Tiny Experiments: How Curiosity Beats Goals with Anne-Laure Le Cunff #360

I'm James Taylor, and you're listening to the Super Creativity Podcast, a show dedicated to inspiring creative minds like yours. Today's guest is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, neuroscientist, entrepreneur, founder of Ness Labs, and author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Anne-Laure has written a book that turns the ambition-driven, outcome-focused language of success on its head, arguing that curiosity, experimentation, and small trials are more sustainable and actually often more illuminating than fixed goals. From leaving a high-profile role at Google to building a thriving learning community, her journey has been about reclaiming meaning, creativity, and self-knowledge in a busy world. If you're tired of chasing milestones and want to make choices that feel genuinely yours, then this episode is for you. Anne-Laure, welcome to the Super Creativity Podcast.

What an amazing introduction. Thanks so much for having me, James.

So I mentioned earlier, you were early on in your career, you were working at Google. So I'm wondering, working at Google with all that external valuations, and what was the moment that you felt something fundamentally inside you kind of changed, that that linear path, those OKRs, those metrics, wasn't delivering what you thought it would?

I loved my job at Google. I loved my team. I loved the projects I was working on. It was exciting work, very intellectually stimulating work. So it took something external. It took a trigger, a big change for me to notice that something was wrong. And that thing for me was a health crisis. So I was working at Google in San Francisco at the time. I was working pretty hard. I had a very long to-do list, lots of projects, but again, just waking up every morning, going to work. And sometimes canceling social plans, but just getting things done. So one morning, like any other, I was in my bathroom, uh, brushing my teeth, and in the mirror I noticed that my entire arm had turned purple. And so I went to the Google infirmary because yes, we had an infirmary on campus at Google, of course. And the nurse there had one look at my arm and said, you need to go to the hospital straight away. So I went to the hospital and the doctor said, 'we need to operate as soon as possible. You have a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs.' And in that moment, what did I do? I said, 'One second, let me check my calendar.' So, I— the doctor were telling me that I needed surgery as soon as possible, but in my mind, what was most important at that moment was to check that all of the projects I was working on were going to be okay, that my to-do list was still going to be taken care of. And I had this almost like out-of-body experience when you see yourself do something completely absurd. Who is that person who is having this response to this information? This is when, for me, I realized that despite the intellectual stimulation, despite the fact that I was working on very interesting stuff, something was really out of back in my life in terms of my sense of priorities.

So I'm wondering, like, do you think— I mean, your upbringing, uh, was, was this kind of way of thinking about things, was that something in your, your family? Or did you— when you— I used to work in the Bay Area as well, and there was obviously that very kind of hustle culture, quite long hours, very good entrepreneurial, very driven. It feels like they're— it's almost like part of the water. When you drink the water there, it's— you're kind of getting that as well. So So where did that, you know, that first, that sense of, okay, no, actually the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to check my calendar and do kind of the businessy stuff before I actually focus on my health and my wellbeing. Was that something that had just kind of seeped into your life, that way of thinking about the world?

It's interesting because I've shared that story many times, but I've never really been asked the question exactly in this way. And it makes me wonder, it's kind of a chicken and the egg kind of story, right? Because what kind of people are the kind of people who are going to see take the kind of jobs and this kind of hustle culture that you have in Silicon Valley and then make that culture. That culture is not appearing out of thin air. Culture is made by people, right? But then it becomes this almost self-perpetrating cycle where, because the culture is like that, then people feel like that in order to fit within that culture, they also have to have those kinds of priorities where work is more important than everything else. So to answer your question, I think that because of my background coming from an immigrant family where, where work was considered a very, very important value. I already had this sense in myself, the sense of identity that I was the kind of person who gets things done. I was the kind of person that you could count on, that is not the kind of person who would let their team down, right? So that was really important to me, even if at a subconscious level. And second, yes, absolutely. Silicon Valley is known for its hustle culture. And I think part of me, again, even if I hadn't really articulated that to myself in a conscious way, was scared that people would think less of me because I was not able to deliver on the promises I had made at work.

Now, at that point, you made a decision. And for those people that don't know, getting to work at Google was like one of the— I know it's one of the most competitive things in terms of getting in there as a role as well. And so What was that decision and how did your coworkers respond when you kind of told them of your decision?

I decided to leave, which, as you've mentioned, getting this job was actually— wasn't easy. And especially as someone whose English is not my first language, I didn't grow up in the US, and so I had all of these additional barriers. And a lot of my coworkers were surprised in the sense that you know, why would you leave such a job? It was, it was such a great job, right? The most surprising, not necessarily surprising response though, the reaction that was the hardest for me to manage though, was not from my coworkers. It was from my family, from my mom specifically. She thought I was headed for the homeless shelter. She was incredibly worried that I would quit my job and, uh, I, I can understand. I can understand where that came from. She went from feeling like she had done her job, that I would be safe, that I had a stable career, financial security, to all of a sudden getting the news that I decided to leave all of that behind and to try and do something else.

Yeah, I think that, that story of what you described there will be very familiar to a lot of listeners if they come obviously from immigrant backgrounds as well. And, you know, their parents obviously haven't had had to give up things in order to get the better for their children. And then you make this decision, it's almost like saying, I'm gonna go and join the circus. It's, it's, uh, like, what are you thinking? So, so you made this decision. What did you do next? Did you take some time out just to focus on, on your health, or what was that, what was that next stage of your life?

I, I wish I could tell you that that's what I did, that I took a little break and I focused on my health, and I took some time to think about what I really wanted to do with my career and my life in general, but the truth is I, I was still, I was still quite young, inexperienced, and more importantly, I was very uncomfortable with uncertainty. And so the idea of not knowing what I was going to do next was paralyzing, very, very scary. And so instead of taking that time to recharge and to reflect, I directly, straight away, jumped into the next socially sanctified adventure that feels completely so normal in Silicon Valley that when you tell people you quit your job to do that, people say congratulations, which is starting a startup. So I left Google and I started a startup straight away. And again, looking back, I know now that it wasn't for the good reason. It wasn't for any good reasons in the sense that some people start a startup because they're genuinely on the mission, genuinely on the mission to change the world. And they have this great idea that they're going to implement and bring to the masses. In my case, I started a startup because I was scared of not knowing what I was going to work on next. And I was scared of not having my identity tied to my work anymore.

So you had this still, this sense of got this goal-driven way of kind of looking at the world. When did that change? When did that, as you say, pivot? You know, we're talking about technology. When did the pivot happen for you to say, actually, this is not the best thing for myself, my health, mental health, and actually it's not actually maybe the best thing for the community that I'm trying to serve?

Again, it took another external event. It's only when my startup failed that finally, finally, after all of those crossroads and wandering and trying to figure out what I actually wanted, that I allowed myself to admit that I didn't know what I wanted to do next and I was completely lost. And in a strange way, this was the most freeing thought I had ever had, just admitting that I was lost. And so I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, okay, so you're lost. You don't know where you want to go, but what is something that you're so curious about, so excited about that even if you don't have an end goal, and even if nobody was watching, even if money and success and prestige were out of the equation, you would be happy to explore, to wake up every morning and to study and explore just for the sake of it. For me, that was the brain. I had always been, I had always been curious about why we think the way we think, why why we feel the way we feel. And so I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience, not with an end goal in mind, not to start a startup, not to plan the next steps in my career, just because I was curious about the topic.

So you, you started to make that transition, you moved into a very different world, although actually I'm, I know Google employ lots of PhD neuroscientists because, and many of these like Meta, they all do in terms of how people use their products and services. So as you were going on that journey and you were kind of moving into this different phase of your life, talk to us about which part of neuro— because it's such a big field, neuroscience— was there an area you found that really spoke more to you?

Well, at the time I was starting from scratch. I had never studied neuroscience before. I had no previous degree in brain science or in science in general. So I really started from zero and I was as open-minded as possible in terms of topics. And I just went through the curriculum and started reading books every time there was something I was a little bit more curious about. It's only when I finished my master's degree and I realized that I actually loved it, I loved studying the brain and I wanted to keep going and I decided to do a PhD that I started really looking into topics that I wanted to dive deeper into. And so I'm currently working at the ADHD Research Lab at King's College London. At the intersection of curiosity and ADHD, which has nothing, almost nothing to do with my current, my first book, Tiny Experiments. Although I've had lots of people email me and say, oh wow, your book is so neurodiversity friendly, which is so interesting because I think even though I didn't really intend on making it so neurodiversity friendly because I was doing this academic research on the side while writing the book, it has somehow seeped through and there is a lot of the tools are useful for neurodivergent people.

Now we had actually a guest on the show a little while ago who was a former director of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence service in, where is it? Cheltenham, I think is where GCHQ is. And he was telling me that of the thousands and thousands of people that work there in the intelligence services doing all kinds of signals intelligence, a third of them would be classed as neurodivergent. So they have ADHD, they have synesthesia, they have different versions of— and he said for them, it's, uh, as an organization, we— they think of it now really as these kind of superpowers, but also at the same time, but as a manager, they're having to like figure out how they do this. But like that curiosity, and I guess is the scientific thing, there's— you see time and time again, and people that do things very detailed for long periods of time, the sense of curiosity, and almost a little bit where it kind of veers into obsession.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, this completely aligns with the research, which is really showing that we tend to call these conditions from a medical standpoint because a lot of people who have ADHD or as you mentioned, synesthesia, tend to struggle. And so we, from a medical standpoint, we treat them as if something was wrong with their brain when in reality what we see is a mismatch between their brain and the environment. So you don't necessarily need to fix anything with their brain. You just need to make sure or help them or support them in finding the right kind of, of jobs, of environments that feel rewarding because the kind of hyperfocus that someone with ADHD can have can be really helpful in some types of jobs. The kind of nonlinear thinking of connecting random ideas that you also see in neurodivergent people can be really helpful in creative jobs. Equally, in some other kinds of jobs where you really need to execute things in order, A, then B, then C, and follow a very strict process, maybe that kind of thinking is not a good fit. And that's okay, right? It's really more about finding an environment that fits your thinking style.

Now, your book is called Tiny Experiments. So when was the first tiny experiment that you ran on yourself that could show you could shift away from this kind of goal obsession to something different? And what did it reveal to you?

I ran my first tiny experiment when I went back to university to study neuroscience, and, uh, as part of my classes, we studied something called the generation effect. The generation effect is a psychological phenomenon that shows that when you create your own version of something, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And creating your own version of something can take many forms. It can be writing a note in your own words. That's why teachers tell you, actually, write notes in your own words. I can see that you're doing that while I'm talking to you right now. The generation effect. It can be a blog post, it can be a podcast, it can be having an actual conversation with a friend where you're kind of forced to use your own words. And I thought, that's pretty neat. I want to apply this. I want to apply the generation effect. And so I designed a tiny experiment where I said that every single day for the next 100 weekdays, I would write a short note and publish it online. And the note would be about something I learned, something I studied in university. And to create a bit of accountability around my tiny experiment, I said, I'm going to have a newsletter also. So every week I'm going to send the 5 notes, the 5 articles that I wrote this week to my subscribers. And, uh, to me, this was a tiny experiment in the sense that there was no goal. I didn't have a number of newsletter subscribers in mind. I didn't have any kind of metrics in mind. The only action I committed to was to show up every weekday, sit down, write something, publish it, and that's it. And trusting that I would learn through that process of showing up and iterating. So I completed that experiment and, uh, at the end of it, I also wanted to keep going. And today I run a business. I have a community. My newsletter has more than 100,000 subscribers. I got this book deal writing tiny experiments with Penguin, and all of that came out of saying, hey, what would happen if I just did that one action for that specific duration?

And what did you notice in yourself? Uh, you mentioned at the start where This often has an impact upon memory. For example, we're more likely to memorize something if we've written it down, you know, notes. And we were all told this at school, you know, to kind of write down in our own kind of way. What did it do to your recall? And also, I'm also interested to know, what did it do with your ability to connect sometimes what we think is random ideas?

In terms of recall, it's absolutely amazing. It's incredibly powerful. I noticed that if I have written an article, even if it's very short, 200 words, 300 words, if I've written an article about a topic, and I'm talking about old school writing where I wrote it myself, not clicking— ChatGPT didn't exist at the time, right? So I actually wrote those articles myself. If I wrote an article about a topic, even if that was 5 years ago, I'm not saying that I'd remember exactly everything the researchers said about the topic, right? But I'll be able to I can talk about it fairly clearly and I remember most of the important ideas. And so in terms of recall, absolutely amazing. It also means I can have much more interesting conversations with people because I can remember all of this research that I've actually studied. And I can't— it's so funny talking about recall, but what's the second part of the question?

Actually, no, it's not funny. Funny, as you were talking about recall, I remembered I bought a book once. And I was in London on business, and I was staying at one of those terrible hotels around the Edgware Road. They're all probably nicer now, but they were terrible back then. And I was staying at this hotel, I was at a conference or something, and I went away and I left, checked out the hotel, and I suddenly realized a few hours later, I've left the book in the hotel. So I called up the hotel sheepishly and said to them, I left a book in the room, could you just check if maybe the housekeeper has picked it up? And the receptionist said, oh, yes, certainly, Mr. Taylor. What was the book called? And it was How to Improve Your Memory by Tony Buzan. That's not a lie. So I'm in sympathy with you just now. So the second question I was just saying there was, so recall was one thing. But in terms of seeing connections, remote connections between different areas.

So actually, as far as— so just, I think your question is interesting because this is basically how the generation effect works in the first place. By forcing you to use your own words, it also forces you to tap into your long-term memory to go and choose those words. And so it helps you create connections with existing long-term memories. And so add this new knowledge to your long-term stores. If you don't do that, it's just stored in short-term memory and then you forget it as soon as you don't need it anymore. And so I also try to reproduce that when writing my articles. If you go on Naslabs and you read my articles, you will see that within the text, I always link back to previous articles as well. So this is something I constantly ask myself when I write something new. How does that connect back to knowledge I already have? How can I add this new piece of knowledge to my kind of knowledge network rather than having it as an isolated node that is going to be much harder to recall because I haven't formed a very clear connection with something that is already in my long-term memory. And so by forcing myself to do this, at first it's hard, right? You're looking at your text and you're like, please, I just need to find one connection. But when you write every day and when you do that every day, it's almost like a muscle. It becomes much easier. And now when I write my articles, I almost see it in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of a paragraph where I just see the connection. Was something I wrote 3 weeks before, 6 months before, sometimes 2 years prior to this article. And I'm like, oh yes, that connects to that. So it takes a little bit of practice. It's not easy at the beginning, but I think it's worth it. And it really helps you create this knowledge network that is unique to you.

There's something you said there, um, when you write every day or when you publish every day, so I'm, I'm a, I guess I'm a recovering goal setter. Um, uh, and so I am obsessed with setting goals. If you probably look at my journal just now, there's a whole bunch of goals. There's goals for today, there's goals for this week, there's goals for this month, and then there's goals for the whole year and different segments. And I remember reading an article, uh, I think it was Scott Adams, the, the writer, a few years ago wrote an article about, uh, systems, not goals. And I remember thinking about this, this idea that, okay, rather than obsessing about, say, writing a book. He said, no, just— you should just think about the process. So the process of— rather than get obsessed with the outcome, you should focus instead on, okay, I'm gonna just go and write 1,000 words a day. So just that the process rather than the actual outcome. But I kept finding myself continuing wanting to steer back to the comfort of having those kind of fixed goals. So what advice would you give for someone like myself that— to embrace a little bit uncertainty, to start perhaps with a little without a little bit of clarity and their goals? How do you coach someone who's deeply uncomfortable with not knowing to build tolerance for that space?

I think that's why tiny experiments work so well for recovering goal setters. I love that, recovering goal setters. So what you described, the first kind of system that you described is more akin to a routine or habit in the sense that It, you're committing to this action forever. You're saying every day I'm going to do this, or every week I'm going to do this. I'm going to write those, those 1,000 words. And I think it's very difficult for people to commit to something that is forever. Um, we change, our life circumstances change, our ambitions change, a lot of things change around us. And so it almost doesn't make sense to commit to something forever. A tiny experiment doesn't have an end goal in the sense that If you say, I'm going to write a newsletter, you, you don't have the end goal of saying, I'm going to have 25,000 subscribers by the end of the year. But a tiny experiment has a specific duration you commit to. So you say, I will write one weekly newsletter until the end of the year. And you can almost think of that as a goal. Your goal is just to show up. Your goal is just to write the weekly newsletter until the end of the year. And if you're someone who does like feeling like you have a bit of control, you have a little bit of visibility, I always tell people, do you need a spreadsheet? Go ahead, create a spreadsheet. You can have a spreadsheet and for every week you have the date, you have the number of words that you wrote that week, and you have your observations, just like a scientist. How did that feel? Do you like what you wrote this week? How did people react to it? So again, really thinking about the internal and external signals. What you liked about it, but also what other people liked about it. So you can find that nice Venn diagram where you enjoy your work, but people benefit from it. And you track that for the 6 weeks or 12 weeks or however long the duration of your experiment. So it's a nice in-between where it's not about— people think sometimes when I talk about developing an experimental mindset that it's just about doing whatever and just la-da-da, without any structure. But scientists have protocols. There is a little bit of structure. So it's a nice in-between if you're someone who needs a little bit of certainty, but you still want to benefit from the openness of trying something without clinging to an end goal. A tiny experiment can be a really good framework.

Something I tried recently was kind of what you're talking about there, was thinking in terms of seasons. So winter, spring, summer, fall, and say, okay, I'm just going to focus. This is going to be my winter project or my summer project. And then, um, and that was kind of going well for a little while until I actually moved to a completely different country. I moved from Europe, where I am just now, to Dubai. And I was like, okay, I'm going to do my, my deep project, my deep work project in the winter. And I tried to do that in Dubai, and their winter is basically awesome. It's that winter is when you kind of do everything. Summer is when you go inside and you don't go out. So, ah, okay, I've got my seasons all wrong. So I had to kind recalibrate a little bit. Um, when you were kind of working through all this yourself as well and working with clients, what mental scripts or cultural expectations perhaps push back hardest when someone tries to live a little bit more experimentally? And how do you overcome them?

Mostly it's, it's our definition of success in, in general. We tend to tie success to a very binary definition where we set a goal and if we reach that goal, this is success. And if we don't, this is failure. What I need when I work with companies, when I help them implement those frameworks, I need to encourage them to reset their definition of success to success is not reaching a specific destination. Success is learning something new. So just like scientists don't conduct experiments when they already know the outcome, there would be no point experimenting if you know exactly what's going to happen. In real life too, we never exactly know what the outcome is going to be, but it looks nicer on PowerPoint presentations when we have those KPIs and those OKRs. What then happens, and we've all experienced that, is that we very rarely hit those targets. And then we spend a lot of time and energy as a team trying to craft a nice narrative that explains why we didn't hit those targets. We would save a lot of resources if instead we said, here's a hypothesis. We're not sure it's going to work, but that's the hypothesis we have. We think this is going to be helpful. Let's give it a try. For this duration, and let's regroup at the end, just like you have those scientific debriefing meetings and say, here's what the data is saying. And maybe the data says we were completely wrong, but now we know. And this is great because we can use that data to run our next experiment. But again, for that, you really need to let go of that binary definition of success upon which a lot of the way we conduct business and live our lives in general is designed.

Often when I think that you see this word like a business plan and as if it's like a focus thing or a forecast or, and often I just think it's guesses really. It's maybe good guesses, not so good guesses because you work also with, I guess with your background, you have a lot of clients that are in that, they're in the tech space, for example, where something like, I know Google, like John Doerr, like OKRs, objectives and key results becomes very key framework, is what you teach around this idea of tiny experiments, is it the very antithesis of this kind of OKR space, or can it actually be layered onto it and work together?

They actually work great together. The problem I have is when we use OKRs and KPIs for everything without questioning it. And OKRs and KPIs can actually work really well in situations where you have a really good idea of what you want to achieve. And how to do it. So, there are situations where maybe you have a sales pipeline that is very solid and it is really just a matter of picking up the phone, reading your script, and calling as many people as possible. And then we know that we have an X% conversion rate and this is great. And in that case, you know what, just, just do it. Maybe experimenting in this case is going to take more energy than needed when you have something that already works really well. And even then, you could argue that maybe a little bit of experimentation for a small percentage of your clients, of your prospects, could be helpful. The problem is we're treating every single project as if we knew exactly what we wanted to achieve and how to do it. And that's not the case. We know that in today's world, things are changing way too fast for us to have that kind of certainty. And so that certainty we have is just an illusion. So that's what I'm encouraging people to do is to, at any given point, to have at least one tiny experiment running. That's it. For projects where you have already a really good system, things are working, you have that kind of clarity, go ahead, use the OKRs, use your KPIs. But I really challenge you to, you know, dare saying that that's the case for everything you're working on. I'm sure there are areas of uncertainty, and those areas of uncertainty are areas where there's potential for growth. You just need to experiment to try and figure out what might work, what might not work. And again, in those cases, let go of the binary definition of success. Accept failure as an opportunity for learning.

I'm guessing your book would also resonate with a lot of people who come from maybe a Buddhist background as well, whether you, this idea of of letting go, not being attached to the, to the outcome. Still, still, you know, doing it and, and giving yourself and being passionate about it, but not getting overly attached. I mean, I think this in the West, this is quite a— I feel it's quite a hard concept to get a sense of, like this attachment and non-attachment. I remember asking a monk once, a monastery, I said, how— I can't get my head around this idea. And he said, well, It's a bit like when you're driving, where, you know, if you hold the steering wheel too tight, you're going to crash. But also, if you hold it too loose, you're going to crash. So he said, it's just— he said it's finding that balance. I'm wondering, like, as you've— in the book, are there stories there where you share maybe someone that was maybe a little bit dubious about this idea, this tiny experiments idea could work for them? But a change happened and what was the shift that happened for them?

A lot of the people I work with are initially a little bit skeptical, actually. And I understand why, especially for people who are having this more— so I have a little visual in the book that's very popular. It gets shared a lot on social media., and it shows what the experimental mindset is. And, uh, this is very aligned with what you were, you were saying. So I have those, uh, two kind— it's like a matrix and it's like curiosity versus ambition. And, uh, what I explain is that if you have low curiosity, low ambition, that's just cynicism, right? It's just you don't care about anything. You don't even want to try. If you have high curiosity, you want to explore, you want to try new things, you're pretty adventurous, but you don't want to put in the necessary effort to fulfill your potential, that is escapism. If you're high ambition and high cur— and, and low curiosity, so you're okay working really, really hard, but you almost see curiosity as a distraction from your goals, that's perfectionism. And then an experimental mindset is high ambition, high curiosity. That means that yes, you're very happy to work hard and, uh, to really invest the necessary efforts to do interesting things, but also you see curiosity as part of the equation. And when things don't work out, instead of clinging to control like a perfectionist, you're curious. You ask, oh, what's going on here? What can we learn from this? And so what I've seen from people that I work with is that I tend to work with a lot of perfectionists. They're already high ambition. That's rarely the issue, but in their quest for ambition, they have let go of curiosity. They don't allow themselves to explore. So this is what a lot of people I've worked with finally managed to do with a tiny experiment. It's just reinjecting a little bit of curiosity. An example, uh, that I've seen several times is especially startup founders, which is a very interesting type of person because if I, when I start working with them, they will tell me I'm very experimental. I'm very happy to, to try new things. But when you start poking a little bit at how they experiment, you see that they only do it within very specific frameworks that they've been taught in terms of how to run a startup. Do kind of A/B testing or whatever way of experimenting. And so Tiny Experiments is really a way for them to inject that experimental mindset in areas that they wouldn't have thought to experiment with. The way they communicate with people, the way they show up, the way they ask questions, the way they run meetings, for example.

I like that, you know, the curiosity and ambition. I've certainly been lots of dinner parties where you're with people that are highly ambitious, whether that's in law or consulting or technology. And they're some of the most boring people, non— like, uncurious people I've ever met. And actually makes them, for part of the job, actually very successful what they do, because they're, they're very tunnel-visioned in, in what they're doing. They, they maybe— their curiosity is extremely limited to their particular thing. But they have— if you want to have a conversation with them that was outside of that thing, they're just— they're not going to go there as well. And, and sometimes I look at— and there's, there's sometimes I find there's a sadness there as well, that they're losing some of the joy, the juice from life.

Yeah, absolutely. There's, uh, this is also why I have, I have an entire chapter in the book about the tyranny of purpose, which I think is so dangerous. This narrative that we have as a society that you're supposed to find your one true thing in life, the thing you're passionate about, that really kind of, you know, almost devours all of your attention to the point where you can't really think about anything else. And this is such a dangerous narrative for so many reasons. One of them is what you've just described. It doesn't make for a very rich life in terms of texture if you only have that so-called only one true passion. The, the second danger is that a lot of people then end up putting all of their eggs in the same basket. And then they end up having what psychologists call low self-complexity, which means that their entire sense of identity is based on one area of their lives. And when that thing doesn't work out, which is the case for startups, for example, which is typically the kind of industry where we ask people to have that one true passion, when the startup fails, we see a very high rate of depression in those former startup founders because they have nothing else in terms of their identity. Um, and the last danger is how then people who have not found that one thing think that something is wrong with them. And so they feel like, does my life have any meaning if I have not found my purpose yet? And to me, that is probably the saddest part about it.

Just as you are talking about that, I am reminded of a video I just saw a few nights ago with Brian Cox, the cosmologist, and Ricky Gervais, the comedian. And they are talking about purpose, and Brian Cox, Professor Brian Cox, was saying, you know, really, if you think on a big scale, purpose is— doesn't make any sense. There's like a trillion galaxies, within each of these is a billion stars. And so this idea that your purpose has some greater meaning in the cosmos, it doesn't make any sense. He said, but there's something that we're hardwired for. And I, and I think the term is cognitive closure, that we, we like things to have a nice little bow at the end. They can— and he said often when you look at people who are fundamentalists maybe religious or fundamentalist in one area, whatever the area is, often they display this idea of this, this idea of cognitive closure, I think is the right term for it.

It is, yeah.

Where this one purpose becomes all-encompassing. And, and I mean, if you've ever had the joy of having to spend any time around these, these kind of people, they're really quite boring. They're not really generally very curious about other people's views. They didn't really have much empathy for other people.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I've, I've actually had personal experience with some people in my family, uh, like kind of like becoming trapped in that kind of thinking. And, um, the good news though is that we also know that cognitive closure is not a fixed trait. And so it's actually something where you can literally reopen your mind again. And you see a pattern here, given the right environment, given the right kind of stimuli. And so it is really a matter of exposing people to as many diverse perspectives as possible where they realize that although we do have that tendency, you don't need to have this very big bow at the end that closes everything off and, and ends the story, right? You can just have a nice sense of narrative, which I think a lot of human beings need, but that doesn't mean that you need to have that one big purpose.

The one I heard once, which I still often— I sometimes think about, is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he says, we're talking about purpose, he said, uh, it's a bit like a movie, you know, in, in— you have these individual chapters in your life, these scenes, and as long as each of those have integrity, in a sense, you might not know what the whole purpose of the film is until right at the very end, at the very closing scene. But as long as that individual chapter or scene makes sense, then you're kind of living, I guess, I guess, in purpose. If people could start with one tiny experiment today, it could be something low risk, high signal. What would, what would your recommendation be?

I always recommend starting with something personal rather than professional, because you can just do it. You don't need to ask anyone's permission. Something really small, for example, could be I will not bring my phone in my bedroom for the next 7 days, or I will go for a daily walk for the next 2 weeks. So I would start with something really, really, really tiny. And remember that what you wanna pay attention to is the signals that you get back. How does that make you feel? Pretend that you're a scientist, that you're collecting your own data, and based on that data, you can decide whether you wanna keep going, whether you wanna tweak it, or whether you wanna stop.

And is there a ritual or a habit or even a tool that you use daily in your life that you find very useful for your, your own creative life?

I don't use this one daily, but I use it weekly and it's my template for conducting a weekly review. It's called Plus Minus Next, and it's very, very, very simple. It has 3 columns. In the first column, plus, I write I list everything that went well this week. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, next, with a, a little arrow, I list everything I wanna try next, what I wanna focus on the next week. And, uh, it's been incredibly helpful for me in terms of focus, of creativity, productivity, and even in terms of mental health in the sense that it really allows me to celebrate the wins and also to acknowledge any potential areas for growth. And it's not just a static snapshot. The fact that there's this next column at the end really allows me to learn from what happened and decide how I'm going to implement those lessons in terms of moving forward.

Plus, minus, next. Wonderful. I love that idea. Which book, not your own, would you recommend that perhaps you've maybe gifted more often to other people, or a book you're reading just now that's really kind of got got you thinking differently about the world?

One of my favorite— oh, I'm just seeing a different one here on my desk, uh, but I would not gift it to a lot of people. It's hard to read. Uh, so no, another one would be, uh, a book I really enjoyed is called How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. And, uh, on the surface it's about psychedelics, but what I really like about it is is just the way it's written, where the author starts from zero knowledge about the topic, and instead of writing from a place of expertise— I'm an authority, listen to me— he takes you on a journey from not knowing anything to exploring what it means and, uh, and kind of like, you know, his own experience, his own knowledge. I learned a lot about the topic from this book, but I learned a lot about how you can teach and communicate also from this book. So that's why I would recommend it to And I've really recommended it to a lot of people, but I think your listeners will enjoy it as well.

That's great. I love books like that. So rather than being that kind of sage on the stage, he's like the guide on the side, and he's kind of walking you through his journey as well, and you're reflecting on it. If people want to learn more about Tiny Experiments, your book, and all the other work you're doing, the other kind of experiments, the other research you're doing, where is the best place for them to go and do that?

So people can go to neslabs.com, and they can subscribe to my newsletter that I send every weekend where I talk about a lot of the topics we discussed together today. And for the book, just look up Tiny Experiments either online or go to your local bookstore. It's available anywhere books are sold.

Well, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, thank you for being a guest on the Super Creativity Podcast. You can subscribe to the Super Creativity Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a review. I would really, really appreciate it. I'm James Taylor, and you've been listening to the Super Creativity Podcast.