What Does Success Look Like? | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me, Dan.

So as I understand it, your approach to life, which is all about experiments, is based on your prior approach, approach to life, which was a little bit more conventional. Can you if you're up for it, can you tell your story?

I kind of think about my life in terms of two chapters. The first one was, as you hinted at, very linear. I had a clear plan, a clear vision, and I truly believed that in order to be successful, you just had to know what you wanted and then work really, really hard to get there. And that's it. That was the recipe for success. And so that's what I did. I had a clear vision, clear goals. I was obsessed with figuring out what is the— what was the exact blueprint to follow in order to be successful. And then I worked really, really hard. I started my career at Google, which I really enjoyed and felt like was my dream job at the time, working on really interesting projects with smart people until I realized, thanks to— which I know sounds weird, but thanks to a health scare, I realized that my priorities were all out of whack. And this is when I started questioning my approach, this very linear approach that I had until that point. And I started thinking about potentially exploring different ways of approaching life and success.

I wanna ask this question, but I hope maybe, I hope it doesn't destroy the rest of the interview, but when you started, I'm curious, when you started exploring other ways to approach your life? What did, what did that look like?

At first, it really didn't look like the approach I have right now. I, I would love to, I would love to give you a beautiful, clean narrative of how I all figured it out. I quit my job at Google, and then I figured out the perfect recipe. But that, that's not how it happened. I left my job at Google. And I thought, okay, I'm now going to explore and to retry and figure out what I actually want out of life. But instead, I was so scared of not knowing where I was going. I was so uncomfortable with the uncertainty that I jumped straight back into following the same kind of scripts. And so I started working on the first obviously socially sanctified type of work that you can do in the industry I was working in at the time. I was in Silicon Valley, so what did I do? I started a startup. And I started a startup for all, all of the, the worst reasons possible, because that's what people expected me to do. When you stop working at a big tech company, people expect that you're going to start a startup because it was impressive. It gave me again, this clean, nice narrative that I could give to people when people ask me, so what's next? What are you working on? And it frankly just gave me that sense of certainty, that illusion of clarity, that sense that I knew where I was going. And it's only, only when my startup failed that I finally allowed myself to admit that I was completely lost and I actually had no idea what I wanted to do. That once you removed the blueprints and the scripts and following those expectations, I actually didn't know what I wanted.

How did you figure out what you wanted?

Through a lot of experimentation, making mistakes and trying to learn from them as much as possible, through being more honest with myself as well. And slowly, more importantly, I think very slowly, I think that was the biggest shift in terms of that first chapter versus that second chapter I'm in right now. I fully embrace the fact that figuring out a meaningful way to spend your time and energy and attention is not something that you can rush, and it's not something that you should rush. So through a lot of experimentation and through taking my time.

I have a million more questions. I do just want to say, I forgot to say to you what I often say to— what I always say to interviewees, which is that you'll notice that I look down a lot, but that's because I'm consulting my notes. I'm not distracted.

That's completely fine. Yeah.

At some point later, I want to hear in some detail what the second chapter of your life actually looks like. But we are all the beneficiaries of your experimentation and stumbles because you've come up with a way to flip the script, the cognitive scripts that, that, that's your term that we, that we are running on. And so let's dive into that and then we'll come back at the end to hear a little bit more about what your life looks like today. But part, part one of your book is called PACT, P-A-C-T, uh, Commit to Curiosity. And you, you start by talking about the tyranny of purpose, and that confused me slightly because often I have guests who talk about how purpose is so important. But so what, what's wrong with purpose from your point of view?

So nothing's wrong with purpose itself. What's wrong is the obsession we have with finding it. And, uh, I very intentionally picked a bit of a provoking title for this chapter because I knew that it would pique people's interest and they would want to read it. What I talk about in this chapter is not necessarily the problem with purpose itself. The problem is that as a society, we have decided that it is extremely important for you to figure out your purpose if you want for your life to have any kind of meaning. I start the chapter with a graph that I screenshotted from Google Ngram Viewer, which shows you the number of times certain phrases appear in books. And the number of times the phrase "finding your purpose" appears in books has increased by 700% in the past few decades. So That really shows that, and the graph visually is really striking. It really looks like an exponential. So that really shows that obsession that we have as a society with finding your purpose. People read books, get coaching, take courses, and feel like if they haven't found it yet, that something is wrong. So they think, oh, this person has found their purpose, I haven't yet, my life has no meaning, my work has no meaning. And I think that's the the problem. If you talk to people who have found their purpose, if you talk to researchers, entrepreneurs, nurses, doctors, or any kind of jobs, because you can find your purpose in any kind of job, and you ask them, how did you find it? How did you find your purpose? And they answer that question truthfully, none of them will tell you, I spent 10 years obsessing over this question and I filled 1,000 worksheets and did all of the coaching and the mentorship, and then I found it. They will tell you, I actually started working on this project, and then a friend invited me to work on that other thing. I opened that door, I had a little look, didn't like what I saw there, tried something different, and then was invited to maybe do this certificate or study that thing. And I kept on exploring and really following my curiosity until one day I woke up. And I felt like, huh, I really like what I'm doing right now. I could see myself keep on doing this for a little, maybe not the rest of my life, but a little while longer. And this is the sense of purpose that everybody wants, but there is no perfect recipe to find it. And we shouldn't be miserable while we're still in that phase of exploring and figuring it out.

The point is you're not anti-purpose, but you're anti- tyranny of purpose, which is pushing us to perhaps prematurely rush toward figuring out what our life's mission is.

Absolutely. And I'm also, as part of that tyranny of purpose, I think another issue is that it makes a lot of people put all of their eggs in the same basket. I've seen people I work with tell me, uh, I feel like I'm, I'm not passionate enough about one thing. I have 2 or 3 things going on. I'm working on several projects and I feel like I have all of those different identities and I actually derive a lot of meaning from these different parts of my life and those different types of work. And they feel like something's wrong, that again, they haven't found the one true purpose that they're supposed to have in life. I think this is another issue with this tyranny of purpose, is that a lot of people who should be perfectly content because they actually have found several things in life that they like, feel like something's wrong because they haven't found that one true purpose. So again, the tyranny of purpose, I think this is what the problem is.

Another concept you explore in, in this first part of the book is a phrase that we've already used in this conversation, this notion of cognitive scripts. Can you, uh, can you hold forth on that a little bit?

This is fascinating research from the late '70s where researchers conducted a very simple experiment. So What they did was that they asked people, if I put you in this, this specific situation, how do you act? How do you behave? So for example, you're at the restaurant or you're at the dentist and you're in the situation, how do you behave? What they found is that most people, if you place them in a specific situation, behave in a very similar way. And that makes a lot of sense because as part of, as members of society, we all follow what they call cognitive scripts. That allows us to not overthink every single situation and how we're supposed to behave, what we're supposed to do, and what we're supposed to say. So a little bit like actors who are given a script, we are given an invisible script to follow whenever we find ourselves in a social situation. There's no inherent problem with that in the sense that you don't want, again, to have to think about every single action that you're doing on a given day. But the problem is that we're following those cognitive scripts, not just when waiting for our table at the restaurant or arriving at the dentist. We're following these scripts in lots of other areas in our lives, in choosing our careers, in exploring relationships, in thinking about the kind of studies that we're going to do, or even the way we dress. We follow cognitive scripts in lots of areas of our lives that are much more important than how should I behave at the doctor or at the restaurant.

What do we do about that? Just, I would imagine from a Buddhist standpoint, the idea is just to be mindful of that, that we have these scripts so we can see if they're serving us or not.

A misconception people might have when they hear about cognitive scripts the first time is that you need to get rid of all of them. Or get rid of the ones you notice. But that's not necessarily the case. The idea, and this is very aligned with mindfulness, is just to be intentional. So first, observing your scripts, noticing the ones that you're following, and doing that without any kind of judgment. So whenever you're in a situation where you're considering a new job, where you're exploring a new relationship, where you're asking yourself what you should learn next or how you should behave, just kind of asking yourself, what kind of script am I following here? Am I following a script here? And then the second step is asking yourself, do I want to follow this script or not? Because sometimes it might make sense to follow a script, and that's okay, as long as this is intentional, that you're mindful of the script and this is intentional. And sometimes once you've discovered that you're following this script, you feel like, actually, you know what, that's not the script I want to follow. I wanna behave in a different way. I wanna explore a different path. And then you can do that. So it's really about being intentional.

One of the practical tools you talk about in this part of the book is, is something called field notes. Can you describe that?

I call them field notes because this is what they're called in anthropology. When the anthropologists conduct fieldwork, they take field notes and it's really what it says on the tin. It's going in the field. Observing what's happening and taking notes. And you can do the same thing with your own life. You can pretend that you're an anthropologist and that you have your little notebook and you're observing the current situation and taking field notes. And that means a few things that are very helpful when you do that. The first thing is that when an anthropologist goes and studies a new culture, they do so without any preconceptions. Without any assumptions. They really pretend that they know nothing about this culture and they ask questions like, why are they doing things in this way? Why do they care so much about that? Why do they communicate like that? The second thing that's really important is that they don't have any judgment. Whatever they observe, they just take notes. They just observe and they say, huh, okay, that's what, that's the way people behave. That's what they think. That's how they spend their time. That's how they communicate. And that's it. And those are really the main ingredients of what I call self-anthropology, pretending that you're an anthropologist with your life as your topic of study. It's observing the current situation and doing so without any assumptions and without any judgment. Only when you do this, only when you take those little field notes and you really observe your life, with this distance, the same that an anthropologist has, only then can you start imagining what could be different, what you might want to experiment with.

As I said before, there are 4 parts to the book. The first one, uh, is, is called PACT, P-A-C-T, which is actually an acronym, um, Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable. Can you explain a little bit more why, why this is so important?

So what I call a PACT is a Mini Protocol for Experimentation. And I know most of the conversation so far has been quite high-level and philosophical, but the PACT is actually a very, very practical tool. It's a way to design your own tiny experiments. It's based on the scientific method. So when a scientist wants to design an experiment, they only need two things. I mean, obviously they need administrative approvals and funding and all of that, but let's forget about all of that and focus on the essence of what an experiment is. You need two things. You need to know what you're going to test and the length of the trial. That's it. What you're going to test and the length of the trial. A PACT is basically the same thing where you're taking this format for an experiment and applying it to your own life or work or any area that you want to experiment with. And so you need two things: the action you're going to experiment with and a duration. So the format of a pact is "I will action for duration." One of the tiny experiments I did last year actually was around meditation. So I had heard myself saying to someone that I was really bad at meditation. It was just not for me. And when you notice that kind of fixed mindset around something in your life, this is actually a really good sign that this could be an experiment that you could do. So I said, oh, let me actually do an experiment. I will action for duration. I will meditate for 15 minutes every day for the next 15 days. That was the experiment. Action, duration. What's so powerful about this approach is that I'm not committing to a habit yet. I'm not saying I'm going to do this for the rest of my life. I'm just saying just 15 days. That's it. You also, again, like a scientist, withhold judgment until the end of the experiment. So when a scientist conducts an experiment, they don't start poking at the data in the middle and say, I don't like what I'm seeing. I'm just going to stop the experiment. Same here, especially for things you're curious about that have a bit of a, a messy middle or that are a little bit hard to get started with. You, you really commit to doing it for the duration. You finish the trial and only at the end you can kind of analyze the data. No spreadsheets, just looking back and asking yourself how that went, but only when you're done collecting your data. So in this case, at the end of the 15 days. And so it gives you a really simple format. It ensures that you actually really try the thing you're curious about, collect your data, and then you can make a decision at the end. So that's a PACT, a Mini Protocol for Experimentation. And the 4 letters, as you said, purposeful. It's purposeful because when each of your experiments are based on something you're truly curious about, You don't need to find a big purpose in life. You can just conduct a series of purposeful tiny experiments. Actionable in the sense that this is something you should do that you can do right now. So you don't have the excuse of saying, oh, I don't have enough money, I don't have enough time, I don't have the right tools, I don't have the right support network. It should be something you can experiment with right now with your current resources. Continuous in the sense that it should be something you can do either every day or every week or every month, but you need those repeated trials in order to know whether this is working for you or not. If you do it only once, it's going to be really hard to know if it's helping or not. And trackable, it should be something where you can just say yes or no. Yes or no. Did you do it or not? That's it. That's all you're tracking. So PACT is those 4 things: purposeful, actionable, continuous, and trackable.

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See terms for details. And this is— it's interesting that mindfulness and meditation are coming up repeatedly throughout this conversation because it's, it's not necessarily the focus of the book, but you're, you're bringing this kind of mindfulness to your life. You're examining what your cognitive scripts are. You're doing a kind of self-anthropology to get a sense of what you are and are not enjoying in your life and, um, what kind of stories you're telling yourself, including I'm not a good meditator. And then based on some degree of self-knowledge, you're making a pact. And in your case, that was I'm going to meditate for 15 days. What did you learn?

Well, first I learned that I am not terrible at meditation. That was, that was the first surprise. What's interesting with experiments is that even though you don't have a scientific hypothesis like you would have in an actual scientific lab, you very often have a hypothesis more in the sense that you have an intuition, you have a hunch as to how this is going to go. So sometimes you conduct an experiment because you feel like Yeah, I feel like this is going to help, so I'm going to do that. A simple one, for example, that I've done where I knew it would work and the format of the experiment was really more of a forcing mechanism was when I said, I'm not going to bring my phone in the bedroom with me for the next month. I was pretty sure that was going to help with my sleep and everything. In the case of the meditation experiment, I was almost sure this would not work. I had tried a lot of those apps where, you know, those apps where you're supposed to do the 10-day onboarding program and it's like literally 5 to 10 minutes every day for 10 days. And I had never managed to go past 3 days, I think. I, every time I had friends who had asked me to sit down and do it with them, I felt itchy everywhere, really uncomfortable. I really thought it wasn't for me. And so that experiment, I really started with the hypothesis that it would not work. And so what I learned was first that I'm not terrible at it. Second, uh, and that started happening towards maybe 10 days, I was actually starting to look forward to it, which was very surprising, very, very surprising for me. And, uh, third, I actually did not end up building meditation into my daily mindfulness practice, but it's part of my toolkit now. So for example, I personally, I journal every day. I dance almost every day. I have other forms of mindfulness in my life and meditation is not the core one, but now I do it several times a month whenever it feels right, as if it was calling me. And so this is a big change for me because it went from something I was 100% sure was not for me to something that is part of my mindfulness toolkit and that I can use whenever it makes sense.

That sounds great to me. Not that you need my approval, um, but I think the, the larger point you're trying to make here is that we can be making pacts with ourselves on any number of things. Big things related to our careers, maybe less big things related to our, you know, personal hygiene, uh, mental health social health, physical health. But this is a, this is an approach to life that drops the fixed mindset. Oh, I'm this kind of person. I'm that kind of person and puts you in a more of a scientist-experimenter mindset.

Exactly. I actually do call it the experimental mindset. It's really this idea that whatever area of doubt that you have in life, instead of ignoring it, if you decide to observe it, you can actually find experiments to conduct, questions to explore, and grow in this way. And it's a, it's a form of growth that comes with a bit more uncertainty in the sense that it's not providing you with this clear blueprint, this ladder that you're supposed to climb, this recipe that you're supposed to apply. But the idea is that if you keep on paying attention and experimenting and iterating on your experiments, You don't know what that's going to look like, but you are going to grow. You are going to grow.

So part 2 of the book is called Mindful Productivity. I'm curious to learn what you mean by that, because it sounds really interesting to me as somebody who engages in mindless productivity not infrequently. Um, but also like, how does the idea of mindful productivity build on what we've just been talking about, which is moving into an experimental mindset?

Yeah, a lot of people, when I talk about mindful productivity, make a bit of a face because they feel like mindfulness and productivity are two things that don't really go together, that you practice in different parts of your life or times of your life. And the idea really here is, you know, when you think about mindfulness, it is really this idea of nonjudgmental non-responsive or non-reactive observation, right? And this is a real— this is basically the idea to apply this state of mind to productivity. Just observing, observing the way you work, observing the way you feel, not judging yourself and trying to be fully present in the moment, getting in that state of creative flow where you're not having your attention pulled in lots of different directions, where you have a sense of calm, of focus. And so that's the idea of mindful productivity, really being mindful of your thoughts, your emotions, the way you feel, the way you work, and really adjusting accordingly without having any kind of self-judgment again.

And again, what— how does that build on this idea of tiny experiments? Is it that This is kind of part of the how of Tiny Experiments.

So if you think about the, the different parts of the book, we started with the first one where you commit to curiosity. The second part of the book where I talk about mindful productivity is about maintaining this momentum. So now that you've decided that you were going to experiment more, try new things and different path, how do you ensure that you can sustain this initial excitement? And you can do this only if you actually take care of your mental health, if you're mindful of the signals your brain and your body are sending you, and if you adapt your approach accordingly. And so this entire second part of the book is really a call to stop trying to be productive at all cost, which I call toxic productivity, and instead trying to be more, again, mindful of our relationship to work and mindful of our relationship to time so we can actually figure out what we want. We can actually live a life that feels meaningful and fulfilling in a way that actually feels good.

I find that very attractive. You list some tools in this regard, the practical tools that, that are helpful in this regard. Um, they include things like energy sinking, the magic window, sequential focus, conscious movement. I just listed— I just threw out a bunch of terms. Which of those, uh, do you have the, uh, feel right to, to discuss?

I would say probably energy sinking is the, the one I use the most, and, uh, that provides the biggest unlock for people when I mention it. It's, uh, when you think about the traditional definition of productivity, and which very often leads to toxic productivity, it's really based on this idea that your most valuable resource is your time. And so you need to make the most of your time. And this is why we have those calendars that look like a series of boxes, and we're supposed to fill this calendar and stuff it with as much work as possible so we can feel like at the end of the day we've done some good work and we've been productive. And the idea of energy sinking is to pay a little less attention to that time aspect, which obviously you can't completely ignore because we live in a society where a lot of projects and the way we work and collaborate together is actually based on, on on time and those calendars, but as much as you can, trying to adjust the way you work based on your energy levels. And you can do that at a micro and at a macro level. So at a micro level, on a day-to-day basis, start paying attention to when you feel like you have more creative energy versus when you feel like your energy stores are depleted and try to organize your work in this way. So if you have a lot of creative energy in the morning, You should not wake up and open your emails. That's going to suck all of that creative energy out of you. You should probably block that first hour, not check your emails and whatever kind of work that you do, do your deep thinking in that first hour. And if that happens at another time in the day, you can protect that. You can also use that energy sinking idea to even figure out what to work on. If you have a few tasks on your list and you're not quite sure where to start, actually paying attention to where your energy is calling you, what is more interesting to you right now, and that's going to make the work a lot easier. So at a micro level, you can do this. At a macro level too, we don't think enough in terms of seasons, and people didn't used to work nonstop at the same level of intensity throughout the year. So you can also think about your work in this way. What kind of work should you do in the winter? What kind of work should you do in the summer? Again, I realize that in a lot of professions you don't have full freedom to do that. If you're a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur, that's probably easier. For lots of people, that's not possible. So can you carve out a couple of hours every week where you follow your energy to decide what you're going to work on? That's a way to start practicing mindful productivity, even if you can't do it all the time.

Yeah, I would acknowledge I, I have— I'm in a very lucky position in that I'm my own boss and I can set my own schedule. Um, but I have found— I, I don't know that I was calling it energy sinking, but I have call— I have found that what you're describing, which is kind of doing some self-anthropology on my, uh, to, to get a sense of how my energy, uh, flows through the day, that You know, when I wake up in the morning, I do spend 60 to 90 minutes off the phone, often outside if, if I can, if, if I can handle whatever the weather is, um, doing really creative work for the first part of the day. And then my energy goes downhill from there, so everything else, uh, is pushed off until later in the day, including podcast interviews, I'm sad to say. Um, uh, although it's 2 o'clock in the afternoon as we're recording this, so I'm not yet brain dead. But so I found it incredibly, incredibly helpful just to say. I know I listed 4 practical tools, energy syncing, magic window, sequential focus, conscious movement. I think we can intuit, you know, conscious movement is, you know, it, it's helpful to move your body through the day. And I've, I've really been found that really helpful. Sequential focus instead of multitasking. Can you monotask? But what, what do you mean by the magic window? That's the, that's the least obvious.

Magic windows are those moments where you feel like you're, you completely forget your, your sense of, of time, of tasks or of responsibilities, and you really lose yourself in the moment. It's, uh, inspired by the two different words that the ancient Greeks had for time. So they had two words. One of them was chronos, which is kind of the same word we're still using today. You have it in chronometer, for example. So that's the time of seconds and minutes and months. That's the quantitative definition of time. But they had another word for time, which was kairos, which is the qualitative definition of time. And that's the time of sunsets. That's the time of long conversations with a friend. That's the time of, of playing with your kids. That's the, that's Kairos time. Magic windows are a way to intentionally create more Kairos time in your life. So it's figuring out what are, what is a little ritual that you can create for yourself when you're stuck in Kronos time, you're doing, you're in toxic productivity mode, long task list, stressed and anxious. What is a little ritual that can reopen that magic window? That can put you back in that Kairos frame of mind. And I interviewed a bunch of people to ask them, how do you do that? How do you reopen a magic window when you feel like you're just being rushed and pushed and you have no control over the way your energy is flowing? And in the book, I list some examples. Some of them were really funny, but I have simple ones where I was like, okay, yeah, I can see that, where people say, I go in the kitchen and I make myself a cup of tea very slowly and I pay attention to every single gesture and the smell and the heat in my hands and all of that. I had people say they walk in a circle in the room a few times until they feel like they're reconnected to themselves. So they get up from their desk and they do that. I had people say they just go and get in the little ball on the bed and stay there and just close their eyes and take a mini, mini nap. It's not really enough. They don't fall asleep. But again, the acting like a child a little bit for a moment until they feel reconnected with that sense of playfulness. And so again, this is something I really would encourage people to experiment with to figure out what it is for you. What is a way— what is something you can do to reconnect with that sense of Kairos time, with feeling alive, feeling grateful to be in this moment, feeling connected to yourself, and then you can get back to work, but reconnecting with that sense of Kairos time.

That's really helpful.

I—

this is something I also was kind of doing without knowing I was doing it, but I'll take a break and, you know, go motorboard one of my cat's bellies, or, you know, start a playful argument with my wife or my son, or, um, toss a ball around, or something to, to get me out of the sort of headlong, mindless forward momentum. One other thing you say about mindful productivity that I, I found really interesting is that we might be unfairly vilifying procrastination.

Procrastination is really treated as the enemy in Actually, most circles, I find procrastination fascinating because this is something that a lot of people are happy to talk about at a very conceptual level where they say, oh yeah, procrastination. Yeah, I know that's a challenge, but you never hear someone walk to their boss and say, yeah, I haven't finished that presentation because I was procrastinating. Nobody does that. So we never have an honest conversation. We never really admit to the fact that we're procrastinating because there is a lot of shame and taboo around it. But when you really look at what procrastination is, procrastination is just a signal from your brain that something with the task is not quite right. And what we do instead of listening to that signal and trying to figure out what it means and what is wrong with the task, we try to push through. We use our willpower and we blame ourselves in the process for not doing the thing that we think we should be doing. So in that chapter of the book, which is titled Procrastination Is Not the Enemy, I encourage readers to actually have a conversation with their procrastination to say, hey, welcome back. So you're trying to tell me something. What are you trying to tell me? What is the signal trying to tell me? And I share a very simple tool. That allows people to have a bit of a more structured conversation with their procrastination, to really ask where is the problem coming from. I call the tool the triple check because what you ask is, okay, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, although it might not be conscious, but at a rational level, you don't think that you should be working on this task in the first place. And that might be for a lot of reasons. Someone asked you to do it and it has become outdated. You're not the right person to do it. Makes no sense. It's not aligned with the company's priorities, but you should not be doing this thing. And part of you knows that. And so that's why you're procrastinating. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, although you think, yeah, we should be doing this, at an emotional level, you don't feel like that's going to be fun. That doesn't look like it's going to be exciting. And so you're procrastinating. And if the problem is coming from the hands, it means that although the head is saying, yes, let's do this, the heart is saying, that looks like fun. At a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills or knowledge or tools or support network in order to do the task. And all of a sudden, when you actually start having this conversation and asking, why am I procrastinating, without self-blame or self-judgment, you can actually start systematically thinking about solutions as well, whether it's addressing the rational aspect, the emotional aspect, or the practical aspect.

This is another thing that I, that I have found very helpful. Again, not having labeled it any particular way. One of the most annoying clichés is this idea of listening to your heart. But as I often say, clichés get to be clichés for a reason because they're true. And I have found in a productivity context that often it's really helpful if I'll do the thing that I want to do, that my heart wants to do. If I've got a long to-do list, which thing am I going to pick? Which again you talked about, uh, a few minutes ago too. Um, which thing am I going to do? Which chapter am I going to work on of my whole— of, of in my next book? Um, well, somewhere my heart, some wisdom below the neckline has an instinct. Listen to that.

Yes, I love that wisdom below the neckline. I, uh, I'm, I'm a neuroscientist and, uh, And there is, for me, I know, always a temptation to find an explanation at the cognitive level, but I have found time and time again that if you wanna be able to paint a full picture and really understand what's going on, you need to go beyond just the rational explanation. There's always something going at the emotional level or at the practical level as well.

Somebody said the problems of life are arterial. You know, as a poetic, uh, statement, I, I agree with it. The other thing you talk about in this, um, in this section of the book around mindful productivity is, uh, this phrase intentional imperfection. Can you describe what you mean by that?

So I talk about intentional imperfection in the sense that a lot of people who are quite ambitious and who want to be successful have this tendency to try and be absolutely perfect in every single area of their lives at all times, which is impossible. When you put it like that, you know it's impossible. And yet that's what a lot of us are trying to do. So we're trying to perform at 100% across our personal lives or professional lives. We're trying to be the best friend possible, the best spouse possible, the best manager possible, while taking care of our health, while doing all of the different things and commitments that we have in life. And obviously we end up failing at one of those things, not being 100%, and we feel like we did something wrong. Intentional imperfection is just accepting the fact that you cannot be perfect at everything at all times, and you would suffer a lot less and actually perform better if you were intentional about it, if you embraced it. Accepted it and decided in advance, this is where I'm going to try to be at 95% and this is where I'm going to drop the ball this week. And that's okay. The great thing about this approach is that not only it allows you to actually perform at 95% or 100% wherever you want to perform at that level in that area of your life, that's, that week, because that's where you've decided that your energy is going to go. But it also allows you to first not blame yourself for not doing your most in other areas, but also communicate that to others. So you could tell your spouse, I have this big presentation coming up on Thursday, and so I might not be helping as much in the next couple of days at home, and I'm sorry in advance. I promise I'll help again a little bit more at the end of the week. And by the way, If there's something really important that you— and urgent that you need me to do that you feel like I'm not doing because I'm so focused on that other thing, let me know because I might be distracted by that other thing and I don't want you to feel like I'm not doing at least the 50% that I'm supposed to do here. And all of a sudden you're able to perform in that area where it makes sense for you to focus right now while still being pretty decent in other areas because you've decided that you were going to get 50% in advance and you communicated it.

One of the tools you recommend in this section of the book is, it's something called ambition dials.

It's exactly what I just described is really, it's more of an image. And it's imagining that you have this kind of dashboard in front of you with all of those dials where you have your ambition levels. And so you have your ambition dial as of that this week as a manager, your ambition dial as a gym-goer, as a spouse, as someone who tends to cook their meals at home, or whatever it is. Those things are important to you as a friend. And just knowing that it cannot be 100% everywhere. And so how are you going to adjust those dials to get to a level where you look at the dashboard, and if you're being honest with yourself, you can say, okay, this actually looks achievable. It's not perfect because that's not what we're trying to do, but it's doable.

Part 3 of the book is called Collaborating with Uncertainty. I think I know what you're pointing at there, but what— can you say more?

Yes, you've probably understood from the conversation we've been having so far that as a, a scientist and also from my experience in my personal life, I do believe, and this is one of the key messages in the book, that we would all live much happier lives if we accepted that we don't know where we're going and that there is actually a lot to learn from uncertainty. There is a lot of opportunity in uncertainty if we allow ourselves to stay in it, to explore it, and to ask questions instead of trying to escape it as quickly as possible and clinging to that illusion of certainty. So that entire section of the book is really about how to navigate uncertainty, how to embrace it, how to learn from it. And it includes some tools and ways to really navigate moments where things are not going to plan. You're not quite sure what you're going to do next. How can you actually turn these moments of uncertainty into fruitful moments of opportunity?

Well, one of the things I think about a lot, and I— it's kind of a rap I, I deliver on this show not infrequently, but the, the— there are so many great things about the human operating system, but this design flaw is just glaring. There are many, but that the one question here is that we live in a world where change is non-negotiable. Everything's changing all the time. And yet we are allergic to uncertainty and addicted to certainty as some sort of defense against relentless flux. Does any of this sound right to you?

Oh yeah, no, absolutely. It actually makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. So if you think about our ancestral past and the conditions in which we were evolving, the more certainty you had, the more likely you were to survive. So if you knew where you could find the resources, what was that word noise in the bushes, and who were the people you could trust or not trust in the tribe, all of that kind of information added to a sense of certainty in terms of your environment where you could make good predictions and you were more likely to survive. And so in that sense, If, if your goal in life is to just survive, your brain is perfectly designed for that. It's perfectly designed for survival. The issue is that I think a lot of people today want more than surviving. They actually want to thrive. They want to grow. They want to live a meaningful life. And that's when that mechanism where we try to reduce uncertainty as quickly as possible can get in the way.

On the practical tip here, there are, as you referenced earlier, some, some things you recommend. One of them is something called growth loops.

A growth loop is when you put it all together, you could conduct tiny experiments forever. And if you keep on doing the exact same thing over and over again without learning from the experiment, then you're just going to go in circles. If you want to actually grow. You need to pair action with reflection. You need to make sure that you learn from what worked and what didn't. And based on that, you iterate on the previous experiment. And this is what I call a growth loop. This is when you create those loops where each experiment provides you with more knowledge, whether that's self-knowledge or knowledge about your work or knowledge about the world, and you use that new knowledge to design your next experiment. And again, it's a loop, not a ladder, in the sense that you don't have this linear sense of having a step-by-step recipe that you follow to get to a specific destination. It's the idea that you're going to keep on growing through each of the loops that you complete, even though you don't know what that's going to look like.

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So putting it all together, you start with observation. This is what we did with the self-anthropology. You just observe what is. Once you've observed what is, you can start imagining what could be different. And this is when you design a tiny experiment. You keep it small and you try something new. And that can be, as you mentioned earlier, across your health, your work, your relationships, any area of your life where you feel like something could maybe work better. You conduct a tiny experiment. And in order to close the loop, you need to actually reflect on that experiment. So at the end of the experiment, I recommend using a little tool that's very, very simple that I call Plus Minus Next. And the, the name really describes what it is. It has 3 columns. In the first column, you write everything that went well with the experiment. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, everything that you might want to try next, what you want to tweak, what you want to focus on in the next iteration. The reason why this little tool is so powerful is because first, you take the time to acknowledge what went well. You celebrate the wins. There's some things went well. And even if the experiment didn't go as planned, there is always something positive. There, it just find something and put it there. And sometimes there's lots of positive things, but you celebrate your wins. Second, you're honest about what didn't go so well. So, you just write what could have been better, what was unexpected and then not a really good way. And finally, instead of just having this static vision of what worked and what didn't, you can actually extract that knowledge and decide How you going to grow thanks to that knowledge? And so that's the last column, next. This is what closes the loop. Observation, then experimentation, and then reflection.

Yeah, because I could see somebody with my psychological proclivities launching a million tiny experiments, but never reflecting and just launching from one to the next, one shiny object to the next.

Yes, that's why. So a lot of the people I work with are highly curious and highly ambitious. And so they are all very prone. I am as well, to conduct tons, want to conduct tons of tiny experiments at the same time. And there are several reasons why you don't want to do that. The first one is what you just mentioned, which is that if you try to conduct too many experiments at the same time, it's going to be very hard to actually have space for reflection, really integrating what you learned so you can then implement that knowledge and use it for your next experiment. The second reason why you want to avoid having too many experiments at the same time is because it's going to make it harder to know what is having a positive impact on your life. So a little bit like when a scientist is conducting an experiment and you want to look at a couple of variables at most, you don't— at most, sorry, you don't want to have too many variables changing at the same time. So it's just simpler to know if you're doing the experiment of not bringing your phone in your bedroom for the next 2 weeks, for example, if you just do that one thing, it's going to be easier to know that this is what's helping. And the last reason why you don't want to have too many experiments at the same time is because, again, it's very important that you complete your experiments. So, you commit to that action for that specific duration, and only at the end of the experiment, you decide what you're going to do next. And again, if you have 1,000 of them running at the same time, it's very likely you're going to abandon quite a few of them because that's unmanageable.

Yes. People come to me a lot, given what I do, and say, "Oh, I'm a—" I was just having this conversation the other day with a— with our contractor who was saying, you know, he's— he's at a point of self-examination because of some health stuff, and he was like being told to meditate and get more sleep and, um, blah, blah, blah. And, and he was like, I don't know which to do. And I said, just pick one and go really small. But what I should add is do it for a finite period of time and reflect at the end of it.

Yes, tiny experiments. That's really the main difference between a habit and an experiment. It's this idea of having a, a fixed duration and reflection at the end. And then experiments can actually become a gateway to figuring out habits that you want to implement. I told you in my case with meditation, it did not become a habit, which is perfectly fine, but in some cases you might discover that something works so well that you want to implement it as a permanent habit in your life.

Part 4 of the book, the final part of the book is called Grow with the World. What do you mean by that phrase?

I mean that you could do everything I describe in the first 3 parts of the book on your own, and that's fine. But if you really want to grow, you need to do it with the world. You need to do it with others. You need to learn in public. You need to be part of communities of practice. And this is what the last part of the book is about. It's really about opening up your personal laboratory to the world and actually learning and growing with others.

When you say learn in public, what does that mean?

Learning in public, people might think that it means that it's all about posting on social media, and it can be, but it doesn't have to be. Learning in public is anytime you're conducting an experiment and there's at least one other human being who's aware of the experiment. That's learning in public. And that can take many forms. That can be having a little WhatsApp group with friends where you say, hey, that's our experiment for the next 2 weeks, let's do it together. That can be having an accountability buddy where you say every week we grab coffee on Sunday and we ask each other, okay, how's your experiment going? What did you learn? What didn't work? What worked? What do you want to do next? And doing that together. And so learning in public can have a very limited public. That's okay. And it can be all the way to actually having a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, whatever you want to do. It doesn't have to be that, but it's really about making sure that you're sharing what you learn with others, not at the end when you feel like you have figured it out and you're the expert, but really sharing during the learning journey while you're still figuring it out.

I believe there's a quite a bit of evidence to show that when you're trying to boot up a habit, that, that— so what's called, what the psychologists call social support is incredibly important. It can be, it can really strengthen or supercharge the process. I often talk about the importance of, you know, living in the HOV lane or the carpool lane. The term you use is social flow or unlocking social flow. Can you say a little bit more about that?

A lot of people are probably already familiar with the concept of flow. This is a state in which you are, again, like it is kind of linked, and I talk about it in both parts of the book about this idea of Kairos time, right? When you're in a state of flow, you are lost in the moment, you're fully focused on a task, and you feel this sense of ease and both effort and effortlessness at the same time. Anyone who's experienced it will know exactly what I described here. It's actually really hard to describe. And flow has been studied for decades and decades. There's lots of research around it, but most of it has been conducted in individuals. But there's emerging research looking at what they call social flow, which shows that when you surround yourself with other people who are deeply engrossed into a task, really curious about something, and in that state of flow themselves, it makes it easier for you to access, to unlock that state of flow as well. So there is really something about the sense of collective, collective curiosity where we all are trying to explore something, to understand something, to to work on a task, and it makes it a lot easier when everybody is in that same state of flow around you rather than trying to do it on your own.

Yeah, it's really interesting because I've done a million interviews on the show on, on, on the subject of flow. Either I've done entire episodes on it or it's come up within, within episodes. And I always feel a little sheepish in those conversations because it's not frequent that I get into a flow state on my own. Uh, maybe when I'm playing the drums, or maybe when I'm running, But it, you know, it's not, it's not happening all the time. Sometimes in meditation, um, but it does happen when I'm talking to other people, either when we're working on something collectively or if it's just, um, a dinner party, um, where, where the conversation is really flowing. And then I do lose track of time. Yes.

And traditionally, you might not see see those experiences described in the flow research literature because again, we tend to look at it at an individual level. But at a cognitive level, it's actually the exact same experience. It's just a lot easier to unlock with other people.

This part of the book, Growing with the World, is all about engaging with the world, not, not being stuck in your own tiny experiment silo, not being stuck in any kind of silo. Um, but one, one thing I hear from people all the time is, well, you, Dan, and many other, uh, so-called experts are talking about the value of community, but I don't know how to— I don't know how to build one. Um, and you do have some advice here, uh, um, this framework of apprentice, artisan, and architect. Uh, I'd love to hear more about that.

A lot of people struggle to find their community because they try to build one straight away, which is really, really hard. Building a community is really hard. So instead of starting with building a community, start by just joining one. And that's what I call a community apprentice. You just join the community and you try to learn as much as you can. And, and you're, you're part of the community. You join all of the events and you ask questions and you're a good contributor. Then if you want to, and you could just stop here, that's completely fine. But if you're, you feel called to explore that journey a little bit more and go a bit deeper, you can become what I call a community artisan. And this is when you start being a more active contributor in your community. So maybe you start hosting some of the community events. Maybe you start making suggestions in terms of how the community is run. Maybe you start sharing more ideas, getting small groups together. Again, you can stop here, but if this is something you like and you derive a lot of joy from that experience and that connection that you get with people, then only you can start exploring becoming a community architect. And this is where you really start your own community. This is a lot of work, but it can be incredibly fulfilling for people who actually enjoy that kind of work. The only thing I would recommend is maybe start with the two other levels first to try and figure out if that's something you enjoy enough to go to that other level. And, uh, and whether you might be happy just being more of an apprentice or an artisan. You don't necessarily have to be one of the community architects to get meaning from those kinds of connections.

I don't know if what I'm going to say is going to make any sense. Maybe we'll keep it in the show or maybe not. I had this experience the other day. Where my wife and I went to go pick up our son from one of his classmates' homes. And the house and the property was just beautiful. So tasteful, so beautiful. Just, it was— I love the house we live in, but it just put me in this mind state of like, oh, maybe we should be, you know, should we live in that town and that house? And it is just not a fun place to be. Um, it's not terrible. It's not as unfun as murderous rage. But, um, being in that kind of acquisitive comparative mind state is— I don't know, it's not really where I want to live. Whereas when I'm thinking about— I actually have started to experiment with architecting communities, but even if I'm just apprenticing in a community, uh, when I'm in that mindset, I don't have any existential crises. It doesn't feel edgy and, um, uh, cracked out. Does anything I'm saying land for you? It makes sense.

And I think a lot of it has to do with the traditional definition of success that we've been told to kind of— we've all kind of internalized. And so, you know, it's the same with big, like, job titles or big salaries or fancy projects, the big house, the car, and all of that, even though at a rational level, you probably know that you don't necessarily care that much. When you grew up in a society where you've been told that this is what success looks like, I think there is still going to be a part at the emotional level that's going to have those instinctive responses. Whereas, at least in our Western societies, it would be really interesting to talk to someone from another culture, But in our Western societies, we haven't really put that kind of prestige around this, this label on community building. You don't admire people as much in our society around community building. And so maybe that's why there is less of that response, because I think, I think you're right. I think a lot of people would have experienced those two very different responses in those two different situations. But I wonder if And I'm not sure, but I wonder if that's not cultural.

Uh, for me, I think it's 100% cultural. Well, I mean, I think there's something about the human animal that desire is hardwired, but for sure, where are you channeling that desire can absolutely be cultural. Not only the larger culture— I mean, I grew up in the '70s and '80s watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on television— but also the culture of your family of origin. You know, my I had great-parents who were both physicians and, you know, lived, uh, in ways that— and worked in ways that benefited the world. But, you know, it was a very sort of conventional post-World War II boomer mindset of, you know, credentialism and, uh, materialism that definitely got into my molecules.

Yeah, 100%. And so I feel like there is a lot, again, of scripts to unlearn and to relearn, to ask ourselves, what do I actually care about? What is actually meaningful for me to explore? What am I— what are some areas where I'm curious to grow versus copy-pasting or having those automatic responses, which again, we're still— we're going to have those responses, but observing them and then knowing that that's not necessarily the script that you want to follow.

You have this concept right toward the end of the book of life beyond legacy.

What is that about?

Something I keep reading about and hearing about, sometimes even more than purpose, is legacy, leaving a legacy behind. And this is also something that I want to encourage people to, to question. Why is it that we are so obsessed with leaving a legacy that people are going to benefit from once we're not there anymore in a way that is very unpredictable, when we could actually decide on our actions in a way that benefits our current communities, the other fellow human beings for sharing the planet with us today in a way that's very visible and immediate. And I think it might seem less grand and impressive because the kind of generative impact I talk about in the last chapter of the book is really about local impact, community impact, and, uh, just thinking about the kind of positive impact that you can have on the people around you when in general all of the talk around legacy is about the kind of millions of people are going to remember your name kind of legacy, and you're going to change the world kind of legacy, which I think is a distraction.

Yeah, I think I was like in my teens when I realized I was not foreordained to be king of the world. Yeah, it's very common desire to, you know, I think it's, it's a reaction to to impermanence, you know, the— and change and uncertainty that we want a legacy because it's a— it defies death.

Yes, ultimately, we want to feel like our life matters. We want to feel like it made a difference that we were here versus us not having existed at all. And so it absolutely makes sense. I still have those, those intrusive thoughts sometimes where I ask myself, does any of what I do actually matter? Nobody's going to remember it. And Again, none of the work that I do and none of what I write about is about getting rid of those thoughts or those responses that we have. They're very human. They're very, very human. But it's about noticing them, not blaming yourself for having those thoughts, and then deciding in an intentional way to not act on them and act in a different way that is actually more aligned with what you want to contribute today.

That's a crucial point you're making. My point, in my opinion, that mindfulness or self-anthropology or whatever you want to call it is going to backfire if when you see embarrassing parts of your personality, you then lapse into self-judgment, self-laceration, uh, making it bad. In the words of my executive coach Jerry Colonna, who's all— when I, you know, talk to him about my less appetizing or attractive motivations, he always says, like, let's not make it bad. It is human. It is— that urge is trying to help you. It's some neurotic script that you, you know, the, the organism came up with at age 5 or whatever. It's trying to help you, but we don't need to follow it. Um, and I, I just, I just, I think that's crucial. I do want to come back to, um, where we started, which was we talked about the two chapters of your life and you described the first chapter, Google startup that didn't go so well, and then entry into the second chapter, uh, which is experimentation. But what, what does your life look like now? Can you flesh out the second chapter a little?

I ask myself, what, what is something I'm actually curious about? Even if nobody was watching, even if the traditional success was out of the equation, what is something I would be excited to explore just for the sake of it? And for me, that had always been the brain. I had always been curious about how it works. So I went back to school. I went back to school to study how the brain works. And this is where I rediscovered the concept of the experimental cycle, because that's what we're taught in, in school when we study neuroscience, how to conduct experiments, starting with observation, formulating a hypothesis, collecting your data, and then based on that data, making decisions. And I had a bit of an aha moment where I figured, huh, what if I started applying this approach to other areas of my life? And so I started conducting tiny experiments as I was conducting my studies in neuroscience. I also started my first public experiment around that time, which was to write 100 blog posts in 100 weekdays, which I know doesn't sound like such a tiny experiment, but that's because I don't think everybody would agree with my definition of an article. Some of them were very, very short, but I had to publish something every day. And, uh, at the end of that experiment, I realized that I actually loved writing. I love writing. I wanted to keep going, and so I kept going. And, uh, today my life looks like a little bit of neuroscience research. I work at a university in London where I study the brain, a little bit of writing. I still write my weekly newsletter and have published this book, and a little bit of traveling and meeting interesting people and listening to their stories and seeing how I can incorporate that in the rest of my work.

Well, I'm, I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing because I found it personally helpful. At the end of my interviews, I, I ask two questions. One of them is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't gotten to?

Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. Based on our conversation, what would be a tiny experiment you'd like to try?

I'm hesitating only because I'm constantly running my— I'm— my job is to be a self-improvement guinea pig, so I'm just constantly running experiments.

Can I, uh, add a tiny one, so it has to have that short duration.

Well, here's something I've been thinking about. I have a fraught relationship to dessert. I love dessert. It's my favorite thing, especially since I can't do cocaine anymore. Um, I really like dessert. I went— I've gone through periods of time where I just was Cookie Monster and would just eat until I got sick. Literally, one night I got up in the middle of the night and puked Oreos. Um, uh, and that wasn't good, good, because I would feel like shit the next day. And, and that was a whole spiral. And then I went through this whole abstemious, uh, phase where I wasn't having any sugar at all. And then right here on the show in 2020, I interviewed an amazing woman named Evelyn Triboli, who's one of the co-creators of something called intuitive eating. And her point is that actually making food groups bad is not so helpful, um, especially when you're a parent. Um, and so now I, I do allow myself to eat dessert, but I just try to actually taste it while I'm eating, and that can help me not eat as much. And that has been great. And yet, you know, I do notice that if I don't have it, I sleep better and I feel better the next day. And so one of the things I've been thinking about is Without making dessert bad, can I cut back on it? Not because it's bad, but because I don't wanna feel that way. Yeah. So I don't know, maybe there's an experiment in there.

I love that. Yeah. You could say, I don't know, looking at how much dessert you eat today, let's say you have it. I don't know how much you— and also, by the way, I quit drinking 3 years ago and I also now eat I eat so much sugar, so I think it's a very common experience. But I would just look at how many desserts you have every week and say, "I will only eat X number of times, like have it X number of times over the next X weeks." And what I like about doing it by weeks like that is that it's a bit more flexible. So if you have no dessert, if you say 3 times a week, for example, if you have no dessert at all the entire week and you actually feel like having a really, really big piece of cake on Sunday, You can do that. That's fine. That's part of the experiment, right? Or you can have 3 smaller ones throughout the week, but it makes it a bit more playful and a bit more, you know, fun to experiment with and figure out what works for you. But that could be something you could do for a few weeks.

Yeah, I will only have dessert twice a week for the next 3 weeks, and then I will evaluate. Boom! Tiny experiment. I like nothing more than a gold star, so thank you for giving me that. Can you just enter what I sometimes semi-jokingly call the plug zone? Can you, uh, please tell us, remind us of the name of your new book, tell us about your newsletter, anything else you're doing in the world, your website that we should know about?

I love that, the plug zone. My book is called Tiny Experiments. You can find it anywhere books are sold, and that includes Amazon, or you can go and support your independent bookseller. And I have a newsletter called Nest Labs, just go to nestlabs.com. I send it every week and I talk about a lot of the topics that we discussed today.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff, thank you very much for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me.