🎙️ The Path to Authentic Writing with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

That doesn't necessarily mean that you need an actual community. You probably just need to have a mechanism where you encourage more people to reply to you and that's it. Like it doesn't have to be a full-blown community, but if you're craving that connection, that feedback, it can really be as simple as asking people to reply explicitly. Like just ask for what you want really.

This week I'm sharing part of my conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is a neuroscientist, a writer, and an entrepreneur. Anne-Laure is the founder of Nest Labs, which is an online platform at the intersection of productivity, neuroscience, and mental health. Now, this is the second part of our conversation, so you're going to hear us talking about choosing authenticity over mimetic desires. And you'll actually hear Anne-Laure pointing out some of the traps that I've fallen into on my creative journey. We talk about embracing individuality as writers and as content creators. We talk about the work-life balance as an entrepreneur and someone building a business. We talk about what it's like to build community and the extent to which we need to build connection through the work that we do. We also talk about overcoming self-consciousness in the content that we put out and the work that we do, and the distinction between mindful productivity and toxic productivity. And finally, we talk about Anne-Laure's journey as a writer, going from writing primarily blog posts on her blog Nest Labs to now working on a book project and some of the nuances that she's encountered on that journey. So you can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io. And you can find Anne-Laure on Twitter and Instagram @nuran. We'll have all the links to her platforms in the show notes below. Now, if you love this episode, please do share with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners just like you. How much of— obviously you didn't manifest Nest Labs, but I wonder, like, as I look at your journey in building it, funnily enough, this goes back to what we were talking about before about the intentionality. There's a lot of it that perhaps in retrospect, or at least from an outsider's perspective, makes complete sense. It looked like you put a lot of thought into exactly how you were going to build this thing. Everything makes sense. It all fell into place quite well. I think, you know, you're building it, you had a certain number of subscribers within a few months, you started to get some sponsorship money. And because you'd put those building blocks in place in advance, by the time you started to hit more serious growth, I think by the second year, suddenly you're able to make, you know, over £10,000 or so. And then from there, then you're able to start hiring people, and then you build the community. But actually, you didn't just wait and build the community, you already had some community elements from the beginning. That's like, wow, you know, you did this so well. And I was comparing that to my own journey, man. I think, okay, on one part, I wish I had the personality to build a community kind of thing, because I'm not sure I do. Very often I like to like lock myself in my room and just focus on writing. But I do need to be, you know, more social in that respect. But I think that can be hard, like coordinating people doing all of those things. But also from a business perspective and from a scaling perspective, one of the things that I've started to find difficult or strange, and I wonder if any of this resonates with you, it might not because you have the community element, but I'd be interested to know is So my growth wasn't necessarily linear. At the beginning it was linear, but kind of on a small scale. So the first year I was writing my newsletter, we had like 500 subscribers. And for clarity, this is also the retrospect part. There were definitely a few stages where I had no idea what this was about. Like when I first started it, I sent it to some friends and I was like, hey, I'm just gonna share with you the thing that I'm learning. And that newsletter is still there. Like people can go read it. I just said, hey, you know, here's what I'm gonna be doing. And then the first 10 newsletters are all completely random. Like I'm just learning a bunch of different things and you just see me talking about completely random stuff. So in that first year we grew to like 500 subscribers, and the next year we just doubled, so went to 1,000. And again, I'm trying to figure out, okay, what is this? Is this a platform? Now there's quite a few people, there's a lot of people. I think by the time we got to the end of that first year, I was trying to avoid paying extra because, you know, a lot of these email platforms, once you go past 1,000, the prices go up. So I was unsubscribing people quite a lot to try and stay under the, the 1,000. And then the year after that, I think we got to maybe 2,000, 2,500. And then from there, that was the beginning of last year. And then we went up to like 30,000 or so. So a lot of the growth came like right at the end. But what's strange is that because of that, the same with the website. So now let's say we probably have about 10,000 views or so a month. But all of these are just numbers. At least that's how it can feel now. And there's a strange sense in which it almost doesn't feel real. Like I have no idea what any of these numbers mean. It can feel like in some ways it feels less personal when it was a smaller group of people, I still didn't know those people, but I was still writing and knowing that there were people on the other side of that. Whereas now, okay, cool, you have this big number, but I don't know what that actually means. And I wish maybe there was some community. People send me emails and stuff and that's cool. But yeah, there's no sense in which it feels concrete outside of that. Maybe that's a good thing cuz I don't have too many people in my ear, but there's definitely negatives that I feel maybe compared to if there were like an actual community of people having discussions about these things.

What are the negatives exactly, except that the numbers don't seem to mean anything concrete?

Well, I think it's more that sometimes it can just feel like writing into a void. Like, I have— I know what the schedule is. I have to write this stuff every week, and that's just all that I do. I just write stuff and just send it out, and I have no idea, you know, once that happens, who knows, maybe someone will email me. I have one really cool person that I'm not even sure if it's a male or female. I don't even know this person's name. But every time there's like a link broken or something is wrong, they will send me an email. So that person I know is alive and that is a real person. But you know, relative to the total number now, that is just a number. Like it doesn't feel like, oh, a scaling in magnitude of real connections and relationships built. I think that's the part that I'm talking about.

Oh, that's so interesting. Yes. That, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need an actual community. You probably just need to have a mechanism where you encourage more people to reply to you and that's it. Like it doesn't have to be a full-blown community, but if you're craving that connection, that feedback, it can really be as simple as asking people to reply explicitly. Like just ask for what you want really. It's just sometimes I think, because I've been, I've definitely been guilty of this where we sometimes have that mimetic desire of looking at other people approaching their work in a way and we feel like, oh, I need to do this. For me, it's been YouTube. I've been banging my head like for the past 3 years trying to figure out how do I create a YouTube channel? How do I do this? How do I stick to a schedule? How do I, you know, it's only very recently that I managed again through writing in my notebooks. And I had this aha moment where I realized I don't want to be a YouTuber. I actually don't want to be a YouTuber, but because there are so many content creators that I deeply admire. Who also happen to be YouTubers who create this amazing content on YouTube. Without thinking, I just thought, yeah, that's the next step. I need to, to create a YouTube channel. I need to publish a video every 2 weeks and I need to translate my written content into those high-quality videos. And I was really struggling with it. I really felt out of my comfort zone, not in a good way, in a way where I just really was dreading having to go and sit in front of the camera and record that content. I had to script everything. And then I realized, Oh, I don't wanna be a YouTuber. Wow. And that removed a really big weight off my shoulders. So that's why I'm suggesting for, in your case, exploring other options. Because if you were, you were saying, I don't know if I want a community. I actually kind of like just writing and doing my thing. And it's like, maybe you don't need a community. Not everyone needs one. And maybe there are other ways to get that connection you're craving that is still aligned with who you are as a creator. And not just applying what other people have been doing very successfully, but that just may not feel right for you.

I think you're completely right. I'm very grateful for you sharing that.

Oh, sorry. That turned into like a little coaching session.

No, no, no, it's good. This is perfect. This is exactly what I need. And it's funny because usually I would think I'm aware of those things, but I think in this context, I think it's more just because, because it's grown really quickly. I think that's the part where there's just this gap between what I think this is and what it actually is. And I think also this is the other part that I definitely think is the case. When just a year or so ago when I had like 2,000 subscribers, I would look at people that had like 20,000+ subscribers and be like, wow, the lived experience of what it would be like to have over 20,000 subscribers must be completely different. Life must be different. Everything was, is a whole new thing and it doesn't feel any different. It just feels like I'm still here in my room just writing stuff and nothing's really changed. So there's that part of it. And then the other part is, which I do think is legitimate and it does link to what you're saying, but it's just more, yeah, just wanting a sense of like fellowship outside of what you're writing. And I think when I started at the beginning, it was kind of like, okay, there's a few dozen of people that I actually know and a few hundred extra people. I don't know those people, but that's fine. But when I'm writing stuff, I have people in mind that, that who I actually know that I'm thinking about as I'm writing them. And as I'm sharing things, I kind of, I'm intentionally sharing things with this group of people. Whereas now, because that shift was quite sudden, it's like I have no idea who these people are. We haven't had time to get to know each other. It's not like a slow process over, over time of, okay, you know, I've had loads of discussions with people, if you get what I mean. Like, I think very early on there's some people that they would reply to a few different emails and you kind of build relationships with people. You don't necessarily know them, but it's a slow process. Whereas now, man, I'm just sending this number of people this email. Apparently it goes out to tens of thousands of people. Who knows? Random people email me just random stuff. Sometimes I get just bizarre emails. I have no idea what's going on. But yeah, it's a very different experience in one sense. So as you have been building, I think you've also had some difficulties with scaling actually as well. I think you said you had one course that you did where suddenly hundreds of people show up. And actually, that's like a freakout moment where, okay, this is a bit too much, and you kind of retreated a bit from there. What has the rest of that process been like? And also, have you found a difference because you've hired people, you have a team that does some writing, that does some of the community management? Does it feel like there's a distinction between the amount of time that you spend like building, in terms of building the business and all of that, to how much time you can spend writing and creating? Does that feel like there's overlap in a positive way, or does it feel like, oh, these are distinct personalities?

It feels more like a pendulum for me, and I still haven't figured out the exact balance that works, but I can tell that there are some months where I feel like I'm spending too much time working on the business, and I don't have the mental space to think strategically, to be creative, to have big ideas. And it usually starts feeling not so good after a while. And so I try to make adjustments and that can be working with my team to be a bit clearer about our objectives for the next couple of months. So I don't have to be there for every single tactical decision because we have a little bit of a roadmap for the next couple of months. Or sometimes it means hiring some help with things that I've been doing. And I used to edit my own videos and then I hired someone who started helping me with this. For the community management, I used to do it all on my own and now I have someone absolutely amazing who's helping me with a lot of the day-to-day queries. So I can just show up for the online meetups that we have and I can teach some little courses in the community, but I'm doing the stuff that only me can do, that only I can do. And my community manager is helping with a lot of the day-to-day management. And other times I get be so focused and engrossed into the creative process. And that has happened with writing the book that I'm working on at the moment, where I can also feel like, ooh, wait, I'm feeling a little bit disconnected from what's going on in the business right now. I actually have no idea, are we doing okay? Is everyone happy? Are community members okay? And then I, again, I switched back that focus and the pendulum goes the other way. And then I try to be a bit more involved. I will talk to people. Maybe I'll run a couple of surveys with the newsletter and the community just asking, hey, do you like the content? How are you feeling about the community? How are things? How is everyone doing? I will get back into it, but I'm not really good. I really admire people who are very good at sustaining this balance over a long time. For me, I've never managed to do this, so I know it's going to feel more like seasons. I'm going to have 2-3 months where I'm really into research, writing, creating, and I'll think at a very high level about big ideas. And then I'll feel like, oh, I'm itching to get back into the nitty-gritty of the business, and I'll be building sequences in my email management system and thinking about how our Zapier connections are working between the community and our membership management system. Those kind of things where You would think after all of these years, I should not be touching, but I like it too. I actually enjoy that part too. And it's a way for me to really stay connected to how the business is working. And especially for a business where the community is so important, I want to make sure people are happy and I can only know this if I'm actually involved and talking with people. So yeah, it's this constant dance. I'm literally dancing between those, those two states. And I can never manage to maintain that balance over 6 months or 1 year. It just doesn't work for me. So I'm embracing the seasons really.

Hey, we'll get back to the episode in just one moment, but I wanted to tell you very quickly about my newsletter. I started sharing everything I was learning online and a few thousand people came along for the ride. I send 3 regular emails: Brainwave fortnightly on a Tuesday, which is about the intersection between technology, philosophy, and psychology. Then every week on a Thursday, I send Revelations, and that's about creativity and productivity. And then finally, every other weekend I send Wayfinder, and that's about decision-making. So people in the audience actually send me really tough problems that they're working through, and I help to deconstruct them using mental models and decision-making frameworks. So if you'd like to subscribe, you can join me and over 20,000 incredibly driven people at theknowledge.io. Okay, back to the episode. And you've written about mindful productivity. I would love to know how you apply that to some of these different projects. Okay, so I'm thinking specifically of, you mentioned just before, so first of all, we were talking about our general writing practices and what that's like and the balance between whether it's journaling or actually intentionally trying to write stuff. And then also you talked about video recording. And I know that you recently challenged yourself to record, I think it was like 10 videos in 10 days or something like that, but just personal. And I saw some of them on Instagram, you just faring random things. And it brings to mind this idea that I don't know if you've read, I think it was The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. He talks about this idea of resistance, and I just really love that concept. And it happens to me, I face that a lot, where you just have this strange resistance that stops you from connecting with the muse, or it stops you from doing the things that you need to do, where some of them are incredibly obvious. And funnily enough, this is where my Bene Gesserit reference came from, where I was like, there's times where I'm sitting at my desk, or I'm sitting in front of my laptop, and I'm just not writing. And I know I need to write. And when I finally do start writing, it's gonna be great and there's never a problem. But it's just hard to get over that initial bit of resistance and start doing the thing. And I think video can be the same way where I don't necessarily think I'm a video-first kind of person. I would also love to be a YouTuber. Funnily enough, I think about this a lot when I remember it a lot, but I used to record videos on YouTube a very long time ago, and I used to be a YouTube partner a very long time ago when you had to like apply. And I think MKBHD and I are probably around a similar age. And I remember seeing his videos, but you know, when people like repost those videos of when he's a kid, like I was also a kid. So we were both kids. It was not like, oh, we're adults doing this thing. And I would just post these random videos. And I used to get paid money. Like when I was in university, I was getting like a few hundred pounds a month. But again, this is like over 10 years ago now. And then one day, I don't know if I just got self-conscious or something. I just stopped. And funny enough, okay, in retrospect, I also was not putting my face in all of these videos. They were just random videos. Some of them were fitness videos, whatever. But it's funny how, yeah, like I had that lifetime, a lifetime ago, and now I'm way too shy to even like, you know, post stuff. I do try to now, so I've done a few random ones, but they're always like unedited. I just turn on the camera and I just start saying stuff and then that's the end. But I wondered for you, with these different projects that you've had with trying to do video with your regular writing and then also with writing the book, have you faced some forms of resistance and how have you balanced the productivity of, you know, as that pendulum is swinging, like how you focus on writing and being able to stay productive as you're doing it?

Yeah, I'm always a little bit self-conscious about the work I do because who isn't really? I think it's just part of the process where evolutionarily speaking, we're designed to fear being judged by other people. So it's just a very natural reaction anytime you're putting yourself out there and you're saying, hey, this is me, this is my work. You're a bit scared that people are not going to like it and by extension are not going to like you. So I definitely still have a little bit of that resistance that you're describing, but I also know that doing research and writing and connecting with people in this way is what I love doing. Every time I feel rewarded when I manage to overcome that resistance. So it's again, constantly little dance. I feel the resistance, I overcome it, I feel really good about it, and then I still feel the resistance the next time I wanna do it. It never really goes away. In terms of balancing this with my productivity, I think really for me the main thing, and this is the main thing about mindful productivity versus toxic productivity, is that I'm embracing this dance. I'm embracing those seasons. I'm working with the resources that I have. In terms of energy and confidence that way, that day. And I'll sit down and I'll really try to listen to those different signals, work my way through them when necessary. If I feel a lot of resistance, then maybe instead of forcing myself to do the work, I'll just take a 10-minute break and journal and try and figure out why is it that I'm feeling so anxious about that particular project. And then very often I can figure out that maybe it's just, it doesn't feel very aligned with what I wanna be doing, or maybe it's scary for very good reasons. Maybe I care a lot. I care a lot about this project. It's a big one, so I'm, I'm a bit scared. And just knowing that, just labeling the emotion really helps diffuse it a lot. And I can feel like, okay, oh, you just care a lot. Okay, let's do this. We're still scared. I'm still scared. It hasn't changed anything, but Let's do this. We care. That's what being mindful to me means. It's really being able to look at your emotions and your thoughts, but not judging yourself for them. And then being able to still do the things that you wanna do while taking into account how you're feeling and how you're thinking versus some other approaches that are really based on pure willpower and effort and pushing through and being gritty and just do it. Where the result really is that most people end up burning out. Sure, they will be able to do some of that work in the short term, but long term, it's not sustainable if you just keep on pushing through and ignoring those feelings.

Okay, so tell me about what the process has been like of writing the book. First of all, how did the book come about and how has that been writing that?

I was very fortunate that after my newsletter reached a certain number of subscribers, I actually had publishers starting reaching out. I don't know if they have some kind of tracker somewhere, or, but really it was around the same time when I was around 45,000 subscribers at that time. And in the same month, I got 3 different publishers who reached out asking, have you thought of writing a book? And funny enough, as a kid, I actually wanted to write books, but I wanted to write novels. So I would've never thought that I would be writing a nonfiction book. And even on top of this, writing a nonfiction book in English, which is not my first language. I thought, you know what, I would actually love to write a book, but this sounds like a very big challenge, but let's explore this. And then I knew a few people who had written books, including Tiago Forte, who wrote Building a Second Brain. He's been absolutely amazing in helping me navigate this, answering some of my questions about what did I feel like, what are some of the challenges, why did you do it, would you recommend I explore that path, et cetera. So that's how the book came about. I then put a book proposal together that which several publishers liked. So it was really, really a great process. Very new, very anxiety-inducing, to be honest, because it's very different from writing a newsletter. When I write a newsletter, I can send it, and if there's a little mistake somewhere, or if I change my mind on something, nobody's going to be that angry. I can always the next week say, oh, by the way, I wrote this last week, but turns out there's a new research paper that came out that says that things are a little bit different than what I thought. So, and that's okay. It's the internet. Everyone is expecting things to evolve quite quickly, but a book, whatever I write in there feels very permanent and I can't go and run around and ask people to give me back their copies because I wanna change something in there. So I have to take this very seriously. And what was the second part of the question? I felt like there was a second part to the question. How did that come about? So yeah, how did it come about and how's it going?

Like what's What's the process been like? Because I can imagine a book is a much bigger project than writing a post. Some posts might be quite short, maybe there are only 800 to 1,000 words or so. A book, well, usually is quite a bit longer than that. So I was interested to know how you are finding that as well.

Actually, that has been the main challenge for me, is going through writing those more short-form, self-contained pieces of content. Doesn't have to be that short, but even when I write a research paper, that's 50 pages long, which can be the case with the references sometimes, it's still this self-contained, you know, piece of content has this like short introduction, the body of the article, a conclusion, and that's it. Same for the newsletter. Whereas with the book, it's 70,000 words. It has to have this red thread, this narrative running through the book where everything connects together, everything makes sense. This point A at the beginning where you meet the reader where they are and you take their hand and you bring them to point B that is quite far away, like 200 to 300 pages far away. That's where you wanna bring them. And not only needs to make sense, which is one challenge in and of itself, making sure that you're not repeating yourself, that everything builds on top of each other, that on the, those ideas that they're connected, that's one challenge. That you already have a little bit with research papers. What you're not supposed to do with research papers is making them interesting and entertaining as well. With this kind of book, you also want it to be interesting because you want ideally for some people to finish the book. So that's that added layer of complexity where asking someone to finish a 500-word or 800-word article is not the same ask as telling them, hey, read my book. This is an entire thing. So you need to make it extra helpful, extra clear, extra interesting, a little bit entertaining while still being factual, while still making sense. It's difficult. I've been actually really enjoying it, but I can tell this is a completely different skill set than the one I've been using for the newsletter. I'm currently writing the third draft. Of it, and I'm hoping to finish in a month or so. And then I'm very much looking forward to discovering the next steps, which I've been trying not to worry about. I've been trying to take this step by step because everything is so new, but the next steps of choosing the title, designing the COVID building some sort of marketing campaign around it. How do you launch it? Do you announce it more in podcasts or do you partner with people who have newsletters? Do you do it on Instagram? All of this completely new to me and I'll have to learn all of this on the spot.

Exciting. I guess that's the, the crinkle crankle career.

Exactly. Yes.

Oh, one thread I didn't wanna let go of is you mentioned you originally wanted to write fiction. You said what kind of fiction were you interested in writing and have you still tried writing at all any fiction, uh, till now?

Yeah, as a kid I was, I really thought I would be either a novelist or a paleontologist. Those were the two careers I was considering. And I wrote a bunch of novels as a kid. I even sent them to publishers in France. Some of them came back to me with feedback. At the time, it was before you could email your manuscript, so I actually had— she's amazing. The internet is amazing, really. I was maybe 15 or 16, and I was managing this online forum for young writers in France. And this anonymous person who was much older than me, like maybe in their 30s or something, had access to a printer at work and printed my manuscript for free for me at the time because I didn't have the money to print so many manuscripts and posted it for me to different publishers because they really liked my work. And I was quite young, didn't have the money to send it. And I never really knew they had a pseudonym on the forum, so never knew their name, never knew anything about them. They just said, hey, I'll cover this for you. And I know they did it because then I received replies from publishers with feedback, so I know they did it. So thank you for reminding me of this story because I completely forgot about it until now. I was really bad at the time at editing. I loved writing the first draft and I really struggled with rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, which you're supposed to do. You're supposed to write maybe 3, 4, 5, maybe 10 drafts. 10 drafts before you have a good novel. I feel like what's been really helpful with the book that I'm working on right now is that because I'm already working with a publisher, that's how it works. It works in nonfiction. In fiction, you write the book and then you send it to publishers, and if they like it, they publish it. In nonfiction, you write a book proposal, which is a dozen of pages explaining what it's going to be about, and then the publisher says, I want this book, and then you write it. And I don't like disappointing people. So now that a publisher has said, I want this book, I'm going to finish it. I'm going to write it and I'm going to make it as good as possible. Whereas with fiction, I never managed to get to that stage where it was good enough to be published. So yeah, that's my story with novels. And in terms of what I was writing about, it was a lot of fantasy, kind of like science fiction mixed with the modern world. So one of the stories, for example, was reinventing the stories of Pygmalion. I don't know if you know the Greek myth where this artist falls in love with a statue that he's sculpting, and I used that story but transposed it into the modern world with a plastic surgeon and a woman where he was trying to, you know, sculpt that woman to be this ideal creation, which is kind of a creepy story, but that kind of stuff. I loved writing that kind of little bit creepy kind of stories. Yeah, that's what I was writing about.

That sounds like such an interesting book. I really want to read both of these. I want to read the fiction one and the non-fiction one. That's so cool. But I love it though, because I think that's important. And I think a lot of people today, maybe they only read non-fiction, and I think having that balance of inputs helps you to be more creative. It helps you to appreciate the world better. I read a lot of fiction. I also write fiction, also some fantasy and sci-fi as well. And so I think, yeah, it's been a really important part of my creative journey. So hopefully you still get to publish that one day if you're still interested in it. Maybe you see how the first book goes and then you kind of put the other one over the top.

Absolutely. Again, I think it's great that we live at a time and an age and with the internet where really whatever you're interested in and you're curious about, you can explore it. And there's no expectation really anymore that you're going to follow this very linear career. So if you want to write nonfiction and a novel and do research and maybe learn how to paint or do whatever, really. Just, you can do it.

Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It really helps the podcast. And follow me on Twitter. Feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.