Try Replacing All Your “Goals” With “Experiments” To Make Real Progress w/ Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Welcome, I'm Kevin Miller, and this is a podcast for your personal evolution. In this episode, try replacing all your goals with experiments to make real progress. So we as humans, we tend to look at most everything with this linear perspective, like every day in our lives are just a straight trajectory that's either getting better or worse. It's going up or down depending on the day. We look at our desires as these goals and we work towards them, seemingly sequentially, right? Expecting to get closer every day on this so-called straight line. Well, my guest in this episode is a neuroscientist who believes it's an errant perspective, and what our lives and pursuits really align with is tiny experiments. Instead of this sequential progress, we're often starting over again and again until we get it right. I recalled thinking about it, the TV series Lessons in Chemistry, where the main character, Elizabeth Zott, she performed a lasagna recipe after making it, or she perfected it after making it 78 times. Well, that wasn't a linear goal like we think about it, but it was an exercise in starting over 78 times with more wisdom each time. And for me, this helps with trying this and trying that to see what works instead of pushing for one method and feeling like a failure if it doesn't work. So, my guest, Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She's a PhD, a neuroscientist, an entrepreneur, and a writer whose work has been in peer-reviewed journals, Wired magazine, Forbes, Fortune, and Entrepreneur. And her new book is called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Really popular. It just came out and is selling like crazy. And I think rightly so. And it's a guide to adopting and living this more experimental life. And letting go of this perspective on these linear goals. It's turning uncertainty into curiosity. And her intent is to help carve a path for your own self-discovery and progress. Hey, and if what you hear today is helpful, you find value in it, I'm here to help guide you to finding personal guidance. I feel like that's what we're missing in our culture today. We hear lots of information, we get lots of new knowledge, but we need help actually implementing it into our lives to actually transform. And I'd be honored to help guide you to finding a guide. Just email me at Kevin— or how about kmiller@kevinmiller.co. All right, coming up next, Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff and this focus on tiny experiments instead of goals. Let's evolve ourselves today. Anne-Laure, when I saw the topic come over, I mean, this issue of goals— I grew up in a goal focused world, a goal-focused home, even my home. I was a pro athlete and always in personal development and whatnot. And yet when I see somebody come at it with not a contrarian approach, but maybe a fresh look on it, I feel like everybody kind of takes a big sigh because they're frustrated with it. Is that what you find?

Oh, absolutely. That's the response I got. And, uh, I love that you just shared a little bit about your background because A misconception that a lot of people might have when they hear about my work for the first time is that I'm anti-goals and I'm not anti-goals. I think goals can work really well in very specific situations where you have a very clear idea of what you want to achieve and a very clear idea of how to get there. And then it's really just a matter of showing up and doing the thing. And you should be successful if you actually stick to the plan. But a lot of things in life don't work like that. You know, the world keeps on changing, we keep on changing. And so I think universally trying to apply goals to any area where we want to be successful is not going to work for most people.

I appreciate the focus on linear. So that's a topic that I, it feels like it's kind of gotten some fresh, a fresh look, or we're bringing it into the public consciousness. And it hasn't been, and it so speaks to me because, yeah, it's not been my life experience, but I think of it that way. So, you changing the perspective, I think, is so greatly needed because we do tend to look at, okay, here's my life. I start down here and it's just this constant. Growth or constant trajectory. And yet, yeah, if you look at it and kind of do a graph of life, it's not for the most part. And so, I feel like we just stay frustrated. And again, I like you kind of focusing in on tiny experiments, things that we kind of trial and error as opposed to the way that we look at it. And it is either success or failure in a story. And I assume that's why— that's the impetus of the book, is to free us from that, because that can be crippling.

Yes. The traditional definition of success is very binary, as you just said, right? Is here's the outcome I want to get. Either I get to this outcome and that's success, or I don't and this is failure. And something that I thought was fascinating when I retrained as a neuroscientist is how scientists relate to failure. When they get an unexpected result, they're actually excited. They feel like, wait a minute, I didn't know this would happen, which means I might learn something new. There's something to be learned here. And they're excited about that opportunity for growth. And so to me, running tiny experiments and developing a more experimental mindset, a less linear mindset is really about developing this kind of, you know, falling in love with failure, falling in love with uncertainty, and really seeing it as almost like a fertile ground for growth.

Well, again, I'm so appreciative of this. I was fortunate, privileged to grow up in an entrepreneurial home where I saw my parents try stuff and it didn't work out and they try something different and I got such— it felt like just a silver platter of faith that it's just okay. And yet I saw other— I see most people and they're not brought up that way. They're brought up in the success and failure construct. And again, I mentioned sports. So, you know, I grew up doing sports and I thought about that. I was reading your book that in sports, I mean, that's kind of the thing. You go out there and you try different things, you try different plays, you try different moves. And it is—

it's constant.

Just, I'll try this. It doesn't work. Try this, and then you ultimately kind of find a secret sauce for a while, and then it changes. And then we enter the workplace, like what you wrote about, and we're supposed to just get it right. It doesn't, it doesn't make any sense at all. And it feels like, yeah, it just confines everybody, and we stay in such a place of mediocrity when we could go so much further if we would test the boundary some. Yeah.

Yeah. And, uh, you know, I would add to this, whenever we go in the workplace and we try to apply this very linear approach and this plan with fixed outcomes, and then the plan doesn't work, we don't get to that place of success. Our response is not to question the plan or the approach or the method or the framework, right? We just blame ourselves. We feel like we did something wrong because we've been taught that this is the way to be successful. This is again, the traditional definition of success. And so I think not only trial and error, being more experimental, having this approach you just described in sports would help people perform better, but it would also be much better for their mental health.

Yes. Play with something with me, Anne-Laure. I, I've been, I've recently, I mean, this industry, you know, call it personal development, self-improvement, but personal growth. We think of growth, growth, growth, growth. And I feel like we've gotten this concept of Every day we're reading stuff or listening to stuff and we're just adding on and adding on and adding on. And I thought, it doesn't really feel like that's what happens. I don't feel— I don't really want that. I don't want to just keep throwing stuff in my backpack or on my shoulders. I want to just transform. I want to change and alter myself. But it's not this, again, kind of that linear concept of just more, more, more, more, more adding on. I think You know, if it's a garden, if we all have a certain plot of a garden, you have one, I have one, you can't expand it, you're going to grow some things for a while and get tired of it. I'm tired of broccoli. I'm tired of blueberries. I'm going to grow something else. And it's no problem. But like you talk about, when we start a career trajectory or a relationship or find a diet that works for us or exercise that works for us, we think that that's what we do every day. And I like that you kind of took us back in one of the chapters and said, If we look back historically, that is not how life was. There were— my paraphrasing was there were seasons for certain things and then we would stop it, maybe forever, or maybe we wouldn't do it for a while and then come back. And yet today we're in a place where we do the same thing every day. And so I just appreciate you bringing out— saying this doesn't make sense. And it's obviously— I mean, I feel like it's fair to say it's obviously not working.

Yeah. You know what it reminds me of? Reminds me of a question I really don't like, which unfortunately is too common. When people apply for a job, it's very common that they're asked, where do you see yourself in 5 years? And I want to be able to answer, I don't know. And I don't want to know. I don't want to be able to answer that question. You want to, in 5 years, you want to be able to turn back. And be completely surprised, even a bit confused, feeling like, what happened? Like, what happened? Who was that person 5 years ago? Who am I today? What happened? You have, as you say, transformed so much that it is impossible for you to even understand the journey you've been on. If you're able to predict where you'll be in 5 years, that is not true transformation.

Thank you. Okay, so play with So, when we look at goals, I think I've always thought about it as a destination. Here I am, I want to get to here. And again, sometimes that works, but I've been playing lately with, okay, I think that's the destination, but I do want to kind of understand a direction, you know, figure out what I'm doing today and a direction that I'm going. But I don't know that I'll make it to that goal because I'm concerned— or gosh, I shouldn't say it that way. My experience is sometimes I get halfway there and realize, oh, That's not where I want to go. And yet again, we feel like, okay, we've invested this much, we just got to keep going. And I don't want to minimize anything here because, you know, I had somebody on the show who had a childhood trauma and from that thought that they were supposed to become a doctor. So they went to school, became a doctor, started practicing, hated it. And of course, everybody would say, well, gosh, you invested that much time, that much money, you just keep doing it. And I honor the weight of that. And yet, it also— what a terrible thing then to spend the rest of your life doing something that doesn't fit. And so, you saying that, I feel like it should be, again, kind of a breath of fresh air and yet, also know that that's so daunting for people. Like, you start off with the story in your book of having this trajectory, getting the right job, and then saying, "I don't think it's going to fit. I'm going to quit." That feels like such a failure to people. It's such a massive— and we get such cultural pressure. Speak to that. I mean, I feel like half of it is just the social pressure we're going to get from relationships in our life, spouses, parents, siblings, friends, whatever, that are going, oh my gosh, no way. You should be thankful for where you're at. You got to stay there, right?

What you're describing is— I talk about in the book about cognitive scripts. And cognitive scripts are automatic responses we have in certain situations that are based on what we think society is expecting from us. So the one you described is the sequel script, and it's the idea that whatever decisions you make today need to make sense based on the decisions you made in the past. It has to have this nice, legible narrative. And then there's also the crowd pleaser script where we make decisions based on what we think is going to make people around us happy. And those people might be our partner, spouse, friends, colleagues. And the last one is the epic script. It's the idea which you kind of touched upon that whatever you do needs to be bigger than what you did in the past. You need to grow, you need to leverage whatever success you have and whatever you work on needs to be impactful, needs to be impressive. And what's interesting is that these scripts look like they're supporting our growth, but they're really limiting because each of them limit your choices. In certain ways. You might only explore things that make sense based on what you did in the past or based on what is going to please or impress other people around you. And, uh, I was, uh, actually having a conversation with someone a few hours ago and they asked me, so how did you, you know, how long did it take you and how did you break free from those scripts? And I said, I haven't, it's still a work in progress. We live in a society where there is constant pressure. From following these scripts. So the only thing I've become better at is catching myself whenever I'm following one of these scripts and then going back to a place of authentic experimentation. But very often I catch myself seeing a colleague or a friend working on something and feeling like, oh, I need to do that too. That, that's, that is success. I need to do that too. And then only after a while I catch myself and And wait a second, that's not what I want. I'm happy for them, but that's not what I want. And so it's a constant work in progress and our society is not helping.

I mean, you're at that point, you're getting into, you're getting into my identity. You're getting, you know, if I look at, I do, there is that pressure that I put upon myself, even outside of the culture to progress. I've got to progress. So, even if I change something, I need to justify that it helped me get to the next. I mean, we've said that about failure for a long time. No, it's not failure. You know, you learn something from it. You took it forward. Still progress, which I don't want to negate that. I mean, of course, we get wisdom and experience and whatnot. But what if I do something and I'm at level 9 and I change and go to something else and I never get above the level 6, but I'm enjoying myself? We don't value that so much, the internal— well, I mean, that's a big part of it, isn't it? Are we— what's the measuring stick? Is that fair? Is the measuring stick the outward progress in our job, our money, our whatever, or is it our— what would you say, inner peace, joy? How do you define it?

Yeah, I describe these as external signals and internal signals of success. And so the external signals are The ones we tend to look at more naturally, because again, our society is designed in a way that encourages us to look at those signals. So it's the, the money, the recognition, uh, the, the promotions and all of that. And this is, this is fine in a sense that especially if you're working in a field that you're particularly interested in and you like it and your work is useful in some way and you get recognition for that, sure, that's great. The problem is when that is the only signal you look at. And it's very important to look also at the internal signals. How does it actually feel to wake up in the morning and to live the life you're living? Because if all of the external signals are in the green, but you hate your life, you hate working on what you're working, you hate the— you're not comfortable, not yourself in the relationships that you have, you're feeling constantly burned out, tired, and overwhelmed and anxious. Is that really success? So I think it's really, really important to pay attention to both external and internal signals.

Yeah. So back to identity, you're asking for us to get honest with ourselves. Gosh, I even think, Anne-Laure, about— I think it was Arthur Brooks when he was on the show and he talked about some study on happiness. And it showed— I think it was with Olympic athletes or something. And they were asked— I'm going to paraphrase the details, but it was something to the effect of, you know, if you could choose, would you get a gold medal if you only got to live another 5 years? Something like that. And a high percentage chose the gold medal at the sake of ending their life early. Point being, questioning, do we really want happiness? Do we want to feel good? Do we want that internal measurement Or do we really want the external? I don't have a point on that other than it's just you're saying you're kind of speaking to that of get honest with what it is that you want. And if you say, no, I just want to have success and power and fame and I don't care if I'm happy. Well, at least you're being honest. Fair?

Yeah, exactly. This is where I don't find it useful when people are too prescriptive and say, let go of your ambitions. Just live in the moment and you don't have to care about achieving anything. Some people find meaning in their lives by achieving impressive feats. And Olympians are some of these people. They're a very small part of the population, but this is what they want and this is what makes them feel excited to wake up in the morning. I feel like your level of excitement when you wake up in the morning is actually a good yardstick for how good a life you're living. And that doesn't mean there's no effort or challenge, right? Just how excited you are to wake up in the morning. And for some people, like Olympic athletes, it is thriving for that gold medal. But for other people, it can be thriving to be an amazing dad, being a great friend, writing an amazing essay that they get to publish and some people will read and comment on and benefit from. And so, as you said, having this honest conversation with yourself as to What actually makes you excited to wake up in the morning? And how can you optimize your life to have more of that and less of everything else?

Well, gosh, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, you're speaking to my life where I'm at right now. I mean, I'm in my 50s now and I've spent a life achieving goals, achieving. And that's what got me excited in the morning. I'm not excited for that anymore. I'm kind of tired of it. The last few years are the first times I haven't entered races. I still continue to do different athletic events, but I am excited, just not about that. I'm excited about— well, your book is Tiny Experiments. I was thinking exploring. I want to— I'm curious and I want to explore myself and others and humanity. I want to experiment. And it's such a— yeah, it's such a different mindset now. I'm so— I mean, my book is What Drives You. I'm still driven. I'm still excited and interested and curious. But it's such a different— yeah, I guess it goes back to that linear thing. It's not that goal. I'm going to go there no matter what. I'm so tired of that. I've done that. I've— I'm kind of burnt out on that. But doing experiments, it is— it's such a— I mean, it's literally— would you say it's— I mean, it's almost like a different brain chemical. I like the idea of if somebody's sitting down to listen to a podcast and they're going to listen to entertainment, they've got their entertainment brain chemicals going. You, you, you know that you're the neuroscientist, you can say this better than I can. But as opposed to sitting in class, you come into class or come into a therapy room, it's a totally different mindset. So if I'm going hardcore after a goal, it's a— is that fair to say it's a different— it's a different brain chemistry than when I'm over here and I'm experimenting in the lab?

In essence, what's really interesting is that it's actually the same dopamine reward system, but applied to something different because both are very rewarding. And that's what's so fascinating with the brain is that the very same networks can be used for different things. And so when there's something called a variable reward schedule, and it's basically when you're not quite sure whether you're going to get something good or not. So that's what they use when they design those gambling machines. In Vegas. They have a variable reward schedule. That's also what they use when they design the feed on social media. You know how you get 3 bad posts and 1 good one, and then 2 bad, 1 good, and you keep on scrolling because the reward schedule is variable. You don't know where you're going to get. And that's what you get with experiments too. When you experiment in life, you don't know what's going to work or not work. And so in a way, you're using the same reward system that can be unfortunately hijacked by gambling machines or social media. You can use that same reward system to actually train yourself to be excited about the uncertainty of trying new things in life.

Okay, that would use— it feels parallel to the idea I've been working with so much of just our cultural propensity towards certainty. We want to claim black and white, right and wrong, certainty. And I find that most of the things that we're debating about are subjective. They're subjective. They're just not fact. They're not, they're not in cement. They're not certain. And if we're trying to find our security there, talking about identity, we're in trouble and we're in a defensive mode or in a conflictive mode or in a dissension, as opposed to if we can have confidence over here in the mystery, in essence. Is that— feels like that's in alignment with what you said? Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. It— people tend to just be happier in general when they accept that they don't know. Just accepting that you don't know and not trying to cling to the illusion of control and certainty which makes a lot of people miserable because you try to have control, you try to have certainty, and you're constantly disappointed when things don't go your way. When you're not expecting things to go any certain way and you're just curious and open to learn from whatever outcome you'll face, you'll definitely be happier.

Okay, let me, in regards to goals and this linear concept. So as I was reading your book, I was thinking about I mean, there's certain areas in my life that I am always going to be— gosh, I don't know— progressing or maintaining. At least, uh, I'm gonna work whether I need the money or not. I want to work. I want to apply myself to something. I want to be fit and healthy, exercise in essence. I want to do that. I don't, I don't look forward to a place where I just decide I'm not going to do that anymore, you know, or eating nutrition and nutritional food or having good relationships. So if I look at those as categories, but in those categories. I may work. I mean, you're still working. You know, your book starts off with you're at Google, you got this great career, and you decide to stop it. Well, you didn't stop and decide, I'm not going to work anymore. You've continued to work, but you've done different things. You may have exercised one way for a while and you decide, you know what, I'm tired of playing tennis. I don't know, I just— I did that, it was fine, I just want to do something else. So is that— I found myself kind of playing with that, pondering that as I read the book, that there are certain categories that I'm not giving up the goal of producing a good effect in those categories. But the— would you say the methodology? It could change 100 times.

Oh, absolutely. And this is really what having an experimental mindset is about, is really keeping on paying attention to the signals that your brain and body are sending you, truly listening and adapting your approach based on that. It's really knowing that whatever has worked for you for the past 10 years can suddenly stop working. And it's completely okay. You can actually change and it can actually be an amazing opportunity to try something completely different and new and have a different experience, which is going to add to how full and interesting your life feels. So it's really part of the fun. I feel like a lot of people feel like something's wrong when they had a routine for a long time and all of a sudden it doesn't feel good anymore. Maybe they're a bit bored. Really, very often what has happened is just that you have outgrown that routine. It just became something that you know so well that there's no surprise, no sense of actually exploring and growing and learning. And so maybe it's time to try something new.

I have a question. Let's use— let's use work as an example. In your own life, but also as you've worked with so many people now in your labs, Do you see that even if they allow themselves and they do different things, which, you know, different careers or different jobs, different roles, different whatever, that they often maintain a thread of congruence within those, or that some do completely different things? Is there a— I'm just curious, is there a percentage of— no, you find that people tend to they still fulfill certain, you know, some of the same threads throughout what they do, or some can be totally different.

A lot of them are very different, but if you go quite deep, you always see kind of a thread, but that is so general that it's actually hard to see. So I've seen people I work with, for example, that completely change careers, but then you realize that the common thread is that they love working with people. And that can look, that can take so many different forms that if you look at the jobs, it looks very, very, very different, but that's the common thread. I would say in my case that the common thread, when I started digging a little bit deeper, is that I love learning. And so a lot of my jobs have a strong learning component. And so I think some people can completely change 360, do something completely different, but most of us, there is something in life that consistently gets us excited. And, uh, that can be moving our body, connecting with people, learning something new. That can be a combination of those things. And without realizing it, we're exploring different ways to explore that part of ourselves that is kind of a core part of who you are, we are.

Okay, okay, that's helpful.

I—

you have the book segmented into 4 categories, and that first one, PACT, Commit to Curiosity. I really love the word curiosity. It's a— I, I resonate with that. I am curious about, you know, my areas of interest. But I feel like the word— people think of it differently. And I think they tend to think that they, you know, some people are curious, some people aren't. Would you say that, no, we all have curiosity within us, but it manifests differently?

Yeah, that's exactly what I would say. I would also say that we're all curious, but unfortunately, based on the kind of education you got or the kind of environment you grew up in, you might have been discouraged to express your curiosity in a very visible and outward way or to actually just follow it. And so there are a lot of people who grew up in, in kind of an environment where they're told that it's okay to be curious about whatever is part of the curriculum, but to not get distracted by other things. And they might bring that mindset into adulthood and then not really allow themselves to explore things that don't clearly connect to whatever productive task they're supposed to be focused on. And so for a lot of adults, there is some relearning to do, reconnecting with that childlike curiosity that you really follow without trying to control it and without trying to turn it into something productive.

Okay. You, somewhere in the book, Anne-Laure, you said something about unlearning or referenced something. I have gotten more curious about that. Is there anything— a literal question that I ponder— is there anything that I'm really learning totally new? And again, kind of that adding on to myself that is not actually an unlearning of something and I'm really just replacing?

Thoughts? We're not necessarily always unlearning, but—

Okay.

We're never really learning from scratch in the sense that any new long-term memory you're forming is formed by connecting it to something. That you have in mind. So you could, I guess you could call that unlearning, um, but I would say it's more of a tweaking of the memory that you have in store rather than forgetting it and replacing it. And so that's what's interesting is that if you give two people, you put them in the exact same situation and you, you, they have the exact same experience from the outside, they will both take away completely different things. Because they will connect that new experience to their past experiences. So it's never a blank slate.

Then maybe that's it. That helps. And I actually just found my notes on it. You had a quote by John Maynard Keynes. The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping the old ones. That's, that's what I, that's what I kept coming to on this is wondering, am I just learning something new? I mean, there's some context, otherwise I wouldn't want to learn whatever. There's some context or something that exists. But I, again, I like the perspective change or appreciate it that I am replacing something. I think maybe I like it because it helps me realize that how much of what I have, how much is in me, call it beliefs even, that are not helping me or they're not as great as they could be. And am I open to changing my beliefs. That's— is that a primary part of it?

Yes. And that requires being conscious of the fact that, again, whenever you're learning something new, you're not learning in a vacuum. You're learning based on your past experiences, the, the past lessons, the past connections that you've made, the past conversations you had with other people. You're a product of your environment. And if you want to regain a sense of agency in terms of your beliefs and how you navigate the world. Just the first step is being aware of that so you can unlearn what is not really serving you anymore and actually tweak those memories, upgrade them, update them with your new knowledge, and, uh, and start kind of building upon those experiences in a way that actually makes sense for you.

Okay. Something else on goals that you have in this first pact. You said, "Our goals are often not even our own. We borrow them." And then, you used a term that I wasn't familiar with, mimetic desire. Am I saying it right? Mimetic desire. We desire something because we see others desiring it. I wish I had known that term when I wrote my book because part of my book, What Drives You, I went through these key areas of life. Trying to give people permission to step back and say, what do you really want? Have you even considered? Do you want— let's take a relationship. Do you want to get married? You don't have to. Well, I know culturally everybody thinks you're supposed to. How about kids? I have 100 children. I know people doing great things that I wasn't able to do who have no kids. You know, can you give yourself permission? Kind of that question. And especially with social media and the stuff that we see, I have found myself doing that. I found myself with groups of my friends and them getting excited talking about something that they're all into or a product or whatever. And I start feeling like I should. I start shooting on myself. I should get that. I should. I had some guys do this. So they're talking about sunglasses, this new brand of sunglasses. I feel like maybe I should go check them out only to think I don't wear sunglasses. I don't like them. I never have. What on earth am I doing? But take that to that. How much of the stuff are we going after the goals? And it's not something we really desire. Again, I feel like your book is kind of a journey through paradigm shifts. Can we take this cultural propensity that we have and just flip it or question it or open or, I don't know, unlock ourselves from it? Yeah.

Yeah, your experience is so relatable. I also still experience mimetic desire all the time. It's completely normal. We're social creatures. So yeah, we, we do find inspiration in terms of our goals and aspirations based on what other people around us do. And I think a healthy reframe here is not necessarily going to, to say, I'm not going to do anything like what other people around me are doing, but saying, I'm going to be intentional and I'm going to be honest with myself. So just asking, you know, with your example with the sunglasses, do I actually want these sunglasses? And you know what, it might turn out that you actually need sunglasses and why not get the same pair from that brand your friends recommended. Why not? If it's an intentional decision, if you're not just copy-pasting whatever other people are doing and, and basically, yeah, copy-pasting your desires from other people. So what other people are doing can be an interesting source of inspiration, but that's all it should be. It shouldn't feel like an obligation to do the exact same thing everybody around you is doing.

Goodness. Yeah, I'm thinking about my childhood. My dad was a car guy. He was involved with cars, liked them, worked in that industry. And so, I was a kid and I liked cars and I got Car and Driver magazine and I got books about cars only to finally leave home and pursue my own thing and realize I don't care at all. A car is just something to get me from A to Z. I could just give a rip if it's a horse or a Porsche or a buggy, or I don't care. But again, we take those on. And oh, I appreciate you saying that we're social creatures, so we shouldn't diss ourselves from that. But can we, can we be aware, I guess? And well, one more thing in this, if I understand right, with— we're talking about curiosity. Again, this is the, this is the first part of the book, PACT: Commit to Curiosity, Getting Started. And you said we tend to fall into cynicism escapism, and perfectionism, that these are shields. Unpack that a little bit.

So the way I think about those shields is really thinking about a relationship to ambition and curiosity. So if you have high ambition, but you consider that curiosity is a distraction, so you don't allow yourself to explore make mistakes, open doors that you're not quite sure where they're leading. You're just focused on the outcome and on being successful. That's perfectionism. If the opposite, you're highly curious, you love exploring, trying new things, but you're not willing to invest the effort to truly fulfill your potential. So you have low ambition. That's escapism. And if you have both low ambition and low curiosity, well, that's cynicism. And in contrast, I talk about having an experimental mindset where you have both high ambition and high curiosity.

It speaks to me of a need for a level of confidence or humility to do this? Because I mean, that tiny experiments, again, by proxy, you're doing that, being okay if you don't get it right. Can we do that in our lives? I've got two kids who have their driver's permits right now, so they're in the driver's seat doing their thing, and I'm over here. And one of them specifically, my son, will have the tendency to make a mistake and say, I'm sorry. And I'm going, "Bud, it's just, you're not supposed to be good. You're learning. That is the point. You're learning. You're not supposed to— don't apologize to me for not being at the level of driving I am after having driven for however long I've driven, 40-some years." But even that, it kind of belies that propensity to not be— I need to talk to him about this literally and go, "Gosh, you shouldn't be. Please don't apologize for learning." But that's the cultural propensity. Actually, it actually kind of convicts me to how have I not modeled them to be more okay just with making mistakes? Of course, you're supposed to be making mistakes. Don't apologize. Yeah, I'm almost feeling convicted of that right there.

A phrase I love that I actually quote in the book is from a French neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, who talks about making good mistakes. And I think it's such a useful reframe because a good mistake is any mistake you learn from. And so whenever you do something wrong, you can say something like, oh, that was a really good mistake.

Fair. No, I like that. I appreciate— I literally am going to talk to my kids after this about that. I just hadn't conceived of that piece of it connecting with the second part here. Anne-Laure, you've got ACT. Practice mindful productivity, and in essence, you know, to keep going. And a part, a couple parts that I highlighted was cognitive resources. You have managing your executive function, and what it kind of spoke to me of, and you tell me if I've got it right, is that my executive function, they're not finite. I need to almost budget to some degree and not think of them as finite. Fair? Okay.

Yes, absolutely. I talk specifically about your attention and your working memory, and we think that we have infinite attention, that we can multitask and hold infinite information in our mind at any given time, and that is not the case. So we need to be intentional with the way we manage our executive function.

Okay, you say the same thing in here about emotional resources, managing our emotions. Okay, speak to that in the same, in that same framework.

Yeah, just, uh, think about whenever you've been to, I don't know, a wedding, or you saw a movie that made you cry, and you kind of run out of emotions for the rest of the day after that, right? You're not going to spend the entire day laughing or crying or being deeply involved into something. And so that's also something you need to pay attention to if you're doing the kind of work that is quite overwhelming or implies a lot of emotions that you feel very close to, that's important to you, you kind of also need to pay attention to those signals and make sure that you also have time to recharge your emotional batteries.

Okay. You also pulled out procrastination. And I mean, it's a topic that I see quite a bit. And but you came at it. I don't know that I've seen anybody come at it the way that you came at it. We tend to look at how can we overcome it, how can we overpower How can we eliminate it? And as I read your commentary, your research on it, I think of myself as a procrastinator, but I'm kind of okay with it. And you helped me be more okay with it. Thank you. Because I realize when I'm often, you know, quote, putting something off, but I know my head and my heart, they're kind of working on it. And then the day comes and I'm ready to deal with it, or I'm clear on what to do. Or again, so as I was reading, I was also pondering, sometimes as I procrastinate, I realize it doesn't need to be done. I don't want to. It took me a week to figure out I don't care, I don't want to do that. Or the procrastination happens and it kind of took care of itself somehow as well. Now, I know that we can go too far and then just put ourselves in a bind, but I don't know, is my pondering on it in line with your thoughts on procrastination?

Oh, absolutely. I write about procrastination as just a signal from your brain telling you that something is not quite working right now. And as you said, it was really interesting to me when I did research for this chapter and I went on Google and looked up articles about procrastination. And you're right, all of them were all about how to beat procrastination, how to get rid of it. Some of them fairly violent in their language, as if something's wrong with you and you need to fix yourself. When again, it's just a signal from your brain, which you can learn from should you choose to listen to it. And so when I write about procrastination, I encourage people to literally have a conversation with their procrastination and say, okay, why are you here? What are you trying to communicate to me? And is the problem coming from the head? From the heart or from the hand. And if it's coming from the head, it means that you're not fully convinced at a rational level that you should be working on this thing in the first place. As you said, that maybe the task makes no sense, maybe it's badly designed, maybe it's outdated, maybe you should not be the one doing it. Maybe someone else should be doing it. Maybe AI should be doing it. And you feel like it's a waste of time. There's resistance and you procrastinate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't believe that this is going to be fun. It doesn't look like it's going to be enjoyable. And so you procrastinate. And when the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't think that you have the right skills or tools or support network in order to do the task. All of a sudden, when you, you're curious about your procrastination instead of trying to beat it, It is an amazing source of information as to what's wrong. And then you can decide what to do, which includes, as you said, not doing the task sometimes. Just this task makes no sense. I'm procrastinating because I don't want to do it and I don't have to do it.

That was so helpful. That was the head, the heart, and the hand being in alignment. Is one of the highlights of the book for me, um, because I thought about a couple projects or things that I'm involved in now. And in one of them, we've delayed it and delayed it because my heart has not quite resonated. I keep feeling a little off, and so I keep coming back to it. And it's— I think it's proven very helpful that we didn't just go launch it, uh, ahead of time. I have another one where my head and heart feel pretty good, but I don't— I'm not conceiving of the how yet, of the hand, of how to do it. And so, it was just a great filter that I'll continue to use. So, thank you, because it just resonated. I was able to look at some of the things that I'm working on now, and I wouldn't even say they're things I'm procrastinating on, but they're things that I just haven't been ready to launch. And in the past, I've been just a trigger-happy person. Just let's just get it out there and do it. And now I'm not so much. And I think it's been this head, heart, and hand. I just didn't have it clarified. And so now you gave it to me clearly. So thanks.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I love it when a tool is really helpful to people.

Yeah. The next area, the next section, React, collaborate with uncertainty. And I think in another area you said to stay— staying flexible, which again comes back to the trial and error instead of success and failure. Yeah, you make me want to just kind of abolish the whole success-failure concept and just say it's trial and error. Anything that I'm interested in, that I'm curious in, I'm going to go forward with trial and error. And if we try X, I've got a project right now that we're going to launch a little bit next week, and I talked to my partner about it this morning. And it's, well, let's try this. Let's not commit to it, but let's kind of a soft— well, but speak to that because we also have so much of the history going, no, when you go, you go all in. Right? And I get some of the power of that, of not being— help reconcile that because we're saying maybe don't, but then we're also— you're not saying to be flaky and be uncommitted either. Explain that more from the experimental concept.

Oh, absolutely. So when I talk about running tiny experiments, think about a scientist conducting an experiment. They don't just go, oh, let's just try this thing, see what happens, right? No. They design a protocol. They commit to collecting the data and they withhold judgment until they're done collecting the data. And so when a scientist designs an experiment, they decide two things. One, what they're going to try, and second, the trial period. So when you design a tiny experiment, you do the same thing. You say, I'm going to try this thing. I'm going to take this action for this duration. And so you can give yourself 1 week, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months. You give yourself a duration and you say, I'm going to then look at the data and look at what worked. What didn't basically look at that trial and see what we can learn from this trial. And at the end of the trial, I can decide whether I wanna keep going. Maybe things are working. This is great. Maybe I wanna tweak the approach. It's going okay, but definitely some room for improvement or completely valid option. I'm gonna stop. I feel like now that we've gave, we gave it a try, it is very clear that this is not aligned. With our priorities, with our ambitions, with our other commitments. But now we know because we gave it a proper try.

It reminds me of kind of where we started talking of that idea of we feel like we have got to set that goal, be certain and go towards it. And yet, yeah, as I continued in my life right now, I can only see so far ahead. I just don't know what I don't know and I'm not going to. Until we start. So, can I be— I mean, can I be committed to— again, kind of back to my categories. Am I committed to my own health and wellness? Yes. Do I participate in the methodology the same that I used to? No. Some, I just don't want to. I don't want to do it the way I used to. Some, I just— I don't quite— I really don't like limiting myself, but I don't quite have the capacity that I did as a 25-year-old athlete. Athlete, as now as a 54-year-old athlete, it's got to change. And can I make space for that? Kind of like seasons. Again, you talked about that, the fact that we do the same thing every day. Now, you also— I want to pull this out and ask you how you do this in your own life, Anne-Laure. How you— you mentioned that kind of in the past, I'm paraphrasing, but life was slower. Well, you talked about this. We're going to end this recording at a certain time because you're walking to your next place. That's the answer. You're walking. I mean, here in America, there's not a lot of walking. You drive everywhere, you get there quick, you Uber, whatever. You're not taking that walk. And I look at the span of time, the amount of, quote, downtime we had waiting on something. Maybe we're bored for a while, maybe we're— the weather keeps us from going out in the field, so you're going to go inside and, I don't know, man, read a book or take a nap or something like that, or you're walking to the next place. And now we have, of course, the constant device. We're always, you know, busy, we're always going. So here you are, you've got an active a business right now, you got a book and you're doing the book tours. That's adding a lot in. How are you practicing that space? Is that the best way to say it?

Yeah, it's interesting because that you mentioned the fact that I need to walk to my next meeting today because this is actually a fairly recent experiment that I did. So as same as you, I am committed to taking care of my physical and mental health. But I also know that I have different seasons in life, different projects, different levels of intensity in my work, and that something that's working right now might not work in 3 months. And so when I was in the middle of my book tour, and it's funny, people call that a book tour as if you were going all around the country, but really it was mostly me sitting in front of my computer and recording podcast episodes. I noticed at some point that there were days where I would be in front of my laptop from 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM and barely getting up. And that was my day. And obviously this was starting to have a negative impact on my mental health, on my sleep, on my mood. And so I said, I'm not quite sure what would work here, but let, let me try this. Let me just run this tiny experiment. And I said, I will go for a 20-minute walk every day for the next 20 days. I don't know if it's going to work or not, but I'm committing to doing this for the next 20 days. I will pay attention to whether this is helping or not. If this is helping, I'll keep going, and if not, I will experiment with something else. I don't know, meditation or stretching. I don't know what would help, but let me try this one first. And so that's an example of experimenting with different ways of taking care of yourself, making more space for being bored, not being in front of a screen, and doing that even though you're not 100% sure what's going to work.

Okay, right there, not 100% sure. I'm going to come back to— again, that's the title here is Collaborate with Uncertainty. So you cite one of my favorite stories, analogies. You use the story of— and folks, if you're hearing this, you can go look it up, type in China Farmer and Maybe. So the story of the Chinese farmer, his horse runs away. Everybody says, oh no, how terrible. And he says, maybe. And then the next day the horse comes back and it brings 8 horses with it. How great. Maybe. And the story goes on. But I love that has been— I have come back to that story. I don't know how many times in the past couple of years because of in my own life of having something happen that I think with certainty, this is great, this is it, this is the— this is what I wanted. And then a month later, a year later, whatever, to realize that was not helpful. It was not good at all. And then, of course, the opposite, the thing that happened. And I think we probably have more memories of that, of the thing that we thought was terrible, the job that we got laid off of or the business we quit or whatever. And we think it was just terrible. And then, you know, a little while later we go, oh my gosh, it was the best thing that happened to me. I mean, how many times have you heard somebody in social gathering talk about that? But we don't take it to the present. And that's what I feel like you're having us do. How about take that right now and say, okay, here is something. Is it great? Is it terrible? I mean, you got to make a decision on— you think it's going to go one way or the other, but can we do it with— it almost feels like I want to say sobriety. Can we just be sober that we do not know? Is that— that's, that feels like one of the biggest lessons ever.

That to me, this is why having some form of self-reflection practice is so important. So I personally journal every day. Sometimes it's just 3 lines when I don't have a lot of time. On a Sunday morning, if it's really quiet, I can sometimes journal for a good half hour, 45 minutes, doesn't matter. But to me, capturing what I feel in the moment and my predictions in a very sober way, as you say, just saying like, I think this could be good. This feels pretty good. I'm quite excited about it. And then being able to go back to it later on and seeing how many times I was wrong.

Yeah.

It really teaches you over time to just go with whatever feels pretty good in the moment and explore whatever you're curious and excited about, but also to not be too surprised when things actually don't go the way you expected them to.

I— you just used the word prediction, and like that. So we sit down, is it great? Is it terrible? I don't know. But you're going to make a prediction based on hopefully some maturity and some wisdom and some experience and hopefully some counsel, you know, from, from others and whatnot. But I think I'm going to be playing too with looking at it. Can we look at it again, this business project that we're going to be somewhat kind of a soft launch next week to go, okay, we're going to do the first experiment. Here's experiment number 1, and we'll do that, see what happens, adjust, and then go do experiment number 2. We're going for— I, I haven't used that. Um, I think I'll put that because I have been using prediction that everything I'm doing is for the most part, it's a bet. I'm making a bet.

And yeah, there is always an implicit hypothesis when you're conducting an experiment and you're not in a lab actually having hypothesis 1, hypothesis 2 formulated in this very formal way. But the implicit hypothesis, the implicit prediction you're making when you're running a tiny experiment is that maybe this can help, maybe this could be good, maybe this could work. You're not going to try something if you think it's going to be terrible. So even if you're not saying it out loud in a conscious way, the implicit prediction is that this could help. What's really important in having an experimental mindset is to be fully prepared to be wrong. It's to be fully prepared for your hypothesis to be incorrect. And when that happens, if it turns out that your prediction was wrong, that you didn't get the result you expected, to see that as an amazing learning opportunity because now you have more knowledge than you had before you conducted the experiment and to use that new knowledge to iterate and trusting that you will, you will end up figuring it out. You don't know what that's going to look like. You don't know how many cycles of iteration you need to, you need to go through, but you will figure it out.

Okay. I really like again, that a different— it's a different perspective of what if I'm wrong. So if we take a business initiative, is an easy one for me, that we're going to go try X, I do tend to look at, okay, worst case scenario. What's the worst case if it totally fails? Fails. Okay, but if it, if it doesn't achieve what we expect to, what's the worst case scenario? That's different. That's a different perspective or mindset than to say What if I'm wrong? Yeah, that, that's, that, that takes again where I think we're back to identity. Can we do that? Can we be that sober? I feel, I feel like we've got to be though. You're just saying it's gonna, that, that is what we're talking about. So let's just get honest with it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very interesting what you're saying because you're right that when we're predicting the worst case scenario, we're still clinging to that illusion of control that we have mapped all of the possible outcomes. Whereas, what if I was wrong implies that there might be an outcome you haven't even thought about. You might be completely wrong.

That— yeah, I like— it just feels like a different brain chemistry, in essence. Now, you mentioned a minute ago, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, you mentioned journaling. And in this section of the book, you talk about this. I can't remember how you, how you term the exercise. In essence, the plus minus and next. I really liked it. The plus. Well, I was just going to go through you. I'll let you explain it. It's your, it's your thing. So tell us about the plus minus. I just felt, found it again, really a really helpful exercise or filter. So tell us.

So this tool is really about avoiding just going in circles. If you keep on conducting experiments, but you're not learning from them, not extracting any knowledge and only repeating the same thing over and over again, you're just going in circles. If you want to actually grow and transform and explore and, uh, and really figure it out and keeping on iterating, you need to have a process for extracting that knowledge and then decide what you want to do next. And so this tool called Plus Minus Next, Next is a tool to do that. You have 3 columns. In the first column, plus, you write everything that went well. In the second column, minus, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, next, where I use a little arrow, you write everything you might want to try next, what you want to focus on next, the tweaks and the next iteration. And the reason why I love this tool and I find it so powerful, and it's actually one of the most popular tools in my community. I've had people who've been using it for years. Is because first, it's very simple, just a couple of bullet points in each of the columns, super quick, takes a few minutes. But also the format, the format first encourages you to celebrate your wins, which is something that a lot of us don't do. And especially ambitious people who are like the kind of like get things done kind of people, they will achieve something amazing. And they will move on to the next thing without ever taking even one second to celebrate what they've done. So it is really about taking a second to say, hey, you know what? Good job. We did that. That went well. It also, in the second column, minus, encourages you to be honest with yourself in terms of what maybe didn't go so well, what you didn't predict, as we were saying earlier, the parts where you were wrong. And again, that's completely fine. It's really just about extracting that knowledge. And it is the really the last column that makes it so powerful is that instead of having just this static snapshot of what happened, you're using that knowledge to iterate. You implement that knowledge in your next cycle of experimentation. And this is what you do in the next column.

Yeah, I like that. Celebrate, be honest, and then implement. We've even done that as a family, kind of get around the table and talk about your highs and lows from the day, but not the next. So what's next? Uh, it'd be a great just a social check-in as well, like with my family and whatnot. Um, and the last part here of the book, Impact: Grow with the World, Dream Bigger— the primary message I got from that was the power of— we hear this a lot, but I see people doing it less and less, really, really collaborating with like-minded people, in essence. And you even talked about flow and the benefit, or how often flow comes in union with other people. I had not thought about it that way. I've thought about it more autonomously. And you got me thinking, though, about some of the projects that I'm doing in collaboration. And that those are some of the highest places of flow. I just hadn't put it together there. And I think I still don't value is I know that, I know it intellectually, but that, that the power of that is well, and even to do the experiments with other people, even that takes some of the weight off. Yeah.

Oh, 100%. To be fair, most of the research on flow has been conducted at an individual level. So we know a lot and there have been so many books written about getting in the flow on your own. And it's only fairly recent research that actually shows what I think most of us have known for a while, even though there wasn't research to back it, that it is easier to get in the flow when you're surrounded by like-minded people who are also in the flow. And so it really shows the importance of your social environment in order to, for you to explore and to experiment. And you also write that experimenting together is actually even more powerful than just doing it on your own. A big part of experimenting, as we mentioned, is extracting what you learned. And a great way to extract knowledge is to share it with others. So you can really learn by teaching. And so whenever you conduct an experiment, whatever the outcome, even if you were wrong, it wasn't what you expected, you will get even more value out of this experiment if you just take a moment to share whatever you learned with others and with others, depending on the context, that can be your colleagues, but that can also be your family, that can be your friends, that can be the people you train with, whoever could benefit from that thing you tried and learn from.

Well, it shouldn't be a surprise to me in you talking about flow in conjunction with others, because I've said this for a long time now, this right here, this is an area of flow for me to have a conversation about the places I'm curious in, in the— around the knowledge that I've devoted my life to. It's a place of flow in doing that and having this conversation together. So thank you. Thank you for allowing me to sit here and flow for an hour with you. I love the book. I love the paradigm shifts. I think that that is— as we look at this again, this personal development industry, we need— I think more than ever, we need to think differently. And I feel like you didn't just come in with added knowledge. It was to take what we know, kind of that back to the unlearning thing and look at it a different way. So the, the concepts and the filters and the paradigm shift. I'm a fan. Thank you. Thank you for letting me be able to discuss it with you and learn. It was a great gift.

Thank you so much for your thoughtful questions. I absolutely love this conversation. Thank you.

Thank you, Anne-Laure. Well, thanks so much for joining us in this discussion. That again is Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and the book that was my muse here is called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. And again, you want to go from just this knowledge and information to actually implementing into your life. I feel like we all need personal guidance. I'd be happy to help. Help guide you to finding the right guide for you. Just email me at kmiller@kevinmiller.co. Until next time, here's to the evolving you.

Yeah.