people usually respond to uncertainty and how do you encourage them to recast that?

We normally respond to uncertainty with anxiety, which makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. When you think about our evolutionary past, when you think about our ancestors and the context in which they were evolving, uncertainty was pretty dangerous. If you didn't really know who your friends and enemies were in the tribe or where the resources were, or what kind of predators were in the environment where you were living, that could mean death. And so because of that, our brains are wired to try and reduce this feeling of uncertainty as quickly as possible. The world has obviously changed a lot, but we still have those instinctive responses. So it does take a little bit of, of work and of self-awareness to say, okay, I know all of my instincts are telling me that I should feel in control, that I should feel like I have certainty, but I am in no danger of death here. And I can sit with the uncertainty for a little bit longer and switch from anxiety to curiosity instead.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. It reminds me— what we're talking about is something that you said a little bit earlier that I wanted to return to. I think a lot of people would look at your life and say, oh, this is a woman who was had a great career, but she didn't feel that whatever she was doing at Google was her passion. And instead she found her passion, which was communicating with the masses about mindful productivity, you know, and we can talk a little bit more about what that even means. And she's found her purpose and her passion. And I was fascinated that in the book you actually, and I think as a parent myself, I really tuned into this, that it's actually unhelpful to tell people 'Pursue your passion, look for your passion,' that that is it. You're not squelching people's dreams when you tell them it's not your passion you're looking for. What is it we should tell our kids, let's say, or young adults, you know, in our lives? Or, and even when we talk to ourselves, how should we recast that? And what is the downside of thinking about like, 'Oh, I must find my passion'?

Yes, there's a very unhealthy obsession with finding your passion, finding your one true purpose in life. And there are several problems with that and several dangers in that for kids, but also for adults. I don't think this is just children. And I think as adults understanding this, we can help children, but I think we can apply it to ourselves as well. The, the first one is that when you haven't found your passion yet, you might compare yourself to others who seem to have find it. And especially with social media where people who apparently have found their passion keep on posting about it and telling you that you need to find yours as well. And usually what happens here is that you feel like your life doesn't have as much meaning as the life of this other person who has found their passion. And so that impacts your self-worth and that impacts your mental health. So that's number one. For children, it's particularly important because obviously they're not going to figure out exactly what they like. At that age, right? And so just really cultivating this idea that it is completely okay to not know. It's great actually, because it means that you still have all of these possibilities in front of you. So danger number one is really, really pertains to self-worth. The other one is, and this is linked to Carol Dweck's work, is how when we put all of our eggs in the same basket and then we somehow drop that basket, something happens, then our sense of identity gets completely shattered, especially if we've put all— we've put all of our identity linked to that one specific passion. It's very, very common with people who are startup founders or chefs or people in roles where their personal identity and their professional identity is completely blurred. What in research we've seen is actually really good for your mental health and your resilience in life is developing what psychologists call self-complexity. And that's the idea that you have several identities. So yes, maybe you wanna be a great teacher. Maybe you wanna be a, a great parent. Maybe you want also be a great cook. Maybe you wanna be a great friend. And when you have all of these identities and you know that you cannot be at 100% across all of these identities at any given point, that there are going to be fluctuations, then when something doesn't go well in one area of your life. So let's say at work something happened and, and, you know, not a great week, right? But you also consider yourself a good cook. Maybe you go home and you cook a really nice meal for your family, and then you feel better because you also have that identity. So that self-complexity and chasing one true passion goes against that. It prevents you from building those multiple identities.

It's funny, it reminds me of a study I read back in the '90s. I don't know if the research holds up, that's how old I am, but, um, it found that even though working moms were very strapped, their general well-being was higher than moms who didn't work or people who worked but didn't have kids. And it wasn't that their lives were so much more full, you know, it's not that that's like the complete life. It had to do with that idea of identity, that when they were— had a bad day at work they were like, "Well, at least I can go home and be a good mom tonight," you know, and get— read a really great story. And if things weren't going well at home, they had, like, the refuge of work. So I do like the idea of the complex identity. So when somebody is trying to figure out their next move and they're unhappy, instead of saying to themselves, "I think I really have to find my passion," what is some other language they can— we can put into our heads to use instead?

I tell people, ask yourself, what kind of experiments can I run? So not starting from this idea that you have to have this fully formed, this, this one unique passion, but rather that you have lots of different doors in front of you. Which ones do you want to open? Maybe take a peek, see if you like it. Right.

Yeah.

Take a peek. Yeah.

Yeah.

And, um, that always, always starts with observation. I know when we're stuck, there's this temptation to take action as quickly as possible. And, and when people hear about tiny experiments, they just wanna start running their tiny experiments straight away. But a good experiment always starts from observation. So if you wanna know what could be different, you need to know how things are right now. And so I really encourage people whenever they feel a bit stuck, they don't know what their next step should be. Instead of doing all of this vision, planning 5-year plans and all of that, which we know don't work at all. And, and still we, we cling to that illusion of control to instead say, what can I try just for a week or for 2 weeks or for a month? Let me try something and see what happens.

Yeah, it's, it's such great advice. And unfortunately, it's also so contrary to, for example, I can't help but think about, um, how this all relates to young people because, um, we're trying to help them be the best versions of themselves they can be so they can help help us navigate this very uncertain future. And increasingly, young people are being told, "You have to find a passion so you can write about it in your college essay," basically. I mean, it's not quite that mercenary, but this idea that colleges, we do know that they are prizing passion. They are looking for a through line of— they really want consistency. They want you not to have just taught tennis your senior year, but it's better if you've done it for 4 years, you know? And it's really a shame because I, I, I, I'm here, like, I'm sure with my own kids, I, many of the time I thought, oh no, they don't have a passion, or I'm going to encourage them to stick with this thing even though they're bored with it because they've put this much time into it. But what you're telling me is that it's not productive for anybody, you know, for the colleges to be putting those pressures on young people, much less anybody else.

Not only it's not productive, but it's counterproductive, really. It's preventing young people to figure out the kind of life that they want to design. When I look at my life today, I'm spending a bit of my time doing neuroscience research in the lab, a bit of my time writing, a little bit of my time hosting events. And, you know, I just love spending time in community with other people and learning with other people. There was absolutely no way that I could have designed this career by starting from a very clear vision with one passion, right? I got here through trying lots of different things and keeping what I liked, removing what I didn't like, and keeping on iterating. I think that meta skill of trying new things, collecting your own data, learning how to reflect on the experience, what you're good at, what people want, but that also that Venn diagram with what you actually like, the kind of stuff that gets you excited and where you would like to keep on waking up in the morning and working on and studying and learning about. That's the skill we need to teach people, not the skill of telling a nice story, which we keep on using as adults. I, I always find it hilarious how when you have to apply for a job, And since I'm still in academia, I still have sometimes to apply for jobs. When I apply for a grant, I still have to do that. So not completely free of that. And you have to rewrite your CV, your resume, to make it look like it all makes sense. It has this really nice story. And of course you went from this job to this one, which built on the previous one. And this is really funny because when you talk to people and you really ask them about the real story. No one, absolutely no one has that kind of linear career.

Right.

But that's still the story we're telling to each other.

Um, I, I think it'd be helpful just to give people a flavor of the kinds of, um, concrete ways that you help, um, hold people's hands and guide them through processes that will help them experiment. And the one that really, I was really drawn to was the more, um, I think it was, was it plus minus next?

Yeah, plus minus next.

A little bit about that. And I'd like to hear a little bit about how you advise people to do it. I thought it was interesting that it was a weekly experiment rather than a daily or a monthly experiment and why that is. And also, how does it play into this notion of see your life as a series of— I mean, what I took away from the book was like, see your life as a series of small experiments that give you feedback into what you want to pursue more. Um, and, um, so how does this fit into that?

So I already told you about how to design your mini protocol for experimentation, your tiny experiment where you pick an action and you pick a duration. If you just did that, that would already be great.

Actually, do you mind giving us an example of an action and a duration?

Absolutely. So you could say, I will, um, read one research paper every week for 4 weeks. I will host a lunch and learn with colleagues every Friday for 6 weeks. I will send an internal newsletter about the latest news that I read about every month for 6 months. So these are examples of things that you can do at work and education and learning, etc. Tiny experiments can also be in your, your personal life. I will stretch every morning when I get up. I will, um, maybe, you know, meditate every day. I will take a little walk at lunchtime every day before I continue my day. They can also be about removing things, so it doesn't have to be adding things. One of my favorite ones is I will not touch my phone for the first 30 minutes of the day. And so you get up, you make yourself your cup of coffee, maybe you talk with your family, you have breakfast, you do all of these different things, and you don't touch your phone for 30 minutes. It sounds simple. It is, but it's not easy, and it's worth experimenting with. Or I will not bring my phone to my bedroom in the evening for duration. Action, duration. Any area of your life or work where you're curious to see if something could be a little bit different, could be turned into a tiny experiment. So that's the, the first part of the loop. But if you were to run a tiny experiment and you stopped here, that you're not going to extract all of the knowledge that you could extract from the experience, and you're not going to grow as fast as you could grow. This is where Plus/Minus/Next comes in. It's a way to close the loop. It's a way to extract knowledge from the experience and then decide what you want to do next. So Plus minus next has 3 columns. It's super simple. You can do it on paper. You can do it in your note-taking app. And you say plus minus next, plus what went well, minus what didn't go so well, and next, which I use a little arrow for this. You ask, what do I want to try next? What do I want to tweak? What do I want to be different? So for example, if you were to do the monthly lunch and learn— sorry, weekly lunch and learn with your colleagues. So in the plus column, you could say, oh, that was great. We had amazing conversations and I learned a lot and I got to know people at a more personal level. That was great. Minus, you could say that the logistics were a little bit complicated, that every time you had to figure out where people were going to have lunch, etc. And then in the next, you could say, okay, how can I simplify the logistics? So it's more about just showing up. Is it everybody brings their own lunch and just, we just sit down? Is it whatever it is? And then you can experiment again with the format. So that's Plus Minus Next. In the book, I recommend, so Plus Minus Next can be used daily, weekly, monthly. I use it for my annual review, but if you're just getting started, it can be a really nice weekly review, something you do either on Sunday evening you know, if it's a little bit more quiet at that time, or on Monday morning before you start your week, and you just observe the previous week and ask yourself, what went well? What didn't go so well? What do I want to experiment with this week? What's really powerful about this is that it allows you to grow and to iterate and to keep on learning from your experiences without the need for a clear, perfect long-term plan.

Because you're recognizing that it's just an experiment. You're gonna, you're gonna give yourself feedback and you're gonna, it's gonna get, doesn't have to be perfect the first time. We're trying something. We're going to get better. There was something about that and some of the examples you gave even. I mean, this is just very personal to me what I'm about to ask you, but so many of the ways you encourage people to push themselves, I would say, is about public-facing. I mean, you also talk about just personal, you know, things like meditating, obviously, or learning to cook. But there's a lot of public-facing suggestions in there. So for example, it's like if, you know, you sort of— you talk a lot about the importance of community in helping you brainstorm and, you know, get into a flow state of ideas with other people. Um, and the idea is if you don't have that community, go out and create it. Or there's a lot of suggesting of, you know, people who are making videos and putting it out into the world, or creating a newsletter and putting it out the world. And I, I thought, that is one way to make your life bigger and have more impact. But for so many of us, it's daunting to think, who am I to be the person who organizes the local meeting of, um, writers, you know what I mean, in our, in our small town? Like, it feels, um, that alone you know, can feel daunting. And sometimes I thought, is it a young person, older person divide? In other words, for people of your generation, putting out YouTube videos or making, you know, Instagram posts, it's all very much a part of who you are. For somebody like me, it's torture. You know what I mean? I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. I was curious.

Yeah, absolutely. So this is why I talk about kind of like community engagement and putting yourself out there at different levels in the book, which I think is really important. And obviously I share a lot of personal examples of the ways I like to do it.

Yeah.

But to me, so I have a chapter about learning in public and there's so much research that shows that we learn better together. So if you learn with other people, if you share what you're working on, the mistakes, the failures, the, the uncertainty, and you share that with other people, you are going to learn better. You're going to learn faster. Learning in public doesn't have to be in the big public square, public posting on Instagram, doing a newsletter or anything like that. It can be very small. As long as there's at least one other human being.

Okay.

Aware that you're experimenting. Then that's learning in public. And so I've seen people, for example, have a weekly coffee chat, uh, kind of catch up where they would say, hey, what have you been experimenting with? What have you tried? How is it going? So it can be a little, almost like an excuse to catch up with a friend where you say, let's kind of like, you know, see what we've been trying and how you're feeling about your experiments. It can be a very small WhatsApp group. I've seen people do that, 2, 3 friends together, and same, they post their little updates in there. So learning in public can go from really just that one-to-one catch up with a friend all the way to— yes, absolutely, newsletter, YouTube channel. You can do all of that, but that is absolutely not necessary.

I appreciate that. I mean, what we're getting into here are the things obviously that hold people back, right? Which is insecurity, self-consciousness, which brings me quite naturally, I think, to another bugaboo in the lives of many people who feel they're not living up to their full potential, and that is procrastination. And so I wanted to hear what you think your fresh angle is on procrastination. What are we being told about procrastination that isn't helpful? And what are the more helpful ways to think about what's happening there? And how we can get past it.

So if you go on, on Google and you just search for resources in terms of how to manage procrastination, a lot of them are pretty violent. How to beat procrastination, how to, you know, it's, uh, it's really about getting rid of that very pesky kind of, of state of mind behavior that you have. And the reason why is because we've been told that procrastination is associated with either laziness, lack of discipline, lack of willpower. And so what most people do when they experience procrastination is that first, they blame themselves. They wonder, why am I not doing the thing I said that I was going to do? And second, they try to push through. They try to use pure, sheer willpower in order to push through. And as we know, we've all experienced, that doesn't work really well. It might work in the short term, but long term it doesn't work. And this is a really good recipe for burnout when you keep on pushing yourself through procrastination. The first step, I think, is just to understand what procrastination actually is. It's not— it has nothing to do with willpower. It doesn't have anything to do with laziness. Procrastination is just a signal from your brain that something with the task, with your relationship to the task, is not quite right. And so if instead of ignoring that signal, blaming ourselves and pushing through, we listen to that signal, we could learn from it and we could get unstuck. And so this is the shift that I talk about in the book.

Okay. So I, let's say, have, um, this is a very boring example, but maybe it'll be helpful for readers because I can't imagine I'm the only one. I have a very complicated set of, let's say, healthcare bills that need to be submitted and some need to be followed up on. And there's like just a horror of the whole thing. And it goes on, I keep putting it off and I call it rainbow spinny wheel when there's, you know, like when your laptop is loading and then you can't make it go away and it's always in the back of your mind distracting you and making you feel disorganized. How are, how would, And, and I think my sense is what makes me feel uncomfortable about it is that it's overwhelming and boring. So how, how can I reframe all of that so that I can actually get myself to sit in the chair and do it?

Yeah. So I have a little tool in the book that allows you to kind of debug what is going on here. So the idea here is to generally ask your procrastination. So first you say, Hello, you're back. What are you trying to tell me? 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, you're not fully convinced you should be doing this thing in the first place, or is that the task is badly designed. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, it doesn't feel like it's going to be a lot of fun. Feels like it's going to be tedious or boring. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have either the right skills, the right tools, the right support network in order to do the task. So let's take your example here.

Thank you.

Rational level. Should you, should you actually take care of these bills? Yes, I think at a rational level, we're convinced this should get done. This is a task that needs to get done. Great. Let's move on to the heart. Emotional level. Does it sound like it's going to be fun? Absolutely not. This doesn't sound like this is going to be fun. So let's start here. How can you make it fun? So if you cannot redesign the task because we've already agreed that this thing needs to get done, how do you make it fun? Is it grabbing—

Donuts.

Donuts.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, long-term, I don't know if that would be healthy. It depends on how often you have to do these bills. But short term, why not? Um, if you wanted something that you could use more often, is it grabbing one of your best friends who you know is very chatty, very fun, very lively, and saying, hey, I need you to come and do a little coworking session with me for 2 hours on Sunday, coffee on me, and just tell me about the latest. And while we chat, I'll just be doing this mind-numbing thing that I actually need to do, right? So it could be like, you know, going to your favorite coffee shop, grabbing a friend, rewarding yourself, whether that's donuts or going to see your favorite movie in the evening, telling your partner, that your spouse, that, you know, that if I finish this, then I'm allowed to go and do this, or we have a little date night, or we take the kids, we do something fun afterwards. So that's the emotional level. And then just in case you complete the— you, you still ask the hand, because sometimes what happens is that you make it fun. Let's say you go to the coffee shop, you're with your friend, you're like, let's just do this. And then You start looking at it and then you realize, asking the hand, that it's actually really confusing. Those bills are unclear, you're not quite sure what you're supposed to do. So here, there's a practical level. And so how do you solve that? And so here, that could be, depending on the task, coaching, mentoring, a tutorial, or these days, asking AI. He can, you know, help you figure it out. But all of a sudden, you're not in a position of self-blame anymore. You're more like a, a detective where you say, oh, okay. I clearly don't know how to do this, but I, I know I have this sense of agency where I don't know how to do this. I'll figure out how to do this. And all of a sudden it's not about me being a bad person. It's about me not having the right skills. Mm-hmm.

Okay. That's, that is very helpful. And I hope it's helpful to other people as well to sort of attack it from, because sometimes your heart is gonna say, um, just to get back to the first of these three, um, metrics, let's say, sometimes your heart's gonna say, I guess I don't, I wanted to make a fabulous holiday card, let's say. Um, but I don't have the heart. Maybe I don't really think it's that important this year. I mean, that's one of the options.

Yeah, absolutely. And so that's why list, asking the question is the most important part. It's really about your procrastination is telling you, although you're not conscious of those factors, they're here, right? So somewhere your heart is telling you that maybe you're not that excited about doing this thing, or maybe your head is telling you maybe it doesn't make sense, but you haven't taken the time to listen to those signals because you're too busy blaming yourself.

And so sometimes—

You're on autopilot a little bit. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so sometimes actually the solution to getting unstuck is removing the task completely from your to-do list because that task doesn't make sense either at a rational or emotional level or at a practical level. I mentioned coaching, mentoring. Sometimes you're not just the right person to do it. So, rational level, the task should get done. Yes. Emotional level, kind of fun.

Yeah.

Actually, you would spend 3 weeks figuring out how to do it because you've never done it before. And there's someone on your team who knows how to do it. So sorry, needs to get done. That sounded like fun, but it makes more sense for someone else to do it.

Really, really helpful. And I hope, I hope people can extrapolate from this to, to bigger goals. I mean, I will now try to do that a little bit clumsily, but you know, why do I feel like I just send a holiday card out every year? Mostly because a lot of other people do and I get the card and when I get it, I think like, gee, I should do that as well. Um, but in a, in a bigger way, we talk, you talk about the concept of mimetic desire. Um, and it's, it's a way of— I mean, I think all of the things that you're challenging are different versions of autopilot and linear thinking, automatic thinking, rigid thinking, autopilot thinking. And mimetic desire is one aspect of that. And if, if you could explain what that is and also how it can take us down, um, quite significant professional paths or otherwise, and why we should be wary of it, I was really interested in that.

Yeah, absolutely. So mimetic desire is when we want something because other people want it. That's what it is. And a lot of our desires are desires that again, we copy paste from other people. You talked about the, the autopilot. And in the book, I talk about cognitive scripts. So cognitive scripts are really interesting because those are scripts that we follow without realizing that we do. And, and they impact a lot of our decisions in our personal and professional lives. So. They, they come from really interesting research from the late '70s where, and I, I love this study because it's very simple, very elegant. What they did is just ask people, if you're in this situation, and they describe the situation, if you're in that situation, how do you behave? What do you do? And what they realized is that most people, when you place them in a similar situation, behave in almost exactly the same way. That's very useful in lots of situations. So if you go to the restaurant, you know that you're supposed to wait at the front. Someone's going to come and see you and ask how many people, right? Your parents never walked you through that script, but you've observed it several times and enough times that you know that's the way you're supposed to behave. If you go to the doctor, you wait in the waiting room. That's why it's called a waiting room. And if the doctor walked out of their office and asked you to get undressed in front of everyone in the waiting room, you would be very confused because that's completely off script. So cognitive scripts can be really helpful to just know how you're supposed to behave in society. The problem is that we don't only follow them to know how to behave at the restaurant or in the doctor's office. We follow a lot of cognitive scripts too, to make decisions about the kind of jobs we're going to pursue, the kind of relationships we're going to build, the way we dress, the way we talk, the city where we're going to live, the place we're going to live in general. And a lot of decisions in our lives. And so it goes back to, yes, questioning the autopilot, but first and foremost, developing that self-awareness, that questioning mindset where you ask yourself, why am I making those choices? Why am I making those decisions? Is that really what I want to do? And sometimes the answer will be, actually, you know what, now that I've thought about it, yes. I'm actually really happy with the decision that I made, but now it's intentional. Or, huh, actually, maybe I want to experiment with a different way to go about this.

I just find the whole book so unusual in that it, it, I do feel like reading it, I feel, you know, that it does unlock a sense of possibility and creativity in a really great way. And, and, and it's just so unusual for a book that is about productivity to also be warning you off the path of set your mind to it. You know, it's like, it's this nose to the grindstone philosophy of inspiration, which does feel really counterintuitive. And yeah, again, just to get back to that idea that it's so ingrained in us that to succeed, you must have a goal and put your blind, they literally say, put your blinders on, like, don't be distracted, don't look around. And what you're saying is the key to finding fulfillment is not just about reaching that one goal, but like experimenting and iterating and being curious along the way. And I guess it gets to this general idea about mindful productivity. Can you talk about what that concept means even?

Yes, so mindful productivity is, uh, I combined two words that you normally don't see together, mindfulness and productivity. When you think about what mindfulness is, going back to really the core, the essence of what it is, it is really about being present in the moment, being fully present in the moment, paying attention to our experience in the present moment. Without any kind of judgment. And mindful productivity is about taking that way of being from mindfulness and applying it to the way you work. So instead of, again, being on autopilot, pushing through, judging yourself, trying to be in control of everything you do, everything you feel, every minute of your days, of your weeks. It's really about embracing the naturally, the, the kind of quintessentially flowy nature of our days and the fact that they are going to be ups and downs. There are going to be moments of high energy, moments of low energy. There are going to be moments of high focus and moments of lower focus. And it's about developing that sense of self-understanding of what works for you. And what doesn't work for you. Again, with the, the self-knowing that what works for you today might not work tomorrow because you keep on changing, you keep on growing, your circumstances keep on changing as well. And so it's completely okay if you had a way of doing things that worked perfectly fine. And then for whatever reason, new job or health issue, or maybe now you're the caretaker for someone or whatever responsibilities you have or whatever life throws at you, you need to start experimenting with a different way of doing things and of managing your work and productivity. So that's, that's in essence the idea of mindful productivity.

Yeah, I think that's really also revolutionary and really helpful. And it's almost, it's, it's like I always talk to, um, people who are struggling professionally about the third way, you know what I mean? Which is, you know, somebody at the office wants to do it one way, somebody else wants to do it a different way. In the middle, and, um, or you're even just in a debate with somebody else. It's binary, you know, your editor wants you to write it one way, you want to write it one way, and it's about finding a third way and not polarizing and, and living in that mid— embracing that middle space. Or, you know, I even talk to my kids a little bit about, um, you know, if there's some kind of tension over a given issue, they don't have to each pick their side and then dig into it. It's about maybe getting to a place where there's a little bit of right and, you know, and just living in the middle there. And I don't know, I just— what I really appreciated about your book is it's about that, um, it feels like a tightrope walk, um, which is that you're sort of trying not too hard to fall one way or the other. And it is obviously hard to walk a tightrope, but there's reward in it, and that, you know, it is sort of of, um, uh, you know, it's like finding balance, right? Like, that is, you have to have balance in order to walk that tightrope, and we're all looking for that.

So anyway, it's, uh, it's really funny and very, actually very perceptive, because so it's something not many people know is that Tiny Experiments wasn't the title when I pitched that book. It was called Liminal Minds, and this is how I sold it to my publisher, um, for For people listening to this who don't know what liminal means, which is the reason why we changed the title, by the way, nobody knew that word. And I myself discovered that word in the process of doing my research, but liminal, uh, means the in-between, the transition, the threshold, being on the doorstep of something new, the doorstep of change. And so examples of liminal spaces can be as simple as a hallway. That's a very physical liminal space, a hallway. An airport is considered a liminal space as well. But at a conceptual level in your life, maybe you're engaged but not married yet. Liminal moment in your life. Maybe you finished your studies and you haven't started your first job yet. Liminal space. But also, you know, starting a new relationship, ending a relationship, having a child, losing someone. All of these are liminal moments in our lives where We're not really the person we used to be anymore, but we're not quite sure what we're becoming. And we're in that middle space, that very uncomfortable, uncertain space. And again, from an evolutionary perspective, our brain is screaming at us to get out of there as quickly as possible to restore stability, to restore a sense of control. And, uh, the, the book is really about that, about being comfortable sitting in that uncertainty and seeing it as an opportunity for growth. Not because it's not uncomfortable. Growth can be a little bit uncomfortable, but it doesn't have to feel miserable either. It can actually be quite playful. And again, you can have this sense of agency even if you're not fully in control.

It's really profound and again, so refreshing and, um, I think really helpful on a very big picture way because it's, you know, this is, you know, your book to me is very much about potential, you know, and figuring out all the different ways you can be in the world at the best level that you want to be. But a lot of it is, yeah, also just really philosophically deep in that it's about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable and making peace with it. And, um, but we only have just 5 more minutes. And so I thought it would be appropriate to just ask you about the concept since we, you know, the book is so much about being open, being curious, but you do talk about the importance of closure. And so in our last 5 minutes, I thought maybe you could talk to me a little bit about that.

Yes, I talk about the importance of closing the loop. So a little bit like what I, I said about plus minus next, what's really important is when you conduct experiments to close the loop, the closure of finishing an experiment. And that means asking yourself, what do you want to do next with this? Do you want to persist? Which means just keeping on going with the experiment. Maybe you really like it and it works for you. There's a lot of pressure in our society to always scale up. So if you do something that works, The next iteration needs to be bigger. And in the book I say, actually, why? You're doing something that works really well. Why don't you keep going exactly as you're doing? And if at some point you do feel drawn to going a little bit ambitious with this, then do it, but don't do it because by default that's what you're supposed to do. So that's the first option when it comes to closure, just keeping on going with the experiment because you like it and it works. The other one is to pivot. And so that means that You kind of like it, you're not 100% sure. There might be little things that you might, you wanna change. So if you're doing a meditation experiment, maybe you've been trying it to do in the morning, but it's always so rushed, you're running everywhere and you keep on missing it. So maybe trying to do it at another time during the day. So that's a little tweak. And then finally, the last option when it comes to closure is just pausing. Just stop. And that's also a completely valid option. And you'll notice I call it pause and not abandon forever because you might wanna go back to it in the future at another moment that makes more sense for you. So just put it on the shelf and say, for now, I'm done with this experiment. I'm pausing it. So those are the 3 options when it comes to closing the loop with your experiments.

Seems like this is a great time for us to pause right now, actually. I think Lani's gonna chime in.

Um, so thank you so much for such a, uh, thoughtful interview of Anne-Laure. Um, I'm pleased to hear and have you demonstrate how engaging you found the book as well, and so thought-provoking. I know people are a little sick of me saying this, but when I first discovered the book back in the spring through a recommendation by Oliver Berkman, I was reading it for the first time on a plane, and I just felt like every second page I was just like, oh wow. Like, I would just close it and I'd stop and I'd think like, yeah, that's so 'That's so right.' And then I would open up again like, 'Oh.' And part of it, Anne-Laure, for me is that, you know, I've been doing FAN for 20 years. We've hosted hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people across so many domains. And the piece about your book is that in such an incredibly accessible way, you are synthesizing so many threads of whether it's cognitive behavioral therapy, behavioral economics, people who write memoirs, people who are social psychologists, people who are talking about— and the concept is, you've hit on at the end here about liminal spaces, the piece about how to tolerate uncertainty. And this is a theme for people in their worlds today, which can feel so overwhelmingly uncertain from the moment you wake up to the moment you get to bed. I find the work so also at its core so optimistic that it's not some kind of like, "Oh, the bell is tolling," and it's not that vibe. I'm sure folks have been watching, they have a sense of your vibe and you bring that vibe to the book where it's just so deeply, there's like a beauty to it. That's just extraordinary. So when we had the opportunity to host you, I grabbed immediately, and I want to make sure we put books in people's hands. Folks, it is 12:58. In 2 minutes, these 2 women will be joining— well, actually in 5 minutes technically, at 1:03, they're going to be joining us at After Hours. How can you come to After Hours? Donation of any dollar amount to FAN. Whatever is meaningful to you is meaningful to us. Come hang out, come ask questions, This book is beautiful. There were a few folks who asked, like, gosh, wouldn't it be great if somehow 5th graders could have access to some of this in an age-appropriate way?

Like, great idea.

How do you bring that in? How do you get high school kids to think about this, especially as that pressure starts ratcheting up, ratcheting up? Who are you going to be? How are you going to be? How much money you're going to make? Well, and, and as you put in early in the book, you know, that linear that linear view of success, of goal attention, you know, that goal acquisition makes people so hypercompetitive. Because somehow if someone is a little bit on the ladder, somehow that must mean you are not, you know, and that the urgh and the chewing of each other. I mean, it's just— talk about it afterwards. Let's talk a little bit about, you know, if you're a parent, if you're a teacher in a school environment, like what might be some straightforward, simple things, whether it's for a 10-year-old or 18-year-old, you know, I'd love to hear your input on that. So more soon. We are now at 1 o'clock. Everyone, thank you for joining us. We have one more event in this calendar year, December 4th, Guy Kawasaki. That's gonna be a— that'll be a Ferris wheel. Come hang out with us and hope to see you in about 3 minutes at after hours. Thank you so much.