The Power of Curiosity: How Tiny Experiments Can Transform Your Life with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

This is Crappy to Happy, and I am your host, Cass Dunn. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist and mindfulness meditation teacher, and of course, author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. If you have ever set yourself a goal and failed miserably, if you've achieved a goal and then felt disappointed, like it didn't deliver the high that you expected, or if you have just found yourself on a trajectory in life that is no longer fulfilling you and you're not quite sure what the other options are, you are going to love the conversation that I have for you today. Anne-Laure Le Cunff followed the path that was expected of her. She studied hard, achieved well, and that path led her all the way to a lovely career in Silicon Valley. Now, she also found that this was not necessarily fulfilling her in the way that she expected it was going to. And so she had the courage to follow her curiosity to postgraduate studies in neuroscience and psychology. She started sharing what she was learning online, and she quickly grew an email list of over 100,000 people who were regularly reading her newsletters on the topics of curiosity, Lifelong Learning and Mindful Productivity. That newsletter has now turned into her own company called Nest Labs, which is an online hub where she empowers people with practical and science-based tools to work smarter, achieve peak performance, and really thrive. What I loved about this conversation is that Anne-Laure turns the idea of linear goals on their head, and she offers the concept of tiny experiments as an alternative to setting SMART goals or to trying to build habits., and it is the most refreshing change of focus. I think that you will really appreciate it as much as I did. Without further ado, here is my conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Anne-Laure, welcome to the Crappy to Happy podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

So Tiny Experiments, I feel like, is this manifesto for living a more creative and meaningful and productive life. And it offers so many tools to help readers to be able to do that. And it's really a lot about kind of letting go of the old system that clearly no longer is working for us. And I think that many people are frustrated with trying to make it work. So I was incredibly inspired by everything in it. I'm, you know, lining up my experiments as we speak. But I want to start with, can we talk about This idea of liminal spaces and these periods of transition, which people often find very uncomfortable, and why that makes people uncomfortable and how they can potentially instead use those spaces as, you know, an opportunity to cultivate growth or do something different.

It's interesting you're asking this question first because the title of the book, which not many people know, was supposed to be Liminal Minds. And, uh, yes, and we changed it to Tiny Experiments because a lot of people didn't necessarily know what liminal exactly meant. They had heard it, but they were not quite sure. And liminal is one of those words where once you know what it means, you feel like, ah, finally a word to describe that experience. But it's not really a word that is part of everyday vocabulary, and it's not really a word that you might just stumble upon just reading everyday blog posts. So liminal means the in-between, the transition. Being on the threshold of something, being in change. And the reason why it's so useful as a word is because we have so many liminal experiences throughout our lives. We're perpetually in transition. We're always changing. We're always evolving. And that can be quite uncomfortable. The automatic response that we tend to get when we're in a liminal space, whether you're changing jobs, changing relationships, or changing yourself, is that we want to cross that liminal space as quickly as possible. We wanna get to the other side, back to safety, back to certainty, back to control. And what I encourage people doing in this book is really embracing those spaces, staying there a little bit longer and exploring, almost playing with the uncertainty that arises from those liminal spaces and seeing them as an opportunity to learn more about yourself and learn more about the world.

As I was reading about that, that description of the in-between, I often have talked in the past about William Bridges' model of transition. You know, he talks about endings, beginnings, and the neutral zone. And this neutral zone being like this void where the old doesn't fit anymore and the new hasn't taken shape yet. And it's— that's what you're talking about, right? It's this liminal space where there's nothing really solid to hold on to. And yet people's— most people's response is to either want to go back to how things were or to very quickly attach themselves to something new just to get out of that discomfort, which is a mistake if you do that too quickly.

Exactly. And it is a, a behavior, a response that is mostly driven by fear, by the sense of discomfort and anxiety that we have because This is the unknown. We don't know what the rules are in those liminal spaces. We don't know who the other players are. We don't even know what our options are. And very often we also lose the sense of who we are, which can be really scary, but is also really beautiful and can be generative if you choose to engage with that discomfort.

Can we just maybe go back a step and talk about how, like, your career started with following a path and getting a very successful job at Google and then choosing to leave that. And what was that like for you? And I guess, was that a liminal space for you which led to this, you know, this whole new path that you have forged?

Yeah, I think of my life in two chapters so far. There are hopefully going to be many more, but at this stage, two key chapters. The first one was very linear. I was really optimizing for success. And a very traditional definition of success. So I did everything I could to do okay in school, um, to get a good job. I started working at Google. I worked on the right kind of projects to get a promotion and everything was doing really well, but I found myself feeling bored out, which is really the feeling that you already know how the movie is going to end. As if someone had spoiled it and you don't really want to sit and have to, you know, watch the entire thing. You know how it's going to finish. And I lost the sense of excitement that I had at the beginning of my career. I was not really that interested anymore in climbing the ladder. And so I quit my job at Google and I thought that I was finally going to explore this creative freedom, decide what I wanted to do and stop following the rules and all of these scripts. But, I actually found myself following another script very quickly. And, you know, you mentioned how in those liminal spaces, we just want to either go back to what we know or just do the new thing that is going to give us that sense of, of control again. When you work in Silicon Valley, like I did at the time, what you're supposed to do when you leave your job at a company like Google is start a startup. So I started a startup. And again, with the illusion that I was following my own path when really I was just copy-pasting another playbook of success that I was seeing in my peers. And that just felt like the natural next thing to do. It's only when my startup failed and that for the first time in my life, I found myself not knowing what I was supposed to do next. I found myself without a plan, without a clear vision that I finally asked myself, What are you curious about? What is something you'd like to explore? If you remove success out of the equation, if you remove this need for having a plan, what is something you'd be excited to explore every day, even if nobody was watching? And for me, that was the brain. I had always been curious about why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. And so, I decided in my late 20s to go back to university to study neuroscience. Which a lot of people around me felt like, what are you doing? You don't become a neuroscientist in your late 20s. That's a bit late to get started with that kind of career. But that's where my curiosity was telling me to go.

There is so much in what you just said that listeners will be relating to. And so this idea of the linear path to success, like these linear goals and this path that we think that we're supposed to follow, so many people do that exact same thing and find themselves like you did, unfulfilled, stuck, bored, but not really having any sense of what, what other options there are. Like, they don't have any other model of what they could do or what this might look like. And so you start in the book with like really dismantling and unpacking the problems with the idea of linear goals, and I think that will be such a revelation for people Could you share what you see as the problems with setting these like SMART goals, you know, these very clearly defined linear goals?

There's so many problems with linear goals, but I'll just share some of the ones that I think are the most important ones and the most salient ones to me. The first one is that you assume that if you get there, if you get to that specific destination, the specific milestone, you'll finally be happy. And obviously that's never what happens. Either you don't achieve the goal and obviously you're disappointed, but what's more interesting is that very often you do achieve the goal and you realize that happiness was not hiding just behind that milestone. You're still the same person you were with still the same questions and challenges. So that is one problem. Another problem with this outcome-based type of ambition where you have this specific destination is that you also assume that that's where you want to go. You just feel like, that's where I want to go. And very often that is unfortunately copy-pasted from seeing what other people do around you. And you also have a lot of people having that realization when they achieve those kind of goals that actually just trying to achieve the goal has changed them. They're not the same person anymore. And so once they get there, they're not that interested in that definition of success anymore. The world keeps on changing. We keep on changing. And so those rigid type types of goals where we define so long in advance where we want to go, what the destination is, don't make sense at all. Um, so that's another problem. And another one is that if we're all pursuing those linear goals, and especially in today's world with social media where we can have access to what everybody is doing all the time, this creates a giant leaderboard where we're all on our parallel ladders trying to climb and get to those destinations. And you compare yourself to each other and say, am I going fast enough? Am I doing this right? Am I being productive enough? What I advocate for in the book and that I place in contrast to this linear approach is a more experimental approach where instead of following that straight line, you go through cycles of experimentation and where your growth is just your own. That makes it impossible to compare your journey to the one of someone else because it's so different. And you're in your own learning laboratory that you cannot really compare based on the same factors with others. And that also means that you're not overly obsessed with getting to a specific destination. You are actually exploring your own liminal space and you're finding joy and growth in that space.

So how does somebody go from this linear kind of approach to a more experimental mindset?

I think, like, any kind of change, it starts with noticing first where you've been approaching life in a linear way. A lot of us do that automatically, again, because we're very social creatures. And so we do tend to see what other people around us do and feel like, okay, it seems to be working for them, so I'm just going to do the same thing. But that's very automatic. So I would start with a phase of observation and, uh, a metaphor that I like using to describe what that looks like is the metaphor of an anthropologist. So what does an anthropologist do, right? They, they go and they study a different culture. They know nothing about this culture. They go there, they take their little notebook and they take field notes. They observe, they ask questions like, why are people doing things the way they're doing them? Why do they care about this? Why are these their priorities and not something else? And why do they communicate in this way? But they don't judge. They just take notes. They observe. They capture those observations in their notebook and they withhold judgment for now. And I highly recommend just starting doing this with your own life, becoming an anthropologist where you observe your own life and you just ask these questions. You poke at the assumptions, at the routines, at the way you've been just simply doing things because that felt like the most obvious way of doing things, or maybe that felt like the most obvious career. Maybe that felt like the most natural way of building your relationship. Maybe living in the city where you live just felt like just the thing that you do, right? There are so many of these assumptions in our lives, so many of our scripts. So it starts with observation. Once you start really observing your own life, you can then start asking, what if that looked differently? What if I approach this in a slightly different way? What if I tweaked my approach? This what-if kind of thinking, that is what an experimental mindset is all about. Just asking, what if, what if? That is the formulation of a hypothesis. And then you can start experimenting. You can start trying new things and see what happens.

And this idea of a hypothesis too, it means there's no failing. Like, this is the other problem with the linear approach, isn't it? There's either you win or you lose. Like, you either succeed or you or you fail, or you, or you quit. And never— nobody wants to be a quitter. Like, we can talk about that. Um, but when you take this curious experimental approach, there's no winning or losing. There's just taking the feedback and letting that kind of inform the next, whatever the next iteration is.

Oh, absolutely. The definition of success, the traditional definition of success, is very much based on this binary vision of what success is supposed to look like. As you said, either you win or you lose. And because of that, we fear failure and we feel like we cannot try new things because it is likely that we might not get the outcome that we predicted, right? Whereas when you have an experimental mindset, just think about the way a scientist is designing an experiment. If they already knew the answer, if they knew with a 100% certainty what the outcome would be, that it would be quote unquote successful, they would not run the experiment in the first place because there would be nothing new to learn here, right? Yeah. And so this is really how you want to think about your life and your projects and your work and your relationships, asking the question not how can I succeed, but what can I learn? This is a completely different mindset.

Completely. And I know this quote that I've heard before, and you mentioned it in the book as well, which I love, is the most Illiterate person is the person who can learn, unlearn, and relearn. And it is a lot about this examining and unpacking these scripts, like these, these rules that we've been conditioned to believe, like, this is the way that we do things. But let's say, okay, so I've got my hypothesis, how do I design my tiny experiment then?

So scientific experiments are all based on the idea of repeated trials. So you don't just do the, the thing once. You need to collect data several times to see if when you do A, you actually get B, if there's some form of correlation. When you design your own tiny experiments, it's really not about doing a scientific experiment where you're going to analyze data and do statistics or any of that. But you do wanna keep that principle that you need to do the thing several times in order to know whether this is working for you or not. So the way you build and design a tiny experiment is by choosing an action, a change, something you're curious about, and committing to it for a specific duration. I call this formula the pact. It's a pact. It's a commitment to your own curiosity. It's a commitment to explore. You say, for this duration, I'm going to do this thing. And again, I'm going to withhold judgment until I'm done collecting data. So you say, I will, for example, let's say that you've noticed that you are spending a lot of time in front of your computer. It's funny, I'm using this example because this is literally the experiment I'm running right now at the moment. That's my tiny experiment. I've noticed that I'm spending a lot of time in front of my computer because I'm doing a lot of meetings. And because of that, there have been days where I haven't even left the house. So I designed an experiment where I said, I'm going to walk for 20 minutes every day for the next 20 days, and I'm not going to judge whether that's working or not until I'm done with the experiment. For now, I'm just showing up. I'm going on my walk every day, and I, I'm paying attention to how I feel, but I'm not stopping the experiment until I'm done. And that's a tiny experiment, an action and a duration.

And when you design that tiny experiment with your 20 minutes of walking, that's a great example. Are you very prescriptive about in the morning, or, you know, like the time of day it has to happen? Because this is what I hear a lot with, like, the people that I work with too. Like, if I'm not doing it, I've got to do it before breakfast, or I've got to do it at lunchtime. And I always say, to start with, don't constrain yourself to a particular time of day, just, just as long as it gets done. Like, would that be your advice as well?

That's my approach, but I would say that This is, it's kind of meta, but it is part of the experimental process as well to figure out what works for you. And so if you find that actually saying, I'm going to do that first thing in the morning, even be— before I have breakfast, I'll put my shoes on, I'll go for a quick walk around the neighborhood, and then I'll come back and I'll make myself breakfast. And this works better for you, then do that. If you find, which is my case, that it's better for me to not have a specific time because sometimes It will literally be just before going to bed and I'll say, oh, I haven't gone on my walk. Actually, let me just go outside sometimes in my pajamas and I will just literally walk a little bit around the block and come back and at least it's done for the day. That works for me. I would at the beginning design something that is as simple as possible and really optimizing for being able to complete the experiment. So whatever feels easiest to you, but what is easiest for me might not be what is easiest for you, right? So. Really listening to yourself, going for the easiest version, and this is part again of the experimental approach, paying attention to what works and what doesn't and feeling comfortable tweaking your approach, trying different ways. As long as you complete your pact, that means that you can say, actually, from now on, I'm going to be a little bit more rigid with myself. I'm going to say it's in the morning because I've noticed it's very hard if I wait until later in the day. 'Or trying to do it in the morning, actually, when I skip it, then I feel like I failed for the day and end up not doing it. So actually, I need a more flexible approach.' All of these are completely fine, and they're really based on that sense of observation and experimentation.

So at the end of the experiment, you've talked about the walking for 20 minutes. In your book, you talk about meditation. I mean, you talk about your newsletter being— I think, was that your first one of your first kind of tiny experiments. Maybe just, could you share that for listeners?

Yes, that was my first experiment. I hadn't even really codified my method in the way that I did, uh, later on through writing and in the book, but a lot of the principles were already there, actually. I, at the time, started my studies in neuroscience, and I discovered something called the generation effect, which shows that by creating your own version of something you're studying, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And I felt, oh, that's, that's pretty neat actually, this generation effect. I, I wanna use it. I wanna use it so I better connect with what I'm studying in my neuroscience studies. And in order to be accountable, I said, okay, I'm going to do this, this tiny experiment where I'm going to write 100 articles in 100 weekdays, and I'm going to send them in a newsletter. And it didn't matter how long the articles were. They could be literally 100 words. I have some very short ones actually that I wrote, a few bullet points, or they could be a massive essay if I felt really inspired and I had a lot of time. The format didn't matter. The content didn't matter either. It could be anything I was curious about that week, about any research paper I read, a question, an interesting thought, a conversation that I had with a friend. Didn't matter. All I had to do was for 100 weekdays to write and to send one article. And that was my first tiny experiment. And it actually turned into the Nest Labs newsletter. It turned into the Nest Labs community. It turned into the business that I'm running now where I have a team and it turned into a book. So you never know where your experiment is going to take you.

It's amazing. It's amazing. And how many subscribers are there right now to your newsletter?

About 100— more than 100,000.

Yeah, right, pretty successful. Yeah, I had another, um, young woman on the podcast. She also studied neuroscience. And do they teach you all this in like first year of neuroscience? Because she said that she learned basically she would learn better by teaching, and so she started a podcast to talk about what she was learning in her lectures, and now she's got like one of the most successful podcasts. In the world. It just continued. So there's something in that.

Yeah.

Teach what you're learning because it's obviously really beneficial for you, but also other people.

I think this is one of the very lucky, fortunate things about studying neuroscience or psychology or anything that has to do with the brain and the mind is that as part of your studies, you actually learn about the way you learn yourself.

Yeah.

They teach you how we learn, how we acquire knowledge, how we connect ideas, how we form memories. And so those are some of the fields of studies where, again, at a very meta level, you can actually apply a lot of what you learn to your own life and to your own work. Yeah, exactly.

So at the end of the experiment, then you've collected a whole lot of data, and at that point, you know, you're in a better position to make a decision about whether this is something that you want to pursue. And I know that you said, you know, in the book you give the example that, you know, a lot of people, once they decide, oh, okay, this has been working for me for 20 days of walking. It's almost like our instinct is to then go, okay, now I'm going to increase it and I'm going to do 30 minutes. And now, now I'm gonna, you know, like we start running for 5 kilometers and next week we need to run a marathon, like constantly upping the ante. So what's your, you know, what's your advice around like how you make decisions at the end of the experiment about where to next?

Yes, I noticed in my case that when I did a meditation experiment, my next thought was, I need to go to a vipassana retreat, I need to go and do something bigger. And so, especially if we enjoyed the experiment, this is something that might happen where we want to just go for something, a more ambitious version of it. And this is why I share 3 different options that you have, routes that you can explore at the end of your experiment. And the first one I list is to persist, to just keep the experiment as is and to keep going for another cycle of experimentation. So maybe you finished the 20 days of walking. That felt great. You're just going to go for another 20 days, 20 minutes for another 20 days, and that's it. Actually, it felt really good. You enjoyed it. You don't need to walk for longer and you don't need to also make your experiment any longer for now. You just keep going. Let's do another cycle. That's it. This is actually something that very few people consider. We either decide to, to, to ramp it up or to tweak it, or, but just persisting, just doing the exact same thing. That's one option. The second one is that maybe you enjoyed the experiment, but you felt like something could be changed, uh, something could be improved. And this is where you can say, Actually, 20 minutes, I felt like I still had it in me to go for a little bit longer, and I didn't wanna go home when I was done, so I'm going to go for 30 minutes now. Let's do 30 minutes. Or you could say, 20 minutes actually felt daunting sometimes, especially when I was exhausted after a long day at work, so I'm just going to do 10 or 15 minutes. And so you can tweak your experiment. You can also tweak things that are not quantitative like that. You can say, for example, I loved my walks. 'But my feet were hurting by the end of it. You know what? I'm going to invest in my next cycle of experimentation, and I'm going to buy a nice pair of sneakers so I'm more comfortable.' Or you could say, 'It was nice, but I was a bit bored sometimes. So maybe I'll start listening to podcasts now on my walk, or maybe I'll invite a friend to join me.' So you can tweak it. And so, that's the pivot one. So persist is one option, pivot is another one, and the last one is to pause it. To just say, I'm going to stop for now. And that's not quitting. That's not fully abandoning it because sometimes you might wanna come back to it. Even in 1 year or 2 years, you might wanna come back to that experiment. But for now, this is not really working. This is not exactly what you need. It's not serving you in the way you expected it to, so you can pause it and that's completely fine as well.

And I like that you make the distinction that when we make this pact and we commit to doing this action for this period of time. This is not like making a habit, because I think people get stuck in that mindset as well, don't they? Like, everything's gonna be a goal, or it's gonna be making a habit. This is the old thinking. So we're just experimenting.

Yes, exactly. That's the major difference between a habit and a pact, is that with a habit, you assume that this is going to be good for you, and so you commit to it for basically the rest of your life, right? You say, from now on, I'm going to drink this amount of water every day. From now on, I'm going to go on a 30-minute walk every day. From now on, dot, dot, dot, right? And some of the issues with that are that first, it's a very big place to start, just to say I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. So it might be so overwhelming that you end up just quitting very quickly. But to me, the deeper problem with this is the assumption that this is going to be good for you. And walking, for example, sure, it's good for a lot of people, but if it's not something you enjoy, it might not be the right form of body movement for you. And I know some people, they don't really like walking, but so what do they do? They signed up for dance classes and they get the same benefits than you would from walking. They move their body. They even have the social connection on top of this, of going to dance classes. And they figured that that's what's good for them, but you won't know if you don't try it. So I highly recommend if there's a habit that you're considering exploring, before you do that, design a pact where you say, I'm going to do that thing for this specific duration. And at the end of that experiment, I can decide whether I want to keep going. And maybe I do want to turn it into a habit afterwards, but now my decision is based on personal data that I've collected myself and not just on seeing what other people around me are doing.

Yeah, I want to go back to the things that tend to keep people stuck. So the, the old way of goal setting and the, and the old, you know, the old way of habits in people's working lives, in their professional lives, like there's, there's a lot of things that once people get on a path, they feel really constrained. They find it really difficult to broaden their interests or to try something different or to be seen as not the expert. So I would love it if you could talk a little bit about like how this approach, this tiny experiments approach, and, and some of the extra things that you obviously share in the book about how people can be encouraged to try something different, to, to step off that kind of trajectory that they're on and be willing to explore something different that might make them feel more alive or that sparks their curiosity?

Yes, there's a big misconception around embracing a more experimental life that it means that you need to quit your job and go and do something really risky and really scary. But that's not the case at all. It's really more about being intentional and creating spaces for experimentation in your life. So I want to start by saying that it's completely okay if you decide with intention— again, intentionality, that's the keyword— that in some areas of your life, you're very happy to keep it quite stable and quite predictable. And I know some people who feel like, you know what, I'm in this job, I'm in this career, I actually feel quite comfortable. I know what I'm doing. I know my team. I'm making good money and I have no plans on changing any of this right now. Doesn't feel like the right time, but I'm going to experiment with my health, for example. So maybe I'll decide to start experimenting with running and marathons and training, or maybe experimenting with my diet, my nutrition, trying new recipes, trying new ways of cooking. Maybe I'll start experimenting with my relationships. I'll go to friends' dating events and try and meet new people. And I feel like I can do that because I have a sense of safety in another area of my life where I don't feel like experimenting right now. Other keyword, right now. It just means that right now is not the time. So you can be intentional and say, I'm going to experiment here, but not there. And that's completely fine. And the second thing that's very important, and this is why the book is called Tiny Experiments and not Big Experiments, is that you don't have to start really big. You can start with something really small. And when you start observing your life, you will notice that there are some routines that you've been sticking to for years without really questioning them. Or you will notice sometimes a sense of lack or missing something in some other areas where maybe you feel like you don't have enough social connection. Maybe you feel like, again, not enough body movement, not enough time for quiet, not enough time for creativity, maybe. And you can say, okay, what is a tiny experiment I can design here to reinject some of that thing that's been missing in my life? That can be as simple as that to develop this experimental mindset.

And if somebody is, for example, in a, a job or a career, I was thinking as I was reading, you know, I'm a psychologist and I've trained as a psychologist. And when I first started posting online, I really felt, probably still do to some degree, but you know, this like almost having to stay in your box and having other things that I might want to share or talk about or express, but feeling really like this is my role, like this is my public image. And you know, it's that sort of restriction. So I'm just interested in like how, you know, somebody, for example, or you might be a doctor or you might, you might be an accountant, but you're really interested in how to make raw kombucha. Like, you know, like, so it's like finding little ways to nourish that curiosity, isn't it?

Absolutely. I love that you mentioned those two examples because in the book I do have an example of someone who decided to experiment with making kombucha, and, uh, and I do also have an example from a medical practitioner who became really interested in psychedelics and for a time didn't feel like they could openly explore this curiosity because it was kind of at odds with what was accepted in the medical community and the professional community she was a part of. And this is also why, although I highly recommend, if you can, to experiment and to learn in public, it is also completely okay if because of your current circumstances, there is something you want to explore more privately and you want to experiment with more privately. You can see where your curiosity is taking you. Sometimes what happens is just that actually that was not as interesting as you thought it was, and you're kind of happy that you didn't tell everyone that this was something you were trying. But sometimes what happens is that your curiosity keeps on growing. You, you're really enjoying yourself with this experiment and it almost feels like you need a bigger change in your life. And, uh, that person I mentioned in the book ended up leaving their job as a traditional medical practitioner and retraining as a psychedelics facilitator. But that only happened after a period of experimentation where she felt like, actually, I, yeah, I feel too curious about this. I feel too drawn and too called to do this work. And so I need to reinvent my career. But again, that only happened after a period of experimentation.

And I think that's a really great lesson. It can just be a a tiny step. Like, you don't— nobody's suggesting quit the whole job and launch this new thing, which is what I think some people have in their mind. To do that, I'd have to dismantle this whole thing. But actually, you could just take baby steps and see how that goes for you and just see how it progresses.

Yeah, I, um, I really tried in writing this book to be cognizant and inclusive of the many situations people are in. Just looking around me, I'm just thinking about my own mom and how she grew up. It is not possible for everyone to just quit their job and take that risk. You might be a caregiver, you might have debt. And that's also why I wanna make it very, very clear that that is not what tiny experiments are about. They're not about taking that big risk. They're about conducting that very small experiment and see what happens. And once you feel more comfortable, once you've learned enough about that first phase of experimentation, you can go through another cycle, see how it grows, and kind of expand the size of your comfort zone. But you can do that at your own pace. You don't have to force yourself to take a risk that feels really scary, unnecessarily scary.

You mentioned before learning in public, learning in public, and also the benefit of community and this kind of social flow. I think they're really important things to touch on as well. Like, what are the benefits of doing that?

This, uh, entire idea of learning in public and social flow is just based on the premise— this is something I think a lot of us know at an intuitive level, but there's actually a lot of research to back it up— which is that we learn better together, we learn faster, and it's actually more fun when we learn together. So if you can, if you're in a position to do that, it is much better for you to actually design your experiment and conduct your experiment in public. And in public doesn't necessarily mean that you need to post on YouTube about it and tell everyone about it. Although you can do that. That is actually a great way to learn in public, but it can be more semi-public, just having an accountability group, being part of an online community. Maybe it's just a WhatsApp chat conversation that you're part of with 2 or 3 other people. Who are also interested in the same experiment. And that not only creates a sense of accountability where you make sure that you complete the experiment, the pact that you have committed to, but that also means that you're going to learn from each other. You're going to learn from each other's challenges. You're going to be able to pool resources and you're going to be able to progress faster just by being in that same group and by sharing those resources.

And I like too that you mentioned the benefit of when you're learning in public, you're kind of leaning into your curiosity as opposed to leaning on your expertise. I think for people, like I said, like they've got that established kind of identity, this is what I know and this is what I do, and there's that very, um, kind of stacked, you know, we go up the ladder as opposed to, you know, going into a space and being willing to be a learner and to experiment and be curious.

Yeah, that's what's beautiful about embracing the fact that you're a lifelong learner and not an expert is that instead of being this version of yourself that is fixed in time, that is not going to evolve anymore, you are really welcoming, embracing the idea that you are an ever-evolving, changing human being, that you're, you're just a student, student of life, student of your work, student of whatever it is that you're curious about. And that you're willing to learn together with other people. This is also how I've been designing my own work. The Nest Labs newsletter and a lot of the work that I do is based on learning in public. I never write anything saying, hey, I'm an expert, here's what you can learn from me. But I say, hey, here's something I just discovered. And a lot of my newsletters are actually based on topics I literally discovered that week. 'Look, here's something I just discovered.

I feel like maybe you'll find it interesting too, and here's my understanding of it.' And it takes that pressure off, which holds so many people back from, like, needing to be the expert or needing to have all the answers. Like, I'm just thinking of the people in my community and the things that they come up against, and that's, that's one of them, right? Like, I need to have it all together, I need to know everything, and I need to be perfect before I put it out into the world. And it just stops people from doing anything.

Exactly. So when you do a tiny experiment and when you say, I'm not the expert, I'm just here to learn something new and to share what I'm learning right now, it makes it much easier to start, but also to keep going.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And in the book, which I hope everybody will go and get, like, it really is so good. There's advice there about procrastination and perfectionism and all of the usual things that trip people up, and it offers a different perspective and, you know, a way to work with all of those things and still continue on this path of like curiosity and growth loops as opposed to linear progress, which we haven't even talked about, but that's also something that people might be interested in. And I guess the last thing was, which I thought was a really great point that you made in the book, Anne-Laure, was about this idea of generativity as opposed to legacy.

Yeah, we're, we're obsessed as a society with our legacy. We're encouraged to think about our legacy and And I find that completely absurd in the sense that we're focusing on what we're going to contribute to society once we're not here anymore. Right. And so we make decisions in the moment that are based on what might happen maybe from like 20, 30, 40 years from now on when we're not even here. And instead, I encourage people to focus on generativity instead of legacy. The difference is that with generativity, you're making decisions based on what can have the most positive impact on the people who are around you right now, sharing this very same planet together. And you trust that this is going to have a good, positive impact over the long term. But that's not what you're optimizing for. You're optimizing for doing good in the present moment.

I love that important distinction. It has been such a pleasure. I really love the book and I want to just thank you so much for your time today.

Thank you for having me. This was a really amazing conversation.

Crab It or Happy is created and produced by me, Cass Dunn. If you enjoy the show, please hit the follow button wherever you listen to ensure you never miss an episode. Share with a friend to get me into the ears of more lovely listeners, and I would love for you to leave a 5-star rating and review. Thank you so much for being here, and I cannot wait to catch you next week for another fabulous episode of Crab It or Happy.