Mindframing for Entrepreneurs with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

¡Hey everyone!

And welcome to Bright and Early, the podcast for people building early-stage startups.

I'm your host, Ryan Ray. I talk to entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and marketing pros to learn what works, what doesn't, and why, giving you at least one thing to apply to your business first thing tomorrow. My guest today is Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Anne-Laure is a founder, writer, and speaker. She studies neuroscience at King's College London and also spends her time building products and writing about wellness, creativity, and culture at Ness Labs. Anne-Laure, welcome to Bright and Early.

Thanks so much for having me.

Completely my pleasure. You, uh, you showed up on my radar first when, uh, Jane Portman tweeted out your Joy of Missing Out article. And so I've been hooked there. I went and read that article, found it was very interesting, and then saw that you had all this other stuff already posted and have just been digging in. So could you just tell us about Nest Labs, what you're up to there, what you're up to in general?

Sure. It's very interesting you're mentioning this article because it's been one of my most popular ones. So it's interesting that's how you find me. In terms of what I'm doing at Nest Labs, I just to kind of like backtrack a little bit, but I used to work at Google and then I started a company, a startup, which didn't work out. And Nest Labs has been kind of my sandbox since then to explore and try new things, launch new products. Experiment. So what I do at Nest Labs is that I build products and I write content that is all focused on wellness and productivity. I deeply believe that it's possible to do a lot and achieve one's goals without losing your sanity. And having worked both in London and Silicon Valley and having seen and experienced myself burnout, this is something I care a lot about. And, and I, I think it's possible to create products and to educate people so they don't have to go through this. So this is kind of the mission I have at Nest Labs. And I do this sometimes on my own and sometimes collaborating with other people.

So what percentage of your time would you say in a given week or month is spent writing and researching, doing that sort of work versus building out an idea, creating a new product?

Yeah, that's a great question. So I basically have every morning, I book an hour and a half. It's in my calendar. It's the first thing I do in the morning and I write. I both do it because I think it's one of the greatest ways to connect with people, but also because I do have an interesting need for it. So I do that usually from 8 in the morning to 9:30. I just write and then I publish this. And then the rest of my day is filled with either ideating, coding, but also consulting. So lots of the ideas I write about are things that companies are interested in and that they'd like to teach their employees. So I sometimes do workshops or one-to-one consulting over Zoom. So, and this is pretty flexible, basically. The only one thing I have that is fixed every day in my calendar is writing in the morning, and then the rest is consulting, building, coding, all of that.

How did you, how did you just come to that practice that an hour and a half in the morning it's writing? Is that, is that something that you would recommend to everybody, or is it the sort of thing that's like, No, Brian, you might need to schedule 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM and go to the gym. Like, that is your thing that keeps you grounded. Or 1:00 to 3:30, you need to be coding. Like, how did you arrive at that particular practice for yourself? And how would you advise other people to find what their fixed calendar activity might be?

Yeah, it's very interesting you're asking it this way because that's actually the only thing I recommend is to book that time. So if it's writing you want to do, if it's going to the gym, if it's— I wouldn't leave it to chance. I wouldn't expect for it to just happen. So you have to book it. And then it's more of a matter of like, what else is going on in your life, basically. So in my case, I have a lot going on through the day. I have clients that are in different time zones, and I found that 8 to 9:30 is usually pretty quiet. So it's pretty nice. I don't usually have calls around that time. People usually don't expect to have meetings that early in my time zone. So this is what works for me. But if you're someone who has a full-time job, for example, and sometimes, you know, after lunchtime is better for you, that's completely fine. So I would tell people to just experiment with it. You can have one week where you book it in the morning or in the afternoon. It doesn't really matter and see how easy it is for you to stick to it. But the one thing that I 100% recommend is to put whatever you feel is essential, something that you would feel bad about not doing at the end of the week if you didn't do it. This needs to go into your calendar and this needs to have this fixed time that is is 100% dedicated to it.

That's, yeah, that's interesting. And that's really helpful.

I am trying to get a better handle on my routine and calendar and schedule. And so as you were saying that, that's why I was really curious about that. Why, I wanna go back to, so the Joy of Missing Out article.

Yeah.

You mentioned that it's one of your most popular articles. Why do you think that it is What about it do you think has connected and resonated well with so many people?

Yeah, I think we're going through something pretty unique. Our generation, I mean, where whatever you do, you're also very aware of what everyone else is doing. So the previous generation, you could just stay home, read a book, go to the park, do your thing basically, and just enjoy yourself. But We're so connected nowadays that even if you try to get away and focus on your own thing, you will have notifications or a feed that you can scroll that gives you real-time updates into what other people are doing. And it's a very natural behavior for human beings to compare themselves to each other. So you will be like, oh, I'm doing this, but this person is doing that. Is this better? Am I missing on something. So this is why FOMO has become one of the most popular expressions that has been used the past few years, having massive FOMO because people, other people seem to do things that are more interesting than what you're currently doing. And I think the article I wrote resonated with people because it's all about claiming back your time and all about making the conscious choice of disconnecting from social media and deciding that the right thing for you right now is to spend time alone or doing things that really matter to you and doing them because you want to do them and not because society is pressuring you into doing the latest thing, attending the latest exhibition, and always, you know, keeping up with what's going on, basically. So I think the reason why this article is so popular is because it really resonates with lots of the stuff our generation is going through.

Well, it was really good.

I got a lot of things in it that completely resonated. I think one thing I wanted to ask you about it is that I often, I sometimes find myself swinging too far in the other direction of like, of not necessarily having this fear of missing out. I know that there's always more to do than I'll ever be able to do. Yeah, but that from time to time it is, it is good to push yourself, like to get out of, get out of your comfort zone, try something new, do something that you wouldn't normally. That sometimes is spurred on from seeing one of your friends doing it and sharing about it. So what, what, what thoughts or what advice do you have on that? I totally agree.

I, and yeah, I totally agree. And Despite the fact that I love staying home and just geeking out on my laptop, I'm actually a pretty social person. Um, and so I, yes, I totally agree with you. I think the difference and what's really important is to be mindful of the reason why you're going to go out and do a certain activity. Are you doing it because you're pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and trying something new and as you know, it is a way of growing as a person. So this is great. Or are you doing it because you feel pressure to do it? You feel like you're going to be judged because you're the only one in your group of friends who hasn't seen that movie or attended that exhibition or, you know, went to that dinner, etc. So it's— I'm not saying that you should always push back on doing things with friends. What I'm saying is that you should ideally try to always ask yourself, why do you want to do this? Yeah.

Yeah, that's so good.

You—

so at NessLab, nesslabs.com, Ness with two S's, listeners. So you have this handbook called The Beginner's Guide to Mind Framing.

And it's really— it's super readable. It's very like straightforward, super good. And in it, You ask, why do we struggle so much to accomplish our goals? And we do. So yes, why, why do we struggle so much to accomplish our goals, Anne-Laure?

It's, yeah, it's, I think it's something like 90% of people never manage to actually achieve their New Year's resolutions. Which is quite interesting. It's mostly everyone can't do it. So it's quite interesting. So I think the reason why that's the case is that we focus a lot on the end goal rather than focusing on the process. And this is really what mindframing is about. So we very often give ourselves goals that are very ambitious, um, that are also very exciting. But, uh, in order to achieve these goals, we— it usually entails a very complex process and we kind of get lost in the weeds and it never happens. We lose motivation, uh, in the process. So this is, why I really advocate for committing to something you can do every day instead of focusing on the end goal. So instead of saying, my goal is to become a developer, I would say coding every day. My goal is to become an author. No, I will just write every day. And I think if you do these things every day, you will start seeing some patterns. Emerge. And you will also start knowing enough about the topic that you're trying to learn or the thing that you're trying to achieve to start making educated guesses. And the keyword here is educated. Before you get started, you have no idea what you're doing.

Right.

And so your goals are— they don't make sense basically, because you have no idea what it entails to get there. Whereas if you're just like, okay, I'm going to start coding every day or writing every day, if you start writing every day, you're going to start noticing that maybe your sweet spot is 700-word articles. That's where you feel very efficient and you communicate at your best. And maybe you're going to start noticing topics that you're very interested in. If you start coding, you're going to notice that actually frontend is more your thing. And so you can get more into this and then you can design a goal that makes sense for yourself. But I think, Starting with the process rather than starting with the end goal is a really good way to actually achieving them.

And you also talk about 3 mindframes that are essential. You talk about growth mindset, metacognition, and self-authorship. So can you define each of those and, and describe why they're essential to eventually achieving your goals?

For sure, yes. So the first one, growth mindset as opposed to fixed mindset. It's pretty simple and it's been a bit overused in my opinion, but it is actually a really good mind frame to have in order to achieve your goals. So growth mindset means that you believe that you can achieve anything with enough hard work and you see any challenge as a temporary setback, something that you can overcome to grow yourself as a person. Whereas someone who's in a fixed mindset will think that they have those kind of like predefined abilities and they have to basically try to do the most, achieve the most they can based on these fixed abilities. So someone with a fixed mindset will tend at work to optimize the way they present themselves based on the abilities that they think they have. Whereas someone with a growth mindset will feel more comfortable making mistakes, trying new things, because the end goal is to grow and not to seem like someone who is the most competent person on the team. So that's growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Metacognition, which sounds like a very fancy word, just means knowing about knowing. Okay. So instead of, you know, blindly learning new stuff, it's taking a step back and study the way you learn. What's the best way to learn for you? How do you learn best? What are the tools that work best for you? What are the strategies that work best for you? So it's just taking that step back and learning about the way you learn. That's metacognition, which is super important. Lots of people tend to jump in, jump in straight. Into learning and cramming and like learning lots of stuff. But if you don't know what's the best way for you to learn and remember stuff, that's not going to be as efficient. And the last one, self-authorship, is the belief that you can define your own life and your own values and who you are outside of the frameworks that are given to you by society. So instead of responding to external pressure to choose a certain career or to behave in a certain way, self-authorship means that you believe you can be your own person. Yeah.

Okay.

So first a question about metacognition and then another one about self-authorship. So on metacognition, is that, is that related to or the same as like emotional self-awareness, being, you know, socially aware of how, of conversations, how things are flowing, or that, that type of self-awareness? Or does metacognition, is it meaning specifically, this is how I think, this is how I learn, this is how, these are the things that I know and don't know, are they related at all?

So the only way they're related, as you mentioned it, is that they're both forms of self-awareness.

Okay.

Yes, totally. Both forms of self-awareness. Emotional self-awareness, as you can say in the words, about emotion, and metacognition is about cognition. So really about thinking. Okay. Really about thinking. Yeah.

Yeah.

So how, how does somebody get better at accurate metacognition or doing metacognition well?

I'm not sure exactly how to describe it.

Like, yes, how do I get better at that?

So first, I am going to— I am absolutely not affiliated to them, but I'm just going to recommend it because it's an excellent course. It's actually the best-selling course on Coursera.

Okay.

Out of all of the courses. And it's called Learning How to Learn. And it's, it's excellent and it's free. So it's, yeah, it's completely free and it's really good. So I would say that if someone listening to this is very interested in metacognition, I would recommend taking that course. I took it and it's really good. And then it's, there are lots of different strategies, but one of the things I thought like helped me a lot, for example, was journaling. So just reflecting back on the way I learned something. So if I— so I learned how to code earlier this year, and once a week I would just kind of like write down what I learned, but also how I felt about the experience, how easy it was, what I felt was hindering my progress. And, uh, and little by little like this, I started kind of, you know, redesigning the way I learned. And it really was from things that were very close to the content, such as I noticed that taking notes on paper weirdly worked better for me. So that's one thing I changed. I was taking notes on Google Docs before, and so I did that. But also I noticed that I worked best when I was at my desk rather than on the kitchen table. So I started changing that too. So the two things I would say is like there are lots of like very complex strategies that would take a 2-hour podcast to go through. So I think Learning How to Learn is a great course to learn all of the strategies. But if someone doesn't want to do this, the simple act of taking the time to reflect and think about the way you learn and what worked and what didn't and adapting your the way you learn based on this is a great way to approach this.

Yeah, no doubt. I mean, yeah, it's about self-awareness. And so self-reflection is key there. Hey friends, it's a good time to pause and let you know that Bright and Early is brought to you by transistor.fm. Besides being a really easy to use podcast hosting service. I also really like the way that Justin and John, the guys behind the software, are running their company. As I'm talking here with Anne-Laure about wellness, creativity, and entrepreneurship, those are all things that Justin and John are focused on with Transistor. They, they talk on a pretty regular basis about how they want to be sure that Transistor promotes mindfulness and awareness. Those are things that that I also value, and I am proud to host my show with them. And so if that, if that resonates with you, if what I'm talking about here with Anne-Laure resonates with you and you're thinking about starting a podcast for your business, just go to transistor.fm and let them know that Brian sent you.

Okay.

So, um, question about self-authorship.

Because the idea that we have, you know, free will— or I guess let me reframe it— the suggestion that we do not have free will is somewhat in vogue in certain, you know, intellectual circles right now, that we are completely dictated by chemical reactions, our responses based on our upbringing and our context, and just we're just a system responding to previous feedback, right? So what are, what are your thoughts on that and how this, this idea of self-authorship and empowerment is actually critical and essential?

This is super interesting, and especially because, as you mentioned, I'm studying neuroscience. So this is a very interesting question, and I felt like the answer was in your question already because you said that We're a system, uh, basically reacting to constant feedback. And I think this is the key here. I do believe personally that we are a very, very complex system, uh, replying to feedback. But I also like that you mentioned constant feedback. So I don't think that anything that happened to us in the past will define everything that will happen to us in the future. And I think that any way we change our environment or behavior or habits today can impact the way the system will function in the future. And this is very important to me because it does take— our body and our brain takes new feedback every day and adapts to it. So this is the very important part for me is that yes, it's a very complex machine, but it is taking in new information every day and reacting and acting based on this. So we do, I do think that we have free will in the sense that we can decide what kind of feedback we give to our minds. And we can't really predict how we're going to react to it, but we can do A/B testing every day and see what works and what doesn't and just test it basically. And neuroscience is still very, you know, compared to other types of science, it's still pretty young. So there's lots of stuff that we don't know, but it doesn't prevent anyone to experiment with their own mind on a daily basis. And see what works for them and what doesn't.

Right.

And it feels like that answer ties back to your previous response about focusing on the process rather than the goal. Like if my goal is to be able to, you know, I don't know, run a 10K in under a certain amount of time, well, I'm going to fail on that today and tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And, and so by, by kind of succumbing to that feeling, as opposed to saying, okay, over time— that's, that's in like in the physical sense— and taking it back to the mind, over time, if I continually give it a new piece of feedback every single day and retrain it, reframe things, and have a different mindset, over time, eventually I will start to see those things change, and it will feel as if I have I will have changed my mindset and practiced some self-authorship, but it takes a long time.

Exactly. And, you know, I love that you're saying this because one of my favorite expressions is fail like a scientist.

Okay.

And it's really about that. It's exactly what you just described. Scientists, they don't just do the experiment and it works. They try it and it fails. And then they try it again, changing a little component of the experiment and it fails again. And they try it again and it fails again and it fails and fails and fails over and over again until it works. So it's really about that. It's really about trusting the process and just keeping on trying and, you know, changing a tiny thing every day and testing it and see what works and what doesn't. And at some point it will start working out and you will, you will feel it. You will know that it's starting to work out and you will do more of what is working and less of what is not working. But it's the same way scientists run experiments, the way we run our lives. If there was a perfect manual telling us exactly step by step what we have to do in order to succeed, It would probably not be as fun, right?

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

So I'm glad you, I'm glad you brought up that, uh, that phrase, fail like a scientist, because that, that is from another one of your articles that, um, I really enjoyed. It's about fear of failure, right?

Yes.

Um, and so yeah, I wanted to ask a couple questions about that because such a big part of entrepreneurship or really any big risk that someone might take in their career journey.

Yeah.

The, like, the possibility of failure is a pretty big deterrent. Like, it's there, like some leap that you're willing to take, or that it may not work out.

Yes.

And so I guess just kind of talk about that a little bit.

Like, why, why is the fear of failure so bad? Or why do you perceive it as bad as opposed to, no, actually, this is an evolutionary thing that's kind of given me some feedback saying, hey, this might be risky, you might want to just hang tight with status quo. Why do you look at that fear as being a negative?

It's funny that you mentioned, is this an evolutionary thing? And it is. Because we're, we're social animals, right? Right. We have this very strong need to be accepted by other people. And this is probably part of the reason why we're, comparatively speaking, doing so well as a species. The problem is that lots of the fears that we have developed a very long time ago when we needed them to survive in the world make absolutely no sense anymore today. So this is also why, for example, lots of people have a fear of public speaking. Whereas, you know, rationally speaking, when you get on stage, that no one in the public or in the audience is going to eat you alive. There's nothing like that is going to happen. But still your heart is pounding and you have this knot in your stomach and you're sweating and you have all of these physical reactions, even though there's nothing to be afraid of. But in nature, having a bunch of strangers/other animals circling you and all looking at you was a big sign of danger. So we still have this in our head. And so for the fear of failure, it's also very similar. We, in the past, we needed as part of a social group to be considered a useful member of that group.

Right.

Because useful members would get more food and would be protected, etc. Today we have, unfortunately not enough yet, but more systems that protect us. So it's not as dangerous to fail, at least for people who have a safety net. But we still have this fear of failure that is deeply anchored inside us. And so I do think it's something that's evolutionary. And this is also why it's so hard to get rid of it. Right.

Yeah, that, that So that makes complete sense in terms of the sense of feeling the need to feel like you belong, like you're valued, like you're part of the, part of that group. Yeah.

And so, and that's what would, that's what would hold, that's what would hold you back. And I pulled it up because you've got this, you quote Seth Godin as well in the article, the cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing. So let me say that again: the cost of being wrong is less than the cost of doing nothing. So that, that is right. I just want to play devil's advocate. That's right if you are— if you're discontent with your status quo. Like, what if I'm— what if actually, no, I'm pretty happy with my status quo? The cost of being wrong would be that I'm putting all of this at stake and somehow So how can we think about structuring these like fail like a scientist type experiments so that I'm exposed to the upside without putting, you know, the kind of foundation of my status quo at stake?

Does that make sense? Yeah, totally. I want to say first that a lot of the content that I write is for entrepreneurs and not everyone has to be one. And so if someone is really happy with, you know, their life at this point, and they don't feel the need to create a company or take that risk, it's completely fine. So that's one thing, but to answer your actual question, but how can you kind of like, you know, explore and innovate without necessarily having to feel that fear, which is a complete, completely natural one. This is also why I'm a huge fan of side side projects. And I think anyone who feels the need to create something should first start with a side project. There's no need to quit your job straight away.

Totally.

And take that huge risk because it is a huge risk and not everyone is single with a safety net. Like lots of people have kids, have, you know, a student loan or or just not a lot of money and not everyone should have to. There's this very toxic narrative that I see a lot in the Silicon Valley circles about this kind of like supposed correlation between your passion and motivation for your startup and the fact that you're willing to quit everything else and just dedicate your life to it. And I think that's very dangerous. I think that it's absolutely great to have a full-time job, feeling secure and being able to try things out, experiment, launch a side project, see how it goes. And by see how it goes, I mean both see how it goes in terms of building this business. Is it a successful one? Is it something that people want, but also how's it going for yourself? Do you actually enjoy the process? Do you, Do you enjoy not having someone telling you exactly what to do every day? Because that can be very scary to have to decide for yourself every day what you're supposed to do. Do you, how do you cope with the uncertainty in terms of revenue? Because you're going to switch from a salary that you get every month to some months where you're doing very well and some months where you have nothing. So, so how does that work for you basically? And so, yeah, I think to me side projects are, a great way to answer that question about the fear of failure.

Yeah, thanks, thanks for that.

We only have a few minutes left here, so I just want to ask one more question. Just in terms of, of, of everything that you've been writing about, all of these different topics, and you mentioned just a second ago that you are writing this specifically with entrepreneurs in mind, what— are there any aspects of these practices or the topics that you're writing about that you most commonly see entrepreneurs struggle Yes, I think for lots of entrepreneurs, it's—

and this is, I think, why the Fear of Failure article was so popular, why the Joy of Missing Out one was so popular. It's this constant battle between personal and professional life. And it's very different from people working a 9 to 5 where you have this clear cut between work and life. And for entrepreneurs, especially because they're usually taking a big risk, it's the line blurred.

Yes.

And it's very difficult for them to know where personal life stops and professional life starts and vice versa. So to me, this is probably one of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs that I see reading my blog at least face. Okay.

Well, yes, I— everything you said there resonates personally.

Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for everything that you're, that you're writing and putting out there.

How can listeners find and follow you online?

Uh, so I'm not going to share my Twitter because I created that handle when I was very young and it doesn't mean anything and it's impossible to spell, but I'm going to share my website, which is nesslabs.com, N-E-S-S-L-A-B-S.com. And, uh, there are links to all of my social channels there.

Wonderful. And I will put those in the show notes as well. My guest today has been Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Anne-Laure, thank you so much for everything that you've shared with us today.

Thank you for having me. That was great. Thanks.

All right, everyone, let's get into some closing thoughts here. But before we do that, I want to say thanks so much to the listeners who have left a 5-star rating or review at iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks in particular to username Armature Natural for saying, "I wish I could say how I stumbled across Bright and Early. What I can say is the quality of practical content is off the charts," and then some other super nice things. So thank you very, very much for that. It really does mean a whole lot. And if you could take just a minute or two, scroll down on your podcast app there, leave a 5-star rating or review. Really would help other listeners to find the show. So, uh, all right, let's get into it. I— that whole bit about scheduling, uh, Anne-Laure scheduling 8 to 9:30, um, every day and writing— I, I asked her offline after we hung up, hey, I, I meant to ask a follow-up question there. You know, when you're writing 8 to 9:30, are you 3 days ahead? Is that for next week's bit or what. And she said no, she writes from 8:00 to 9:30 and then she hits publish on her blog. And so whether or not that ends up working for you or not, I think just the discipline and the forcing function there of I'm going to write and produce every single day. And I think she's— I think Anne-Laure is at like 100 straight days or something. And so that feels like the sort of thing that once you become— once you kind of get the flywheel moving and once you, once you get that discipline and that practice in place, then it starts to become easier. Completely resonates with me. I can just think of so many things in my life, both creative, emotional, physical, whatever, like all sorts of different areas of my life that I can think of that right now would feel really hard to get going. But at one point in my life where those things were really easy. There are things I'm doing right now that are quite easy, or they feel easy rather, because they've become, they've become this habit. And so I liked, I liked her advice about, you know, book it, do not leave it to chance. Those sorts of things are not going— you're not just gonna, you know, find yourself, you know, on day 100 of writing 700 words a day in a row, and likewise for other things. So what else? I, you know, so I had posted about this maybe a week or so ago on Twitter saying like, do I know anybody who's just completely nailed, you know, your calendar and just like your weekly routines and, you know, etc. And I was asking it in the sense of being self-employed, you know, how do you schedule those those things out. Um, and Asia Matos, uh, who I want to say episode 9 of Bright and Early, uh, might be getting that wrong by an episode or two, but, uh, but she reached out to say that, you know, it's definitely something that she, um, she has worked on and has a morning routine, sticks to it, sees a ton of value in it. Uh, somebody responded to that saying something the effect of, um, You know, I don't see the obsession. I don't get the obsession with scheduling and calendaring. That's why I work for myself, so that I can dictate and determine what I want to work on. If that resonates for you, if that works for you, then cool, go with it. I have not seen it work for me. And so I was finding— I just think it was interesting to hear that that is a practice that, that's been helpful for Anne-Laure as well. I'm curious, you know, as you're listening and thinking about the habits that you have established, how have you established them, most especially around things like, like, like creative production, that sort of thing. I'm really curious how you have been able to nail that. And so if you've got thoughts on that, hit me up. Hit me up on Twitter. I really enjoyed that bit of the conversation around the joy of missing out, the fear and fear of missing out, asking why it is that you're, you're, you're thinking that you ought to do something. And is it, you know, is it because you're pushing yourself to grow? You want to try it? You want to have a new experience? Something genuinely just sounds cool and sounds fun to you. Or is it, you know, because of a feeling of some sort of pressure or of keeping up, keeping up with your peer group or something like that? Just the basic question of why am I doing this? Why do I want to do this? That is pretty much never a bad, never a bad question to ask regardless. And so I'll link to that article in the show notes if you haven't already read it. It's a very quick read, you know, less than, you know, 10 minutes, and I think will probably give you plenty to think about. Really enjoyed the bit of the conversation around valuing prioritizing the process, the daily process over the big picture goals. Definitely a good idea to, you know, have, have a goal in mind or like some somewhere that you want to get to, but figure out what are the, the tiny steps, what are the incremental habits that you can, you know, start to do today, every day that will eventually get you there and then put your focus on those. Definitely hearing plenty of James Clear and Atomic Habits in that. If you haven't read that one yet, Highly recommend it. Good book. And yeah, and good stuff from, from Anne-Laure there as well. The whole— yeah, that piece about the 3, the 3 mindframes that are most likely to help you eventually reach those goals around growth mindset, metacognition, and self- authorship. I just found that to be incredibly fascinating. Totally, totally agree that, you know, growth mindset might be— is probably being overused, misapplied, etc., etc., in a couple of places. On the other hand, it is— if it is becoming cliché or overused, it's because, you know, it has— there's a whole lot of truth to it. And I just think there's— it's It should be— it's almost self-evident, I think anyway, that the mindset of, well, you know, I don't know how to do this right now. I can get better at this. I don't have to be the best ever. I don't have to be the best in the world. I don't even have to be in the top 20%, but I can do something to be better at, to be better than I currently am. I can improve on my current position. And I have that ability. That's just— it's self-inherent. It's inherent to me that that is just a better way of thinking than the fixed position. And let's see, yeah, on metacognition, I appreciated her thoughts there that it is related to emotional self-awareness. It's all about self-reflection, understanding how you think, who you are. Um, uh, wait, I— that sounded funny, the, the, like, not, uh, who— how you think you are. I mean, uh, it's all about how you think. It's about who you are. Um, and, uh, and how do you— how do— yeah, how do you go about processing things and then expressing the way that you've processed them? And I just I feel like in every area of life, you know, know yourself, like know thyself is key and critical to figuring out what it is that you want to do. I'm definitely going to check out this Coursera Learning How to Learn course. What a great answer there to my question of, hey, how do you get better at this? And Anne-Laure says, well, it happens to be the most popular course ever on Coursera and it's free. So there you go. Super, super practical. Great, a great takeaway there. If my goal is to give y'all one thing that you can apply tomorrow, well, how about a free course? That's not bad. It did not surprise me that journaling is something that that Anne-Laure has found to be super effective. This is something that I hear all the time and makes me wonder why, why I'm not— why I am not better at journaling or more, more disciplined at it. I used to journal. I used to journal all the time. And at some, at some point as a practice, it just, it just fell off. And any time I'll go through these seasons of journaling on not even a daily basis, just like semi-regular basis, I just notice it. It just feels, it just feels better. Your thoughts, your thoughts are more well organized. Um, it's just, yeah, it's just such a good, it is just such a good practice. Um, I have a friend, so Richard, I wonder if you're, if you're still doing this, um, where I remember that, uh, you know, he would, uh, he would use this app Day One. Oney. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, spelled exactly like it sounds, O-N-E. And it's, you know, it's a nice little like journaling app for at least at the time iOS and macOS. And so made it really easy to like add photos and like journaling about your day and all this sort of thing. And if I'm remembering correctly, my friend Richard had this command line tool or something. Where, you know, on a daily basis, it would just, it would pull something from history about, you know, from that day. Basically, it like, you know, rolled his own This Day in History type of app. It just seems like that's just such, that's just a practice that's so important in life, especially as things become more hectic, more fast-paced and all of these different inputs that we're getting, the ability to slow down, practice some self-reflection. What do I think about this? What was my experience? How did I react there? How might I decide to react differently in the future? How could I affect my reaction? That sort of thing just becomes much more important. And in— let's see, last thought was just the idea about failing like a scientist. I am completely completely on board with that, uh, with that approach, you know, to not be afraid of failure, to, uh, to not— to fail regularly and safely, um, uh, that, that is how you learn. I definitely think that there is some like cultural pushback on this now because of, you know, Facebook's very famous move fast and break things mantra from the early days that is now like, oh yeah, move fast and break democracy, is definitely getting thrown under the bus there. Rightly so. Facebook, if you haven't deleted Facebook, then you should seriously consider it. Sidebar. But so to get back on the train here, The idea of fail fast and learn from it is getting some pretty serious cultural pushback. I think much of it is misapplied and unfair. The idea that you should be able to, you should want to, you ought to run multiple tiny experiments and learn as much as you possibly can as quickly as you possibly can is just such good advice. It's just a good model, I think. And what I think is particularly important to keep in mind, as we were talking about it there, is do so in a way that you're going to learn something without blowing up the lab, you know, so to speak. And that's what I was trying to get at. I'll link to— I need to look this up because I'm not sure if I wrote a blog post about this or if it's just like some tweets that I had, but where I just, I really think that like the, the advice of just go for it is really, really bad advice. So I was, I really liked that Anne-Laure was mentioning like, hey, yeah, the way to do this is with side projects, with side hustle. And I just, the notion of if you're not yet full-time entrepreneur, if you're still working on it, working at a a salaried position but want to get into entrepreneurship, build your own thing, "just go for it" is terrible, terrible advice in my opinion. I think that it almost guarantees that in the end you will actually not be able to realize your dream because if you just go for it without putting the parameters in place to run your experiment with some degree of like a foundation and a baseline, you're just going to find yourself going back to your salaried position.. And so there are some like practical things you can do to set up the lab so that you can, uh, so that you can run your experiments, um, and that it has a, a higher chance of, of teaching you what you need to know over time. Um, okay, I'll quit, I'll quit torturing the metaphor there. Uh, would love to know what you all think. Um, it's, it's so good, uh, when I hear from y'all, um, on, on Twitter. I am Uh, B-R-A-H-E-A. And if you do have time to scroll down on your podcast app right now, just leave a 5-star rating and review. Would mean a whole lot. Uh, it's how other people, uh, stumble across and find the show. Um, those ratings, uh, it, it matters, um, how they— how you show up in the podcast search engine. So if you got a chance to do that, would mean a lot. And I guess I will talk to you Next week.