Stop Setting Goals! Do This Instead | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Our brain hasn't changed that much. We still have those voices telling us, don't mess up, don't miss that deadline. You have to be perfect all the time.

My guest today, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, is the founder of Nest Labs and the author of Tiny Experiments.

When a scientist designs an experiment, they only need to know two things. The first one is what they're going to test.

Okay.

And then the trial period.

Her whole approach is built around mindful productivity, listening to stress as a signal, and replacing pressure with curiosity.

The tool that I use is called Plus Minus Next. You write everything that went well, minus everything something that didn't go so well. And this is what ensures that you don't just stay stuck.

I love this format, but how do you come up with ideas for what tiny experiments you should be running?

I have a little exercise that I recommend anyone does: observing what is taking a lot of your time, what gives you energy, and what drains your energy. And finally, what's— I guarantee you, if you do this for 24 hours, you will start noticing patterns. And this is where you formulate your hypothesis.

What's the advice that you would have that you really want to leave every listener with?

Most people are not successful because of the goal that they set up. People are successful because they—

So most people set big goals. You do tiny experiments instead. What makes the difference in that and how does it show up differently in your life?

I think first we need to talk about the difference between a goal in general and an experiment. So When you have a goal, you have a specific destination in mind and you say, I need to get there. So you have this vision, you have this plan, and then you work really, really hard. And then either you succeed or you fail. So it's very binary. It's very binary. Exactly. Whereas with an experiment, the only thing you're trying to achieve is learn something new. So you say, let me try this, let's see what happens. And as long as I discover something new, I know more at the end of the experiment than I did at the beginning, That's success.

Okay. So how does that show up in, you know, like you might set a goal one way and, but the experiment is totally different. Like how does that show up actually in the results and then your day-to-day actions?

I'll, I'll use the example of a newsletter.

So it's close to home for our audience. Yes.

So if you have a goal and you would say, I'm going to reach 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year.

Okay.

That's the goal. There's a destination.

And probably 80% of our listeners have set a very similar goal to that.

Exactly. So that's a goal. Now, the experiment version of that is I will send 20 editions of that newsletter and I will see what happens. I will tweak my approach. I will look at the numbers, I will look at the engagement, and I will keep on experimenting until I figure out how to make this work.

I could see a lot of people, I actually know a decent number of creators who have realized that consistency is the most important thing. And so they've built, um, you know, maybe a process or a habit around staying consistent and not achieved any of the results that they wanted to from it.

Yeah.

Like what's the shift that you would make for that to actually turn into what they hope from it?

The problem when we only focus on being consistent is that we're only focusing on action. And if you want to actually grow, you need action and reflection.

Okay.

Those are the two sides of the coin. And I think that's what's missing from the recipe that a lot of creators are applying. They show up every day, they do the work. That's great. That's a big part of success. But then they don't give themselves space to actually reflect on what's working and what's not working. So you basically don't grow. You just go in circles.

So yeah, you just keep doing that action over and over again without understanding what's working and then changing your behavior based on that.

Yes, exactly.

What's another tiny experiment maybe that you've run that's had a big impact on your creator business?

I, my entire business is a series of experiments. Um, I'd like to give an example of an experiment that didn't go to, not necessarily go to plan, but that had an unexpected result and which I think actually has been really positive, even though from the outside you might think it was a failure. So a few years ago, I don't know why, but all of the creators around me started saying, you need a YouTube channel. Okay. You need YouTube. This is where everything's happening. And the success of your business depends on it. I said, okay, I don't know, but let's give it a try. Let's design a tiny experiment. And so I started experimenting with YouTube and I said, I'm going to publish a weekly YouTube video until the end of the year. That was the experiment. Okay.

How many weeks was that?

That was probably a good 2 months, 2 months and a half. Yeah. So I did it. I showed up consistently. I posted my video every week and looking just at the external factors of success. So numbers of likes and subscribers and comments, it looked pretty good. Nothing crazy good, but good enough. Yeah, we're like, if I had only looked at that, I should have probably kept going. But I noticed looking at the internal signals, how I felt, that every time I had to sit down in front of the camera and record myself, I hated it. I actually hated it. I love having face-to-face conversations with people, but just looking at a camera with no feedback, nothing happening, not knowing how people will respond, gave me a lot of anxiety. And when I knew I was supposed to record that day, I would procrastinate for the rest of the day and do nothing else, which had a negative impact on all sorts of areas of my business. Right.

You're giving up 20% or more of your creative time, right? If you're losing a whole day to this one initiative.

Yes, exactly. And so that's why the reflection piece is so important, because if you only focus on looking at your metrics and your dashboard and you see, oh great, views are growing, engagement is growing. You might just keep going and listen to that advice that tells you, you just need to keep on showing up, just be consistent and you'll be successful. But what kind of success is it if you actually hate doing it? Right. So I decided to stop. And a lot of people might say, oh, that's failure. She quit.

Did you stop the experiment mid-range? No. Did you finish out the, the 2 and a half months?

That's a, a very important part of, of running experiments. So think about a scientist running an experiment. They don't stop in the middle, poke at the data and feel like, oh, not quite sure I like what I'm seeing here. I'm going to stop. So instead they commit when they design the protocol to finishing the experiment, collect all of the data, and at the end they decide what they do. And as a creator, that's very important because there's very often a messy middle where you kind of don't want to keep going because you're actually growing, you're learning something new. It can be a little bit uncomfortable. And so deciding on the duration in advance is a way to say, I'm giving this a try, I'm taking this seriously, and I'll decide afterwards. So I did finish it, but when I was done, I looked back, I looked at both external and internal signals, and I decided to stop.

And so sometimes people would say that experiment was a failure, but really in this case, the experiment can't fail. Because it didn't have a goal that you were trying to achieve, right? The goal was, the, the goal was learning.

Yeah.

And you learned actually really a lot.

Yes. So if you, if you remove the binary definition of success mm-hmm. From the equation and you only focus on learning, as you said, there's no failure.

Right. Something that we do inside of Kit is maybe 6 to 9 months ago, we really shifted from being very project focused to being very initiative focused. And so now in this case, we have very specific goals that we're trying to hit, and it might be as narrow as increasing our trial-to-paid conversion rate in a certain way, or the number of people who activate on this feature. And we meet on it every single week and we run all of these experiments. But what we realized is that we were only celebrating the experiments or the tests that had a positive outcome. And so if something didn't have a positive outcome, then we were like, oh, that's a bummer. Oh well, hopefully next week we'll be better. And what that resulted in was people only work on experiments that they thought had a high chance of success. And so we actually made a deliberate effort to shift and to celebrate the failed experiments, right? That didn't improve our numbers as much or more than the ones that worked. And people started trying wilder swings, you know, siphoning off like a little bit of our traffic and being like, what happens if they go this direction? And our failure rate increased. But we started to find these outliers and learn things that we wouldn't have learned otherwise that then led to much bigger successes.

Yeah. Your failure rate increased, but your learning rate increased exponentially.

Yeah. Is there anything, you know, from a, uh, scientist perspective, is there anything that, you know, advice that you would give on that? Or this is us just messing around inside of our company, but where you're saying, oh, this is actually how it, how it plays out and, and the lessons someone should take away from that.

Yeah, what's interesting is that our brain is designed to reduce uncertainty as quickly as possible. So, and this makes sense from an evolutionary perspective in the sense that in order to survive, just think about our ancestral past in the jungle. The more you knew, or at least the more you felt you knew, the safer you felt. So knowing where the resources are, who are your friends, who are your enemy, what that, that's where noise in the bushes and all of that, you would feel like, okay, I know enough, I'm safe. Right? And this is great if all you want is to survive. This is great. Your brain is doing its job. But if you want more than that, if you actually want to grow, if you want to stretch yourself and learn and explore different paths and fulfill your potential, whatever that is, then your brain is kind of getting in the way when it's doing that. And so something you can do if you're working with a team, is really trying to recreate that sense of safety of saying, hey, actually it's okay if you fail, you're not going to die, but you're also not going to be fired.

Right.

We really encourage this because this is really at a low level, neurobiological level, brain is screaming for safety.

Right.

And so if you're a creator who's working with a team, this is something you can do to help people experiment more, really giving them this sense of safety.

Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting of like someone's actually might be subconsciously thinking or consciously, oh, if I have 2 failed experiments or 3 failed experiments in a row, am I going to get fired?

Yeah.

Or the creator who doesn't have a team might be saying, if I have 2 or 3 failed experiments in a row, is my revenue going to dry up? And this magical creator business that I've made going to come crashing down. And you know what? I should make smaller bets. You know, I should just pursue a goal. Let me just play it safe. And so really saying, you know, like quieting that inner voice and being like, no, it's actually fine.

Like, which is interesting too, because when you stick to those, those goals and you only have those goals and you try to just again follow a recipe, step-by-step recipe, a blueprint, what it gives you is really just the illusion of certainty. You think you know where you're going. You think that, and this is why a lot of people are craving the kind of step-by-step advice that tells them, hey, if you do that, if you just follow this advice, you will be successful. In reality, anyone who has run a business for more than 3 months will know that you can have the best plans in the world. Nothing ever happens according to plan. And so you basically have 2 ways of approaching that uncertainty. You can pretend it's not there, or you can embrace it, accept that, yes, there is a lot of uncertainty when you're trying to build a business. So how can you more systematically explore that uncertainty How can you ask questions? And how can you know? Because all of those experiments that didn't give you the result you expected, you basically went from not knowing to now you know. And you can tell the rest of the team, hey everyone, I tried this, don't do it. Waste of time. That, that doesn't work. Now we can focus on something else.

I like that. Okay. I want to hear about one more experiment that you did. And then you, after that, you have two ideas in the book that I think would be fun to draw out more visually. Yeah. So what's another experiment that you implemented in the pursuit of your creator business?

Actually, I'd love to share one that doesn't sound like it's directly business related, but I think is also important and had a big impact. So I designed an experiment where I said, I'm going to meditate for 15 minutes every day for the next 15 days.

Okay.

And the reason why I designed that experiment was because I heard myself say to someone, I'm terrible at meditation. I can't do it. And noticing when you have a fixed mindset around something, when you hear yourself say, I'm just not good at this, I can't do this, it's actually a really good source of inspiration for designing experiments. And the reason why I want to share this one is because I do believe that taking care of your mental health is incredibly important if you want to be able to do this for the long run.

Yes.

And so although that looks like something outside of my business, experimenting with different ways to be more mindful and better take care of my mental health, I think has had a really positive impact on my business.

Okay. So most people would view that as a habit. I'm trying to build a meditation habit, and so I'm going to meditate and, and they, they put a goal in there, like for 15 minutes, uh, every day. And that's probably the end of it.

Yeah.

Like how do you change that of the attempt at a habit into an experiment? One thing that I picked up on was the timeboxing.

Exactly.

But what else is in there?

So that's basically the main difference. With a habit, which is crazy, with habits you see people commit to a new habit that they have never tried ever.

Well, we're going to do this forever.

Exactly. Like, now for the rest of my life, I'm going to do this. Whereas with an experiment, you just say, I'm going to do it for this duration. What's interesting with that experiment is that actually it didn't turn into a habit for me.

Okay.

So I don't meditate every day, but now I know first I can meditate.

Yeah.

I actually kind of enjoy it given the right circumstances. And now it's part of my mental health toolbox.

Right.

And so I know that if I'm actually really stressed and feeling this anxiety and especially the kind of like free-floating anxiety where you don't really know where it's coming from, that I can actually go and meditate for 15 minutes. And I don't do it every day. Not every experiment has to lead to a habit. But now all of a sudden, this thing I used to say I can't do, I discovered that I can do.

How did you reflect and learn from the experiment as you went? Because I think a lot of people would do the thing and do it for a fixed amount of time and say, oh, that's an experiment. But as a scientist, you're taking notes and you're learning and you're documenting. How do you think about that part of it?

There's a tool I really, really like. And you mentioned we were going to do a bit of drawing. I think actually I can show you.

Okay, great. Let's go to the board.

What's really important when you're running an experiment and you wanna reflect on the result is to look at both what worked and what didn't.

Okay.

The tool that I use is called Plus/Minus/Next. It's super simple. You have 3 columns, and in the first one, plus, you write everything that went well. Okay. In the second column, minus, everything that didn't go so well. And very important, and this is what ensures that you don't just stay stuck.

Okay.

In what went well and what didn't, what are you going to tweak? What are you going to do differently? What is the next iteration of your experiment going to look like?

Okay. And is this a cycle that you go through, say in your 15-day experiment, you're going through on a daily basis, or is this for the whole experiment for all 15 days?

So that depends on the format of the experiment. If you're doing a very short 10-day experiment, So when I did the 15 minutes every day for 15 days, I did that every day. That takes literally 3 minutes because it's just bullet points. It's very quick. When I did my weekly experiment, when I started the Nest Labs newsletter and I said, I'm going to write a weekly newsletter for a number of weeks, then I only did it every week. You can decide when you do it. A lot of people use this as a weekly review. And so they review their experiment at the end of each week. And I know it's a bit meta, but you can actually experiment to try and figure out how often is useful for you.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay. So I love this plus minus next. This makes me think a lot about flywheels. I'm obsessed with flywheels. And one of the key things is you have to measure them and you have to set aside a certain amount of time when you're gonna measure it. And so I always say, what cadence does this flywheel spin on? Is it daily, weekly, or monthly? Actually, almost never daily. Uh, since let's say it's, uh, weekly or monthly, and then you schedule in the time for when you're going to do that. So if it's weekly, then there's that 15-minute block on your calendar to measure, to reflect on it. But this plus minus next gives a much more concrete formula for that, which I love.

And it's still very flexible in the sense that I highly encourage people to, in the plus and the minus next. Not only include the professional aspect of things.

Okay.

So you can put, of course, the numbers, how the newsletter is growing and all of that, but how did you feel this week? Oh yeah. Because that's very important too. If your newsletter was growing really fast this week, but you're completely burned out at the end of the week, that's something to pay attention to. And, uh, what's really nice, especially if you do this digitally in your note-taking app. Is that you can start seeing patterns, right? One week when you're feeling a bit burned out at the end of the week is fine because maybe, I don't know, you had to take care of your kid that was sick, something happened. If you're seeing 3 weeks in a row that you're growing, but you can't sleep at night, you're canceling plans with friends and all of that, something needs to change. And so you can think about the next to take care of both the professional and the personal aspect.

Right. I like that a lot. The other thing, this has always been valuable. In a world of AI, this is like 10 times as valuable because then you can have all of your notes in an LLM and then ask it to give you feedback or things that you might miss or any of that. And so getting it out of your head into another format that where you can interact with AI just makes a huge difference.

I love that. You could even imagine some form of AI coaching based on your past finance next.

Yeah. And it's just like, what should I do? And it's like, well, you should do this. You're like, Oh, it's actually pretty obvious. I, I, so in the book you have another, uh, I guess a simple structure for how you design tiny experiments, how you think about it. What is that?

Think about an experiment. When a scientist designs an experiment, they only need to know two things. Okay. The first one is what they're going to test.

Okay.

And then the trial period. That was it. And so when you wanna design your own experiments, that's the same. You need to know the action and the duration. So the format of an experiment, think of it as a mini protocol. Is I will.

Okay. And then fill in the blank.

Then action. So I guess, yeah, you can put action.

Okay. Should we go a different mark color just for the fun of it? Yes.

Love it. Then for duration.

Okay. That's it.

I will, action, for duration.

Okay. So let's fill in the blanks. What are a few examples here? Okay.

So again, you can say, I will write a weekly newsletter for 6 weeks. I will reach out to an expert in my industry every Monday for 3 weeks. I will host a community meetup every quarter for the rest of the year.

Mm-hmm.

I will try a new YouTube video style every 2 weeks for the next quarter.

Ooh, something that this is making me think of is I used to send a lot of emails that would make me nervous. When I sent them, not because I'm making a mistake or doing something like that, but that I actually cared about the result. But I think as I elevated my career over time, I started reaching out to people and I got very used to getting yes back. And so I'd send emails, didn't make me nervous at all unless I was doing something like recruiting, you know, a very top creator or an executive for my company where I'm like, okay, hopefully this, they're gonna come through and say yes. And so I could say something like, I will send an email that makes me nervous, uh, every, uh, every week. Yeah. I guess every day if we wanted to compound this, that might be a little too much. Uh, you know, every week for 10 weeks.

Yes.

Is that, would that be following the format?

Exactly. And then you can decide, do I wanna reflect on this every week using plus minus next, or do I just wanna reflect at the end of it? Right. Because it might be just an experiment that's running in the background. You don't want it to be the, You know, taking over everything. You're working on other stuff, but you wanna make sure you have this running in the background. At the end of the weeks, the duration, you reflect on how did that feel? And again, external and internal signals. So the external signals, what kind of business did that bring or what kind of impact did it have? And maybe some collaborations that came out of it, external. And internal, how did that feel? And trying to reflect on how did it feel at the beginning versus the end? Did you become a bit more comfortable? Did you maybe feel Kind of proud also to do that. And so you can reflect on that as well.

Okay. So speaking of the duration, you've talked about a lot of different ones. My gut feeling is that if we have too short of a duration, so I'm, or let's say too long of a cadence, like I'm doing it once a week for 3 weeks. We've got, we've done this action 3 times for the, for the experiment, but probably our sample size then is way too small to learn something. What do you think about for the, the cadence and the duration? And those boundaries?

So it's interesting you're saying this because I actually recommend going smaller at first, especially if it's something you've never done before. So there is the temptation. I call that the Maxime Attis brain, the temptation to always go—

you're describing me very directly—

to go for it with the bigger, most ambitious version of an experiment.

Right.

That's okay if this is something you've done before and you just kind of use the experiment as a forcing mechanism to actually go a little bit deeper. But if it's something you've never done, go for a first iteration that can be 2 or 3 times. And at the end, plus minus next, what worked, what didn't. And then you can go for another iteration that's a little bit longer, but where you change the parameters a little bit depending, based on what you learned. So I would at first start with a, that's why my book is called Tiny Experiments, tiny version of it. And then you kind of scale your ambition. As you go through each of the cycles, a little bit like the flywheel that you mentioned. Maybe the first time you go around, go with something simple that you know you can complete, learn as much as you can, and then go for another round.

Okay. So let's take a very specific one that might be appropriate for a creator.

Yeah.

Uh, I had a habit of writing 1,000 words a day every day for a very long time. Uh, 600 days in a row is what I got, and I built my whole career on this. I then got shingles, got super sick, and You know, there's, there's pros and cons, uh, to that. The writing didn't cause the shingles, to be clear, from a scientific perspective. You're like, uh, cause and effect here, I don't know. But as I try to rebuild that habit and really run an experiment to do, I like, I should say, I've tried to rebuild that habit many times and I've actually never gotten beyond probably 30 days as I've done it again. Um, my life is very different now than what it was then. But if I were to look at that and say, okay, let me run it as an experiment. So the action is writing every day.

Yes.

I could go as small as any amount of writing is the goal. And that's it. And then the duration, you know, I have options in frequency, right? Is it daily versus weekly? Or, and then the length of time, right? Are we doing this for 10 days or 30 days? And I guess in this. You know, I have experience, experience writing, maybe anyone thinking of starting a newsletter or whatever else has that experience. How would you, as we play with these variables, like which one are you, uh, ramping up? How do you think about quantity versus frequency versus duration to design this experiment?

So there are several factors to take into account. In this case, you already have a bit of experience with it, and you're pretty clear that you actually want to do this, but you're not quite sure as to how.

Yeah.

So actually your experiment is around the frequency and then trying to figure out what will work for you. So you used to do it daily, so maybe start here. You used to do daily, so maybe start with daily and maybe just start with 30 days, something quite short at the beginning because you're just trying to figure out, has my, maybe life changed so much that now that daily patterns that I had doesn't work anymore?

Right.

Or is that part still working?

Cool.

Maybe it's working, maybe it's not working based on that. What does the next iteration look like? If the first 30 days were successful, maybe let's do 3 months now. And maybe you noticed that it was easier to write in the morning or in the evening, so you can also implement that in your next iteration. So even figuring out the duration is part of the experiment. I can give you an example with my book. So I had a deadline to write this book, and I had never— I write a newsletter, right? So for me, writing normally is kind of every week being like, what am I curious about? And, uh, let's, you know, make it, make myself a cup of coffee and, and write about it. And then I hit send and it's not always the best newsletter in the world, but I always, there's always the next one to try and write something different. With the book, uh, first I had a very specific deadline. It was a lot of words compared to what I write normally every week. And also the added pressure that I would not be able to go back and edit it. So that was final.

Yeah.

Printed. Not going to run after people and say, oh, sorry, can I just change this sentence?

That's the new version.

Exactly. So I had to experiment to try and figure out what worked for me. And at first I said, I will write for an hour every weekday. Okay. Until the end of the year. It was about 12 months, so pretty long in this case. But again, writing for me is something I do regularly. That did not work because all of the days I didn't manage to write the, that one hour, I felt terrible. I was like, I'm not, this book is not happening. I'm not making any progress. So I changed it to 5 hours every week.

Okay.

Which is the same number of hours, but all of a sudden, if I felt really inspired on Sunday night, I could just write for a few hours on Sunday and it was fine. And it took a little bit of tweaking, quite a few plus-minus-next iterations to get there until I figured out what worked for me.

There's another version of this that I've seen play out at Kit, where, uh, we talked to our team and said, hey, we're gonna release a new feature every week. And that felt like quite the cadence and it was very, you know, like, how are you gonna do that? And we have a pretty good-sized team, so we can, like, you look at it mathematically, we can absolutely do that, but it was very daunting. And so our engineering product leaders came back and said, actually, we're not gonna do that. We're gonna release 4 features a month.

I love that.

And it's, it's the exact same as the same, but psychologically it feels different.

And, uh, again, it's that sense of safety.

Mm-hmm.

It's that sense of safety. It's giving you a little bit of wiggle room. And, uh, it's also kind of decoupling the outcome from the just showing up. And so as long as you show up and you keep on exploring, the work will get done. It's just that you don't necessarily know what it will look like and you don't know yet what is going to work.

Okay. So I love this format for tiny experiments, but how do you come up with ideas for what tiny experiments you should be running?

Again, let's go back to how a scientist designs an experiment. Okay. It always starts with observation. So if you think about the experimental cycle, you're going to love this because you love flywheels.

I do love flywheels.

It actually looks like a flywheel. And so you have 4 different steps.

Okay.

And the first one is observation. The second one is hypothesis. Then data collection and data analysis.

Okay.

Um, so first you start with observation. You observe what is the current situation. Then based on that, you formulate a hypothesis. You ask yourself, huh, maybe that would work. Maybe that would change the situation. So then you try it. That's data collection. And once you've tried it, you look back on what you just tried and you see if the hypothesis you formulated was correct or not. That gives you a new observation and you can then tweak your next experiment. And so to come up with ideas for experiments, you start with observation. For this, I have a little exercise that I recommend anyone does, and especially if you're a busy creator that's just going through your task list all the time and hasn't had time for reflection in a while, is to take 24 hours and pretend that you are an anthropologist with your own life and work as the topic of study. And you can do that just by taking little notes, but observe the way you work, observe the way you spend your time, your energy, and your attention.

I'm gonna write those down. So things we're, we've got time, energy, attention. We've got TEA. Yes.

Time, energy, attention. Observing what is taking a lot of your time. You can even do that by looking at your calendar. Are you spending a lot of time in meetings? Are you spending a lot of time creating? So your time. Energy. What gives you energy and what drains your energy? And so maybe you have a conversation with another creator and you're so excited, lots of energy. Or maybe sometimes you're stuck in a meeting and you just want to go and hide in the corner. You don't want to be here. So that's really important data as well. And finally, attention. What's grabbing your attention? What are the things that you're naturally inclined to explore? You can pay attention to this. I guarantee you, if you do this for 24 hours, you will start noticing patterns. Whether you spend too much time on stuff that you don't wanna spend time on, or whether things give you a lot of energy and maybe you should make more time for them, or maybe you don't have enough control over your attention. You feel like you're being pulled in all sorts of directions. Based on that, you can ask yourself, okay, what do I wanna change? What do I wanna tweak? And this is where you formulate your hypothesis. You formulate a hypothesis, you use a magic word, one of my favorite words, maybe.

Maybe. Yeah. Okay.

Maybe if I remove half of my meetings, I'll have more energy for something else. Maybe if I reach out to fellow creators for collaborations, I will have more visibility. Maybe if I invest in that online course, I'll be more comfortable editing my videos. Maybe, maybe, maybe. So that's the hypothesis. Based on the hypothesis, you can design your tiny experiment. So that's the data collection with I will, action, or duration. You just do the thing and just like a scientist, you withhold judgment until you're done because you don't know if your hypothesis is correct or not. You just have an intuition that it might be.

Right. That, that's a key thing.

Withhold judgment until you're done. And lastly, when you're done, you can analyze your data. And for this, you can use plus minus next to see what worked, what didn't, and what you might want to tweak next or experiment with next. And that is the experimental cycle.

I love that. Okay, so you've applied all of this to your business. You've built a pretty amazing business as a creator. All while having a whole separate life as a neuroscientist and all of that. So I wanna dive into that. So let's sit back down and talk about how it applies to your business. All right, so my audience loves flywheels. I think the only thing they love more than flywheels is numbers of creator businesses and the behind the scenes. So in 2024, how much did you earn from your creator business?

250K.

That's fantastic. And How is your time spent? Because I follow you on social and we talk and you're not the person who's working 50, 60 hours a week on your creator business. You're actually like, you know, working on a PhD and like all of this other stuff, right? Yes.

In 2024, I was running my business and writing a book and completing my PhD. So I was definitely not spending 100% of my time on the business. And I think this is what I'm, The proudest of is not necessarily the number and the, the money I'm making, although I am proud of that, but it's the fact that I'm not sacrificing my personal life or my mental health or my other creative pursuits in order for this business to run and be sustainable.

Mm-hmm. Okay. And so then the other thing that someone might assume is they're like, okay, well, Anne-Laure, you did all of that, but probably your 5 to 10 person team did most of that work for you, right? And you would say what to that?

I would say that part of it is true. I do work with freelancers who have been with me, some of them for 2 to 3 years. And I generally don't think it would have been possible to do everything I did last year if I didn't have a little bit of help.

Yeah, but you've got a small amount of help. You don't have, you know, multiple full-time team members. So who are the freelancers that you have? Like, what roles do they fill? And then are they part-time, full-time? How does that work?

It's interesting you're mentioning having full-time employees versus freelancers because I actually started with full-time employees a few years ago.

Most of the time people make the opposite journey. They go freelance to full-time and you went full-time to part-time.

And I realized it was too much work to manage full-time employees because there is this expectation that you're going to train them. And I do want to be a good manager. And so I'm going, I do everything I can to provide the extra supports that you're supposed to give to a full-time employee. Whereas And now with the freelancers I work with, what I really like is that it's a long-term relationship. So we actually do grow together, right? But there's no expectation that I'm the one who's responsible for supporting that growth. We just learn from each other and we grow together. And so I'm getting the support that I need. Everybody is part-time. I, they don't have fixed work hours actually. And I don't care where they are in the world, how many hours a week they work. We have just a few deliverables. And I only talk to them for half an hour every week where we do a one-to-one and they show me everything they've done. I give them my feedback and then we don't talk again until the week after.

You know, the responsibility was such an interesting thing because what stood out to me is I have a small farm and in the summer we hire a few high school kids. My kids are younger, but we hire a few high school kids from the same school to come work for us on the farm. And something that weighs on me is I'm thinking, am I a good employer to these kids? Obviously I treat them super well. I give them fun projects to work on. They enjoy it and they're paid well and all of that. But I'm like, oh, am I helping? Am I teaching them how to work? Am I creating the environment where their parents are going to be like, oh yeah, they, you know, because, you know, my son or daughter worked on Nathan's farm, they learned all of these things. And I'm like, no, I don't think that I do a very good job of that. Whereas if you hire someone to like come in and fix the irrigation system, they are a professional who comes in for— I don't, I don't think for a second about their professional development. Right. They're already, uh, at that place and not equating employees to, uh, you know, high schoolers where you need to teach a lot. But it is interesting thinking about that different relationship because in this case you're bringing in a professional to help achieve a very specific thing. Exactly. And it's a much, much more tightly scoped set of work and set of responsibilities.

Yeah. And, uh, there's also, which I've done with my employees in the past where I would hire someone where they're maybe 60% of the way to where I need them to be. And that's okay because we're going to do the training together and, uh, I'll help them get there. Whereas with a freelancer, it's plug and play.

Right.

They show up and they immediately make my life easier. And so I think both models can work, mm-hmm. But you need to have a very honest conversation with yourself as to whether you want to be a manager or not.

Right.

And personally, it's not that I didn't like it, it's just that it was taking so much of my time and energy. I was trying to do it so well that it was actually removing again from the time, energy, and attention from the other things I wanted to do, which in my case are research and writing and creating books. So again, I think as a creator, you can decide both models are okay, but I think a lot of people don't do it in an intentional way. They just, they equate having lots of employees with success. Right. And so they think that they need to hire for the business to grow. That's not the case. An example I love, I always think about him, is James Clear, who has one employee.

It's true. I know James quite well. One employee.

One employee. And that shows that you can be very successful. And it was very intentional. He's written about it. It was very intentional. He's so successful, he could definitely afford to have more employees, but he's choosing not to. And so I would really encourage anyone who's wondering whether they should hire or not to really think about it.

Yeah. Those constraints that you have are really interesting. I wanna come back to this in just a second, but, but to give a better idea of where you're at in your business and all of that, can you talk about the main ways that you make money in your business and, uh, either the specific dollar amounts or rough percentages that are kind of allocated to each revenue stream?

So I make, I would say about probably 40% of the money is coming in from the community. We have a private community where people can subscribe and have access to courses and workshops. And this is also where they can post their tiny experiments and get feedback from each other. So that's a big part of the business.

What do you charge for the community?

$49 per year.

Okay.

Which is very low. I know a lot of people are surprised, but to me, you'll see how this actually works really well in the sense that I also have Probably 30% from sponsorships from the newsletter. And then a lot of the money we're making are actually corporate workshops, public speaking, those kinds of opportunities, which a lot of them actually come from the private community. So the private community is low priced, but the type of people who are in the community, a lot of them are knowledge workers at big companies or at startups who are interested in these topics. And then I get a lot of emails saying, hey, I love the topics we're talking about in the community. Would you come and talk or give a workshop for the company I work for? And those are priced in a way that's completely different because, yeah, you charge a corporate versus an individual.

When the company credit card or, you know, somewhere someone in accounts payable is taking care of it. Exactly. You can easily add a dollar sign if not multiple or add a zero if not multiple zeros. And they're gonna— it's gonna round to the same number.

And they do have— a lot of them have budget for learning and development. And so, that budget is here, and so, their job is trying to figure out how to allocate it in a way that's useful to their employees. So, if you can demonstrate that you have something useful to provide, then they'll be very happy to work with you. And what better way to demonstrate that value than to actually give it to their employees already individually? So, then those employees become almost like ambassadors for your product.

Yeah, because they would've, they'd be in the community learning from each other, sharing their experiments, getting help and feedback, and then getting success from it. Right. So they're going to be talking around the office or on Zoom with their coworkers and saying like, oh, I did this experiment and here's how it went. And someone's like, that sounds cool. I should do that.

Exactly.

And if 2 or 3 people do that, then they mention actually, well, Anne-Laure does these trainings and we should just have her come in, you know, and the person who controls the budget's like, I mean, we can just pay for that, you know?

It's funny because I actually hadn't really thought about it this way, but it is also a flywheel in the sense that I have then had, I've been at companies giving a talk and then someone from another team hears about it, joins the Nest Labs community, also likes what they see there and then say, you know what, actually I kind of want to do the same thing for my team.

Right.

And then they go back to the same company, but in a different team. So there is a flywheel there.

And you're already approved as a vendor.

Yes, exactly. Oh, so much easier. That's the worst.

If you've ever tried to get paid by like an Adobe or one of these really big companies, it's incredibly difficult. Yes. They're thrilled to pay, you know, whatever amount. They're like, oh yeah, of course. And they're like, but to get the money is—

you have to fill those, all of those forms. And, uh, yes, yes.

It's, it's a whole thing. So you're very intentional about how you've built this business and I see the values and all of that, right? It feels like you've built a very calm business. Is that an accurate way to describe it?

Calm, yes. Intentional, I want to go back to this because I think there is often the temptation once you have a system that works to make it look like it was all intentional to get there. And it was actually quite messy, right? And it's like, it was again, a lot of experimenting. I tried lots of different ways that didn't work for me. This is why again, it's not that common to go from having employees to then working with freelancers. And so The only part I was intentional about was really to pay attention to what worked and what didn't and keeping on adjusting. But I had no idea at the time what I wanted the business to look like. And now it actually is a calm business, but it wasn't from day one.

You had to experiment, run a bunch of tiny experiments in order to get to that point.

Yes. And I had periods of times where I was very close to burnout or even burned out, I think. Uh, because I again was not really making sure that I was spending my time and energy and attention in a way that was sustainable. Right.

I wanna go to burnout in just a second, but thinking about this intentionality around your business and the values that you have from it, there's, I, I don't know who it's a quote from, but it says something like, uh, you know, a principle is not really your principle until it costs you money. Right. You can say, I have these values, this is what I stand for. And then an opportunity comes up and says like, well, yeah, but if you did either built a business in a different way or said yes to this thing, you could make $50,000 or, you know, or, or even more painful, right? If you don't hold to this value, you're going to lose this huge amount of money. And so what I'm, what I'm curious about is if there's an opportunity that's come your way where you've had to say like, oh, actually that would be an amazing opportunity, but I have to say no because of how I'm operating.

Probably when the, the book went to auction, in different countries. So I first sold the book in the US and then it was sold in the UK and the next one was France.

Okay.

And France, obviously I'm French, so it was very important to me that the book had as much visibility as possible in France. And my mom doesn't speak English also.

Okay.

So that French translation was very important to me. To give you an idea of the kind of offers that you normally get for the French market is between 1,000 to 5,000 as pretty good. That's considered pretty good. $5,000.

Like US dollars.

US dollars.

Yeah.

Pretty good, right? I got an offer for $20,000 from a publisher where I could not have my book published there. It's a publisher that also publishes book that tells people that they should not take their treatment for cancer and that they could just, they should just use the power of their mind. And that has a lot of what I think is problematic content.

Right. And like you're a scientist. Yes.

But I was told by quite a few friends actually that it didn't matter. Nobody pays attention to the name of the publisher. And, uh, and if they have so much money to put into the advance, they will probably also invest in marketing.

Right.

And, uh, it took me a few days to think about that.

Mm-hmm.

And I ended up not going with that publisher, but—

So you're walking away from $15,000 or $20,000.

Yes. And also I think the, my friends were right saying that usually when a publisher invests a lot of money in a book, they also invest a lot in marketing afterwards.

Right. Because they have to make their money back.

Exactly. So it was all of that, not only just the money directly coming in my pocket, but also the marketing for the book afterwards. And I don't regret it at all. But when you find yourself again, you know, it's your values, right? It's, uh, and I wish I could say that it was just automatic and I said no, but it did take me a couple of days to think about it and I ended up saying no.

Yeah, I love hearing that story because those are the things that we wrestle with., but those only happen behind closed doors.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, thank you for talking about that. Going back to mental health and burnout, one of the most important things that a creator can do is to show up consistently and do it for a very long time. I'm not talking like 6 weeks or all of that. We're talking more like 6 years, 10 years, that kind of thing. Because everything that we do around building an audience, reaching people, selling products that has insane leverage. But the leverage takes a lot of time in order to compound. And so many people quit before they have any time to compound. And so I'm really curious about your process and how you think about mental health and burnout and really just running this creative business for a very long time while you're tackling ridiculously ambitious projects. Like most people would do one of the things that you're doing and you're like, yeah, I'll do 3 in one year.

I think a lot of creators spend a lot of time investing in systems for their business.

Mm-hmm.

I think we need systems for our mental health as well.

Okay.

It's the only way you can make it sustainable. And as you said, with the timelines we're talking about as a creator, 5, 6, 10 years, your mental health is one of your most precious resources. Again, I wish I could tell you that I just figured that out straight away, but it took a lot of iteration and, uh, a lot of struggling with my mental health sometimes. When I launched the Nest Labs community, I wanted everybody to be happy. And so I would attend every single event. I would answer every single message that I got as quickly as possible. I, and I was sacrificing my sleep, my social life outside of being in front of my computer, going to the gym, skipping meals and all of that, which sounds Crazy to me now, but when you're in it and you care, you truly care and you want what you're building to be helpful and successful, you don't realize that what you're doing is not sustainable. And so today it's a big part of how I run my business to pay attention to how I feel. Mm-hmm. So I personally journal every morning, and I don't think you have to do that. That's quite intense, but it's a cornerstone for me. Of my business and just checking in with myself. How am I feeling today? Did I sleep enough? How healthy or unhealthy am I eating at the moment? When was the last time I went to the gym? When was the last time I had a nice walk? When was the last time I called a friend? And having those little check-ins allows me not necessarily to have perfect mental health all the time, but to kind of catch it early enough if I'm not doing well. And kind of recalibrate and say, okay, actually, you know what, this weekend I was planning on catching up on some writing. I'm not going to do that. It will wait until Monday. Nobody's going to die if I'm a little bit late with this article. So recalibrating based on how I feel.

That's, uh, when Ali Abdaal was on the podcast, that was something they talked about is on one hand, how seriously we take a creator business and how important that is. And you know, like you wanna operate level and achieve your maximum potential and everything. And then also coming from the world of medicine as a doctor. And he's like, but to be clear, there are no lives on the line. Like no one, you know, the stakes are completely different. And so they're, they'd be stressing about a YouTube video in the script and they just don't quite have the thumbnail. Right. And he's like, I love this attention to detail that we have and all that, but also like, no one's going to die.

Although the fear of failure and the fear of judgment from others is so deeply ingrained.

It kind of feels like sometimes you'd rather die.

Yeah. And so you have, you have to consciously remind yourself that it's actually okay. Because again, if you just let your brain do its job in an automatic way, it will tell you messing up in front of other people is actually really dangerous. And in today's world, it actually isn't, but our brain hasn't changed that much. So we still have those voices telling us, Don't mess up.

Right.

Don't miss that deadline. You have to be perfect all the time.

Which is interesting because as a creator now, everyone following you, they want the authentic version of you. And so you're saying like, I cannot mess it up in front of people, whereas your audience is going, I mean, but if you did, we would just relate to you more, you know? Yes. But like, uh, reconciling those two different perspectives is actually really hard.

It does require quite a bit of courage to. Actually open up.

Yeah.

To really open up. I think it's very easy to also fall into the trap of curated authenticity where you just show some parts and, you know, as a way to relate deeper with your audience, but you're not really showing the behind the scenes. And, and I can completely understand the temptation because again, there's this fear of being judged. Also being an online creator, literally it says in the name, means doing business on the internet. And we know not everybody is nice on the internet. So that fear can be justified sometimes. And so I think this is also something that's very important to figure out for yourself. How open do you want to be? How authentic do you want to be? And, uh, how much do you want to share?

I think when it comes to mental health, stress is such a big part of that. I'm told that maybe I'm going gray a little early because of the amount of stress of being a creator and a parent and, you know, running a software company and all of that. But in the book you talk about stress as a signal. Yeah. What does that mean and how do you think about it?

So we've been taught that whenever we feel stressed, we need to find a way to get out of that state. And being stressed is bad.

Mm-hmm.

But there are actually two kinds of stress. There's distress and eustress.

Okay.

Distress is the bad kind of stress. Eustress is the same EU at the beginning as in euphoria. Means good stress.

Okay.

And there is such a thing as good stress. Good stress is the kind of stress that makes you push yourself to learn more and to grow. And you can almost think about it as a bell curve where you want just the right amount.

Mm-hmm.

And if you have zero stress, then you're bored. If you have too much stress, then we get into anxious territory where it impacts your sleep and all of that. So paying attention to stress as a signal is really about asking yourself first, what kind of stress are you experiencing? Are you experiencing right now? Is it the good kind or the bad kind? And how's the amount? How's the temperature for you? Like, is it, is it too much? Is it too little? Are you in that Goldilocks zone? Right. Because that's where you wanna be.

Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Is there an example from your business of how you've been thinking about, like, a time that the stress strayed, you know, too far either direction and how you brought it back?

The book was definitely a moment.

No, the book was stressful? I don't know. I thought they were a walk in the park.

You know, you're laughing, but actually I really thought, I, I thought it was going to be difficult, but I thought I've been writing this newsletter for years.

Yeah.

And so I just need to sit down and show up and be consistent.

Right.

And you know, if I think about each chapter as maybe 2 to 3 newsletters, it's going to be okay. And of course it wasn't. So many skills that I had picked up when writing the newsletter did not translate to writing a book. So you're laughing, but seriously, actually, I thought this is going to be okay and it was not okay. I was really stressed about it. And so I really had to redesign all of my systems. This is actually when I started experimenting with meditation. Because my anxiety was through the roof.

Yeah.

And so I was interested in different ways to practice mindfulness. And to me, this is really how you reconnect with yourself when you're in a situation of high stress. Instead of trying to get rid of the stress, which you're never going to be able to do, and the more you try to do that, the more stressed you are, it's really about being curious about the stress and its source. And so saying, oh, hi stress, you're back. It's been a while. So why are you here? What's causing this? What can we do? And what kind of experiment can we design around this where we could maybe try a different way to go about this so we can reduce it a little bit and get back in that nice middle of the bell curve?

You know what's interesting about that is that I'm thinking about, I don't know if it's a habit or a process that I've started. Of realizing when I feel something like stress, anxiety, anger, any of these things. And I'll get to this point and I realize, wait, I don't know what I feel and I don't know why I feel it. And so I almost have to like pull out the mental remote and hit rewind. I'm like, bzzz, and we go back, say 10 minutes. I'm like, okay, what has been happening? Well, in the last 10 minutes, I've consumed an insane amount of information, right? I've probably, uh, maybe I did this first thing in the morning, right? I've looked at Slack, I've looked at email, I've looked at Instagram and X. So 4 places where it's just a fire hose of information. And I might have something that makes me excited. I might have felt a win. I might have felt angry about something I saw on X. I might have felt disappointed about an email that I got that was that rejection. That I didn't want and all of this. And so now I'm here and I'm going, I feel stressed. I don't, I don't even know what I feel. And I have to, like, that was really, really a problem for me until I started to build, you know, the habit of rewinding that and being like, okay, let me unravel all of this and start to see what each thing is individually. Because wow, we can throw so much information at ourselves that I just think, I don't know. I mean, you're the scientist here, but I think that our brains are just not at all equipped to handle that velocity of information.

Oh, absolutely. And especially when you don't have any space in between to actually digest it. Because technically, if you look at the absolute amount of information, if you had that throughout the day and you had some breaks in between where you could either take some notes or discuss that information with your team and say, actually, I read this, what do you think? Should we implement that, take it into account or not? And that was nicely, almost like dripped throughout the day, you would be fine. It's the firehose of information that we get without any space to process it that is actually really hard to manage.

Yeah, that makes sense. So something that I think you do really well in your business is managing social media and you have a different take than I think, uh, most people do. And it's something that all creators have to do, right? There's very, very few creators out there who, uh, you know, have a thriving creator business and don't participate in social media. So tell me about how you manage social media.

So I love how you said you, you can't really not participate. I agree. And I would also say that you can actually be intentional in terms of which parts of social media you actually want to participate in. Anytime you decide to do a new thing on social media, that has a cost. That has, again, a cost in terms of time and energy and attention. And you will constantly hear people telling you, you need to do Reels, you need to do that, you need— now it's carousels, now it's this, YouTube Shorts and Threads, you need an account on TikTok and all of that. And you could spend your entire time running in circles trying to do everything, not even knowing what's working and what's not working, and not even growing or seeing an actual impact on your business, right? So I would say the first thing, and that's what I did, is that I've been quite intentional with trying different platforms for a specific duration and then quitting, property quitting if it didn't work. So I had a TikTok for a few months. No TikTok anymore. YouTube, I mentioned earlier, I'm not on YouTube anymore. I mean, my old videos are there, but I'm not posting anymore. Threads also totally quit it. And so currently I'm only posting on Instagram and on LinkedIn.

Okay.

And that's it. And the occasional post on X. But just for announcements or those kind of things because I historically have a pretty big audience there.

Yeah.

But I don't post regularly there. That's number one, I would say, especially if you're a creator, uh, who's getting started and you don't have a team, be intentional and allow yourself to try those platforms. And if they're not working for you, if you feel like you're putting a lot of resources in them and it's not doing anything, stop. It's okay.

Right.

A lot of the most successful creators actually have been quite sequential in the way they grew their audiences on social media. So they were at the time all in on Twitter and then LinkedIn and then something else. Once you get to a certain level of where it's almost celebrity, really, and you have an audience that will follow you everywhere, then you don't have to worry about that. But at the beginning, just focus on one platform at a time. And second, get help. Don't do everything on your own. So I hired a freelancer that is every week taking some of my newsletters, content from the book, clips from interviews that I'm doing with other people, and she puts it in— it's a very manual process, but she puts screenshots of what she's planning on posting next week in a Google Presentation. And when we do our one-to-one, Every week, I literally verbally tell her, oh yeah, love that, don't like that, can we change this? I don't think I would say this this way, doesn't sound great, can you shorten this? She's taking notes and then she schedules it.

Oh, that's amazing.

And that's it. And the more we do this, and if I notice it's been several weeks in a row where I repeat the same kind of feedback, I also tell her, you know, I mentioned that last week already, can we kind of, you know, and It works. It's both, all of the content is super aligned with the kind of stuff I would post myself if I had the time. And, uh, I even think it's better than what I would create myself.

Yeah, because she's spending a dedicated amount of time on that and she's trying to understand you and your voice and she has a huge amount of source material to pull from, right? She has a book, she has hundreds of issues of your newsletter, right? All of that. So that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. So I would say design a system that works for you. The system that I have works for me, but I have also friends who decide to block an hour every morning to do it. I've seen so many different systems. The one, the one thing I would say is that I don't think you can really grow an audience on social media if you don't have a system.

Right.

So figure out what is your system, but make sure you have one.

And really run an experiment to say, I might, listen to your system and be like, that's interesting. Let me design my experiment. That is where I get to try on, you know, the version of your system that's right, right for me. I might do it for 15 days and go from there.

Exactly. And then you'll end up having a system that is unique to you and your business.

Mm-hmm.

That is not copy-pasted from someone else and that actually works.

Right. Okay. That's interesting. So I'm coming into this conversation and I'm very much a goal setter. I want to get, you know, 100,000 followers on LinkedIn, uh, this year, uh, you know, any of this revenue number, all of that. I imagine so many people listening are in the exact same place. And so I'm really curious, as we wrap up, what's the advice that you would have that you really want to leave every listener with?

Let go of goals a little bit.

Mm-hmm.

In the sense that most people are not successful because of the goal that they set up. It's just a nice way to have a north that star in your mind and to motivate yourself. But people are successful because they kept on showing up and experimenting until they figured out something that worked for them.

Right.

So focus on that and ask yourself, is there a goal that you have right now in your business, just one, that you could maybe turn into a tiny experiment?

I love that. Okay, where should people go to— they should obviously buy the book, but then where should they go to check out everything else that you're making?

So the book is available anywhere books are sold. And, uh, I have a newsletter at nestlabs.com where every week I write about a lot of the topics we discussed together today.

Sounds good. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me.

If this episode got you thinking about building a business that fits you, you'll love episode 52 with Josh Kaufman. We dig into how to create a high margin creator-led business without a big team. One that's simple, profitable, and built around your strengths. Be sure to like and subscribe for more content like this, and I'll see you next week.