Anne Laure Le Cunff: The Fallacy of “Follow Your Passion” and the Power of Tiny Experiments

Hey, I'm with Anne-Laure, author of Nest Labs, and we're here to talk about her upcoming book and just hang out. Hey, Anne-Laure, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. This is very cozy.

Yeah, it's very cozy. So right before we were starting, we were talking about our definitions of success. Curious if you just want to continue that conversation and wondering what does success mean to you?

Yeah, the— what we were talking about, it was the different metrics of success that people have. And I know quite a few people around me who think that having a lot of employees, for example, is a marker of success. I've realized, thinking about it and actually asking myself what it is I want, what kind of life do I want to live, how— what do I want my days to look like, that I want to keep my team very small. I like the idea of having a very small team and we're very close and we all know what's happening and we can make decisions very quickly. And I often think about James Clear because I discovered that he only has one employee. Her name's Lindsay. And when I hired my team, I was thinking about how can I find my Lindsay? I want my Lindsay and that's it, not a big team. So that's just one example, but I think a lot of us could really benefit from being a little bit more intentional in terms of figuring out what does success look like to me and How can I make sure I'm not copy-pasting what success means for others?

Makes sense. How has that changed for you over the years? Like, do you think 3 years ago you would have said the same thing about success?

Yeah, probably not, because I started my career in tech in Silicon Valley at Google, and there was a very specific script in terms of what success looked like. You would start your job, in a big tech company, save enough money, build a network, raise money, start a startup, and change the world. Anything less than that was not considered successful. And so if you told me that there was a definition of success that was keeping your team very small, having a lot of freedom over how you organize your days, being able to just take days off whenever you want to, being able to change direction in the business and say, actually, let's stop working on that thing that we don't want to work on anymore. Let's work on that other thing instead. I would have said, oh, cool, but that doesn't really sound like success to me, right? And so it took me a few years and a few failures and a few detours to figure out for myself that no, actually, there are as many different definitions of success as there are people.

Yeah. One thing that brings to mind, in your book you mention a few different default scripts. I remember one, like doing things for what other people think. And there's a lot of other default scripts, right? Like raise money for a big company. There's, I mean, entrepreneurship itself can be a script, like consulting or things like that. If you were to look like 5 years from now and look back, given I think the rise of the creator economy and, um, with all the transition from COVID and everything, in my mind, I imagine there's like more, as, as many, as much as people are kind of creating their own scripts, I imagine there's like a new level of default script kind of coming up, like with Gen Z people or things like that. Curious, like, since you're so deep in this world, do you see any new scripts coming online that like maybe 5 years from now people are gonna think about and have to work through or something?

Yeah, the one I think is the most insidious and a lot of people are following right now is the, uh, follow your passion script, which is glorified by our society and which makes a lot of people feel miserable because they haven't found their passion yet. And so they feel like something's wrong. And, uh, I think there are lots of factors that come into play. One of them is obviously social media. So we have access to this giant leaderboard where we can compare ourselves to each other and where a lot of people are projecting and sharing those passion-led lives where they say, I wake up in the morning and this is what I'm working on, this is my mission. And we feel like that's what we need in order to be happy. And then another one is probably also the rise of just spirituality in general, which I do think is a really good thing. But sometimes we can be misled to think that we need to figure out, we need our lives to be meaningful and we're unable to let go of finding that meaning.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, that's, that's one of the scripts where I think a lot of people will realize in a few years that it is not necessary. It's not necessary. And in fact, when you ask people who have found their passion how they found it, if they're being honest, a lot will tell you I stumbled upon it. I was doing this thing and then I found this thing and I followed this path and I had no idea where I was going. And then I woke up one morning and I realized that I was super excited to wake up and to work on that thing. And I'm now very passionate about this. And the second thing is that most people who are quite content and who feel connected to their passion, they also accept the fact that it might, it doesn't have to be for the rest of their lives. Maybe one day they'll wake up and that's not really the thing they wanna work on anymore, and that's okay. They can trust that something else will emerge at some point.

Yeah, a lot of that resonates, uh, quite deeply. As I mentioned to you, this past year has been an experiment for me in doing more meaningful work. Um, I went part-time with my KindaTech job and ended up working at a meditation startup and a legal psychedelic startup. I was the first hire for both, which is super fun and super awesome. And I think I, my hypothesis in the tiny experiment I ran going into that was, can I live a work life that I'm going to care about in 10 years, working with people that I care about in 10 years? So, and then, you know, and ideally be energized by that day to day. By all accounts, I was successful. And I just a few weeks ago, announced leaving the job and I'm starting a new one in a few weeks. Um, almost going back into tech, uh, as a way to re— because I kind of realized some of the things, you know, you can do meaningful, purposeful work, but for me at least it's like, that's great, but it also has to fit in with like the context of your life and just, you have to see the reality of it and everything. Um, so I now I'm running another experiment to see what that's like going forward. But, uh, yeah, yeah. I think, I think that's the thing that I see a lot of people chasing. They're like, if only I just had a job that was at the cornerstone of every single interest I have, then it's going to be perfect and I'll never have any problems. And I find that, yeah, I agree. It's like, I think that's actually a really worthwhile experiment to run, but it also has to kind of fit into the context of life and see what emerges.

Yeah, I think what's really interesting in your approach is that to me, the main problem with trying to find your passion is that you're already focused on this outcome and you attach a lot of other things to this outcome. You feel like once I find this passion, I'll be happy, I'll be whole, I'll have everything figured out, right? Whereas if you did the way you just described where you said, well, as long as I meet interesting people that I might want to stay in touch with for the rest of my life, as long as I learn something, right? You're focused on the journey and whatever happens, even if you end up wanting to leave that job after a while, even if the product you work on doesn't end up launching, even if actually this is really not the industry you wanna work in, you wanna do something else, right? You will have learned something new about yourself, about the world, about the kind of work that you want to do. And so that's success. That's success. Not getting to a specific destination, but having had the space to explore a hypothesis, a research question, and having learned something new. That is success.

Yeah, I totally agree. It's interesting because it's in, and I think me in high school or something would have looked at it and been like, oh, that's so obvious. Everyone, it's about the journey, not the destination. It's like, it's a thing that you're kind of, once you start reading self-help, you're inundated with that, but it really is just true.

Yeah.

And I think it's a thing where, uh, every generation and every person has to kind of discover it for themselves in a way, um, from different angles, from different approaches at like more subtle levels. Um, something that someone told me, uh, that I think really hits and it kind of reminds me of this. Whenever I, whenever you or whenever someone starts thinking, oh, once I get this, then I will win forever. Like sometimes there's a subtle, like, I will win forever if I get this job, or I will win forever if that. And it's just that, that's like a really, it's a good, if I sense that, that motivation in me, I'm like, oh, there's something that's probably not helpful here. And the opposite of that is the process, you know, it's like, you know, the forever permanence, it's just like, oh, the process of going through it, the process of going, of just living it is more important and more interesting.

Yeah, there's a, I think there's a sense of lack that this comes from when we, when we feel like we'll only be happy once we get to a specific place and that specific place is not now.

Yeah.

It usually means that something's missing, but that we feel a little bit stuck and we don't really know how to address it. We don't really know how to accept it. And so we just figured that if we create this intricate plan or if we have this vision for the future, it might not solve for the way we feel right now, but at least it gives us the comforting feeling that it will be better in the future.

Yeah.

And so to me, not letting go of that idea of that, this arrival fallacy, that once you get there, everything will be all right, is also a, a way to embrace the uncertainty of the present moment, accept the fact that you actually have no idea where you're going, accept the fact that change and growth can be very uncomfortable. And that's okay. That's actually part of it. That's part of what being alive is. And that's fine, right?

Yeah.

But obviously that's more easy to say than done. For sure.

For sure. It's like, it's like someone, you know, going to the gym and doing all this stuff and then really then seeing the outcome of like, oh, I can run this fast or lift this much weight when it's like, it's just part of the pro— it's part of the process in some ways. Part of that, I'm curious, so you've often talked about how if you look at yourself 20 years ago or 15 years ago, like you in your teenage years was going through, were going through a lot of hardship and a lot of difficulty. How do you think that younger version of you would maybe respond to that kind of insight you have now?

She would probably be very cynical about it. And that's the thing. And that's also why I have a lot of empathy for people who are stuck in a place that feels like it's dark. It doesn't have a lot of hope because it's very difficult when you're in that place to be able to just imagine what another reality might look like. And the response that we might have to that is very often cynicism. Making fun of people who are earnest, who are genuinely trying to explore and to learn and to grow and treating that notion of wanting to be alive and wanting to explore as almost ridiculous. I think that's the reaction that 13 or 14-year-old me would've had at the time.

Yeah. Yeah. I can relate to that. I can relate to that. And I think through the process of writing in public and, and like learning in public, you almost have to shed that cynicism. I don't think I know anyone who can stay cynical while expressing themselves in writing and sharing because a lot of times the cynicism I find within myself is a protection against feeling judgment or I'd rather criticize myself than let someone else criticize me. And yeah, it's a way to be, to kind of play small and just not be out in the world in a way.

So, oh yeah, that's such a, yeah, that's a great insight actually. You're basically saying, okay, it's fine. Like I'm not going to take myself seriously. I'm not going to take my work seriously. And so it's okay if other people don't take it seriously either. Whereas when you stop being cynical, there's really a sense of hope and trust in other people that they will actually earnestly engage with your work and your ideas. And that doesn't mean they'll be, they'll actually agree with you, but there will be this honest sense of discussion and connection and really trying to understand what you're trying to express here.

Yeah. I'm curious, how have you dealt with the haters over the years? If there have been?

I actually haven't really had many, to be honest. I've been very, very lucky. I think I can think of two emails I got that were a bit hurtful, but I've been writing online for so long that this is really little. I've been very, very fortunate. I think maybe this is because of the kind of things that I write about. It tends to attract the kind of people who would not necessarily have this kind of behavior. Also, because a lot of the people who engage with my work have grown up on the internet like I did. And I think we have this deep understanding that behind the screen there is a human being and we try to be cognizant of that.

Yeah.

So yeah. And even the couple of times where people have been a little bit hurtful, I generally think that they were probably struggling themselves. And so they were maybe projecting things on me. So Um, yeah, so I haven't really had to deal with it, which is very lucky.

That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome.

What about you, Baidu? Is it something that you've had to experience?

No, never.

Yeah.

Just curious. I feel like it's a thing that I hear about, uh, and occasionally there'll be some kind of maybe like a rude comment or someone doesn't seem understanding, but I find that, um, you know, so, so we kind of got acquainted through Twitter and I feel like our little corner of Twitter Hex is very friendly and earnest. And I find that that culture tends to just lead to more friendly, earnest conversation. That's pretty insular is not the right word, but I guess protective or it just doesn't really lead to problems that you see, I guess, typically. So yeah, I thankfully have also been pretty good, but I tend to find that I have a lot of, in my own publishing work, there's kind of this, It's not even, uh, in my mind there's a few tiers of like potential criticism. There's like family, there's close friends, and then like acquaintances. Like, well, like what will my 10-year-old, the piano teacher I had when I was 10, what will his dad, who I'm friends with on Facebook, think of me if I write this thing? It's like some random, it's a random thing there. Uh, and, uh, yeah, that's, that's, and it, but it's, it's really just a projection. It's really just this like fear of something.

Uh, yeah. Yeah. It's that little voice in your head. Yeah. And, uh, We actually talked about that while we were grabbing coffee before we started recording, and how that's also a realization that you, you have when you start kind of like growing up and being more in the world, is that nobody cares. Nobody's watching you. Everybody is so focused on their own journey, whatever they're going through, that they, they don't care. And also I realized almost nobody's going to read your work as closely as you do. So even if there's a paragraph where you go into something that might not be exactly what you wanted to express or where someone might think, um, that it's a bit weird, a lot of people are actually going to skim it and not even see that part.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and what I do have out, it's like anyone who's really engaged with it at any level, no matter what they think, that's such a gift. You know, like they've actually kind of go in, went in and, um, yeah. How's that, how's that been for you kind of, um, as you've grown Nest Labs and as you've grown the newsletter, uh, subscriber base and YouTube and the book, um, how have you, how, how has, how has your life changed by having like an audience or by having people that like what's on your mind?

Yeah, my, I think my biggest realization over the, the years has been that I'm terrible at predicting what people will find interesting. So I will sometimes spend hours and hours researching a topic, reading all of the research papers and trying to write the definitive article about this. And it's crickets. Nobody replies to the newsletter. Nobody seems to care. And sometimes I'm in a rush. I'm literally waiting in front of the gate about to take a plane somewhere and it was that kind of week. And I just sit down and in 20 minutes I just write a very short newsletter, few bullet points. Here are some interesting questions that I thought about this week about this topic. And I get so many replies, people who say, that's me, that's, you know, I really resonate. I really can, I connect with what you said and thank you for sharing this. So To answer your question about how having an audience has changed things, actually it's become, it's made me more comfortable just saying, okay, I'm just going to show up. The kind of only pact that I have made with myself and my audience is that every week I will send a newsletter and sometimes it will be very well researched. Sometimes it will be quite short, but it will be something that I find interesting. That's it. And then maybe you'll find it interesting, maybe not, but clearly after, I think I sent more than 250 newsletters at this point, I am the worst judge possible in terms of whether you're going to like this or not. So I'm just going to write it and I'm going to send it.

That's awesome. I find that, uh, even with tweets, it's a similar thing. Like, who knows, right? But like any kind of content or any kind of thing that's put out there.

Yeah.

Yeah. What's the, when you use the word pact, is that the same type of pact that you have in your book?

Yes. I, so what I describe as a pact is a commitment to curiosity and it's saying I will perform this action for this duration and you remove any other factor. You don't have to think about anything else. You just need to show up and do it. And that's a way of collecting data. About, again, about yourself, about the world, about the work. And you can then revise your pact later on if you want to. You can decide to keep going, you can decide to tweak it, you can decide to abandon it. And so, yeah, my longest pact, which has taken, it has had several iterations, but my very first pact was I will write 100 articles in 100 weekdays. And that was the beginning of Nest Labs. That's how I started Nest Labs. And I've iterated on this and now I still have one where it's every week until the end of the year. And at the end of each year, I revisit it and I see if I'm gonna keep going or not. I've done different pacts with YouTube where I said I'm going to do one weekly YouTube video also until the end of the year. I stopped that, didn't like it. I did a pact with meditation. My current pact is to walk for 20 minutes for every day for the next 20 days. I'm on day 3. It was very cold today. Didn't like that. But yeah, I'm glad I made the pact because I wouldn't have done it. And so, so that's a pact.

That's awesome. Yeah, I like that a lot because it solves a lot of things in my mind where when building new habits, sometimes like a thing that'll stop me from even starting the habit is, oh, it's going to be forever. Or I go the other way where it's like, oh, I just have to start. A little bit. And then even that, it's a little bit, but never goes more than a little bit. So it's like thinking about the right size chunk of an experiment and you commit to that and just what can you kind of— it's almost a balance of coercion and non-coercion. It's like for this time period, I actually can choose to do this much and I will get myself to do it. And at the end, think about it, reevaluate, see, is this something I want to continue or how do I want to change it?

Yeah, it's exactly like— it was inspired by the scientific method. And it's really this idea that you decide in advance on the number of trials, you collect that data, you withhold judgment until you're done collecting the data, but obviously you need to finish collecting the data. And yeah, and at the end you analyze the data and you decide what you want to do. You make decisions based on all of that data that you collected. And so as you said, there is a form of structure of a little bit of self-coercion of saying, that's what I want to do, but you decide what experiment you want to run, but then you're not committing to it for the rest of your life either.

Right. Yeah. And it's interesting because I think like self-coercion can seem bad, but I almost think of it as self-coercion structure. It's the same thing, just depending on kind of maybe the attitude it's coming from or the amount of consent or agreement that there is with it. Similar with non-coercion and like chaos. Like you can be totally non-coercive or fluid or, but that's like, that also can just mean you don't do any, you don't do things in a way that you build long-term trust with yourself on. Um, and I think I've been really into myself has just been just having everything be an act towards building self-trust. And I feel like the PACT method is a way to do that in a very strategic, structured way.

Yeah. It's, uh, what, what I like too is that you're, it, it prevents you from having any assumptions about any kind of things you could try in your life. There are lots of things we don't start because we feel like it's not for me. And lots of habits we don't explore because we feel like, oh, I don't, I don't think that's something I would like. And equally, there are things we just think that we'd enjoy, but we don't do because we don't really have the time right now. And we just feel like, oh yeah, I'm sure. I'll pick it up one day. I'll start this thing one day. I'm sure I'll love it. And we just assume the reason why we're not doing it is because we don't have time. Once you replace those big, vague commitments with something that is self-contained like this, there's first no excuse not to get started because you say, I'm just going to do this for the next 2 weeks or for the next month. And second, you can actually test your assumptions. Yeah.

Yeah. And I feel like A lot of what makes this different than like 10, 20 years ago, like a similar version of this 10, 20 years ago, I think how things are different now is that we're just in an, I think maybe before it was an age of like, it's hard to know what the right thing to do is and you have to push yourself to do the right thing. Now it's almost just like, um, we have a problem of overabundance. There's just so many things, so many possibilities and so many things we could do. So it's just like an overload. Of like, oh, should I learn this language or this language or this code thing or write a thing or do any, you know, and when you kind of do everything at once, you're just not doing anything at all. So it just, it's giving you the structure to at least like carve out, all right, cool. Let me just do this minimum, minimum, but enough amount of things. So then afterwards I can assess. Um, cause I find myself in a thing where I sometimes do 15 things at once and it's just like, none of them are actually structured out enough in a way that I can actually evaluate and decide on.

Yeah, that's why I always say that I wrote this book for people who are both highly curious and highly ambitious.

Yeah.

Which comes with a lot of benefits in today's world, but which also can create analysis paralysis. There's overchoice, as you said, you're curious about everything and you want to do all of these things in the best way possible and you end up doing none of them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like I'm forgetting the act a little bit, but you have these two by two of like high agency, low agency, and high curiosity, low curiosity. Do you remember what the, it was like high curiosity, low agency?

It's ambition. And so yeah, it's a 2x2. Yes. With high curiosity, it is basically based on curiosity and ambition. And so I explained that if you have low curiosity and low ambition, that's cynicism, which we talked about already a little bit. If you have high curiosity, you want to explore, you want to learn. But low ambition, that's escapism. And so that means that you might want to just read a lot of novels and travel a lot, maybe, you know, shopping a lot, buying a lot of different things and trying new things, restaurants, et cetera, which is nice, right? But if there's no ambition to go with it, you might not want to push yourself to work hard towards something that matters to you and challenges you. If you have high ambition and low curiosity, that's perfectionism. So you are going to push yourself to work really hard, to really, you know, eyes on the prize. You, you wanna really succeed, but because of that, you feel like curiosity might be a waste of time and energy. It's a distraction. And so everything you read, everything you watch, all of the information you consume is stuff that you feel like is productive and useful and contributing to your ambitions. And then the last one is the one that I encourage people to explore in the book, and it's the experimentalist mindset, and it's high curiosity, high ambition. You actually want to explore big things. You wanna challenge yourself, but also you wanna have the space for exploration and curiosity, and you're completely okay with the fact that you might not know where you're going. Mm-hmm. And you trust that by keeping on iterating and experimenting, you will get to a place where you work on something that is really exciting, even if you don't know what it looks like yet.

Yeah, I resonate so hard with that. I think, um, I, I was maybe— I've always been high curiosity. I think before I was maybe lower ambition. Maybe there's even a third axis of lower agency, of like high, high curiosity, high ambition, but it's not really able to get things I want done, um, figuring out how. And as I've worked through a lot of emotional stuckness, it's like I've kind of naturally gotten a bit more into this experimental mindset. Um, but it's interesting because I think the high— the high ambition, low curiosity, that's almost like a recipe for how to win in like a ladder world where like you have a ladder and you're just trying to go up the ladder and you're just like just zoned in on exactly what you want. Um, but I feel like the world is increasingly And that actually was, I think, success for many, many years because it was just true that if you just honed in on a couple of good paths, you would just be successful. I feel like with AI, AGI on the horizon, all that stuff, it's just like the world is benefiting curious people more and more and more. I feel I have a bias towards just like helping people become more curious and equipping them with like the tools to just use that curiosity the best they can. Yeah, curious if you have any thoughts on that.

Yeah, and even if you think about the way we educate children, I think, and we're seeing a lot more schools are getting open and, or even parents who decide to unschool or homeschool their kids. I think this is, there's a shift and a realization that if we wanna equip the next generation with the right tools in order to succeed with this new definition of success, that is not that linear definition, that is not a definition that is based on having a clear vision and a clear plan. We also need to teach them those skills of how to be curious, how to learn how to learn, how to ask questions, how to formulate a hypothesis, how to collect data, how to make decisions based on testing your assumptions rather than on copy-pasting whatever blueprint another person has recommended that you follow. So I think it's very important that we educate the next generation in this sense and really equipping them. But I also feel like as adults ourselves, there's still a lot of time for us to adapt and unlearn some of those patterns so we can relearn new ways of navigating the world.

100%. 100%. Between curiosity and ambition, I'm curious, how much do you see those as fixed versus what's more malleable? Or how, how are other of those malleable?

I don't see any of them as fixed really. And even, uh, across those four mindsets, cynicism, escapism, perfectionism, and experimentalism, I see them as responses that we have in the face of uncertainty. And they can shift within the same person depending on our context, depending on our constraints, depending on what we're, we're facing and experiencing at the moment. So if you're, I don't know, maybe if you're like, you know, strained financially, for example, I, it's going to be a little bit harder to want to experiment. You need to have a sense of safety. If you are just coming out from trying something new and different and it failed spectacularly, it's also going to be a bit harder to not be cynical and to say, Cool. Okay, what did we learn? Let's try again. Let's try something new, right? And so the same person can shift through these, but I think it's a little bit like a muscle and you can practice to put yourself back into this more experimental approach to navigating decisions and the world, your career, your relationships. You can just, a little bit like meditation when it's all about like bringing your attention back and recentering yourself. I think it's the same with your mindset where you can practice this. And another element is obviously just the people you have around you and the role models that you have, or even the group of friends and colleagues that you have around you. It is a lot easier to experiment, to take those risks, to even question the assumptions that you have at an individual and group level when that's considered okay to do. In your environment.

Yeah. And I think that's probably easier now than ever, especially with books, podcasts. I remember, I think 2017 was the mode I was like, what you're describing was kind of when I was in that mode of, I was like interning in a random rural area of the country and away from all my friends and just listening to like Tim Ferriss and all these entrepreneurship podcasts and psychology podcasts and Design Your Life and all this kind of stuff. I think that was the first big shift I took in my self-concept and shifting things. Curious, what were some of the biggest shifts for you? I know we mentioned, we talked about psychedelics a little bit earlier, but what were other kind of like points in your life that caused a shift in your mindset that almost allowed for that freedom? Like the first few insights of being able to kind of move in this new direction.

Hmm. Yeah, there were a couple. The first one happened when I was still working at Google. I, I briefly talk about it in the book, in the introduction, but it was when doctors found a blood clot in my arm. And when they asked me, okay, they said, let's schedule the surgery as quickly as possible. And I was like, let me check my calendar because I wanted to schedule the surgery at a time where it would not create any conflict with any of the product launches we were working on. And I caught myself doing this. And I felt like, okay, something's wrong. My priorities are out of whack here for me to do this. That was a first mini realization that maybe I was a little bit too focused on success and my career progression, that I was more worried about that than my health. That was one. The second one was when my startup failed. So I left Google, I worked on a startup, and that didn't work out. And for the first time in my life, I was completely lost. I didn't have a plan. I didn't know what I was supposed to do next. Obviously, one of the scripts is to just start another startup, right? But it was the first time I really questioned what I wanted to do next, and I kind of went back to the drawing board and tried to figure out, okay, but what it is I actually want to do? So that was another step for me. And I feel like right now I am in one of those phases again. Because I finished my PhD, my book is coming out, and I'm again in a phase where I'm actually not quite sure what's next. And it's actually really beautiful to see how I'm responding to this situation now, where a few years ago, there was still a little sense of panic, a little bit, like of, I need to figure out as quickly as possible. What I am going to do next. Whereas now I'm almost relishing being in that liminal space where anything is possible.

Yeah.

I could do literally anything.

Yeah.

And this is actually great. This is great. This is amazing. So it's, yeah, it does come in waves and there are seasons of doing. And I was in a season of doing just now where PhD, writing the book, a lot of getting things done. And I'm going to go back to a season of just exploring and, and there's a lot less fear now around it.

Yeah, that's really cool. What's, what do you think might be in store for you in the next season?

I have so many ideas and I do want to experiment. There is the academic research aspect where I'm not quite sure what I want to do. One option would just be to follow a more linear approach here, which would be to do a postdoc. That's one option. I'm not 100% sure that's what I want to do. Another one I'm exploring is potentially opening my own independent lab, which would be really the nonlinear approach to it, which could be really interesting too. Um, from a learning and personal growth perspective, I've become really interested in plant medicine, not just psychedelics, but I signed up to a herbalism course that I'm going to do over the next 12 months that has nothing to do with my current work, and that's going to be in person in the countryside in England. So that's really exciting too, and I have no idea what I'm going to do with this, is just to learn. And then writing, I already know I'm probably going to write more books because I absolutely loved the process, even the parts that were really difficult. I loved having this container that I could use to explore a bunch of questions that I thought were interesting. So there's probably going to be another book at some point, but I, I wanna have breathing space and, and not just start the next book project straight away. So I'm going to intentionally try to not think about what, what my next book might be.

Yeah.

For a little while.

Yeah. That makes total sense. That's really good. Those all seem like awesome times.

Yeah. I feel very lucky and, uh, and I do think that this life I have right now is the product of actually not trying to engineer it too much.

Yeah.

And, uh, of making sure I have the space to just try things without really having a clear plan in terms of what's going to happen.

Yeah. I think the age of the 5-year plan is basically dead. And it's more of like, it's more like what, uh, I'm not really sure what the right word is. It's not plan, but it's almost like approach. What is your 5-year approach or what is your 5-year mindset or stance or something?

Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, we're also very fortunate now that, cuz that's, um, kind of an argument that I, a counterargument that I hear quite often. Where people say, oh, you can only do this because you're, you're financially comfortable. And so you can do all of these things. And, uh, in my case, which I'm not doing anymore, I'm very fortunate now that I'm, all of my income is coming from my writing, which is great. But there was a long period of time where I was freelancing while I was exploring all of these things. And we can do that now. You can find work online. And you can make money and you can also move to places where you can work remotely and where the cost of living is going to be a little bit less. And again, I'm not saying that everybody can do this and there are so many different factors and you might be the caregiver for someone, which means that you cannot move or you, you know. So yes, but to say that you need to wait until you're financially comfortable, to start experimenting with some areas of your life or work is simply not true.

Yeah, uh, in my own case, a year and a half ago when I went part-time with my job to try to work in meditation and the world, the world I was more interested and cared about, um, I had— that was like the hardest time of my life personally as well. I had like a super high burn rate because I was kind of taking care of some family stuff, uh, and it was like It was like, there were many times where I thought, am I insane? Because I was literally like letting go of a fixed known salary going into freelancing. And I had like the highest possible burn rate I've like ever had and probably ever will for a while. And I think the way I managed it and not even managed it, but just like flowed through it and kept myself sane was I think working through a lot of the emotions around it. Because there's like fear, uncertainty. What if I go into my retirement account? What if I go into What if I had to ask for help? Like, what if I have to ask, go call for a GoFundMe or ask my family for assistance or something? And some of those are probably more or less realistic, but just like all these fears come up and just, you just gotta just work through them in different ways. And then I also kind of sized it appropriately. Like, well, worst case by like this day, if it doesn't work out, I'm just gonna really search for a job. And if that doesn't work out, I'm just gonna do like, I like having this idea of having like my best possible backup plan. I'm like, worst case, I can always be a tutor for like $40 an hour. And like, I know my minimum is basically that, like, they're like, you know, working with people and stuff. So anyways, I think that was the way that I worked with it. But—

That's actually super helpful to try and decouple the emotion, the fear, and the source of the fear. And very often realizing that the fear makes sense, right? It does make sense because you from an evolutionary perspective, your brain is just trying to, wants you to survive, right? So you're going to, those emotions are designed for you to pick the safest path possible. And so obviously all of the alarm bells are going to go off when you're doing this crazy thing.

Yes.

But that's also what makes us human, right? This ability to say, yes, okay, I know this is scary, but this is still what I want to explore.

Yeah.

So being able to decouple this, realizing also that a lot of the things that you're scared about, even if they were to happen, would be fine. I have this example in the book of one of my friends who actually at some point found himself in a situation where he was really struggling with money and he did reach out to a bunch of us and ask everyone for a little bit of money that, yeah. And he said, you know, I'll give it back whenever things are better. And you know, we talked about it afterwards and it was super scary to do this. But the reality is that from the other side, as friends, for us, it was the easiest thing to do in the world. And we were all honored that he would feel comfortable enough to ask us and that we could give him that money in that moment where it was a bit difficult for him.

Yeah.

And so I think going through this exercise of actually really going through the scenario of what would happen and saying, okay, let's, let's say I get to that place where I have to ask for the money. What would my friends think? None of your friends are going to think that you're a loser. They're just going to be so happy that they can help, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, sometimes we're paralyzed with fear because we don't take the time to actually connect with it and examine it and really go through what it means and where it comes from. And it's such a useful thing to do, to just do that, go through those steps and from the source to the, the end of it and following that thread.

Yeah. And I think it's one of those things like even with meditation or meditation progress or things like that, following the fear all the way. And I get a lot of, I got a lot of this from Art of Accomplishment and Joe Hudlin's work too. But like following the emotion all the way to the source or all the way to the end, it's like, it can be pretty crazy and really intense. And the way I almost conceptualize a lot of meditative progress or meditative path is being able to digest more and more intensity and being able to be with the intensity. Because oftentimes these scripts or these stories are there as a way to kind of just push it away. You know, have a ladder, have a thing to focus on, don't have to worry about anything else. And yeah, curious how you view intensity or if it's a similar kind of thing for you.

I try to be intentional with it as well. We talked about seasons a little bit. And I think that's the, the same here. I know that sometimes in my life a lot of intensity is good. I know that other times I'd rather feel more grounded, which is more helpful in that moment. But is, as you said, is really about not seeing intensity as something that's bad necessarily. Uh, if it's there, it's better to engage with it. To be fully in it, to really feel it and process it.

Yeah.

So you can move past whatever barrier or blockage you're feeling in that moment. And you can apply this to anything, really, any emotion that you're feeling. It's always better to just engage with it. And engaging with it can take a lot of different forms, right? Sometimes it can be really like living it in your body. That's why a lot of people, they like body movement, dancing or whatever. Sometimes it's just sitting with it and, or watching it, you know, past meditation, et cetera. Sometimes it's writing, sometimes it's having a conversation with a friend. Sometimes it could be painting, writing poetry, stand-up comedy, like whatever form or shape it takes. But engaging with the emotion is usually healthier than trying to ignore it or trying to push it down and repress it and replace it with something else.

It's kind of interesting. It's just this morning I saw an increasingly popular tweet that was about a paper on maybe repressing memories is good for mental health. So basically the opposite of what you said. But I mean, it's funny because I think the definitions of mental health can be different there, where in the short run, I think there is a real thing of like basically just dissociating or pushing it down as much as possible can make it so you're not in the throes of the intensity. But I feel like in the long run, that just kind of just makes things a lot worse because it leaks. It's kind of not good. And almost like the definition of mental health is, you know, because a lot of times it's like healing work or this opening up will actually be intense or will kind of bring up difficulty, but is a— so in some ways it maybe makes mental health a little bit worse before it gets better. But I find that it probably is a way to like, that's otherwise you're kind of just adding band-aids to kind of a leaky ship or something.

Yeah, I haven't read the paper, but the first thing that came to mind to me is that unfortunately in today's society, we have removed a lot of the containers where it's safe to express and relive like whatever traumatic, difficult, challenging memory that we have. And so maybe that's why it feels safer to repress the memory because you don't have a safe place where you can express it and engage with it. A lot of the rituals that we used to have to go through those moments and go through those transitions, and whether it's grief, whether it's even getting married, having a child, right, which are fairly traumatic actually, are things that now you're expected to just go through and do on your own. And so yeah, I'll read the paper, but to me, I'm very curious to see whether it is really in general repressing the memory that's good, or if it is in today's context when, where you don't have access to a safe space to express it, it is maybe better to just repress it until you find that space where you can do so safely to express it safely.

Totally. That makes a lot of sense. What neuroscience topics are kind of at the edge of what you're exploring? Or what things are you kind of curious about or kind of getting excited about as you review papers?

So in my job research, I'm at the ADHD Research Lab at King's College London. So I study ADHD and currently I'm fascinated with the relationship between curiosity and ADHD from an evolutionary perspective. And I, I recently published a paper about what I called Hypercuriosity Theory, which is explaining that a lot of the behaviors that we see in people who have been diagnosed with ADHD and that are associated with ADHD traits might have had an evolutionary advantage in previous context, pre-modern world. And in particular, being curious about a lot of things, those exploratory behaviors might have allowed us at a group level to have like almost this like kind of like R&D group of people who would go and poke around and try new things and explore more. And it wouldn't have been useful if everybody in the group was like that. You just need a little group that does the R&D. But in today's world where there's high stimulation, a lot of opportunities to be distracted, algorithms that are designed to grab and maintain your curiosity. This can actually be— this R&D mind can be detrimental, difficult, uh, create challenges for people, uh, and those are what we call ADHD traits now, for some of them. Obviously, there are a lot of other traits that are associated with attention deficit and impulsivity, etc., but I'm looking specifically at curiosity. And there's very little research on it at the moment. So that's the area that I'm, it's kind of meta, but I'm very curious about at the moment.

Yeah, that's exciting. That's really cool. I mean, a lot of that I resonate with where I don't think I've ever been diagnosed with ADHD, but sometimes I'm just like, is it me? Is it just that I'm curious? Is the world making me more, you know, sporadic or erratic? And yeah, I'm curious what you think about that, of this idea that the world can make people more ADHD, you know, not in a clinical sense, maybe, maybe in a clinical sense too. But, you know, with the internet, with social media, with short-form video, infinite scroll, it does seem like things are getting more airy, like things are more, you know, hard, hard to stay grounded or hard to focus on one thing.

Yeah. I mean, you may have noticed that I talk about ADHD traits and that's the way I see it. And there's— it's obviously a subject of debate in the ADHD research community. But personally, I think that right now talking about ADHD traits is the most scientifically correct way of talking about this because I'm not 100% convinced that there is such a condition, like a monolithic— monolithic, sorry, my French— monolithic condition that we could label ADHD. And the simple fact that we have to create subtypes, that we have different ways of diagnosing it, and that we say you're this type and you're not this type, it's, you know, it makes more sense for me that there are a collection of traits that are associated with what we call ADHD today, and that can be exacerbated based on what environment you're in. And I do agree, I think that today's environment is exacerbating those traits. And then the, the, you know, million-dollar question, but which I also think might be the case is that there's probably a bit of epigenetic going on in there as well. As I said, from an evolutionary perspective, I think those traits might have been very useful in an environment that was information scarce and resource scarce, where you did want to have those exploratory behaviors, you almost wanted to be more distracted, right? Because you wanted people where if you hear something moving in the bushes, they would go, "What's going on?" and tell everybody, "Hey, look, look, look, something's happening here." You wanted that. In today's environment, not so useful. So it's because it's everywhere.

Exactly. It's the opposite of information and resource scarce.

Exactly. Yes. And I do have a diagram in the paper that I wrote actually that is around that, the amount of resources and information that you have in the environment and how that relates to ADHD traits. So I obviously want to caveat this with this is just a hypothesis and I'm still doing the research. Yeah. Um, but I'm in the camp of researchers that think that those are a collection of traits that can be exacerbated depending on which environment you're in versus a— the dichotomy that we have sometimes, the categorical and medical approach to it that just says whether you have ADHD or you don't have ADHD. I think it's more complicated than that.

Right. It does seem like for a lot of things there's ADHD and other types of things in DSM-5 or other types of diagnoses, the spectrum view makes more sense. But I could also see how there also can be a dilution of people being like, oh, you know, it can kind of take away from people with more serious cases. I think the traits framework makes it so it's more linear and you can still make distinctions for people with more intensity or severity.

Yeah, I think the way my former PhD supervisor saw it is actually kind of helpful. For her, she felt like— and we don't necessarily agree on everything— but she felt like you should get a diagnosis of ADHD for practical reasons. If this is actually interfering with your daily life, your work, and your studies, and so if you might need access to support or medication, then we can use that label. That doesn't necessarily mean that this is an actual thing at an ontological level when it comes to you have ADHD, but for practical reasons of saying you need access to medication, you need support, then we'll use that label. It just makes things easier.

Yeah.

And that solves for the problem of dilution because you could say, okay, you have all of those ADHD traits, you have the spectrum, and past a certain threshold, that's when you get access to medication. And that's based really on just the quality of your experience and how it affects you on a day-to-day basis.

Yeah. Which requires quite a bit. It is very contextual because I could imagine depending on the environment you're in, it may affect one differently depending on like what you perceive as like success or not success or just requires some self-awareness to be understanding of like where it is.

And this is why there is a little bit of research showing that you tend to find more— I can't remember exactly what kind— was it like a correlation? I can't remember the design, but basically there was some sort of association between ADHD traits and entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

And again, I think it was just correlational because it was a pretty small study, but the, the— what I think is that people who have ADHD might maybe tend to seek the kind of careers where they have a little bit more freedom in terms of how they design their work, how in terms of their schedule, in terms of managing their tasks. And so because of that, you see people, more entrepreneurs who have those ADHD traits. And in those cases, a lot of them might not even need medication anymore because they have designed their environment in a way where it's actually completely okay for them to have these traits.

Yeah. I'm curious, what does mindful productivity look like with ADHD traits or just in general? So I find that a thing that I've been really into the last couple of years is just seeing the role of emotions within our productivity, especially with knowledge work. I think that's something that is just so underplayed and underappreciated. And I know you write about that in your book. So curious your view on that.

Yeah, a lot of people think that mindfulness and productivity are two completely opposite concepts and that they can't work together. But if you go back to the definition of mindfulness, which is really about paying attention in a nonjudgmental way, and you apply this to productivity, you get mindful productivity. It's really about paying attention to your internal states, paying attention to your emotions, paying attention to your context, your environment, the different sources of pressure, the different commitments. And making decisions in terms of your work and how you direct your attention in a very intentional way. That is, that's what mindful productivity is. And so it, whether you're neurodivergent or neurotypical, those kind of principles are the same. And, um, there's the, so paying attention part that can take a lot of different shapes depending on what is more comfortable for you personally. I'm a big fan of journaling.

Yeah.

So I journal every morning, but other people might just want to do a weekly review. That's fine as well. But just making sure that you have space throughout the week to check in with yourself and, and say, okay, what's working? What's not working? What do I want to tweak or change or approach differently next week? So that's really this kind of paying attention, looking at the signals, and adjusting accordingly. And the second part of this mindful productivity aspect is also being intentional in terms of your outputs and asking yourself, is that really what I should be working on in the first place? Does that actually make sense? Am I the right person to do it? Maybe someone else should do this. Maybe I can delegate it. The beautiful thing today is that it used to be that when you said maybe I can delegate it, it would have to be to another human being, but now you can delegate it to an AI.

Huge.

Yes. That really changes everything, right?

Yeah.

And you can still be productive, but in a more mindful way where it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to work really hard the entire day. As long as the right things get done at the right time.

Exactly.

Then that's good.

And I think you wrote a couple, a few years ago, I think you wrote an interstitial journaling article. Yeah. Yeah. So that was super useful to me a year ago, um, where basically to get out of this really intense phase of burnout, Well, the main way I got out of it, I was on a meditation retreat and I just cried for 4 days and that really helped. But after that, I think the way to really integrate that experience and to move through the burnout into more energy, I basically just journaled every day and I interstitial journaled every day as I was doing my tasks in a way that was kind of inspired by IFS, Internal Family Systems. But I did that every day for about a month and it really helped. And even now, The thing that I see that's really helpful is basically just increasing metacognition. And I think the thing for me that is a blocker for that, or the times where it's hard, where I just stop doing weekly reviews and stop doing all this other stuff that's helpful, it's just stress. Like I'll just feel too overly stressed or overwhelmed or nervous system a little dysregulated and I just want to push it away and just kind of, you know, numb out. But when I can move through that and keep at least a little bit of metacognition, then I think the coolest thing now is AI can just 10x your metacognition. So if you just have enough that you can use AI to leverage, it can just multiply and just keep things moving.

Yes, no, absolutely. I literally used that this morning. I was sitting at my desk and I was supposed to work on something before coming and meeting you, and I was just procrastinating so much and scrolling on my phone instead.. And I pulled my journal out and I wrote literally 5 lines and just being like, okay, procrastinating, what's going on?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm stressed because I don't really know how to approach these things.

Yeah.

And, uh, not quite sure I'm qualified for, I don't know why they want me to do this and just writing about it. And then I managed to start working on it before coming here. Yeah. Instead of just staying like this. So as you said, just having a metacognitive practice that can help you move through this is incredibly helpful. And just in general, accepting those feelings of the stuckness, this is actually a signal also that you can work with.

Yeah, it's like, uh, I was recently doing gratitude on emotions I wouldn't normally feel gratitude on, and, uh, I think what came up for me is I feel gratitude for the stuckness for showing me that there's something I want to address. You know what I mean? It's just like such a weird reframe that I'm like, I can be thankful for the resistance. I can be thankful for the stuckness. It's just, I, it's, it's been a cool part of the practice for me. Yeah. Um, and it's very applicable too. It's like super practical. Mm-hmm. Where now it's just like, oh, every time I'm on my phone and scrolling for more than like a couple minutes and I don't want to be, that's actually just a mini cope or a mini numbing to like push out an emotion. And that, I've never thought of that before. You know, like realizing that all of these are just responses for emotional, emotional overwhelm. Or it doesn't have to always be overwhelm, but some kind of internal avoidance or something. Yeah.

And the more you pay attention to them, the more you can create those mini like if-then processes. Yeah. For me it's scrolling and it's eating sugar. So yeah, so those are my two main copes and I can be, if I'm reaching for chocolate for whatever and if I'm scrolling, then I will grab my journal and I will write a few lines and see what happens. And so the more you notice, the more you can use this muscle, same, and you build it and it becomes a lot easier and you stay stuck for a lot less longer also when you do that.

Yeah, I think I've had this schema internally where it was like I would walk past a cookie shop and just be like, oh, I should get a cookie. And it's interesting, like, where's that coming from? And it's, this has been a thing that I've been working on for years and it's actually, I mean, it's really improved quite a bit. Through a lot of different angles. And it's such a banal, kind of like not a big deal answer, but I think it actually represents how all this stuff kind of works where maybe when I was a kid, I like used baked goods as a way to kind of cope and self-soothe. And it was also just fun. And then over time that response kind of happens. So then, you know, space between stimulus and response, just noticing really helps. Gratitude towards the feeling can really help. Creating different cues. There's all the Atomic Habits stuff of like cues and, and all that. And then there's kind of really going into it. And sometimes even in like a therapy session, I like went through all the memories of when baked goods were there for me throughout the years and just cried. And it was just like, oh cool. And at the end I just felt less hooked into the grips of that conditioning. Yeah. Which is really interesting. So yeah. And I think this applies to like work stuff and just a bunch of things.

That kind of connects back to what we were talking about earlier. Also the fact that you had access to a safe space to actually go through the memories and untangle them, understand them, accept them, process them, and then move past them.

Yeah.

Which I think is also very important. That's also why I love having a metacognitive practice. Again, in my case it's journaling, but a lot of people have different ways of doing this. I know people who have, for example, just a weekly check-in with a friend because they're not really into writing. And so There are lots of ways of doing this, but what's great when you do that is that you can also start noticing repeating patterns. So it's fine if you notice, okay, I'm reaching out for a baked good or scrolling, then I write about it, I process it, and fine, right? But if you notice that it's been 4, 5, 6, 7 times that you're doing this, then it might be worth asking yourself, okay, do I need, um, a, like a better safer, uh, dedicated container for me to process whatever is going on there. And in your case, it was therapy, but for a lot of other people, sharing circles. Like, there are lots of different modalities that psychedelics that you can work with. And, um, and just noticing the pattern and deciding— because now that you've noticed, deciding to actually figure out what's going on and untangle what's going on.

Yeah, I think the unit the fundamental mechanism is just noticing. More observations, more noticings. You notice a few of the same things over time and you get the insight. And with the insight, you can do something about it.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's really cool. Nice. I think we're almost at time. Totally could talk for a couple more hours. This is super fun.

Thank you so much for having me. This was amazing.

Could you tell us more about your book?

Yeah. The book is called Tiny Experiments, and it's about how to live a more experimental life. And it contains a lot of the ideas that we just talked about today. So You can order it now. It's available on Amazon and really anywhere books are sold.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, and where can people find you online?

Yeah, yeah. I write a weekly newsletter at neslabs.com. I send it every Thursday, so just go there, enter your email address, and you'll hear from me.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.