The importance of curiosity: Tiny Experiments with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

And we're live. So Anne-Laure, welcome and thank you so much for accepting my invitation. How are you?

I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me.

Well, I'm really excited. It's been a while. It was a whole adventure to be able to get this interview, but now that I have you, I have a lot of questions. So, um, just to give my listeners and viewers a little context, I was very fortunate to meet you in London. For your book launch, and I met your very nice parents, and we had a little chat together. And so it gave me an opportunity to learn a few things about you that maybe you don't usually tell people. I don't know. Uh, before, uh, we really dive into the reason why you're here, can you tell people who you are and what you do?

I'm a neuroscientist at King's College London and the founder of a small business called Nest Labs, which is— I kind of describe it as an educational platform. We really try to teach people how to make the most of their brain, and we do that through a newsletter which has about 120,000 subscribers right now, a private community, and educational content, including the book that I've recently launched called Tiny Experiments.

Yes, and I actually have it here.

Amazing.

And there are a lot little, you know, colored stickers in it because I took a few, a few notes and I read it with a lot of attention. So yes, Tiny Experiments. So what exactly is the concept and could you walk us through what a tiny experiment is?

So I discovered the concept of applying an experimental mindset when I went back to university to retrain as a neuroscientist. And the idea of having an experimental mindset is that instead of responding to uncertainty with anxiety, which is the normal response that we have typically where we say, I don't understand what's going on. I don't know where I'm going. I feel a bit lost. And we have all of this anxiety. It's really about responding to uncertainty like a scientist with curiosity. When a scientist is faced with something they don't quite understand, they actually get excited about it. They feel like, ooh, there's something we can learn. There is some discovery that can happen around this question. And so I wondered, what would it look like to take that experimental mindset and apply it to everything in your life and in your work? And the best way to do this is to design tiny experiments. So to design a tiny experiment, you just do the exact same thing a scientist does when they design an experiment. So when a scientist designs an experiment, They only need to know two things. First, what they're going to try, and second, the trial period. So for a 10-year experiment, it's exactly the same thing. You decide on an action you're going to try and a duration you're going to try it for. And what's really different between experiments and goals is that with a goal, you have a very binary definition of success. There is an outcome. You want to get to, and either you get to that outcome and that is success, or you don't get to that outcome and that is failure. With an experiment, the only goal you have is to learn something new. So even if the outcome is unexpected or doesn't exactly work out the way you expected it to, this is still success as long as you learn something new. If you think like a scientist, if you have an experimental mindset, then this is success.

Yes. And I have to tell you something about the book and the concepts. And I'm not the only one. I read a lot of people who had the same reaction. For me, it really brought a lot of lightness to the way I was doing things, because I think a lot of people, like you said, when we try something, we either succeed, it works, or We don't, it doesn't work. And for a lot of people, it's like, oh, if I failed, I wasted my time or, you know, I'm not good or whatever story we can tell ourselves. I'm not going to say that your idea kind of, you know, revolutionized the way I saw things, but it kind of did, honestly. It relieved me of something to think that, yeah, I can just try something and see how it does. And I don't have to feel guilty if it doesn't work. So at least thank you for that.

Thank you. I do get this feedback quite a lot that it's not necessarily that what I write about in the book is revolutionary, but people feel like seeing it written in a book gives them permission to actually apply this framework. And sometimes that's all you need, right? You just need someone else to tell you, You know what? It's okay, actually. You don't have to be so focused on the outcome. Failure is part of the process. You actually need failure in order to learn. And just seeing it written in a book is almost like a permission slip to say, okay, this is fine. So, you know what, like, if that's the only change that it makes on people, just knowing that it is okay and they don't have to cling so much to the illusion of certainty that having those linear goals give us, then I feel like my job is done.

Yes. Yeah, it is. Believe me, it is. Okay. So I'm curious about what are the little tiny experiments that you did? So we've all heard obviously about the newsletter, which was, I guess, a very important tiny experiment for you. And it's still here, I think 5 years later or something. But before that, can you tell us a few tiny experiments that you tried?

So the newsletter was really the first time I designed a tiny experiment with this idea of committing to an action for a duration and withholding judgment while I was conducting the experiment. So I really started the newsletter saying, let me try this. I don't know if I'm going to like it. I don't know if it's going to work. I don't know if I will want to keep going or not, but that's okay. No outcome, no goal, just showing up. Being curious and seeing what happens. And since then, I started applying this approach in lots of different areas of my life. So I have experimented with meditation, for example. I thought I was terrible at meditation, so I said, let me try to meditate for 15 minutes every day for the next 15 days. Action and duration. And that experiment was great in the sense that I discovered that I can meditate. And, uh, although this is not my number one mindfulness tool, I still prefer Body movement, walking, dancing, and journaling. It's now part of my mindfulness toolkit. So it means that now if I feel like I need to relax, calm my thoughts, reconnect with myself, I can actually go and grab that in my toolkit. I have experimented with content creation. So YouTube, for example, I had a bunch of people around me telling me, YouTube is the future. You need a YouTube channel. And I, you know, I got curious. So I said, okay, let me design a tiny experiment. And I said, I will publish a weekly YouTube video until the end of the year, which was about 2 or 3 months, I think at the time. And that experiment, a lot of people would think it was a failure in the sense that at the end of the experiment, I realized that that wasn't for me. YouTube wasn't for me. And so I stopped. But exactly as you were saying earlier, knowing that something is not for you, learning that something is not aligned with your current priorities, your current aspirations, or your values, that's growth. That's growth too, to know that. So to me, that was a very successful experiment. And so, yeah, I basically, anytime I'm faced with a question, a challenge, or doubt, whether in my personal or professional life, now I always ask myself, what is a tiny experiment I can design so I can explore this area of doubt?

Interesting. So let's talk about the process of writing the book, because I can imagine that writing a weekly newsletter and writing a book is not exactly the same thing or not the same thing at all. So what would be the difference? What had to change between your weekly newsletter that you were sending regularly for a few years and writing this book?

Yeah, it's interesting because I was very naive at the beginning of the book writing process. I thought, oh, you you know, I've been writing this newsletter for a few years and every Thursday I sit down and I write it and I send it to people. What is a book? Just, you know, a bunch of newsletters stitched together, each newsletter like a chapter. And if I'm consistent and I show up and I write all of those different parts and then I put them together, voilà, I'll have a book. Obviously that is not how it works. A book is a completely different creative project in the sense that it needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end and a narrative that makes sense and where you're building on top of all of the knowledge you're co-creating with the reader. And a book is also, it feels a lot more final in the sense that with a newsletter or any kind of online content that you create, if you post on social media or if you create videos, it's okay if any one of those pieces are, is not your best work.

Ever.

You can always get better and iterate with the next one. And your audience is following you across this journey. And they will forgive you if there's one newsletter that is, you know, maybe not the best. They know, you know, they know you and you build this long-term relationship. With a book, you're not going to run after people and say, oh, sorry, I want to change chapter 5, change my mind. Sorry. So it has this sense of very, the sense of finality that I think, at least for me, was quite overwhelming and anxiety-inducing because you start overthinking every word, feeling like, is that the right word? So that was one part. And, um, I decided to design a tiny experiment, obviously, to try and figure it out. So the first tiny experiment that I had, I said, I'm going to write for 1 hour every weekday. And so I decided to do that first thing in the morning when I was not distracted, sit down, write for an hour. That sounded like a sensible experiment, but it did not work at all for me. What happened very often is that I would sit down to write and then I would not come up with anything interesting or anything good. And then it would ruin my entire day. Because I kept on thinking, oh no, I didn't manage to write anything this morning. This book is not getting written. Why did I get a book deal in the first place? I'm never going to manage to write this thing. And so I changed the format of the experiment and I said, I will write for 5 hours every week. And it doesn't matter when or how that happens. It might sound like a small change, but it changed everything. That meant that it removed the pressure. So some weeks I would actually end up writing for 1 hour every weekday, but sometimes I would not touch the manuscripts the entire week. And then on Sunday, I would be so excited and just typing furiously, feeling very inspired and feeling like my creativity was flowing. So that format ended up working really, really well for me. Another thing I did was that I hired what they call in the publishing industry, a developmental editor and a developmental editor. Developmental editor is really a thinking partner. And so I had a weekly meeting with my developmental editor, and I don't like disappointing people. I don't like showing up empty-handed. So knowing that I had this meeting every week, I would sometimes write something very quickly before the meeting. So I would not show up with nothing to discuss with my developmental editor. So that was really helpful for me. And in between this tiny experiment and the accountability partner that I had, It really ensured that over the course of a year when I wrote the book, there was never a week when I did not touch the book. And I think that was a big part of creating this cohesive project with this narrative that actually makes sense. And that is more than just the sum of its parts.

Hmm. That's so interesting. So it's made, So the difference was to say, I will write 5 hours a week rather than, you know, 1 hour every weekday. And I think it's, it's so important to also pay attention to those little tweaks because not everyone works the same way. Not everyone functions the same way. And for me, for example, I would be, it would be absolutely impossible for me to commit to, for example, writing one hour every day, because I know how I work. If I have appointments during the day, if I have, you know, classes, coaching, whatever, I know it's— I do not have the bandwidth after that or before that to do something creative, such as writing or creating content. So in my case, for example, I know that I have to book a full day for that, which is usually Friday. And this is my zero appointment day usually. So the only type of appointment I could have on a Friday is an interview, like what we're doing today. Um, because I have tried to do one hour here, one hour there, and it just doesn't work. So I think when you design the tiny experiments, you also kind of have to give yourself some room to make those little tweaks, because sometimes just the way you formulate the experiment also changes everything. You told me at the beginning that you are a researcher, you're also the founder of NessLabs, and now you're an author. You published a book, so you're an author. So how do you organize all that? Because I feel like all these activities separately are already very busy. So how do you organize your days in order to make everything work?

For me, it works because I have all of these different activities, not despite of that. I, I need the diversity of projects. I actually love it that I can spend some time working on a research paper. And when I get to a point where I'm feeling either a bit stuck or frustrated or bored, I can switch to working on the newsletter for NAS Labs. And I don't have the book anymore, but that was the case also at the time I had that writing I could switch back to. While I was writing the book, I was rewriting a lot of my old newsletters instead of sending fresh ones. So that was saving a lot of time as well. And it was actually a great exercise going back to newsletters that I wrote in 2020. And then in 2024, taking these newsletters and asking myself, what would the Anne-Laure of 2024 want to add to this or change, or maybe things I've changed my mind on, or maybe there are new research papers that came out since then. So that meant that instead of spending hours writing the newsletter from scratch, I could just spend 1 hour updating a previous newsletter. And obviously in between 2020 and 2024, nobody remembered what I said 4 years earlier. And it was updated content. So nobody particularly complained about it. For me, it felt really good to actually make sure that my content was updated and fresh and based on the latest research. And so most of my proper new writing was dedicated to the book. And so I was spending most of my time either doing research or writing the book. And so it might sound like those were full-time jobs, but most authors are not full-time authors. Most authors are also either researchers or they're doing public speaking. Teaching is also very common or other kinds of jobs. And I think it's really important because if you want to be a good author, you need to be in touch with the everyday world and you need to have those inputs and those experiences that are going to inspire your writing. I would not imagine a life where You're just writing and you have no space for other experiences. So to me, although on paper, it might sound like this is very hard to manage. I would not, I'm not even able to imagine another way of working for me that would be possible.

That's so interesting because we hear a lot of people saying, focus on one thing. And I don't know, it's, it's so, um, again, it's, it kind of makes you feel a bit guilty. Because you feel like, why can't I just focus on one thing? Like the people say, like, if you want to be successful, focus on one thing. And that's also very refreshing to hear that it's not despite, but because of all those things that you're able to manage it. Oh my God. I'm so glad we spoke. Okay. So, um, I was wondering, uh, because when I, Okay, so here's it. When I met your parents, who are like the coolest people ever, my— your mom, she's my new spirit animal, honestly. She actually reminds me of my mom in the sense that— so my mom is a very short and dynamic little woman.

Okay, I can see why you see a connection here.

And very, you know, and my mom is always very elegant very well dressed. And she's, you know, she's always, she pays a lot of attention to her appearance and everything. And when I saw your mom, I was like, oh my God, it's like, oh, she kind of makes me think of my mom. But anyways, so I met your parents, I spoke with them. And one thing that they told me was about like, oh, but you know, Anne-Laure, when she was little, she had this, like, she had this blog or this forum, or I don't remember exactly what it was. And she won this I think contest, writing contest, or what I— well, they told me a lot of things, and I was trying to imagine young Anne-Laure, you know, doing, um, doing all these things. And that makes me wonder, um, where does the curiosity come from? Because that's a word that you use a lot in your book and when you speak in interviews, and, and I feel like it's really your you know, your number one concept, like stay curious, be curious. So why is it so important to be curious and where does your curiosity come from?

Several parts, I think. So first, absolutely education and the environment you grew up in. And in my case, I was very lucky to grow up in an environment where curiosity was encouraged. I, if you saw what my childhood bedroom looks like, there's an entire wall that is just books. And I didn't grow up with a lot of money, but there was one thing where there was no budget and my parents would never say no. And that was books. And, uh, we would sometimes go to, for French listeners, La Fnac, which is a big bookstore. With my dad and we would spend the entire afternoon there just sitting on the floor, reading books, and then picking a couple that I could bring back home. I actually was a fairly introverted kid. And, uh, it's something that my parents were saying a lot too, is that whenever we had guests at home, I would use books as an excuse to not hang out in the living room and to go back to my room because I knew again, that if I said I'm reading, that was an excuse that was considered good enough that I could avoid all of the social interaction. So first, I do think that having an environment as a kid where curiosity is encouraged is extremely helpful. And for me, curiosity has always been more than that. It's always been almost like a lifeline. Whenever I have struggled with my mental health, whether that was depression or anxiety, Curiosity was almost like the thread that was keeping me connected to life, connected to other human beings, and connected to the next day. Wanted to keep on waking up and seeing what happens next. So this desire to keep on learning, even when everything else looked pretty dark, has been almost like a drive and, uh, Yes, I think lifeline is really the right word here, a lifeline for me. And, uh, I know quite a few people where it's been the case for them as well. And so when life was very difficult for them, they might find just the right book at that time that would really help them and support them. And so that's why I'm also passionate about making sure education is available to anyone he wants to access it and needs it. And I think curiosity is one of the most beautiful and powerful human abilities that we have, and it's very important to cultivate it and encourage it and make space for it.

You mentioned at the beginning of your book that you used to work for Google, and it was like your dream job, basically. And, uh, so if I remember the story well, you said, um, at some point you that like you had, you started having some rashes on your arm, I think it was, or something physical on your body and you had to go to the hospital. And this is kind of the, you know, the moment where you realized that something was wrong with what was going on. And I would like to get back to that because I find it really interesting when I hear these kinds of stories. That sometimes we do things, we go through the motions, and there has to be a physical sign or an event to make us realize that the way we're doing things or the life we're leading is not the right one and so on. So would you mind, you know, getting back to this moment and how you managed to get through that?

I was working at Google at the time. And it really felt like my dream job at first, in the sense that I was working with really smart people on interesting projects with really the kind of budgets where you can actually do really cool stuff. And it was Google, you know, I know it's become a really, really big company now. But that was 10 years ago or more. And it was smaller then. And it still had this very cool vibe. And so I was very excited to work there. And as a result, I was the yes girl. You could ask me to work on anything at any time. I would completely ignore the fact that we only have 24 hours in a day and maybe we need to sleep and maybe we need to see our friends. I was actually very often canceling social plans in order to finish work. And, uh, I was probably a bit burned out, but I didn't even realize it because again, I was actually excited about the work. And at the time, when people were talking about burnout, they had a very limited definition of it. So when people talked about burnout, they were talking about the horrible manager that's forcing you to work long hours. That did not resonate at all with me. And so I didn't think I was burned out. And so one morning, I was brushing my teeth, getting ready for work, and I noticed that my arm had turned purple. So I went to the Google infirmary. Yes, they have that on campus. And the The nurse there checked my arm and said, I need to go to the hospital as quickly as possible. So I went to the hospital in Stanford. The doctors looked at my arm and said, you need to have surgery as quickly as possible. There is a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs. And in that moment, what did I do? I said, give me one second. Let me check my calendar.

Wow.

And this is when I had this almost like out-of-body experience of seeing myself have this ridiculous response, really realizing that my priorities were completely out of whack when your health becomes less important than your to-do list. And so that was the trigger for me where I really started questioning, yeah, am I actually focusing on the right things?

Yeah. Wow. That's a, that's an incredible story. And I'm so glad you, you mentioned that at the beginning, because I always say to my friends and to everybody, your body is speaking to you, listen to it, you know, and don't wait until, because sometimes your brain says one thing, your body says something different and listen to your body first before, you know, it becomes something dramatic, like what you had to go through, but It's just so crazy to me. All right. So we, I want to be mindful of your time, Anne-Laure, but I would like to ask you what's next. So do you have other projects in mind that you can talk about? What can we wish you for the future?

I'm not 100% sure what's next yet, which I think is exactly as it should be. I just launched this book. I want to take my time and figure out what I might be curious about. That being said, I got some really good news recently. I got some funding from the UK government, $200,000 to study curiosity in ADHD, and that's going to be a 12-month project. It's still very, very, very early, but a potential challenge I would be excited to explore would be to potentially writing my next book based on my own research. Tiny Experiments is, I think, a really good distillation of existing research, which I have translated into practical tools for anyone to explore their ambitions in a way that's more sustainable. And for that next book, I'm thinking, what would it look like if it was my own original research? So still very, very early with this, at the stage of just curiosity, not quite sure. Nothing set in stone, but at the moment, this is kind of what I'm thinking about.

Oh, I love that. I read the newsletter where you mentioned that you got this grant for this research. So congratulations. That's very exciting. And I'm, yeah, I'm impatiently waiting for, to be honest, I wish you write a second book and a third and a fourth. So many, you know, because I really enjoyed reading this one. And, um, and it's not just because I've read thousands of productivity books at this point, or books about, you know, the brain and everything. And what I like about this one is it's practical. It's very clear. The steps are clear. Like, you do this, here are the steps. And it's also well written, which, um, sometimes is a bit lacking in those types of books because it's not a literary book, but, um, there's something about your writing that is— it makes it way more enjoyable to read. So if you put out other books, I will be the first one to pre-order them. Honestly, thank you. Here again, uh, you can order it in any good bookstore. And my final question, it's actually, um, a very question— a very simple question is What is your, you know, final word/recommendation for anyone who's listening today? What would you like to tell them?

I would tell them if you're currently facing an area of uncertainty, you're not quite sure what to do next, whether that is in the personal area of your life or your professional area of your life, ask yourself, what could be a tiny experiment that you could design? So you can explore potential different answers to that question and see what works for you.

Okay, that's a great final word and great recommendation. So thank you so much again for your time. I know you're a very busy woman, especially at the moment, but I'm so, so cool that we finally managed to talk together. So thank you again and hopefully see you for the next book. Who knows?

Thank you so much.

Thank you.