The Psychology of Curiosity with Anne Laure Le Cunff

Welcome everyone. Today I'm really excited to be talking with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Anne-Laure holds a PhD in psychology and neurosciences from King's College London, where her research focuses on lifelong learning and curiosity. She's previously worked at Google as a lead on digital health projects. She runs a popular newsletter and community, Ness Labs, and she's written a new book, Tiny Experiments: How to Live Free in a Goal-Obsessed World. And I'm kind of obsessed with this book. It's been really fun. I've read it straight through and I've been like dipping back in the little little chapters, um, and obviously preparing for this interview. So it's been super fun. Anne-Laure, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me, Nick.

I would love to jump in with the subtitle of your book, actually, which I found really intriguing, which is How to Live Free in a Goal-Obsessed World. So I'd love it if you could start by unpacking how you think about freedom, or lack thereof, kind of in the modern world, and maybe how it relates to this, um, our relationship with goals in our current kind of culture.

Absolutely. This book started as an exploration of our relationship with uncertainty. And as you said, we technically have a lot more choices and options. Our generation has access to so many possibilities and potential paths, but there's also a lot more uncertainty. And there's lots of research showing that when we find ourselves in places of uncertainty, we tend to respond to that with control. We wanna feel in control. We wanna feel like we have a plan. We, we know what's going to happen. We can predict what are our next steps. This is why we love it when people give us a step-by-step recipe that we can copy and paste and telling us, just do this and you'll be fine. And that's what I talk about when I talk about our restricted sense of freedom in today's society. Where, because there is a lot of uncertainty, we tend to cling to what I call linear goals. We tend to cling to blueprints of success, to those milestones that we try to get to in a specific order to feel like we know where we're going, we know what we're doing. And this obsession with goals, whether they are in our careers, in our personal lives, limit our possibilities. So although we technically have more choices, as you said, we don't actually explore all of those options, and we limit ourselves to a very linear, narrow, rigid path.

I love that. I, I've been thinking a lot about this on more of a somatic or body level. Even I'm talking— I think we have a mutual acquaintance, Johnny Miller, and I was talking to him recently about this idea of clenching and like how often, especially when we're striving for something, we're very tensed and clenched, you know, like our muscles are really taut and we just feel so tight and almost by definition constricted. You know, there's something about taking this extremely linear path toward a goal where we kind of necessarily tense up and you can feel that physiologically, but I think it operates on a psychological level as well, given the sense of like our options are narrowed. Right, when we're in this tense kind of linear tunnel vision kind of mode. So I love how you describe that. One of the things, you know, that kept— a question that kept coming up to me as I was reading through the book and thinking about it afterwards was, what's the relationship between freedom and curiosity? Because you talk a lot about both, and I know you study curiosity, and I, you know, I think it's a concept that's really underrated among psychologists, especially kind of practicing psychologists. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that. Like, how do you see the relationship between these two things, that sense of freedom you were talking about, or lack thereof, and curiosity?

Yeah, I think being free and living a free life starts with being aware of all of the options that you have. And in order to do that, you need to be curious. When we're not curious, we might only explore what is obvious, what is in front of us. And by obvious and in front of us, I, I mean, what society has taught us is the right door to open, the right path to follow. Society or our parents, our education. And so we're not really free when we're not curious because we're still looking at maybe one or two options that are the ones that are considered the correct ones. So if you want to truly be free, you need to first be curious, curious to see which doors you might want to open, which potential paths you might want to explore. And then the second step is getting curious about what works and what doesn't for you. Again, not copy-pasting what other people are doing, but actually trying the thing and collecting your own data and seeing what works, what doesn't, and depending on that, making decisions so you can live a life that is a life that works for you, not a life that is the life you're supposed to live.

Okay, let's dive into kind of curiosity as a construct because I, again, I think it's one of these big words, sort of like happiness or productivity or something that it's just, it's so big. I almost wonder if it's one little tiny word is trying to hold too much. It's doing too much work. So let's break it down a little bit. The first thing I'd love to hear from you talking a little bit about is, you know, I hear other psychologists talk about curiosity in all sorts of ways from some people talk about it like it's a trait. Almost like a personality trait. Some people talk about it like it's a skill, like a muscle you kind of build up, a mindset, a motivational state, an emotion, you know, people talk about it in all these different ways. So from your perspective, what type of thing is curiosity most fundamentally? Like, how do you think about what's the best, like, level of analysis to think about curiosity on?

Well, you have to think about it at a trait and state level. So curiosity is the desire to know. And there's the state of being curious about something in the moment. So, you know, when you're watching a movie and you're like, who's that actor? I can't remember. And you pull out your phone and then you fall into your Wikipedia rabbit hole. That's state curiosity. Trait curiosity is the trait, as in the personality trait of being someone who has more curious tendencies. You will tend to have more of these episodes of wanting to know, this desire to know. But you can't really think about them separately in the sense that the, the more episodes of curiosity you allow yourself to have, the more you're going to become curious at a trait level. And also, as I said, someone who has what we call high trait curiosity in research will have more episodes of that. And so they're, they're kind of associated in that way. And what I would argue is that If you consider yourself someone who maybe is not very curious, which is a very fixed way of seeing it, oh, I'm not, you know, not that curious. You can actually practice. You can actually build it. You can actually put yourself in situations where you're going to explore things that you don't know a lot about and use that muscle figuratively. So you become someone who actually is more curious. So yes, both states, both traits. That being said, I wanted to give you a very simple answer. If you look at the research literature, it is actually funny, the number of ways to define curiosity, the number of scales, the number of measures, and any researcher in that area, whenever you design a study, a big chunk of your protocol is just trying to figure out, okay, what kind of curiosity are we looking at here?

I love this idea, and I, in a lot of ways, I've based my whole professional life around the idea that you can take things and there's a lot of psychological faculties that we can improve and build like a skill and even generalize to lots of different areas of our life. And given how important curiosity is, like, I, I very much want to believe that that is true of curiosity. However, the more skeptical part of me, when I look out at the world and my general kind of observations, interactions, suggests that some people just seem very high on kind of trait curiosity, like high openness in like a Big Five kind of model, right? Just very— they seem to be kind of curious about everything. Like they always want to go a layer deeper on just about everything. And then I see there's a lot of people who don't seem especially curious, but there's usually, if I get to know them, there's one or two or three areas of their life where they actually have a lot of curiosity, some hobby or some like aspect of their work where they are definitely very curious. What I have not observed a lot in my life is someone moving from that second category to the first one where like they deliberately try to practice curiosity more and it results in kind of generalizing to their entire personality. Do we know, I assume it's possible, but is there research on that transition actually happening?

I haven't read any research about that transition specifically, but we do know that the environment plays a big role in that. And so if you're someone who is just a little bit curious, you have a couple of topics that you can get curious about and you're thrown in an environment like you're, you're, you end up working in academia or whatever that is where you actually need to learn about a lot of things that sometimes feel a little bit disconnected and just figure it out and ask a lot of questions. You're probably inherently going to develop that kind of curiosity over time. You have to, this is literally part of your job. And so I think, and this is just my intuition here, is that the reason why we're not seeing those trajectories is just, it's not even about curiosity. It's just that we don't actually see a lot of people who start in a type of career or start with a certain kind of like self-construct, self-belief about what they can do and cannot do, and then end up completely changing. That self-construct and do something completely different. So their sense of curiosity is a, a part of that, but so is their sense of agency and their level of, of productivity, creativity, whatever they think they're capable of. So yeah, I think it's a really interesting question, but I think it's bigger than just curiosity.

So I think my intuition is somewhere similar, which is if I was designing an experiment where you could see what was going on here, I would bet that A lot of times in order to go from state curiosity, like you're curious in a couple specific situations to a more general, I think it's kind of mediated by the environment to a large degree, which going back to your point about control, I think a lot of us tend to, we downplay environmental factors because they, they're less directly controllable. We like to think it's all about like the way I'm thinking about something or the happen— me, something me internal, but often it takes kind of agency, belief, experimentation to actually modify your environment to make something like curiosity much more conducive to growth. So it's this less direct, more circuitous path of curiosity sort of blossoming because of changes in environment. Could be physical environment, but it could be social environment. Like, who are the people that are around you all the time? Like, if you're not super curious, are the people around you like supportive of and inspiring of curiosity, or are they the opposite? And then maybe your own level of it is a function of that kind of social environment that you're in.

Yeah, absolutely. And there's, uh, there's this approach of changing your environment, maybe changing the kind of people who you hang out with and hanging out with more curious people. But there's also realizing that there is a lot more you can experiment with within your, your environment than you usually believe is possible. I have so many conversations where, with people telling me, oh, um, I'd love to go back and, and study psychology or neuroscience, but this is not something you can experiment with, right? And every single time I tell them, why? Why not? There are lots of universities where you can go and study one or two modules. You don't have to go back and do a full master's degree. You can absolutely experiment with that. Go and do one module. See how you feel, and if you like it, you can keep on going. There are very few areas and very few environments that completely restrict you in terms of what you can do, but we create all of these artificial barriers by feeling like there is— we can only do it the way that everybody around us has been doing it.

That's a very, like, personally relevant example for me because I think one of the most important— like, if I look back on my life at the major sort of transition points where things went one way and could have gone the other way, it was After my undergraduate, I was teaching and I knew I wanted to do something different, but I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And I was, I was kind of getting interested, curious just about psychology. And, but I had no background in psychology at all. Like I was an English major, took zero science or psychology courses in undergrad, didn't do any research. But then I found out that UC Berkeley had this extension program, like this adult education program where you could just take all these kind of classes that were taught by Berkeley professors, um, but for people who weren't actually enrolled in their, you know, undergraduate or graduate program. And so I did, I took like one, quote, like, intro to psychology, the one like every, like, freshman takes. And I just thought, this is incredible, so cool, so fun. So I took a couple more, and then once I had a few more, then this whole, like, set of opportunities opened up where, oh, actually going and getting a master's or going and doing research somewhere, it feels much more doable than it did initially. Um, you're talking about opening doorways, right? But that willingness to experiment just a little bit— I don't have to have had a huge background in science, like, I can just experiment a little bit and that opens the door to something else.

Yeah, absolutely. And it, it really helps with the overthinking and analysis paralysis that I see happen. And I do it too, right? I still struggle with it sometimes where I just immediately think about the biggest, most ambitious, most also overwhelming version of whatever it is I want to explore. And I have to catch myself and observe that that's what I'm doing and then ask myself, okay, What is the small, low-risk, fun, tiny version of exploring this project?

I think it's one of those skills, those kind of mental or psychological skills that's so important, which is that the ability to, to zoom out and see the big picture and have the big grand plan, but then not to linger too long and really quickly zoom in on like, what's the next thing like right in front of me and almost kind of forget about the big picture because it's so, it can be so paralyzing, right? But speaking about that, like, analysis paralysis and getting stuck, you have this section of the book I really liked, which was you were talking about defense mechanisms. And first of all, I love it because typically that's only kind of like old guard psychoanalytic people talking about defense mechanisms, but you're sort of a very kind of new guard neuroscientist. And you kind of pull out 3 in particular: cynicism, escapism, and perfectionism, which are really related to burnout. We might talk about burnout a little bit, but I thought this section was so interesting. First of all, I, like, I'd love to get your take on what is a defense mechanism exactly? Like, how do you, as sort of a modern contemporary neuroscientist, like, how do you think about defense mechanisms?

I really think about defense mechanisms as a way to cope with uncertainty, to feel like you're in control. At the most basic level, this is what they are. If you go back to, you know, just the psychology and the, and the research, we know that a lot of our behaviors are just our optimization for survival. Basically, we're just optimizing for survival. And so we try and go for whatever behavior feels the safest and it's not always the most helpful. So that's what I like telling people where I've been asked, is there something wrong with my brain because I have those defense mechanisms? And I tell them, no, actually, this is exactly how your brain is supposed to work. This is not a bug. The only issue is that again, your brain is optimizing for survival. So if you want to just survive, great, it's doing its job. But if you want more than that, if you want to thrive, if you want to grow and evolve and try new things and fulfill your potential, then the survival mechanisms are maybe getting in the way of you exploring all of those possibilities. So that's what that, those defense mechanisms are just, again, your brain trying to protect you. And as you said, in the, in, in the book, I talk about 3 of them that I've seen in a lot of the research and a lot of my work with people in my community, which I have plotted against ambition and curiosity. And the way I explain them is that if you are highly ambitious, you want to have a positive impact. But you're not allowing yourself to open all of those different doors and explore and maybe make mistakes and maybe look like a fool, you're a perfectionist. If you're someone who loves trying new things, shiny toy syndrome, you love try— having fun exploring and changing and doing different path and different careers, but you have a hard time committing to something for long enough. And having this big picture that you mentioned in order to have a bit of a longer-term impact, that's escapism. And then if you're both low in terms of curiosity and ambition, that's cynicism. And cynicism is quite interesting because it is really about saying, I don't care. I don't care what happens. I don't care if this succeeds. I don't care if I succeed. And it is one of the most efficient defense mechanisms in the sense that you cannot get hurt If you say that you don't care at all.

It's so interesting. You could do a whole thing on cynicism. I've been thinking a lot about perfectionism. I want to pick your brain more about perfectionism because two things, like, I, for whatever reason, I've just had a lot of people asking me about perfectionism recently. But also you mentioned something that's really interesting when you were describing perfectionism and what it's doing, what it's sort of defending against. You described it as like people feel afraid to experiment and try new things because they're afraid of looking like a fool. And it got me thinking that I think people get in their head, have trouble with perfectionism because they think it's about trying to be perfect. Like, oh, I want to be perfect. They're like, well, I know I can't be perfect. I don't struggle with perfectionism. But really, I feel like it's almost more of a social thing. I need to be perfect in the eyes of other people. Like, I can't be imperfect. So what do you think about this? Like, a strong assertion would be, What if perfectionism is fundamentally a social construct?

Like, yeah, I never phrased it this way, but this is such a good way to think about it because perfectionism is fear of rejection. You don't want to be rejected by your tribe, being judged by other people. And, uh, yeah, you want to be perceived as perfect, as in worthy, useful, someone we want to keep around, basically.

I think so. I used to spend so much time with people who were kind of, had kind of a perfectionistic flavor of anxiety, and it was all very cognitive, looking at their beliefs and their thought patterns and self-talk and all that kind of stuff. And I started getting a lot more traction when I started approaching it as a relational thing, like looking at patterns of when does perfectionism show up for you? And almost always it's in these very specific social situations. And so changing it from a, well, I'm thinking wrong problem to what's the nature of these relationships such that I feel the need to like be perfect or to come across as perfect.

Yeah, that's so helpful. I think this is also why a lot of people, there's this tendency to kind of experiment or try new things with the garage door closed because you wanna try the thing, potentially fail, which is okay as long as nobody sees you failing, right? And, uh, it's really hard to actually experiment in public to work with the garage door open where people can actually see that you don't know what you're doing and you're still figuring it out.

So, this is a great transition to, you know, I think a lot of people might associate you, Anne-Laure, with things like mindful productivity or burnout, or there's all these topics you are known for talking about. Personally, I think of you as the building in public person. Like, I, like my, when I first, like, I think when I first found out that you were just starting, like, your blog and writing and community and you were, you were building in public, you were trying all this stuff, switching career paths, all sorts of things in public, right? Like building this stuff as a brand new, as a beginner, not having been a writer. So tell me a little bit, I'd love to hear a little bit. It could be kind of personal, but it could also be helping other people to think about it. But talk about this idea of building in public and why, why maybe it's a concept anyone listening to this, whether you think of yourself as a creative or a content person or whatever, whether or not you think of yourself as like that, like, why is this idea of building in public important?

Yes, I, I have actually changed the way I talk about it these days from building in public to learning in public. And I think it is still the same thing. It's exactly the same thing, but it just communicates a little bit. It's a bit clearer what I mean and what the benefits are. When you learn in public, you learn faster because you learn with other people. And every time you iterate and you try something, you get feedback straight away on that iteration. From people who maybe have had similar experiences, who've tried similar things, who have failed before you trying the exact same thing. And because of that, you have more feedback loops and you just learn better. It's more efficient. So that's the very pragmatic reason why you might want to build or learn in public. But it's also genuinely more fun. You connect with other people. It gives you a reason to make new friends. To, to work with new colleagues. There's an example in, in the book that I share with Steph Smith, which she's done. She has a way of learning in public, which is amazing, which very simple. She has a page on her personal website where she tracks all of the things she's experimenting with, the books she's reading, fitness experiments, whatever podcasts she's been listening to. She had a— she learned— she taught herself how to code and she tracked all of that, all of her coding sessions. And she told me that she can attribute a lot of her best, most interesting connections on the internet to having this public page where she was learning in public, because there would always be someone who would stumble upon it and see a book or a podcast or an idea or a course that she was studying, and who would reach out saying, oh, hey, I actually did the same course, or I love that book. So That's the kind of second-order effect of learning in public, is that it's also going to be a lot more enjoyable.

I love this. My business partner does this thing he calls stupid human tricks, which I don't know where exactly he got it, but every year he picks a skill that he wants to learn, but it's a non-resume skill. It's not something that like accomplishes anything for you. It's just something that he thinks would be interesting. So he like learned how to skateboard one time as a 45-year-old, you know, or he took up knitting and like learned how to knit. Like, doesn't, doesn't do anything, doesn't accomplish anything, utilitarian, but he just really enjoys it. And I think a part of it is this sort of showing himself that he can be a beginner and like learn new things. But the other thing, and I was thinking about this when you talk about Steph, because I think what it does too is it's so empowering to other people. Like, so many people feel inspired and like motivated themselves when they see you going out on a limb and trying to learn something new or build something new socially, not with the garage door closed, you know, behind, behind, you know, nobody looking. So I think it can be, it's so empowering on a social level if there are more of us out there trying stuff and we get to see each other. It normalizes this behavior of experimenting and messing up and getting feedback and then growing a little bit more. I just like, what a world if like, you know, even 10, 20% more people were, were doing that.

I know that when I started the Nest Labs newsletter, it was actually kind of funny how I've always written about neuroscience and mindful productivity and all of that. And I have no way of knowing the exact numbers, but I thought it was funny how I'm pretty sure that a fairly high percentage of people who were following my journey at the beginning were doing so because they also wanted to start a newsletter. And it was interesting to them to see how I was doing it because I was sharing everything that I tried that didn't work and I was doing it very openly. And so, yeah, I always thought about the kind of breakdown of my readers as part of them interested in neuroscience and another part interested in how to build a newsletter.

Okay. Let me ask you kind of a selfish question that I, I've been thinking a lot about lately, but don't— haven't come up with a great answer to. Which is how do you consistently get high-quality feedback on stuff you're doing now? Because my experience is that, you know, people always, when they talk about the internet and social media, it's always this like doomerism, like, oh, it's all trolls and people are super negative and mean. And I found the opposite. Like, I always get really supportive, like really nice, kind comments almost universally. And what I actually struggle to do is elicit more, not negative, but like critical sort of feedback so that I can learn and get those feedback cycles and continue to kind of expand and grow and learn more. So like, how do you do that? Like, how do you think about that? And like in your work now? Yeah, how does that look for you?

Yeah, you can almost think about feedback as in, is it good or bad? And is it useful or not useful? And, uh, before my book came out, I mostly had almost same as you, only positive feedback. Some of it not useful, but just feeling good. Like, I love that. This is great. This is great, actually. Good motivation. Some of it useful too. Good positive— sorry, positive feedback can be useful in the sense that you can use that as a signal of what you should keep on doing or do more of. So it can be positive and it can actually be constructive at the same time. And it's only after my book came out that I started reaching new audiences, people who didn't know me, and where I started getting the kind of negative, non-helpful feedback also. So I had, I started seeing comments on my appearance and my accent and things like that on YouTube when, which is very, you know, It's great in the sense that it's, uh, it's really helped with book sales, but when a video is seen by millions of people, you're bound to have that kind, those kind of comments, which I had never experienced before. So I was not really prepared for it. For the negative constructive feedback, what I have found is that you need to proactively seek it. It's very rare that people will just email you and say that the essay you just published sucked for whatever reason and for constructive reasons, right? So if you don't seek feedback proactively, you'll get the 3 others, good or bad, mostly not helpful, or positive and helpful, but you're not going to get the negative and constructive. So what I've done with my book is that I actually recruited beta readers from my community to give me feedback and I proactively briefed them and said, I want your negative feedback. Tell me what doesn't work. And yes, of course, a couple of feel-good comments here and there. Great. That's, that's nice. But tell me what doesn't work. Tell me when it gets confusing. Tell me when I'm not making any sense. So I would say that if you want that kind of feedback, first, proactively get it. And maybe second, just be clear about what you want to do with it. Uh, if you're just collecting that negative feedback and then you're not using it, there's no point doing that to yourself. So maybe seek it for a piece of content or a piece of work that is important enough to you that you want to get that feedback.

Yeah, it makes sense that the more intentional and thoughtful you are about how you request feedback, like, the better your odds of getting helpful, constructive feedback. So let me ask you with the book too, because I think this is your first book, right? Your first traditionally published book. Yeah. So when in the process did you elicit that feedback? Because I'm working on a book myself and I have this sense, I'm fairly early on, I have this sense of like, I don't want a ton of feedback right now. Like, I just want, I wanna get my kind of unadulterated thoughts out there. I don't want them too contaminated, but I know at some point there's gonna be a tipping point when I do need and want the feedback. So how do you, and I hope this question can generalize to not just writing books, but I think at any point in any kind of learning process, and I'd be curious if you agree with this or not, I think there's like a, maybe a phase where you do kind of want to be in your garage, like maybe you're just playing a little bit yourself and then you make the jump to public and feedback. And so how do you think about that transition with, with, I mean, maybe with writing a book, but like with any kind of process more generally?

Yeah, I think you need a first full draft of whatever that is for a book. For any kind of project, really taking your time to think through it and clarify what it is you want it to be. What are your thoughts on the questions you're, you're the question you're exploring? What is it you're trying to say? What's the point you're trying to communicate? For a book, I genuinely don't think you're at that stage until you've written one first full draft, the entire thing, which, which can be a shitty first draft, but you need the complete draft. And at that stage, you can start bringing in people. This applies to everything. This applies to even the, the way you use AI. I really recommend that if it is something important, if you're using AI for like a search engine to just ask a quick question, just go ahead and ask your question and usually it will these days do a better job than a regular search engine. That's fine. If you're using AI as a thinking partner, I, and for something that you actually care about, like it's not writing a quick email or anything like that. I highly recommend that you close that tab for a little moment and you actually spend time thinking about the question, wrestling with the question, clarifying what you believe, what you don't believe, clarifying your knowledge gaps, what you're unsure about. And then only, then only you can turn to AI and then you can actually call it a thinking partner because you've done some of the thinking first.

Yeah.

So it really applies to any kind of work, any kind of creative work where that matters to you and where you really want to communicate your thoughts. Spend a little bit of time doing the thinking and then only bring in other people or bring in AI.

This is such a great point and answer, I think, because I love the word you use, which is wrestle, like how important it is creatively to wrestle with something before you get feedback or polish or, but like this, the creative act of wrestling and struggling. With something, which goes all the way back to your first point about being willing to live in uncertainty. Like, is this any good? I don't know. I'm still like molding it and wrestling with it. And it's so uncomfortable to be in that state, you know, that like two steps backwards, one step forward, or two steps forward, one step back, you know, like it's frustrating and uncertain and scary. And but like, that's so much of the creative process comes in that turmoil, that wrestling. I just think that's I'm glad you— I want to call that out because I think it's just so important for people to hear. No matter what your project is or what you want to, it's going to involve wrestling, and that's, that's okay. Okay, I have so many more questions I would love to ask, but let's wrap this up. I want to do a quick kind of lightning round, um, and then I have a final question for you before we go. So lightning round, quick answers, feel free to pass if you want to. Who is your favorite psychologist or neuroscientist?

At the moment it's Anil Seth. Do I need to say who he is? Is that helpful?

Maybe. You can give a teaser. You want a teaser? Yeah. Give us a teaser.

Uh, he studies consciousness. He has an amazing book called Being You.

Does AI enhance human creativity in a meaningful way?

It can certainly, again, if you partner with it.

What book do you recommend or gift to people most often?

Michael, Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind.

It's a great one. Really good. What's the best French food most Americans have never heard of?

Ooh, it's so funny how I almost said couscous and then I'm like, that's not French at all. That's my mom's couscous. Kouign-amann is a pastry from Brittany where my dad is from. And it also, I think, is in the Guinness World Record for the most calorific pastry in the entire world. Wow. It's like, I think, 80% butter. I'm making that up. Don't quote me on that number, but it's really good. And it will make you fat if you eat it too often.

Everyone's— all things in moderation. What's the biggest mistake you made writing your book? And what did you learn from it?

Including way too many examples. I think because it was my first book, I was lacking confidence. And there's a little bit in the book, I think, of Hey, believe me, here's an example. Not convinced yet? Here's another example. And here's another one. And for my next book, I want to have more confidence and, uh, I want to maybe go a little bit deeper with fewer examples.

I feel that strongly, this like need to justify everything with a research study and like, you know, coming out of academia where you have just like pages and pages and pages of citations. Um, man, I feel that. What's your favorite productivity hack or trick? Like, I think a lot of what we talk about, what you talk about productivity, is trying to get to a deeper level of really thinking through productivity and what does it actually mean to want to be productive. But like, I don't know, we all have productivity tricks and hacks. So like, what's something you do on a regular basis that helps you be a little bit more productive?

It's the first half hour with no phone, no email, and journaling in an old school journal with my cup of coffee and just Yeah, just checking in with myself before I start work.

Do you do that kind of morning pages style, just sort of free association, or do you have like a structure to the journaling or?

There's no structure, but I don't, it's not morning pages style in the sense that there's no, I'm not trying to write 3 pages every morning. It's sometimes it's just a short paragraph. Sometimes it's very long, but it depends on what I need to process that morning.

Mine is location switching. Like if I'm getting tired or stuck or whatever, I'm just like, Pick up, go to the coffee shop, go to a park bench, like go come back to my office. Like there's something like so magic. We talked about environment before, but it's crazy how much your environment impacts everything, including like your motivation and facility working. Okay. I have one more question before we go and I'll let you go. But before that, I just want to encourage everyone listening and watching to check out the book, Anne-Laure's book. It's really, it really is excellent and it's a ton of fun. To read. Like, I just found it— it's fun to— it was really very fun to read the first time. But like I mentioned, it's a— a lot of books don't meet this criteria. It's very fun and easy to like dip back into. Like, a lot of books I finish and I'm like, oh, thank God, like, store that away. I still have to get back through that, even though— even if it was good. But the way you've done your book makes it really easy to kind of dip back in and out of, which I really appreciate. And thanks, helps like— helps me internalize it more. So, okay, final question, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. What is a topic in psychology or neuroscience that you think deserves more attention or research or enthusiasm? Just something underrated, uh, in psychology or neuroscience?

Well, of course I'm going to say curiosity, but it is actually the case. And, uh, I think because it is not clearly linked to any kind of mental disorder as in classified in the DSM, uh, because It is something that is hard to measure. It's something that researchers have been staying away from, and there are maybe 3 to 5 researchers that spend a lot of time on it, but it's not a big field of study, and I think we should study curiosity more.

That's a— that's— I ask this question a lot to people, and that is almost always my answer, like, which is why part why I'm so excited. I was so excited to chat with you today. Um, I think a close second for me would be values. Like thinking about what are the things that really matter most to you and how do they kind of affect— like, we're so probably coming out of a tradition in psychology of what went wrong in the past and how is that affecting the present that we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about, like, what do I actually want moving forward in a, in a rich way. There's the superficial cheap version of, like, what, like, how quickly can I make partner, or, like, you know, but that the kind of deeper version of that looking forward, I think it's just really underrated. I wish, yeah, I wish we'd study that a little bit more. Anyway, Anne-Laure, thank you so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.