Building a Creativity Inbox: Anne-Laure Le Cunff & David Perell

And then I want to introduce our guest today, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. So I've been following her for a while. We were going to meet in Mexico City and we were so excited. And then the pandemic happened and it didn't end up happening. But I'm just really impressed with how she's synthesizing all these different kinds of ideas from metacognition to creativity to productivity. You just built this beautiful section on your website where you're sharing all your notes. Your drawings are now beautiful. And I'm just like, how is she so creative? So that's why today we're gonna be talking about building a creativity inbox. Honestly, I'm here to learn just as much as you. I'm just in awe of how prolific you are and your ability to build community and make things. And I can't wait to learn from you today. So thanks for being here, Anne-Laure.

Awesome. Well, thank you, David, and everyone for having me today. As you mentioned, we're going to talk about building a creativity inbox and building a creativity system in general, from basically finding ideas and inspiration to publishing content online and making it a creative habit. So just a little bit about me. You can find me on Twitter where I'm pretty active, maybe hyperactive on Twitter. But I'm basically the founder of Nest Labs. I used to work at Google where I was based in San Francisco and I left that job about 2 years ago. And now I'm studying part-time at King's College in London, and I'm using a lot of the stuff that I'm studying at university to write on my blog and newsletter, which David presented. And thank you so much for this super nice introduction. And what I write about, I write about 3 main topics. The first one is mindful productivity. So mindful productivity is kind of the opposite of what you would say lots of productivity gurus write about. There's lots of productivity porn online that is telling you that if you are struggling to work from 5 AM to midnight every day while hitting the gym and raising your kids and doing a PhD, it's because you're procrastinating and you should probably work more on yourself. So this is obviously bullshit, and this is something I'm fighting against. And this is kind of my mission to teach people that there's only a certain number of hours that you can actually work in a very creative way, that you do need to recharge your batteries, and that there are ways to do this that are much more mindful than trying to cram as much work as possible in a day. So that's basically what mindful productivity is about. Then I write a lot about purposeful creativity, and we're going to talk about it today with David. It's basically about how lots of people see creativity as a hobby on the side. So they will have their work and then they will have their hobbies to relax. And that's completely fine. And that's awesome. And I do have these kinds of hobbies as well, but creativity can also be something much more meaningful that you actually embed into your life. And that's part of your work and something that can actually be a bit uncomfortable sometimes, something that gets you out of your comfort zone. It's not necessarily something that's always relaxing and that's completely fine. So purposeful creativity is really about this, finding your purpose and your meaning. So even when creativity doesn't come as easy as you would want it to be, or it's not as relaxing as doing crochet or something like this, you would still keep on pushing through. And finally, the last thing I read about is better thinking. So there is— I really believe that if you can understand more about how your mind works, you will be able to think better. And I really hope that one day we'll live in a world where everyone will have the thinking tools necessary to both think better and communicate better together. So this is why— part of why I'm studying neuroscience and what I'm trying to evangelize the content to people so they can use this in their daily life and their daily work. So I write a lot about mental models and other such tools to think better. In terms of what I've achieved with Nest Lab so far, so I started writing on Nest Labs last summer in July. And since then I've written about 200 articles. There are about 12,000 newsletter subscribers. And I said I did that in less than a year. The reason why I'm mentioning the numbers is because when I started, I had no idea I would be writing this much or that I would have that many newsletter subscribers less than a year later. But the only thing I did, the only pact I made with myself was to be consistent and basically just like keep on writing, keep on improving, etc. But I didn't set a specific goal, a specific number of articles or a number of newsletter subscribers. I basically just told myself to show up every day and to write every day. And as you'll see in this short presentation and in the conversation we're going to have with David, this is basically something I really believe in, that it's really not about having those lofty goals that may seem too hard to reach and you never end up doing any of the work. It's really more about thinking of all of the baby steps you can take every day so you get closer to having such a portfolio of articles online. So that's why I think the formula for growing an audience online and writing online is pretty simple. Doesn't mean it's easy, but it's simple. It's quality content that you write and publish consistently. And you'll notice, and it's really important that I'm not saying quantity. It's not quality and quantity. I did write 200 articles myself. It doesn't mean that this is what you should do, and it doesn't mean that it will work for everyone. For me, the quantity of articles I have published is kind of a byproduct of the fact that I've been writing a lot. But it was never a goal to write that many articles. What was more important was consistency. And just so you can visualize this, I could have probably written all of those 200 articles in a couple of months if I had worked really, really hard and that was the only thing that I was doing. I don't think I would have ever reached those 12,000 subscribers in 2 months if I had just dumped that much content on people in one go. The reason why I'm where I am today is because I went from being a complete stranger to these people to being kind of like, you know, a friend or an expert on these topics that that they follow and that they listen to. And this is because we've had many conversations, written conversations with them reading my articles over the course of a year. So it doesn't matter, the absolute number of articles that you publish doesn't really matter. It's really about being consistent. And I think David, actually, you're a great example of having way fewer articles published than me, but you also wrote about this, right? That then you start having this kind of cornerstone pieces of content that people keep on coming back to. And I definitely noticed this myself that I can't really predict which piece of content is going to do well. And the Pareto rule definitely applies to my content. Like 20% of my articles, like bringing in 80% of the traffic and the new subscribers. So I think again, Not quantity, just quality and consistency.

Yeah. Do you mind if I hop in here? I think that one of the ways to think about this is what a lot of what you're trying to do when you write online is, is construct a worldview and you're doing that brick by brick. And what you're doing when you do that is you're trying to say, okay, I need to construct a worldview, but each individual piece needs to build on top of the other ones. And now it shouldn't be like too much of a rational process. Like actually following your intuition is sort of paradoxically the best way to end up with an emergent property of articles that actually constructs this beautiful painting. But what I find is how can I actually add to the articles that I've built upon and then have these sort of canonical articles that I'm always linking back to. And you'll see like with a guy like Ben Thompson, this is what he does with aggregation theory. It's always what he's coming back to is like the pillar of his work. And likewise for me, I've written certain articles and have certain ideas, like for example, audience-first products. I fundamentally want to, as I grow Write of Passage, turn this and let it evolve into a business school where we're having people building audiences and then getting them to start businesses. And so I just call that audience-first products. And now I have that article as sort of this baseline foundation, and then I can build on top of it. And so I think that what you realize when you write is that all your different ideas are networked, and each new article is trying to build the wall, build the worldview on top of it. And so I would only be publishing our new articles insofar as you're adding to this tapestry of knowledge and actually weaving that quilt together.

Absolutely. And actually, I think it was pretty recently that we were both mentioned in the same tweet that was about owning a theme or a topic. And for you it was writing, for me it was mindful productivity, and there were quite a few other people listed in there. But there is definitely something powerful in having your name constantly show up whenever people mention a specific topic or look up something like owning that term. And yeah, I agree with you. It's not something you can build in one day. It's something that you need to weave on and build upon along, like during a long time. So let's say now that, okay, you're convinced that you need to work on this consistently and that you need to produce quality content. 'How do you find ideas?' And there used to be this myth of the muse who would come and whisper ideas in the ear of the artist. And there's, I think there's been countless poems written by artists who were despairing of not having the muse visiting them that night, or like the muse disappearing. Also lots of poets who were self-medicating, taking opium and stuff like this in order to get the muse to come back and visit them again. So it's very interesting that for most of the history of humanity, we were believing that creativity was something that you experienced or that you didn't experience and that you had very little control over it. And that it was really the, you know, the decision of this muse to come and visit you or not. So I have good news for all of you who are not into drugs. So there's no muse. And what's funny though, is that even though the idea of this mythical person visiting you sounds silly and most of you don't believe it, the idea of creativity, that's something that you have or don't have and that you can't really control, is still something that the vast majority of the population believe is true. And this is why you hear a lot of people saying like, oh, I have this friend, she's so creative, or I have this friend, he's so creative. But very few people believe that creativity is something that can actually be programmed and can actually be manufactured and can actually be controlled, which is the case. So creativity is— and there's quite a bit of research around this— is actually combinational in nature. There is no such thing as having an idea in your dream that came absolutely out of nowhere. Every time you have a new idea, it's because your brain and your mind combined ideas that you read or you heard, etc. And sometimes we don't realize that's the case because we combine stuff that we heard yesterday with stuff that we heard 2 years ago. And we don't really remember exactly where that idea came from. Still doesn't change the fact that there's nothing completely new. Your new ideas are actually just the combination of other ideas. And I like this illustration that was published on the Airbnb blog when they announced their new logo, which lots of people were making fun of because it looks like something else. But still, the process is quite interesting here. You know, you look at the final— you look at the final logo and you would be like, oh, that's quite new. I've never seen anyone use a shape like this for a logo. And then you look at their process and when they destruct it, you see, oh, actually this is what they combined together. And obviously when when it comes to our own individual creativity, it's very rare that we can go back and kind of like deconstruct the Lego construction of the idea and see exactly where the idea came from. But the process is still the same. It's just that we're not as intentional and we're not as good at documenting the process. So it's hard to go back. So when you understand that creativity is something that's combinational, that it's like playing Lego, you know, that's just the— it's natural to go on to the next step and see that if you have quality input, you will have quality output. And this is something that, you know, the reverse is true. If you don't have good input, you'll have bad creative output. And I think it's pretty evident, but this is still something that we're not very intentional about. Obviously, if you spend a whole week just binging kind of like TV shows on Netflix, which is a nice thing to do time to time, I'm not judging anyone. I've done this. But you can't really expect to be very productive and creative that day and to come up with lots of interesting ideas. On the other end, if you do still watch a little bit of Netflix, but you mix it with reading some interesting articles and then you read a book and you listen to a nice podcast, that's lots of different quality input that you bring in together to potentially get some good output. And I always meant like the metaphor that I use is like your diet, your nutrition. It's the same, basically. It's if you only eat the same thing, however good it is, you're not going to have a balanced diet. You're not going to be healthy. You know, even if cucumber is healthy, if you only just eat that, you'll just starve to death. So it's really about Making sure that you have a varied diet and with higher— the highest quality ingredients as possible that you're consuming. And it's the same with content.

Yeah. One of the things I want to add onto this is there's a documentary. It's a really good documentary on Netflix. It's called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. And it's about the world's best sushi restaurant and how they make such delicious food. And one of the most surprising things about the documentary is how much of it doesn't happen in the kitchen, but rather happens at the morning fish market. And that's because the people who run this restaurant are obsessed with finding the best sushi fish before it even gets to the kitchen. And so what they do is they go, they see all of their friends, they have all of these connections, and it— there's actually a line at the market because it's so competitive every day. To go get the best fish. And the lesson here is that you can't actually make great sushi with your output unless the input of delicious fish happens. And it's the same thing with ideas, that just as a chef, if they want to improve the quality of their cooking, a writer, if you want to improve the quality of your writing, the first thing that you should be doing is focusing on making sure that every single thing that comes into your brain is of high quality, so you're always at the Tokyo fish market, and that way we can make some really high-quality sushi.

I love this, and, you know, here's an example of taking quality input. I'm absolutely going to steal the Jiro story for the next time I'm giving this presentation. I love the documentary too. I never thought about the parallel. So yeah, thank you for that. So Yeah, ideally, can imagine Jero and going to the market, bringing the food, putting it like, bringing it to the kitchen. But ideally, this is basically what your creative process should look like. Obviously, we're going to talk about what that combinational magic is like later on. Doesn't have to stay a black box. But ideally, this is what it should look like. Lots of quality ingredients coming in, then combinational magic, and then quality output, quality creative output out. Unfortunately, what happens for most people is more something like this. We get some content in there, very often random content, and we don't take any notes, we don't do anything to remember it, and our brain is more like a leaky bucket where we just forget things as soon as we consume them. So instead of allowing our ideas to stay in the bucket for long enough for the combinational magic to happen. We just forget those ideas way too quickly. So this is why, like, all of this that I just explained is to convince you that instead of like waiting for inspiration, you should basically try to make sure that your ideas have sex together. And so they need to stay in the same room for long enough together for it to happen. So inspiration is the version we talked about before, the muse coming to you at night and whispering ideas in your ear. That doesn't work. Some people say drugs help, but this is not a sustainable way to go about it if you want to write every day. So we need a better process for this. IdeasX is a much better way to go about it. Why? So let's just compare them. Inspiration is passive. It's something you wait to happen to you. It's unpredictable because you are just waiting for the muse to come, and maybe she doesn't, and then you're just desperate, basically. And it's stressful because you may have a deadline, or you may have an event for which you want to have something ready to publish, or you may have the collaboration with someone, something cool happening, and you're just basically staring at a blank page with nothing happening. The cliché of the writer staring at a blank page. And I think it's a cliché because it has happened to so many people that it is real. I'm not saying it's not real. I'm saying that it doesn't have to happen this way. IdeasX, on the other hand, is active. You're provoking it. You're making it happen. It's programmable. You can create models and systems for yourself. So you don't need to wait for your creativity to just come and visit you. And it's mindful instead of stressful because it takes into account your natural, your levels of mental energy and the time that you have to write and the resources that you have, the help that you may get from other people. It's really about building a creative process that works for you instead of just waiting for creativity to visit you, maybe or maybe not. And to me, something that's core to turning inspiration into idea sex is action-driven note-taking. And you'll see a little bit more about what I mean by this. So I see a lot of people take notes and they think that it fixes the leaky bucket problem. It doesn't. Just taking notes by themselves doesn't fix this problem. What it does is just that you add more stuff in the bucket, but it doesn't necessarily close the hole that makes all of your ideas leave and you forget them. So something typical, for example, of people who take notes is just writing verbatim lots of the stuff that they're reading or hearing, writing as much as possible. I do suspect that there's a little bit of anxiety here and that by writing a lot of notes, we feel like we're doing something productive, which is not necessarily the case. And then they add lots of tags, lots and lots of tags, because they think that it's going to help them retrieve the information later. So they're going to be like, you know, hashtag reading, hashtag cars, hashtag driving, hashtag wheels, hashtag travel, hashtag journey, hashtag A to B. And they're just going to add all of these because they're like, you know, maybe my mind later— they know that their mind is quite fragile and that they're going to forget. So they're like, let's use all of these tags, that's going to help me. Surprise, it doesn't, because no one searches like this. You don't, that's not how you remember ideas. We don't use tags in our mind, so it doesn't really work like this for note-taking either. So instead, what I personally use, those are the only tags that I'm using. I'm using to read, to process, and to write. And those are the only 3 tags I'm using in my note-taking system. It doesn't mean I don't have more links, and I'm going to share a bit more about this later, but in terms of tagging, you will never see a tag that is like a random generic word next to notes that I have. So the first phase for me is to read. So to read, this is basically my reading inbox, and I'll talk about it more later, but I am very anti-multitasking. I think it's very bad. You basically lose your concentration every time you switch between tasks. So every time I stumble upon something interesting, so for example, I'm on Twitter, I see that David posted something interesting, as he often does. I'm not going to stop what I'm doing. I'm just going to take this link and paste it in my note-taking system and tag it to read. And that goes in my inbox. And whenever I'll have time, be like, oh, okay, cool. Yeah, there was this article here and I can, I can read it. So this is a living inbox. It's very similar to an email inbox, but it's for reading. And the best thing is that there's no spam in it because I'm the I'm the only one adding content there, which is great. Another thing that's very important about my To Read inbox is that there is really no guiltiness. Like I have content in there that has been there for months and it's fine. I will probably not read it ever. And because it's by date and there's no counter of number of articles in there, I don't have the anxiety that you have with your inbox of having 200 unread emails. Here, I don't know how many are there, and to me, if there's something that's been there for 2 months and I still haven't read it, it means that I probably won't, and it's completely fine. So it's a more mindful way to consume content rather than being at the mercy of your email inbox or reading stuff as soon as you see it when you're on Twitter and where it becomes very anxiety-inducing. So then I take notes while I read something. I recorded a video on my YouTube if you want to check it out later where I'm doing that in real time. I'm reading this article and I'm taking notes. And I try and copy and paste as little as possible from the article. I mostly write questions, things that I want to explore later. So this is why I mean it's action-driven note-taking, is that I'm not taking notes just to remember stuff because I'm not going to remember it much better just because I took notes. I make sure that whatever I put in there is action-driven. It's something that I'm going to use to write an article later. So this is why my notes are very short and I'm very selective. And I always think when I'm taking notes, how could that be helpful for an article I may write later? And to your point, David, about building on top of things, like when you think like this, this makes much more sense, right?

Yeah, wow, that's really interesting. I love this. So walk me through what you're thinking when you're reading, both in terms of how you're reading, thinking about potential future articles, and how that impacts the ideas that you actually save. And then walk me through your questions. And just to give you— and I just— to give you some time to think about it, I'll just give you one example. So I have a couple little things that I do. So my read-it-later app that I use— so it looks like you use Roam Research. I use an app called Instapaper. And often when I'm reading on Kindle, I'll do the same thing. So I have a couple things, like even last night I was reading something and I forget what it was. It was a history of time going back to like the 13th and the 14th century. It was very interesting. And I saw, and like what I'll do is I'll write things like, love this. And then I have a little 3 sort of like asterisk symbol. Whenever I see a 3 asterisk symbol, it's like a story. That I want to use in a future article. Often what I'll do as well is I will write a long paragraph as I read that just sort of includes the ideas that are flowing through my mind. And my general point, especially with that last idea, is people underestimate the extent to which reading is a sandbox for you to have interesting ideas, in that reading isn't necessarily about what you take out of the ideas that are coming into your brain. Oh my goodness, I need to memorize this, all these sorts of things, the sort of stress and anxiety that we feel when we read. If you have this system that Anne-Laure is talking about of, oh, I'm gonna write down my questions, oh, I'm gonna actually have my comments and think about how I can make life easier for myself when I write, you begin to realize that you're creating this environment for yourself to have interesting ideas with, just like when you go to a club, the music is creating an environment for certain emotions to occur and for certain interactions to happen. Looks like Anne-Laure's frozen, so I'll keep going. So with that, one of the things that I would think about as you read is to consider what can I do to actually make my writing process easier? And it's interesting what happens when you begin to read like a writer. You see that the, the distinction between creation and consumption begins to disappear. And what ends up happening is as you are consuming something, you begin to think, what will I need to know as a creator to make my life easier? Because when you create, I always say that in school We're taught to research first and write second. But Anne-Laure, she's written what, 200 articles? And in order to do that, you can't get to a place where, okay, it's time for a new article. Now I need to go spend 40, 50 hours researching. Like school teaches us a whole semester. You need to get your note-taking system to a place where by the time that you sit down to write, you already have 80, 90% of the information that you're going to need, and that's when you should start a project. Hey, Will, I have a question. Are there any questions in the Q&A that I can take right now? Yeah, definitely. Let's jump to a couple of those. Um, let's see. I mean, I think this is a good one. Apart from writing consistently and developing your own voice over time, are there any strategies you recommend to start developing your own style more quickly? Yeah, the style question is interesting. Um, I would focus on fun. That if you have fun as a writer, you will have style, whereas if you focus on having style, you won't necessarily have fun. And this is something I think a lot about in running a school for 9 to 11 year olds. What we do is we focus on making sure that the kids have fun Throughout the week, because we know that if kids have fun, it will then lead into creativity. And a lot of what style is as a process— well, you could think of it in a couple ways. The first is style is your own sort of weird idiosyncratic quirks, and those are things that just gonna— that are just gonna emerge naturally. Like when you watch me, I'm sure I have interesting ways of speaking and sort of thinking and sort of going through ideas. Of some kind. I have no idea what they are, and that style is actually an emergent property of me just doing what's sort of natural to me. But then what I find is that if you try to have fun as a writer, what ends up happening is style begins to emerge, because when you have fun, you're tapping into this deep intuition, and the wisdom of our intuition, especially in creative moments, is so beyond what the rational mind could ever fathom. And so when you are trying to be creative with your rational mind, you actually prevent style and, and individuality. But if you think of style itself as just a productive individuality, your intuition will give you that. And so if you can write from the heart, actually spew out your soul onto the page, style will just be a natural and inevitable byproduct. So I would encourage you to have fun, to trust your intuition, and to— style is one of those things that you actually get by not focusing on it too much, but then by thinking, how can I let my own idiosyncratic quirks actually come onto the page rather than deflecting them so I can fit in or conform?

I'm actually back. My laptop, like my MacBook, restarted after an update in the middle of this. That's a first for me. I'm sorry.

It's all good. We had some great questions, so we just kept going. If you just want to go back to the presentation.

Awesome. Thank you. So yeah, I'm just going to answer your question. I had lots of time to think about it since I was gone. Yeah. So in terms of topics, first, I agree with you. The fact that I've been writing about a set of maybe 3-5 main topics. Umbrella topics on my blog helps a lot to frame the way I'm reading content. So it's kind of easy to directly see, does that fit in general with what I write about, or is it completely out there? And it's fine that I also read stuff just for pleasure, but if I read for pleasure, I'm not going to be taking notes if I'm reading a good novel or just something that is completely outside of the field of what I'm writing about. This is which is completely fine. I'm not going to have Roam open and type notes as I go because that would feel like work, which is, you know, creative, like creative work and just like relaxing, as I said, not the same thing. So that's the first way I go about it. The second is that the more you write, the more there's stuff you want to write about. So I do actually have also in my note-taking system articles that I want to write, but I feel like I still haven't formed a good opinion about them or I don't have enough information or enough data. And they're there and I can link what I take notes about back to these articles that I may want to write in the future. And right now it may feel like it's just like having these ideas that pop out, but it's really part of the writing process. At first, when I wrote my very first articles on my blog, I was being very hungry for ideas, so I would interrupt friends when we were having conversations and just be like, oh wait, wait, give me one second, I need to write this down. And I was just writing everything down all the time. Now I have kind of the opposite problem where my list of ideas of stuff I want to write about is way too long and I need to start being selective. So I think once you start having a few ideas of what you want to write about, the question you ask yourself when you take notes is basically 'Can I connect this new note, whatever I'm about to write, back to something that exists already, or would that be something that would live in complete isolation?' And chances are, if you put something in your system that lives in complete isolation, you will never stumble upon it ever again. You will never think about it ever again because it's not connected to the rest of your thinking web of sorts. So those are the main mental models that I use when I'm reading and taking notes. And for the questions, it's really anything that— either the simplest ones or the ones where I just don't understand. So here, for example, this literary question is like, what is the Riemann hypothesis? It's like, I don't know what this is. And the author wrote it like if anyone who would read the article would know, and it would be basic stuff. And I'm not a physicist, so I mathematician, sorry, so I didn't know what it was. And then some other questions are more stuff that I wonder about, or they're based on statements that an author make, like if it was obvious, and I'm like, but is it really? Isn't there something a little bit more interesting going on here? Some— something that I could write about. So those are the two main kind of questions that I write in my notes. So once I'm done processing, what's really nice is that if I go back just to the previous one, at the bottom you can see that it says like tools for systematic interconnectedness. That's an article I've been thinking about writing about. And so here is an example of what I was telling you. Every time I've been taking notes and I thought that it was relevant to this article, which is in my writing inbox, it shows up here. So it means that whenever I'm ready to sit down I have links to all of the different places where I mentioned this before in my other notes. So it makes it very, very easy to combine ideas. Again, this is literally combination of creativity here, but in the system, rather than just waiting for it to happen, I can combine all of the interesting information and thoughts and questions that I've had before and use them to write a new article. And something that hopefully hasn't been written exactly in the way I'm going to write it. And so this is really why, like, it's a different way of thinking, a different way of writing instead of being linear, which is how we're being taught to write in school. In school, you're being taught, what is your question? Great. Now write an outline. Now fill this outline with the content. Do your research at the same time, and then you need to have a conclusion, which kind of assumes that you already know exactly what you're going to write about, that you have all of the answers, that you've studied for the test, because this is what school is about: study for the test and then write exactly what your teacher is expecting you to write, because this is how you're going to have a good grade, because there's a metric saying what's good and what's not. This is different. Instead of going A, B, C, D, linear thinking, you use network thinking instead. And again, idea sex. This is all of these ideas connecting together and making idea babies and helping you write essays.

One of the things I want to add to this is that there's an element here of writing for discovery versus writing for an answer, that most of what I'm writing isn't things that I know. It is things that I have an intuition that something is interesting. And it's sort of like when you're a kid and you start exploring, and if an adult was like, "Where are you going?" You're like, "I don't know, I just thought that that was cool." And it's the same sort of thing that it's like this feeling that you have, this fingertips feeling where you're sort of navigating through the idea maze to say, "Huh, there's something over there that I think is really interesting, but I don't know what it is." And right now for me, what I'm really interested in is the history of work and sort of relationships between labor and capital and how they happened in the industrial era, and then now how those are beginning to shift into the internet era and what that means for the individual. I have no idea where I'm going to end up there. I know that that's something I'm really interested in terms of building businesses, in terms of helping people write online.. But this is an essay that I'm working on and I've called it Why Work Went Wrong. I've set a— I've planted a flag that I said, I'm gonna write 10,000 words about this. I have a big whiteboard right over here that has, okay, I have an outline here that I'm sort of trying to build off ideas, but I have no idea where I'm gonna go. And so I'm really interested in this subject. And so what I'm doing rather than school saying, look at how much I know, look at me, look at me, now give me a good grade. What I'm saying is, I'm really interested in this, and if I learn for public consumption, my ideas will be sharper and more refined, and then by teaching others, other people who've already studied this, who've already thought about this, who see things in different ways, almost like a kaleidoscope, will then come back to me and say, "David, you missed this. I really liked your point on that." And then it will set off this intellectual cascade of ideas, where then that can be some new multi-year rabbit hole that I go down and then I just benefit because the ideas happen to be on my site.

Absolutely. I actually talk about this a little bit later on. So I love that you're mentioning this, the whole like multiplayer thinking aspect of it, which is amazing. So, okay, that sounds like a lot of work, basically everything I just described. And I realize this. So I think it's very important to ask yourself how much creative work is enough creative work. Do you really want to spend your whole day doing this? Don't you have other things to do? Don't you have a life basically outside of writing? And I think most people do, and you're not supposed to spend all of your time on this. So it looks like a lot of work, but it doesn't have to be. And it's really about having the right processes in place and about being mindful of your time and your energy levels. So I just want to very briefly mention the study that I think is really interesting. It was conducted in the '50s, and it was conducted at a university where they interviewed 200 scientists and researchers. So basically knowledge workers, what we call knowledge workers today. I don't think that was a word that was that popular at the time, but this is really what it is. And what they did, very simple, is that they compared the number of hours these people were working with the number of papers they were publishing, because it's really hard to measure what productivity is, like being productive. But here in this scientific paper, they have a very rational way of going about it. How many papers do you publish? How many hours did you work? And you see the curve is quite interesting. It has this M shape, basically. Up to a certain point, up to 20 hours a week, the productivity is going up. And then it goes down. What's interesting for me, I'm French, we have the 35-hour work week in France, and this is the lowest point on the curve, so I think my government probably needs to change something up. But then it goes up again, up to 50, and then down again. For the 50 bit, I was really curious, I was like, this is weird. So I read the rest of the paper to understand, and actually this is a bit misleading because the reason why all of the scientists that are in the second part of the M up here are scientists that had lots of lab work. So they did need to be in the lab for much longer. They needed to be more hours there, sometimes just waiting in line to have time with the scanner or access to the lab, etc. So it inflated the numbers for them. So really, if you look at this curve, the highest levels of productivity here are at about 20 hours for a work week. And this is actually where you probably heard about the 4 hours of creative work per day rule that people should have. That's where it comes from, basically. If you work Monday to Friday, you should only work 4 hours per day, basically. And by hours of creative work, I don't mean hours of work, because most people in their job, they do have admin, they have emails, they have to reply to people. If you run a community, you need to to talk to members. There's lots of stuff going on, basically, but actual focused creative work such as writing, coming up with ideas, being in the flow, we, you know, we peak in terms of productivity and creativity if we only use 4 hours a day of this. So again, another proof that it's really not about quantity. There's no point in cramming your day and forcing yourself to stare at a page if you can't write, or just like trying to write as much as possible nonstop for a day from like 5:00 AM to whatever number of hours productivity gurus tell you to work for a day. It's really about consistency, and you will have way better results if instead of forcing yourself for a week to work really, really hard to the point of being tired, if instead you show up for a few hours every day, but you do this for a year, this is where you're going to really start seeing the results, and which is consistent again with what you see with these scientists. You don't do a full research paper in one week of hardcore work. You do it over a few months, a little bit of work every day, and that's what worked for them, and this is what should work for most knowledge workers. So how do you do this? To me, the best technique is time blocking. It doesn't work for everyone, but I think it's because lots of people are doing it in a way that is quite extreme. So again, if you go on productivity blogs, this is what time blocking looks like. That's your calendar. It's like all completely booked, nonstop. I see this, it gives me anxiety, seriously. So this is what my calendar looks like. It has lots of gaps in there. And the reason why it looks like this is because I only block time for things that matter.. And I don't care about filling my whole calendar up. Like, heck, actually, if my calendar looks pretty empty for a week, I'm really happy about it. I don't feel unproductive because of it. What you will see here is that I have some recurring tasks, and the main one is writing. I write first thing in the morning for an hour and a half. That's in my calendar. That's recurring, doesn't have an end date. And I've been doing this since last summer when I started writing for Nest Labs, and this consistency has been a big part of why I think the blog has been successful. And then I block time for other important things for me, like going to the gym and this kind of thing. So it's not only about work, it's really about what are the things that I know I will feel bad about not doing at the end of the week if I don't do them. And those are the only things I block time for. So in order for this to work, there are a few principles that you need to apply. So first, I mentioned that already, only block time for what matters. Be ruthless. You're not going to be more productive because you fill your calendar with lots of random stuff. So be ruthless with this. The second thing is protect your time by saying no. So once you've managed to implement time blocking for yourself, your time is really precious, so protect it. Say no. Ideally, I know lots of people say later. Don't say later if you're not going to do it. Disrespectful, just say no and move on. Like, don't put that in your calendar. Avoid multitasking. So one block in your calendar should be for one task. So I have blocks for reading, I have blocks for writing, but I don't like, you know, except if I'm really working on an article on a specific topic, I'm not going to browse Twitter and go read stuff and random stuff that's not related to what I'm doing right now. I'm very focused on one task. At a time. Take breaks. Breaks are really good. Don't feel like you're being unproductive because you're taking breaks. And create mindful routines for yourself. So as I mentioned earlier, I have stuff in there that may not feel productive to people, but sometimes I feel like I need a break, so I'm going to, you know, I book time, I book a routine to go for a walk or to go to the gym. For some people, it's just to listen to their favorite podcast or whatever, but So don't feel like every single time you spend during the day has to be spent writing because again, input, output. So think about the input.

Yeah. One of the things I want to focus on here is there's a question in the chat about how you write first thing in the morning. And it's basically implying like, wait, but don't you need to read before you actually write? And I think that there's a deep misconception here about the feedback loops of reading. If you're reading things that are hearty and that have soul and that have information content that are making you think, the feedback loops actually take years. Like something that you read 4 or 5 years ago will only begin to crystallize for you now. And it really isn't about this like huff and puff, get absolutely exhausted flow of, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, I'm going to read all the time. Oh my goodness, I'm going to read all the time. Then I'm going to write about what I just read and it's going to be crazy. I'm gonna go like this. Oh my goodness, I need to publish all the time. That's not the point at all. The point here is to read things that every single thing that comes into your mind is of ultra high quality. Then to get away from this idea of speed reading, which doesn't work, and to think of reading as something that isn't, okay, I need to consume and memorize and then regurgitate this information. But rather as something like, I'm gonna take some small bits of information that are gonna make me smarter, but that are more importantly going to allow ideas to churn in my mind. You know, it's kind of like good music. Pop music, which is the way that this question implies, is like pop reading, where you're trying to get music or articles and books that just like give you intellectual candy, and it's just sort of like fun and entertaining and you're dancing. But if you listen to classical music, what you realize— or just any kind of good music, something that isn't of the popular genre— what you realize is you can get quality. And if you listen to it more and more and more, you actually begin to hear things that you never thought you heard before. So maybe a song, like even a good more popular song, will catch you with the beat then it'll catch you with the lyrics. Then as you continue to listen, you'll say, oh my goodness, that relates to a song from 3 albums ago, and wow, that actually relates to something I'm going through. But that process will take years. And so what I'm encouraging you to do is to think of reading as something that— this like multi-year project, and not this process of exhaustion of I need to do more, I need to work harder. It is much more about applying leverage on your time with how you're reading so that when you do sit down to write, you already have those sushi high-quality fish ingredients for you to work with.

I love this. I can tell you're a writer. You're good with metaphors. But yeah, I totally agree. And as I mentioned earlier, again, remember, for two ideas to have sex, they have to be able to stay in the same room for long enough. It's not about being really quick here. So yeah, totally agree. Okay, so if you do manage to write quality content in a consistent manner, what do you get then? Because we've been all about the how, but why would you want to do this? So first, what you get is, which is amazing, like we mentioned it already, it's a you know, solo player network thinking, being able to navigate your own idea maze, having new ideas coming in together, being able to think long term about topics in a way that means that you're going to form your own ideas around them, which is not something that common when you think about it. Many people go through life without ever creating an idea of their own, without ever building on top of older ideas to add to it. Lots of people never do that in their life. So just for this, I think it's worth creating, creating and building a creative system for yourself just to be able to say that, you know, I was here and I had my own ideas and this is pretty cool already. But then you can take it a step further and go from solo network thinking to multiplayer network thinking. And this is where it starts getting really interesting, and David touched on this a little bit earlier in the chat about how writing and publishing what you write and working in public and creating in public like this creates those amazing conversations. And you start, you know, people learn from you, but you start learning from them also, and you start having conversations. I often say that reading a book by an author is like having a conversation with them, and that it's amazing that we're able to have so many conversations with authors or from 100 years ago to like 1,000 years ago, and we can read their thoughts and have this conversation with them if we decide to engage and be active in the reading process. And it's the same with the internet today. You can have the passive interaction with it where it's more about scrolling and just like, you know, watching videos and going on to the next one, or you can be an active player and have a real conversation with people. And then it starts feeding into your creative system because you read something interesting on Twitter, you save it into your reading inbox, you read it later, you start building on it. And then, you know, maybe if the author is on Twitter, you can actually— the author that inspired you to write about this in the first place, you can tag them and say, hey, I loved your article. I expanded upon your ideas a little bit. What do you think? And you can have a real conversation with them. The same then when you start publishing your articles on your blog or publishing them in your newsletter, you start building an audience of people who are waiting for you to share your work and who will also share feedback with you. And so basically being able to have this conversation is a very privileged thing that you can constantly talk about stuff that you care about with people who are also interested in the same things. This is pretty amazing, and I think it makes it worth it to put in this, this work, to put your work out there so you can connect with like-minded people. So in my case, a quick overview of stuff that has happened because of my writing. But I have like my Twitter, I have about 25,000 followers now, and I have amazing conversations there. I have met lots of people that I don't think I could have just reached out to with a cold email. But because it's Twitter and because I care a lot about these topics and write about them, makes it much easier to make new friends basically. I have the Nest Labs community of people who are all interested in mindful productivity and purposeful creativity and better thinking. And I have a Telegram group for newsletter owners where we talk about writing, etc. And basically, once you start writing regularly and publishing regularly, you are going to have an audience forming around you, and you can just wait for it to happen, or you can be a little bit more proactive. But in any case, it is going to happen because this is how curious minds communicate together, by reading stuff from other people, listening to their podcasts, etc. So the best way to start being part of these communities is to start contributing yourself. So this is for me another advantage, and one of the other reasons why you may want to do this and to write more online. And I have a public notebook also where I push, like David mentioned it a little bit earlier, but another thing that I think is quite important for me is that I don't necessarily wait until I have an amazing, like, 5,000-word essay to publish. I sometimes publish nuggets and little thoughts, and this is the same with the, you know, this multiplayer network thinking that's happening here. I have people commenting on this, giving me feedback, sending me additional links that I can add to my reading inbox. And I learn from them and they learn from me, and this is just part of the creative process of making it iterative and publishing my notes before I have a blog post that is available. And then that's the last step, that's basically publishing on the blog. So as you see, like, I have ideas that come from Twitter, from Telegram, from the Nest Labs community, then I have my public notes where it's like a little bit more refined, but it's not necessarily something that I would publish on my blog and my newsletter. And once I have a proper essay, something that I'm pretty proud of, then it goes on the blog and on the newsletter. But the reason why I call it multiplayer is that I don't necessarily wait until I have something perfect to post it. I do post my thinking in steps. I post my first ideas on Twitter and then notes on my public notebook and then the essay. So this is also something that I really encourage people to do is don't wait until— like, don't work for 6 months on something with nobody seeing it, especially if you're just beginning writing, if it's something very new for you. People who can afford to not show their work at all for 6 months before publishing anything, in general, they've been writers for quite a long time and they know what they're doing. So at the beginning, I think, make this feedback loop a little bit shorter and do show it to people, share it with fellow writers, you know, David has this amazing community, Write of Passage, like show it to people there, get their feedback, etc. But don't wait until you have something you think is perfect to publish it and show it to people.

Yeah, I think that this is something that we talk a lot about in Write of Passage. So we're talking about networked thinking here, but there's actually 3 different buckets of networked thinking that I just want to sort of split everything apart and make very visible. So there's networked thinking both in terms of our own minds. Where we're networked between all the ideas that we have and actually building this intellectual quilt, weaving it one post at a time. That's number one. The second kind of networked thinking is us with all of the authors outside of us. You know, René Descartes said that the reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries. So what we're doing here is we're going back and we are finding who else is talking about things that can contribute to our ideas. So we're networked now within our own minds, and then we're networked through time, but we're also networked through space. And so what Anne-Laure is saying here is if you go out and share your ideas, you're gonna become a lighthouse for like-minded people, and you are going to magnetically attract all of these people. And to add to the third leg of the tripod that is network thinking, she is then encouraging all these people to come to actually help her improve and iterate, refine and develop her ideas. And it is through those three different kinds of network thinking that we begin to take advantage of the internet.

Absolutely. So yeah, so this is basically exactly what you just explained. This amazing recap. Beat you to it. And the one thing I would add is that, you know, you can see how there's a progression between those 3 different steps, but it doesn't have to stop here. It can then go beyond, like, you don't have to stop. It can be a lifelong process of exploring what are other levels of of sharing your thinking with other people. And, you know, I've seen quite a few people who started with Twitter and then they had a blog and now they're writing a book, basically. So Thiago is one of them, for example, and I've seen a few other people doing this. And for some people, maybe it would be creating a course or maybe becoming a public speaker. But there's so many other options that are obviously not the ones you're going to start with if you haven't published anything yet. But that can be options in the future. And really, for me, multiplayer network thinking is about creating more options for yourself. And you don't know yet today when you're getting started what they're going to be. I didn't know when I started writing all of the doors that this would open. And this is fine. I think instead of trying to guess what's going to happen, just apply consistency, make sure to publish quality content, keep on doing it, and then you're going to be surprised by the opportunities that are going to open to you. And so one last thing, my favorite expression ever, and I always repeat it to people: remember that this is basically a learning process, so fail like a scientist. Scientists, they don't design experiments knowing exactly what's going to happen. They don't design experiments to achieve a specific goal. They design experiments to answer a question, and this is really what it is about here. Ask yourself, you know, would I be able to write an essay about this? Like, would I be able to do this? Like, do I have something interesting to say here? Can I maybe combine those two ideas together and see if there's a third angle that I could bring to the table here? And then that's basically your hypothesis. Can I do this or not? Let's try it. You experiment, you see, you know, How you do it, etc. And then you observe the results. What could have been better? What's the feedback from people? What could I improve? Was it hard? Was it easy? Are there any ways that I could make it, maybe make it easier for myself or more interesting next time? And then you form a new hypothesis and you rinse and repeat. And for me, the creative process is more like that rather than having this linear, perfect recipe that you're going to follow and that's going to tell you step by step what to do. You will need, you know, you can have as much guidance as possible. And it is amazing to have people who've been there, done that, and can tell you what worked for them. But in the end, you will still need to put in the work and you will probably need to try and you will probably need to fail and you will need to try again. And to me, this is really the difference between writers and just people who wrote some stuff. Writers are people who probably wrote a lot of really bad stuff. And they kept on going and today they write better, but they failed and they kept on going and they kept on writing and they kept on publishing. And you ask any author about stuff that they wrote a few years ago, they will all tell you that they're quite ashamed of what they wrote and that it's a good thing. So I think this is really something to remember here.

I think that there's a general principle that has emerged from this conversation in how interestingness is a compass for where you should take your writing. You know, a lot of the questions as I look at the Q&A here, they're like, what should I do? How should I think about this? Should I read this much? Should I write this much? And look, the fact of the matter is the best way to be interesting to other people is to be interesting to yourself. And if you are continually surprising yourself, if you are continually going down these rabbit holes of, oh, that's really interesting, and then always raising your standards for what an interesting idea is, you'll realize that just the byproduct of what you produce will be better than what you could have done if you had set this rational plan. So what you can see is that revolutionary ideas come from evolutionary thinking.

Absolutely. Yeah, I'm basically done. I'm not necessarily going to go through all of this. This is just a recap and we can keep it in the background. But those are the key ideas that I talked about here. Forget inspiration, try idea sex instead. Forget linear thinking, use network thinking instead. Go from solo player to multiplayer. Don't focus on quantity, think about consistency. And don't try and give yourself crazy goals, just focus on the process and keep on showing up. That's it.

There we go. Thank you. That was fantastic. I have a question for you around feedback. How are you— how do you take feedback? How do you actively solicit it? And what are some of the structures that you've built into your life to actually develop ideas? Is writing a very solo process for you, or are you pretty social, actually having conversations? Getting feedback before you actually start writing?

Yeah, so in terms of feedback, I think the— so what I don't have, I know some people have this, but I don't have this, is that I'm not part of a writing, like, mastermind or any group like this where I show actual drafts straight, like, and have people comment on it. But this is also because I've been writing for probably, like, 15 years. So I, you know, I kind of, like, know how my mind works. And I usually do have an idea of when things are wrong. What I do though, so two things. First, again, I publish a lot of my ideas in a public notebook, on Twitter, etc. That creates organic conversations where I get answers. One thing that if you want to get lots of feedback, post something that you think is wrong on Twitter and you will get lots of answers for free. It's like free consulting from all of the internet, basically. So So just by being on Twitter, posting what I think, posting on my public notebook, I get lots of feedback. And then time to time when I'm a little bit stuck, I will send my draft to a couple of friends, but I'm being very selective. I send it to a couple of friends that I know know about what I'm wondering about, or that I admire for the way they think and who have helped me in the past get unstuck, basically. So I will do that sometimes and be like, hey, I can't articulate this, or I feel like I'm, you know, I'm not conveying the idea that I'm trying to convey, etc. Or sometimes I will just send it to them and be like, can you read this and then tell me what you understood? Which is also very helpful to see if what they understand is what I wanted to say. So this is how I implement feedback in my process.

How have you thought about developing ideas and language around your work? Things like metacognition, things like thinking about thinking, a brand like Nest Labs. How do you actually think about— to go back to the beginning of the conversation— the things that you're actually known for? How deliberate has that process been, or has it been emergent? And then, assuming it has been somewhat deliberate, how do you help yourself navigate into new waters that are inside of terms and ideas and sandboxes that you are actually creating yourself rather than ones created by other people.

Yeah, I think it's very similar to the concept of diffused and, uh, diffused and focused thinking where when you're thinking, you basically always alternate between being super focused, like, so really focused, you're trying trying to solve the problem actively. You're in front of a question, you're trying to crack it, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And then you leave it away, and all of a sudden, that's what we call shower thoughts. You just go like, oh, eureka, I got it! And so that's because you let your mind do the work in the background. That's called diffuse thinking. And our brain basically always alternates between focused and diffuse thinking. And I think when it comes to creativity and to the topics that I write about, it's a bit similar where the diffuse mode of writing would be, oh, this is interesting. Let me explore this. I'm going to write about this. And I just like follow my curiosity and I write about it. And then the focused mode would be when I notice there's a pattern. I've been writing about similar stuff for a few months and I'm like, is there a term that I would be able to use in a more intentional way to put them in their category that both makes sense for my readers, but will also help me position myself as someone who knows about it. Because I know about this, I've been reading, writing all of these articles about it. It's just not visible at the moment. So for me, using one term, an umbrella term for several articles that I wrote about a topic, is just a way to make that expertise visible to readers because they're like, oh, She wrote now, you know, 20 or 25 articles about mindful productivity specifically, so she must know about it.

I'm gonna ask you a tough question. Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason, has this idea that all thinkers are regional thinkers. How do you think that being French has influenced your writing and your style of creativity?

Okay, so the bad and the good. I'm going to start with the bad, which is something I've been fighting a lot with, is that if you read French, in French sentences tend to be really long. We love long sentences in French, and I see Becca nodding like, yeah, it's something I don't really know why, but in English I feel like simplicity and being able to articulate something in a few words is valued, whereas In French, we say "flurry," like "flurry language," or whatever. It doesn't mean the same thing as in English. I think "flurry" means something else in English. But in French, it's really about decorating and making nice and making it long. And the longer sentence you can make that still makes sense and that has a musicality to it is something that is very appreciated. So when I write in English, I constantly have to remind myself that this is English and I need to cut it and I need to be short and crisp, etc. So that's for the bad. For the good, I think that there's a very long tradition of thinkers and philosophers in France, and so I don't know about other countries, but philosophy is a mandatory discipline that you have to study from 16 to 18. So it's something that every single French person that went to school up until 18 years old had to study. So we had to read Kant, and we had to read like from Plato to Kant to Descartes to all of these guys. That was basically basic reading that we had to do, and I think it's impossible to be a writer and having been forced— not forced, I really enjoyed reading these— but having had to read all of these from a young age to not be influenced. So I do value a lot arguments that are explained clearly I have to fight against myself to write it shortly, but I get really annoyed when something is vague or it doesn't make sense. And that's something I'm trying to really do in my writing. I will sometimes spend a lot of time rephrasing one sentence because it just sounds bullshit, and I never want to have anything that is bullshit in my writing. So that's how I've been influenced by French Fires at First.

That is an outstanding answer. One of the things that I really like about studying philosophy is the dialectical mode of thinking that it gives you. All philosophers are wrong, but some are useful. And what you find is that philosophy helps you take an idea to its— to its farthest possible extreme. And then you just assume that when you're reading a philosopher that they're wrong. So critique is embedded into the philosophical mode of discourse. And what you realize is that you sort of have to swing like a hammock from one philosopher, then sort of get to the opposite side. And it is only through that swings of like thesis, antithesis, synthesis of ideas that you actually begin to discover truth. And I think that a lot of the harshness of social media, like if you look at somebody of how they're talking on Twitter, for example, it tends to be very harsh. It tends to be, "This is my opinion. This is what I'm saying." And in order for that not to drive you crazy, you need to ask, "How is this wrong?" and "How is this useful? What can I learn from this idea that offends me? What can I learn from this idea that's sort of jarring and daunting and different from how I ordinarily think?" And I think that a lot of the things that are wrong in terms of public discourse is our very— basically, we've lost this ability to think dialectically, to think of how an idea could be useful and wrong, and to assume that that's the case in the first place, and just to hop on people at the beginning for just being wrong. And I think that a lot of what is required for interestingness is paradox, and that we're taught to think of truth in terms of logic, in terms of right and in terms of wrong. But philosophy begins to see that a lot of truths— and same with religion— they begin to see that a lot of the deepest truths in humanity are rooted in paradox. And it's only through that mode of thinking where you can hold two ideas in your mind and not go crazy that you can actually access those kingdoms of knowledge.

Absolutely. And, and it's, uh, It's something that's actually also true of science in general. And a mistake that people make a lot with science is thinking that science is finding a definite truth. But when you think about it, we've been going from being wrong to being less wrong. But, you know, if we thought that we were right with science, we would just stop today. We're right. We're done. Boom. Job finished. No need to do more science or more research. So the reason why science is progressing and the reason why we're progressing as humanity in general is because we're able to question whatever is being said by other people or the beliefs of other people in a thoughtful, constructive way. And we're like, okay, this is wrong. Like, is there a way to be less wrong, or is it compatible with another way of thinking, or is there more to it that we didn't think about yet? And you talked about paradoxes, and it's just super interesting to think that one of the biggest problems in science today, when like quantum physics and Einstein's theory of relativity, they're completely paradoxical. So right now, if you're a scientist, you have to believe two things are true. They're both valid so far as we know, and we have to live with this paradox. And so I absolutely agree with you that to me, being able to make progress either in public debate discourse or in science or really anything as human beings is being about being able to hold two ideas that may seem contradictory in our mind at the same time and to examine them without going completely crazy.

Yes, absolutely. To return to something a bit more practical, how do you think about distributing your work? So you've published your work, but there isn't a— if I write this, they will read this idea online. How do you actually think about distribution? I know you have the community. I know you have the newsletter. What else are you focused on and how would you summarize your frameworks that you're using to actually get your ideas out into the world?

Yeah. So basically it really depends on what stage the idea is at. If the idea is very, very early, very half-baked and I'm not quite sure if I'm going to write it yet, it's going to be shared as a tweet. Then if I have a little bit more thoughts, it's going to be in my public notebook. And then if I have something a little bit more, you know, I worked on for a little bit longer, it's going to be on the blog. To distribute the articles that are on the blog, I have several channels. The very first one, the most important one, and the one where it always goes there for sure is my newsletter. So this is the, you know, I have this kind of like contract with my readers that they don't have to worry about following me on Twitter or trying to catch like whatever I'm publishing everywhere. If they're subscribed to the newsletter, they know they're not going to miss anything. So that's really for me the main pillar. Then I post in some communities sometimes, but I'm being very mindful about it. And it's really only about, only in case the topic is very relevant to what that community cares about. So I don't write that much about these topics anymore, but when I used to write about writing newsletters, very meta, I would post, for example, in the newsletter group because that would be relevant to them. So that kind of stuff. And then I always try to make sure that I can expand my reader base because if I only posted on my newsletter or the groups that I'm a part of or on Twitter, I would just kind of keep on engaging with the same people, maybe a few new people, but it would still be mainly targeted at my existing audience. So I also post in other places such as in my case, pretty relevant, not relevant for everyone, but on Hacker News. So on other platforms like this, there are public, sometimes on IndieHackers, etc., where I know that entrepreneurs are hanging out. And that's because in my audience, I have lots of knowledge workers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. But I guess if someone is writing about another topic like gardening or whatever, they would post in forums that are more relevant to what they're writing about. So, yeah, I try to make sure to have a healthy mix of directly sending these to my audience, but also using channels that have people there that don't know me yet so I can keep on growing my community.

I've seen you begin to incorporate visuals into your writing, sort of like the bucket that we saw today. How have you thought about incorporating visuals? Where are you taking inspiration from and what are you using to get better at that?

Yeah, I actually started doing this with like probably the second or third article I ever published on Nest Lab. So I've been doing this since the very beginning. I think first, okay, the very first reason I did this was very practical. The very first time I did it, it was because I needed something to show up on social media when I was posting it. I needed a visual here. And I just thought that was interesting real estate and that instead of instead of putting a random picture, I could put something that was really about the content of what I wrote about. But then I started realizing that these were super helpful to capture an idea, and sometimes I actually use these in parallel of writing. I will be writing and I will be struggling to formulate an idea, and I will stop for a second and just try and draw it. And if I can put it in this little illustration, it means that clear in my head. So there's this dialogue sometimes between the illustration and the article itself. And then the reason why I've kept on doing them is because I get lots of positive feedback from readers who tell me that they're super helpful, so I keep on using them. In terms of improving, they're fairly simple, so it's not like, you know, I make them in Google Slides, by the way, I'm not using any special software, so if anyone here wants to also do cool illustrations. You can just do them in Google Sites if you don't want to invest in software. I just like, I just try to, you know, again, I read content where I see some of these. Like, I know that James Clear has some of them, for example. So I think by just making sure that I consume content that has nice visuals, like, it just gives you inspiration. But because for me the visuals are not the main thing I'm trying to improve. It's my writing. I definitely don't have a creative— a creativity system as polished as I have for my writing. So it's more about reading illustrating books and reading blogs that have these, etc. And I'm letting the diffuse mode of my brain doing the job here. I'm not trying to control it.

I think that there's a theme here of clarity in that once you begin to switch mediums, your brain can actually see what you're trying to say in new ways. And it actually— I just realized this— in the same way that conversation can get us unstuck, the same thing you can do is just switch mediums. And also you can switch context too. You can go from thinking in your office to thinking on a walk to thinking in a coffee shop. And by then switching the places that you are working through ideas, you are then removing the blockers from your brain. So what I would think of here is a lot of ideas, the way that your brain works tends to be like a maze. And what happens is you have in one part of your brain the original seed of an idea, and in the other part you have this basically where you want to end up. And when you think through an idea, you have to traverse through this maze, but you end up getting stuck You run into some dead end here. Woo! Gotta go back. Then you go, oh wow, I have some momentum.

Woo!

Gotta go back. And so then you're trying to get to that endpoint, but every single time that you switch context, every single time you have an interesting conversation, every single time that you switch mediums, like going from writing to drawing, you begin to lower the walls in your maze that then allows you to get from point A to point B faster.

Absolutely. I actually wrote an article about this and I call it mindful context switching because I think it's very important to know that it's not the same as multitasking. Multitasking is doing two different tasks that have nothing to do together at the same time. Really bad, really unproductive. You're not going— you're basically going to do a bad job at both of them, whereas mindful context switching, which is exactly what you described, is I still have the same goal, I still have the same task, I'm just going to approach it from a slightly different angle. And for example, I have a friend who's actually a writer. She published a book and she's writing on her second book. For her, her mindful context switching method is that if she can't write and if she's stuck, she will take her voice note recorder from her phone and talk to herself and try to explain the idea to herself and has an automatic transcription. Thing in it so she can then just read the transcript and like, oh, actually, that's exactly what I wanted to say. Weird that I couldn't do it while writing, but I could just say it out loud. So, yes, definitely mindful context switching is super helpful.

Yeah, I'll take you and go one further. So in Write of Passage, we have on Saturdays, we do this thing called CrossFit for writing where everybody in the course, we all get together., and we go from start to finish on an article in 2 hours. And so it's a 9-step framework that I developed for doing that. I know it sounds ludicrous for the average person to be able to do that that fast. But what we do is we sit down with notes, and then you go through a series of conversations where you have a conversation, explain it to somebody else, then you write it. And what's interesting is the brain evolved to learn how to read and write quite late. We've only learned how to do this in the last 500 years, and even after Gutenberg invented the printing press, only a small percentage of people could read and write. And those who did, like Martin Luther, who wrote the 95 Theses, had a huge impact because books were so scarce. My point in saying this is that speaking and thinking of ideas in speech is rooted much deeper into— in terms of the evolution of human consciousness. So what you realize is in CrossFit for Writing, what we do by forcing people to speak, it helps you structure ideas, which you can't do when you're just sitting down on the page. So what we do is we give people these 2 to 5 minute blocks to just talk through their ideas, and then we say, go right back to the page and write down exactly what you said. And through the process of speaking, two interesting things happened. I mentioned the idea that it automatically structures ideas for you. But the other one that our students realize is when you speak, the things that you don't mention when you can still convey an idea, those are the things that you should delete. So by virtue of speaking, you know both how to structure your essays and what to delete from them, which is why the system works so well.

This is an amazing method, and, and I think this is why lots of people find it helpful helpful to just have a chat with someone when they're stuck. So, you know, I've never heard about it used for writing. This is really cool.

Well, Anne-Laure, thank you very much. This was utterly fantastic and exceeded all my expectations. And I say that I had big expectations because I'm a huge fan of your work. So thank you very much.

Thanks so much for having me.

Bye, everybody.