Mindful Productivity with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Hi, I'm Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I'm the founder of NAS Labs, where I write about mindful productivity and how to take care of your mental health at work. You can read some of my articles at naslabs.com. And this is my episode for Sleep, Eat, Perform, Repeat.

Coming up on Sleep, Eat, Perform, Repeat.

When I left Google and after working on a couple of other, other projects, having another stint with burnout, I found myself completely lost. I didn't know what to do next. At the time, the logical path was work at a big tech company, then do a startup. That was what everyone wanted to do. So when the startup path didn't work out for me, I didn't know what to do next. And I decided to go back to the drawing board and to ask myself, what is something that I would be interested in studying even if I wasn't paid to do it? Even if there would be no glory in it or anything like that. Just for me, just something I love learning about. And the answer was the brain.

Support the podcast, and we've set up a Patreon page where you can go and subscribe, or just a performance well-being growth partner. You can check it out at www.hauoralife.com. That's H-A-U-O-R-A-life.com. Now, without further ado, let's get to the episode with Anne-Laure.

Welcome Stories, Lessons and Learnings.

Today we spoke with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, entrepreneur and founder of NessLabs and PhD neuroscience student. Anne-Laure worked at Google promoting digital health products and is now back in school studying the brain. She is a PhD researcher at King's College London investigating how different brains learn differently with a focus on supporting neurodiversity in online learning. She's the founder of NessLabs, a little corner of the internet where ambitious and curious minds come together to achieve their goals without sacrificing their mental health. It's packed with content, a thriving community, and coaching based on the science of learning, creativity, and productivity. Her very popular newsletter has highly practical content at the intersection of neuroscience, entrepreneurship, and education. We both are subscribers. Some of the topics include cognitive biases, mental models, learning how to learn, mindful productivity, and mental health at work. It actually reminds us of Trevor Ragan of the Learner Lab from episode number 64 with us. Today we spoke about her journey from Google to Nest Labs and King's, burnout, and what she does now for her own self-care. Anne-Laure unpacked habits, routines, and rituals, how they're different, what her typical hybrid work week looks like of PhD work and building her business Nest Labs. Many things came up in this conversation. From Stephen Hawking and Salvador Dalí to a goat in a cabin in a forest. It was fun. Welcome to the show. We're looking for this one, Anne-Laure. Nice to have you today. Ciara and I were just saying off air, we're really grateful to be able to spend a little bit of time with you today.

How are you doing?

I'm good, thanks so much for having me.

So tell us, you're in London. You're actually, I think, in King's College London, where I went to study for a while. So What's the day-to-day like in London at the moment for you?

I am currently working from home. I'm splitting my time between running my company Nest Labs and doing my PhD, so I'm not always on campus. And today, since we're talking together, as you can guess, this is a Nest Labs day, so I'm working from home. And the day is a typical London day. The sky is pretty gray, as I can see through my window right now. But yeah, I'm doing all of my meetings, chatting, social work stuff today, so I can save other days for deep work stuff that requires proper focus and where I don't want to be interrupted. So this is a human interaction day, I would say.

And you've kind of come to really the first part we were both interested in was, how are you striking the balance between building a successful business that is your business. We both subscribe to your work. We read your newsletter. We read what you're putting out there. But then, yeah, deep focus going into that space. What does the week look like and kind of where is the energy? And also, do you have any buffers in and around that? So we're just curious as to nearly what the overarching week looks like.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of something I like to call mindful time blocking. I discovered time blocking a few years ago, and I thought that was genius to just plan for every single hour in your week. And this way you would know exactly what would happen and you would be your most productive. And that absolutely didn't work out for me because I would put things in my calendar and I would stuff my schedule with a bunch of things. And then I would maybe not match— meet a deadline, or I would procrastinate on something and I would just start looking away and ignoring that calendar. So it was completely useless. And I know it does work for some people, but for me it didn't. So I've switched to a more mindful approach to time blocking where I actually try to keep my days as free as possible. So it's kind of the opposite. As soon as my calendar starts to look very, very busy, I look at everything that's in there and I ask myself, is there anything that could be an email instead of a meeting? Is there anything that I can remove? Is there anything that I can delegate? So I would say that the first key to balancing the— I have quite a few different projects on my plate— is mindful time blocking and trying to keep my calendar as free as possible. And the second one is trying to avoid context switching as much as possible by having dedicated days to certain goals. So that would mean that I would have a day that's just deep work for Nest Labs. That would be writing, researching stuff. For maybe updating the website, etc. I would have another day that's also in a S-Labs, but so that's Wednesday for me today where I talk to people and I literally just finished a meeting before jumping on this podcast recording with you guys. And my day is going to be very much filled with meetings today and I'm probably going to be quite exhausted at the end of the day, but that's just one day in the week, so I don't care too much. And I have days that are dedicated to working on my PhD. And during those days, I don't even check my inbox for Nest Labs. It just doesn't exist. So I think creating those boundaries between the different projects that you have and avoiding context switching is going to make you a lot more focused and a lot more productive and probably going to help with your mental health in general at work.

Wow, that's very— you couldn't be closer to heart for the two of us at the moment.

Yeah, it's what we're trying to do, and we look to career architecture and sort of life architecture. A lot of people are going on the treadmill, and probably the pandemic has changed people's perspective of work and what they need to be doing to fulfill themselves and give themselves energy, as well as being productive and providing for family or themselves. When you were changing from, I believe, an MSc in like management, and you were working with Google, and you were in the sort of marketing and management sphere, what was it that made you want to follow the transition to neuroscience and follow maybe a dream to start up Nest Labs?

I didn't have a plan, but a few things happened that put me on this path. So when I was working at Google, I experienced my first burnout ever. I was very excited to be able to join Google after I applied, when I got the letter saying, you're in, you can join. And that was 10 years ago. And I know things have changed quite a bit. But at the time, for me, working at Google was this big dream and I was so excited, fresh out of university to go and join this big company that was working on products that were impacting millions and millions of people in the world. Very excited, but also massive imposter syndrome because I felt like someone would discover at some point or another that I didn't really belong there, that a mistake had been made, that I was not as smart or talented or knowledgeable as my colleagues. So as a result, I was saying yes to absolutely everything. If you needed help with any project, if you needed a hand, you just had to walk past my desk and just say, hey, can you help with this? And I would say, absolutely, yes. I was trying to make myself as useful as possible, but there was a tiny constraint that I forgot to take into account, is just that we have a fixed number of hours in a given day and we need something called sleep, which is very helpful. So I did manage to hit all of my deadlines and to help with all of the projects that I wanted to help with, but that was at the expense of my sleep and my mental health. I just started cutting on sleep, skipping meals. I even started saying no to social engagements I had with friends, just telling them that I was too busy to hang out. And the moment I realized something was really wrong was when I had to fly to San Francisco. I was based in London, London at the time. I had to fly to San Francisco for a work project and I had a call back with my team in London. I took the call in the middle of the night and I received a tiny piece of constructive feedback, nothing bad, just telling me, you know, this bit of research sheet for this report, I think maybe we should double-check that the calculations are okay or something like that. And I started crying on the call. I immediately logged off the call and pretended that I had issues with my Wi-Fi, so they wouldn't see what was happening. But that's when I realized that something was really wrong because crying for something like this, which is not really important, is not really normal. So I started looking around, asking some friends and some colleagues, and I started learning about burnout. But the problem was that everywhere I was looking, all of the information you would find to help you with burnout assumed that you hated your job or you had a terrible boss or all of these external factors, which didn't apply to me at all. I actually had an amazing manager. I really liked my job. I liked my colleagues and still I was burning out. So that's something that kind of planted the seed for what I did afterwards. I didn't do anything about it at this stage. I stayed at Google, really had a better time, had a conversation with my manager, managed to get out of this phase. But when I left Google and after working on a couple of other other projects, having another stint with burnout, I found myself completely lost. I didn't know what to do next. At the time, the logical path was work at a big tech company, then do a startup. That was what everyone wanted to do. So when the startup path didn't work out for me, I didn't know what to do next. And I decided to go back to the drawing board and to ask myself, what is something that I would be interested in studying even if I wasn't paid to do it, even if there would be no glory in it or anything like that, just for me, just something I love learning about. And the answer was the brain. So I went back to school to study neuroscience, and this is when Nest Labs started. I didn't know at the time that it would become Nest Labs, but I learned about something called the generation effect that shows that by creating your own version of what you're studying, you're going to understand it and remember it better. So I started my newsletter, started sending it. Very quickly, I had thousands of subscribers. And then I had people messaging me and saying, can I sponsor the newsletter? And I was like, oh, this is, maybe this is a business. So that's how all of this happened. I started writing about how to apply neuroscience to live a better life, to have a better mental health, to be more productive at work, basically to answer a lot of the questions I had when I was working at Google and there were no resources for people who want to take care of their mental health but who are also very ambitious. And that's what NessLabs is all about today still.

Wow, amazing. What an amazing story and just how you get into thousands and thousands of subscribers. We're working on it. But you're touching on a lot of key points there about learning maybe when to say no, how you can build awareness around actually there's something going on. That's burnout, as it were. So for us, what's really important, like we're physios and we work in the wellbeing space. So usually when we're starting with anyone, we talk about self-care. Because if you look after yourself, you can look after your team, your family, et cetera, et cetera. And the work becomes better for it. So where does self-care now fall into your week? And what do you do to look after yourself to for sure mitigate the potential of burnout coming again?

Self-care is incredibly important for me. I'm not always good at it, and I really don't try to give the impression that I always get it right. I do have a problem with self-proclaimed gurus that tell you that they have this perfect routine that they always manage to stick to, and please buy their book that is going to tell you exactly what to do. Doesn't exist. Yeah, not my case. It's not always perfect, but I have 3 things that I try to pay particular attention to you, and these are my habits, my routines, and my rituals. So habits are things that you do completely automatically, you don't really think about them, and they can be good or they can be bad. Good habit I hope you have is brushing your teeth in the morning. Most people don't even think about it, you get out of bed and you—

sorry, we're checking our teeth, anyone listening to this thing. We flossed this morning, we use mouthwash.

Yeah, beautiful spouse. I can attest to that. So brushing your teeth is a habit that most people have, and you don't really think about it. You can be half awake, complete zombie, you just walk to the bathroom and you brush your teeth. Bad habits include, for a lot of people, you know, smoking, for example, drinking, or you can have silly habits like always leaving some stuff around in your house and your spouse gets angry at you. And you're really trying to do your best, but it's so deeply ingrained that you keep on doing it all the time. So these are habits. Then you have another, if you add another layer of intentionality, you get to routines. Routines are things that you do in a more intentional way, and they're not automatic anymore, but you know, they're good for you. So you try to build themselves into your life. That includes, for example, going for a run every week or a few times a week, making your bed in the morning, I don't know anyone, maybe some people do do it automatically, but this is something that you tend to stop doing as soon as you're a bit tired or a bit stressed. So it's something that you force yourself to do because you know that for some people it makes them feel better for the rest of the day, kind of sets the tone for the rest of the day to make their bed. So you can have lots of different routines, skincare routine, just making sure that you clean your face before going to bed, any kind of thing that you do that is intentional, that you know is good for you. Trimming your beard, for example.

Not doing a lot of that at the moment.

So that's routines. And then the highest level of intentionality is rituals. And this is when you really bring your whole self to the table. And these are a lot deeper. This is usually not something that you do very quickly, like making your bed or anything like that. This is something that very often has a mindful aspect to it. That could be journaling, that could be meditation, but any routine can become a ritual as well. So skincare routine could technically become a ritual if you decide to close the door, tell your kids that nobody can come in the bathroom, lighting some candles, taking half an hour just for you to have this self-care routine for yourself. That becomes more of a ritual. So Something I don't have any hard and fast rules when it comes to self-care, but I really try to always stay cognizant of those habits, routines, and rituals that I have in my life. So I'm making sure that if I see that there are some habits that I'm starting to develop and they're not really good for me, I try to keep them under control. Doesn't mean that it will be perfect, but I just try to keep them under control. And I try to develop more good habits. So, you know, just like filling some water in the morning and putting it next to my laptop my laptop, just trying to make this an automatic thing that I don't think about and I just do, even if I'm half awake. I also try to have more routines and routines that I find helpful and that I can keep up with, making them sustainable, because it doesn't work if you have 5 or 10 different routines and none of them work. So finding 1 or 2 that you can keep up with, whether it's going for a run or anything like that, that's good for you. Is very helpful in terms of self-care. And then having at least one ritual. For me, it's journaling. I'm very bad at meditation, but I have friends that do meditation regularly. But just making sure that however hectic the week is, how much work you have or how stressed you are, making sure that you really protect that space and that time for you to be able to reflect, to look inwards, to look at your emotions, to really connect with your thoughts and your feelings. Really making sure that you protect that space for your personal ritual is something that I consider a very important pillar of any kind of self-care.

It's brilliant. The biggest piece there that I take away, and I think we've spoken about before, is that self-care is often perceived as being easy and it should be enjoyable all the time. Sometimes it's hard. Meditation is hard, difficult. Sometimes keeping up with positive rituals or positive habits is difficult. You have to try and ingrain it to be automatic. So it's a big message to take that when we are looking after ourselves away from being productive and away from our output, that it's not always going to be just relaxing and, you know, you're getting a massage or, you know, hot bath or something like that. Sometimes you have to put the work in for self-care as well. Just building on that, we've touched on when you're trying to re-energize yourself for your deep work, your productive output, the moments— what is the ritual to get into them? 4 hours of deep work or however long it is for you? How do you set yourself up for success when you're trying to get into them deep modes?

It's very funny that you mentioned 4 hours because there is a bit of research that suggests that 4 hours is actually roughly the number of hours maximum that you can dedicate to deep work in a given day. So that's just interesting that that's the number you mentioned. In terms of getting ready It's interesting because it has nothing to do with work. Very often for me to be ready for a deep work session, it means that I need to have enough sleep, to feel hydrated, to not feel stressed with other issues in my personal life. So this is also why journaling for me is so important. This is something I do first thing in the morning, and it really helps me to deal with whatever is on my mind or to notice any aspects I haven't really taken care of. And sometimes those aspects can Those aspects can be very physical. Oh, I haven't been drinking enough water, or I've had a lot of junk food yesterday, so I'm just going to try and eat a salad for lunch, or I'm very tired, or I'm stressed because I haven't heard back from so-and-so, so maybe actually I'll give them a quick call before I get started with work. Having this time, I roughly have 1 hour blocked in the morning just for writing. Usually it takes 10 minutes. I just, I don't use the whole hour, but at least the hour is here if I do need to write a lot more. And so I don't stress about it. I know I'm not starting work until later. So making sure that all of this is sorted before I get into deep work is very helpful. And even if it's not sorted, just writing it down on paper, there's something about, I don't know how you call this in English, you know, in Harry Potter with the wand, they take their thoughts and they put them in that base thing.

Oh yeah, it's almost just creating distance between your thoughts, labeling your thoughts, and creating that emotional and physical dis— or, um, psychological distance from it. Yeah, well, if there is no word for it, it should be.

I, I, I actually never watched any Harry Potter. Oh, I never watched Harry Potter. My sister did, I never did. I'm sure my kids will, and then I'll end up watching it. But yeah, sorry, sorry JK, uh, if you're listening.

Okay, that's a revelation there.

Yeah, so you don't know what I'm talking about, but yes, creating distance.

Well, as a pensieve, was it?

Exactly. Yes, I think it's like the best. So yeah, creating distance is really helpful to then be able to feel like, okay, I haven't sorted everything out, but at least it's written down. I can go back to it later, but for now I can focus on whatever the task is at hand.

And then flipping it, and you know, we've had Steven Kotler from Flow Research, we are having Cal Newport coming up. So this is a space we're really interested in, right? So that's the buffer, the hour, that piece of writing, that practice obviously gets you into that mindset for the 4-hour work. What about after? So release, recovery, what do you do to maybe come away and just remove yourself from it? You did what you needed to do.

Taking a walk is the best thing after work. It just, again, this time creates distance between your work and yourself. Has this nice— it's just a signal for your mind that work is over and now you can go out and play, I guess. So yeah, I try to, I try to take a little walk and very often I don't even need to go for a walk for the sake of just going for a walk because if I've been working during the whole day, I just have a list of errands or little things that I need to do. And so I just do that right after I'm finished and that's just an excuse to go and walk around and see a little bit of the sky and trees and people in the street in London.

So let's pivot over to getting the most out of your mind, right? It's a turn of phrase we're robbing from you, but talk to us a little bit about Maker's Mind and even those pieces of work that you're curating and you're putting out there. What's the vision behind it and what are you trying to do and what are you hoping that David, Ciarán, and everyone listening gets when we read those?

So I always tell people that if you're a knowledge worker, and that's a very broad category, but that includes creatives, writers, engineers, any kind of manager, anyone who has to work with information, then your mind is your most precious tool. If you're a manual worker, your hands are going to be your most precious tool. Precious tool, but as a knowledge worker, it's your mind. So you need to take care of it and you need to understand how it works if you want to make the most of it. So that's why at Nest Labs, a lot of the content we publish is around topics such as creativity, decision-making, and what we call mindful productivity. This bit in particular, I know a lot of people are into productivity optimization, you know, having better workflows and all of that. That's also something that was very surprising for me when I started looking into the literature that's available in terms of helping people with their productivity. There is a lot of what I call toxic productivity or productivity porn out there. And specifically, I call it productivity porn because it's the same as regular porn. It's completely unrealistic and very few people actually apply these things in real life. So you're probably not going to get what you want if you just try to copy and paste. Whatever you're seeing there. And so you have all of these books that tell you Productivity Ninja or Work 1 Hour a Day or the 3 Secrets to Productivity that are going to turn you into— it's just, it's, yeah, selling, overselling a dream. It's never really working. And it leaves people feeling bad about themselves because they think, Surely this book is pretty successful. A lot of people have read it, so it must be working for them. If it's not working for me, something's wrong with me. So this is something I've been trying to— I've been trying to offer a counterbalance to that toxic productivity with NAS Labs by writing about mindful productivity, just trying to teach people strategies that are evidence-based to be more productive and more creative, but that are also realistic. In terms of what can actually be achieved. And also constantly repeating to people to not beat themselves up if it's not working. It's, it's just, it's really all about being consistent over a long time, over— instead of trying to really manage to stick to whatever routine or habit that you're trying to have every single day. It is going to happen that life happens. Some days are going to be more difficult than others. Some days you're going to procrastinate. Some days you're going to be more stressed. Some days an external event is going to happen that's going to completely derail your beautiful plans that you had prepared for the week. And that's okay. That's completely okay. There's no magic formula. It's really more about applying general principles. And whenever things don't work out, you just be like, okay, what can I learn from this? And how can I try again?

I'm just thinking to your points of 4,000 people subscribed to your newsletter, you're getting more and more. And you mentioned imposter syndrome early in Google. Has it ever creeped back in when you were founding Nest Labs and Nest Labs started to take off? Were you ever afraid that, oh, am I the person to give this advice? And if you ever experienced that, what did you do to overcome it? I just think back to people who are maybe looking to start maybe something themselves, but they won't take that first step because they may not have the confidence or the self-belief that I am the right person to write this book, to start this community activity. To start this fund, whatever it is. What are your keys to overcoming that imposter syndrome and to keep exploring new avenues?

So since I experienced imposter syndrome when I was at Google, I actually did read quite a bit about it. So first, to make people feel better, imposters, actual imposters, don't tend to have imposter syndrome. And the reason why you have imposter syndrome is because you know what you don't know, you realize that there's a lot that you don't know. This is a really good position to be in. It means that you can see all of the gaps and that you can then decide to keep on learning and to nurture your curiosity versus someone who thinks that they know everything. So they don't know what they don't know, the classic Dunning-Kruger effect. And they're not going to have any kind of imposter syndrome. So if you think about those two situations, maybe having imposter syndrome is not so bad. What's bad is when you let it control your decisions. So I think feeling imposter syndrome is fine. I still have it so many times. It's just, it's not gone. What has changed for me is how I deal with it. Now I just look at it and like, okay, friends. Yeah, I know we're feeling this way. It's fine. I'm still going to go for it and give it a try. And it has helped me a lot in terms of tone when I communicate, because I always try to make it very clear that I'm sharing what I know at the moment, what I've learned, that I am a student and I'm just publicly sharing my learning journey for anyone who wants to follow along and learn with me. On NestLabs, for example, I have articles where I publish something and then it was debunked months later or a year later. A new study came out and that showed that what I wrote was wrong. And instead of just removing these articles, I keep them on and I edit them and I say, oh, this is completely wrong. You can read what I wrote, but this is wrong. This is the paper that shows that this is wrong. So I'm really learning in public. And I think if you put yourself in this vulnerable position of saying, I'm just a student, I'm just learning with you, then, you know, even though you do feel imposter syndrome, it's a much more comfortable position because nobody can point a finger at you and say, oh, you said that and that was wrong. I'm like, yeah, yeah, probably, yes. And so I would tell people, just go for it. Whatever you know is— there's probably something you know that nobody else knows, knows, or that nobody in your circle No, so you can be the vector of sharing that knowledge with other people, and you can both share that knowledge with people but also be proven wrong whenever something is not correct, and you can keep on learning this way. So it's a very virtuous cycle.

Yeah. Having looked back a little bit and, you know, Google and the learnings from that and heard a little bit as to Nest Labs and where that came about. PhD, going to be finishing that, and then Nest Labs continued to evolve. What are you hoping to achieve? What's on the horizon? What's kind of— what's coming up next?

So I'm still doing my PhD, so right now, yeah, doing both of them. I don't know exactly what I want to achieve. I have a very vague dream for when I'm old. I want to live in a cabin in the woods and write books, and I think I want a goat also.

Goat? A goat? Yeah, no, everyone's paused this and re-round and said, did she say a ghost?

Yeah, no, a goat, like the cute fluffy animals with horns that have weird eyes. Yeah, they're very playful actually. So yeah, or maybe a pig. I don't know yet. As I said, very vague at this stage. Yes, it's few details.

What would you call the goat?

See, that's a detail I need to figure out. So if—

Kieran. Kieran's a good name for a goat.

Steve. Steve the Goat.

Steve the Goat, of course.

Of course.

I like Steve. I think though, I think I would want a gender-neutral name because I don't know how to make the difference between a male and a female goat, so I'll probably go with something gender-neutral too.

Stevie.

We need to look up the literature on that one. We're expecting that in the next newsletter.

But yeah, no, I don't— I have, and I think this is fine actually, I don't have specific goals. I do have pretty good idea of what would make me happy in terms of what a day would look like. And I think that would involve a lot of writing, a lot of reading. I would love to live somewhere that's big enough where I can invite my friends to come over or organize some sort of events and keep on being connected with a community of curious people. What it looks like and when exactly will happen, where it will happen, I still have no idea. And I'm very comfortable with not knowing.

So when you're a doctor, your PhD, with your doctorate, when that's finished, will you be lecturing in King's with the goat beside you? I think that would catch media attention, that would go viral very quickly.

I think, I don't know if I'll be lecturing, but wherever I go, the goat will have to be. Um, yeah, we'll, we'll see. Um, we'll have, you'll have to wait, like, well, you know, we can, we can touch base in a couple of, a couple of years where, where I am at and where the goat is.

Sounds good. We are looking through a few of your articles, a few of your press releases over the last while, and in one for Calm blog, you mentioned what a superpower you would like to have. And it was— you said it would be weird when you gave a prefix disclaimer that it sounds weird, that you'd like to be able to talk to dead people. So to have conversations with people of the past. Now I'm going to give you the chance to dive into that bit deeper. If you're on South Bank and you're sitting on a bench, who are the two people that you'd love to sit, from any age, dead or alive, that you'd love to learn from?

Oh, I think the first one would be Stephen Hawking, the physicist, because I actually did have an opportunity to meet with him and I didn't go, and I was so stupid at the time. I mean, I don't know, I was young and I ended up having a really nice holiday. But yeah, I was working at Google, they, uh, I was helping the events team at the time, and, uh they organized a conference where Stephen Hawking came. And I was not working on that specific event, but because I was friends with a bunch of people on the team and they knew I was a big fan of his work, they told me, we can give you a random job, like sneaking you in. Like, you'll just be serving beers or something, but just like give you a random job just for you to be able to attend the conference. And at the time I had booked tickets to go with a bunch of friends to Indonesia. And I was in my early 20s. That was a lot of money at the time. That was a trip we had planned for a long time. And so I chose Indonesia instead of serving beers at an event at Google for a glimpse or chance of maybe saying hi to Stephen Hawking. But that's something I've been— it's not necessarily like a regret, but it is some decision in my life that I often go back to and ask myself, was that the right decision? I don't know. It was a really good holiday in Indonesia though, as I said. So Stephen Hawking would be great if he could come back and we could have a little chat. And especially if it's a one-to-one chat instead of him on stage at a big conference. Yeah. Sounds a lot cozier to me. And I think another one would be Dalí, the painter.

Salvador.

So many of his paintings I love so much, but I would just love for him to sit next to me and I would tell what happened, what, how, what does that mean? Yeah, his mind sounds so fascinating, and I would love to, to know what the inspiration— I know he drew a lot of inspiration from his dreams, but I wonder how— we all have weird dreams, but not everyone is able to translate them into something so mystical. So I would love to just sit with him, and preferably also with his paintings in front of us, so we can have a little chat.

I've got a print of the Persistence of Memory in my home office.

Amazing.

Anne-Laure, we've learned loads from you today and we've really enjoyed it and we're huge fans, true fans of NEST Labs and all your work. Last question from us today is building on all that you've done, that you've achieved, that you're still going and the goat coming along on the journey with you, What does, what does high performance mean to you?

I think high performance means sustainable performance. There's no point in being highly productive for a few days or a few weeks and then burning out. So whatever your level of performance is that you can actually sustain without hurting your mental health and while maintaining space for you to learn and grow and connect with other people and just enjoying life in general. That's high performance to me.

That's brilliant.

Thanks very much. We got loads from today. Really grateful for your time.

Yeah, thanks a million.

Thank you so much for having me. That was great.