When Goals Fail: Anne-Laure Le Cunff on How Small Experiments Change Everything

The natural tendency that we have as human beings, because we really don't like uncertainty, is to try and escape those liminal spaces as quickly as possible. Get onto the other side, swim to safety. I argue that there is a lot of opportunity for growth and self-discovery in those liminal spaces if we manage to sit for a little bit longer in the uncertainty, and we can learn a lot about what we want and what we might want to do next if we don't try to escape them as quickly as possible.

Hey there, this is Larry Weeks. Welcome to another episode of the Bounce Podcast. Today on the podcast, we discuss a science-backed approach to navigating uncertainty in any context, really, like tackling a new project, navigating a career choice, or even a setback like unemployment that, and here's the thing, replaces linear goal setting with a tactical systematic curiosity and iterative learning process that treats unpredictability and uncertainty itself as a laboratory with you as its mad scientist, or as my guest would probably label, an anthropologist. Yeah, this is an interesting chat. My guest is Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She is the founder of NessLabs and a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience at King's College London. Her research focuses on applying neuroscience insights to support people throughout their career, education, and personal development. She's also the author of Tiny Experiments, which is the touchstone of this episode, and previously worked as an executive on Google's digital health team. She holds a PhD in psychology and neuroscience and an advanced degree in applied neuroscience. Anne-Laure argues that the way we typically approach purpose and goals can actually weigh us down or put pressure on us. She actually says purpose becomes a kind of tyranny, an almost moral burden to discover the one big thing you're meant to do. And she also says that goals too can kind of trap us in rigid definitions of what we consider success and failure. So in this episode and in the book, she offers something more flexible and I think more effective, experimentation. Which I've talked a lot about on the podcast. And not just conceptual experimentation, but tactical. She actually shows how small, very purposeful experiments can move you forward in your projects, relationships, and life in general without this burden or the pressure of getting it all right or setting a target, let's say, in a, in a goal. We talk about why curiosity is innate, but often dulled by education and maybe work systems. We talk about how to relearn curiosity as adults. She expounds on 3 cognitive scripts that are kind of running our decisions in the background. We talk about liminality. It's really cool. And the hidden power of transitional moments when you're in uncertainty. She discusses the maximalist brain and its traps. And then we get into the comparisons of experiments versus goals and versus habits. And why experiments can free you up to move forward specifically, and then get very practical. She goes through her PACT framework, purposeful, actionable, continuous, trackable, and she talks all about that. And then how do we design experiments that will continue running? And then we talk about the generativity versus legacy and how shifting focus to the impact you make now changes everything. And in that context, we discuss the concepts of Kronos versus Kairos, reclaiming qualitative time in a calendar-driven world. And then we get into learning in public and much more here. This isn't just a conversation about productivity. It's really about how to live with a bit more agency and freedom and meaning when you really don't have a clear path. So here's my conversation with Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Enjoy. I loved your book. I'm sorry, I'm loving your book because I'm still reading it. It not only has interesting insights or research or work that you're doing— this is based on work you're doing at Nest Labs, is that right?

Yeah, I started researching and, and writing, uh, those topic— writing about those topics for the Nest Labs newsletter, and I really consider the book a distillation of all of the, the research and reading and writing that I've done over the past few years.

I, I want to— I was trying to think how to discuss this because your story is interesting, plus we're both at Google, so I'm very curious. I'd like to talk about your story and your path to what you're doing now, um, starting at where— when you're at Google, and then kind of tie in this whole experimental kind of mindset So first of all, I've had AJ Jacobs on twice. Are you familiar with AJ? Yeah, just because this guy, you know, runs these experiments overall in his life and, and they're crazy and what have you. So I've talked about experimental mindsets before, but you have really taken this from a neuroscience standpoint or psychology or what have you, and you've kind of codified a way to live an experimental. But one of the questions I had as I was reading your book and your, your life story is part of me thinks that, and maybe both are true, that being curious is innate, something wired or nurtured in us. But you're presenting this like a skill set you could learn. So are they both true, or some people more curious than others by nature? And Or if they're not curious, is it a skill that can be taught and learned, if that makes sense? Or are both true at the same time?

Yeah, I like how you said and/or, because I think that kind of captures the answer here, where most people are born curious in the sense that this is how we learn, this is how we grow. At first, we don't know anything, and it's really by being curious about certain situations, about certain topics by, through trial and error that we end up learning. So we learn through curiosity and then something happens, which for lots of people is growing up, going to school, going through a traditional education system. And, uh, our education system, at least in the West, is very linear in the sense that we follow a curriculum that we're supposed to go through in order. And we're only supposed to move on to the next quote unquote level once someone, a teacher usually, tells us that we're now proficient enough with something that we can go on to learning the next thing. So it's not really encouraging the kind of curiosity and nonlinear thinking that you observe naturally in children. So I wouldn't say that It's some people are more naturally curious. I would say that some people lose a bit more of their natural curiosity as they grow up, depending on the kind of environment that they have. And so we can actually relearn that as adults. You can relearn to be curious. It, it does require intentionality. It does require wanting it. It doesn't just happen on its own.

So then your book, Tiny Experiments. Now that I'm thinking about this, I'm just naturally curious. But now, now that I'm thinking about and reflecting on what I've read in the book, it seems like maybe you've laid out a way through experiments to either reconnect with your curiosity and/or build that curiosity muscle. It seems obvious now that I'm saying it, but is that the case?

I really see the book being helpful for two categories of people. Either people who are still naturally curious, maybe, you know, they've been fortunate enough that they went through a form of education or a kind of career at work where curiosity was encouraged. And so as an adult, they still have a lot of curiosity, but they don't feel like they have the right tools or frameworks, or they're not quite sure about how to apply that curiosity. How to direct this cur— their curiosity. And the book provides the tools to do that. And this is really what an experimental mindset is about. And the second category of readers is readers who remember being highly curious in the past, and then life happened. Maybe they had to take a job that again was not really encouraging that. Maybe they haven't really had the time or the mental space to really dedicate some energy to exploring their curiosity, and they want to reconnect with their curiosity.

So can you define for me cognitive scripts? And then I, I think what's bucketed under that are two things that I'm curious about: liminality and the maximalist brain.

Okay, so cognitive scripts. Cognitive script theory is a really fascinating area of research from the 1960s where Researchers discovered that if you put people in certain situations, they all behave in very similar ways. That can be very helpful in lots of situations. So anytime you go to a restaurant or you go to the dentist, you don't want to have to think about every single step or things that you're supposed to say and how you're supposed to behave. So it's not that cognitive scripts are, are bad, those patterns of habitual behavior. But the problem is that we follow scripts in all sorts of areas of our lives where maybe we don't want to go for those habitual patterns of behavior. Maybe we don't want to have an automatic response. Maybe we want to be a little bit more intentional with our decisions. And so in the book, I talk about 3 big buckets of cognitive scripts that we tend to follow. The first one is the sequel script. That's the script we follow when we feel like whatever decision we make today needs to make sense based on the decisions we made in the past. So this is why some people only explore jobs that make sense based on what is already on their CV. This is also why we rewrite our CVs to make sure that they make sense and they have this nice narrative. The second cognitive script or big bucket of cognitive scripts is the crowd pleaser script. That's when we make decisions based on what we think is going to please the people around us. And those people can be our colleagues, our friends, spouse, parents. Also very common in people coming from an immigrant background to try and make sure that everybody around them feels like they're taking the safest decisions. And so maybe they're going to be a lawyer or a doctor because they're feel— they're following this crowd pleaser script. And the last one, which I think is the most insidious one is the epic script inspired by Hollywood movies. We feel like whatever decision we make, it needs to be the most impressive, the most exciting one. And I know you worked at Google in the past as well. This is a script we see a lot in the tech industry with startup founders. It needs to— we need to change the world, and anything less than that is not worth our time and our energy. So those are the cognitive scripts that rule our lives. And, uh, in the book I recommend trying to uncover your own scripts without any judgment, just asking yourself, what are the scripts that— the underlying scripts that might be directing my decisions? And do I still want to follow them? Or maybe, maybe I want to rewrite those scripts. So those are cognitive scripts. You asked me second about— there was the maximalist brain at the end. What was the second one in the middle?

Uh, liminality and Yeah, the Maximalist Brain.

Maximalist Brain. Liminality is a word that comes from the word limen in Latin, which means threshold, which means the in-between, the transitional space, being on the doorstep of change. We have lots of liminal moments in our lives. It's when you graduated, you finished school, but you haven't started your first job yet. It's when you're engaged but not married yet. Even physical spaces can be liminal in nature. An airport, for example, is the quintessential liminal space. You don't even know what time it is. You're, you're lost in that in-between. The rules are completely different in those spaces. And because of that, those spaces can be, and those moments, those liminal moments in our lives can be deeply uncomfortable. We're in between two identities, in between two roles. We're not quite sure how to navigate these So the natural tendency that we have as human beings, because we really don't like uncertainty, is to try and escape those liminal spaces as quickly as possible. Get onto the other side, swim to safety. I argue that there is a lot of opportunity for growth and self-discovery in those liminal spaces if we manage to sit for a little bit longer in the uncertainty, and we can learn a lot about what we want and what we might want to do next if we don't try to escape them as quickly as possible. So that's liminality, and it's a core concept in the book, which, by the way, the title was— used to be Liminal Minds, not Tiny Experiments. And we changed the title because a lot of people were confused by the word liminal. It felt like a big word and people felt like maybe the book wouldn't be for them. So we changed the title, but that's how core the concept of liminality is to the book. It used to I'll give you the title.

It's really great because, and I think people understand liminal, and I did, but liminality in the context of Tiny Experiments or Experimental Mindset, I was new to me. But here's what I loved about it, and I wish I knew about it when I left Google, because I too hit that intense liminality when I left where I didn't know what I, you know, my father got sick, there was I didn't know what I was going to do next. I, I relocated and I also rested. I took a big break, but it was the first time in my life that I didn't have what's next nailed down. There were some potentials and some were offers, some were jobs, but I, I didn't know what I was going to do. Had I known, I think there's just something psychologically helpful to know what stage you're in or what what you're going through or to have a name to describe it, right? So I wish I'd known about liminality in that sense. I said, okay, this is where I am, okay? And now looking back, it was great. It did feed my— or open up space to be curious and to pick things and to do things. And but boy, it was a struggle. And you actually went through this as well, and hence you write about it. But I just love that that space is not a bad space and it's a thing. Right. As I think you allude to, it's an opportunity.

And thank you for saying this because it really alludes to the power of language in general. And you know how they say naming is taming. And I think that just knowing that this deep sense of discomfort that you're experiencing is so normal that it has a name all of a sudden makes it less scary.

Yeah, because you can parse it and, and it, it makes sense and, uh, you, you understand what you're— it's like naming an emotion. As soon as you can figure out what you're feeling, okay, what information is in this feeling that I have, right? What am I worried about, or what am I sad about? And then Maximus Brain was easier to get, and it's, again, I love this naming convention of that it's, uh, going for the next big thing. Yeah, again, you talk about cognitive scripts. This is a script that we got to go from big, we got to go from, we got to go better, better, better. And that's usually bigger, bigger, or some, um, it can be blinding, like money, money can do it, position, title, roles, all these.

And really assuming that in between two choices in front of you, the bigger one is the better one, which is not always the case. So two jobs in front of you. One of them has a more impressive job title. A lot of us would have, would just assume that obviously the one with the more impressive job title is the better job. And then they take that job and they're miserable. Or assuming, as you mentioned, money, right? That getting a bigger salary will make you happier. A lot of people do that.

They get a bigger salary. Well, you're supposed, it's almost incongruent. It's almost a rule, an unwritten rule. This, that's what you have to do. It feels like that. Right. So in these liminal moments, or as we're trying to decide our next thing— and, and I'm, I'm condensing— this can apply to a lot of different areas, but I obviously am— I'm talking to a lot of people who are either unemployed or getting unemployed or, or making a transition or trying to decide things, make decisions in their lives. Tell me how an experimental mindset and experiments can, can move us forward in, in these moments?

It's really about reclaiming your sense of agency without clinging to the illusion of control. So when we find ourselves in those liminal spaces faced with uncertainty, there is a temptation to cling to control, to try and have a very clear plan, a clear vision, something that we can just execute on. And very often these don't work because We are in the liminal space by definition. None of the blueprints that other people have used apply here. This is a space of uncertainty. There's something really interesting about scientists, and this is what I call having an experimental mindset, is that when they're faced with uncertainty, they get excited. There's almost a sense of juiciness. They feel like, ooh, something I don't know. I don't know what's going to happen. I might have an idea. I might have a hypothesis, but I might be wrong and I'm going to give it a try and we're going to see what happens. And if I'm wrong, well, great. I learned something new. So this relationship to uncertainty is completely different from the one we naturally have as human beings, where we're just trying to, to go and run as far as possible from that liminal space. And this is really, again, what an experimental mindset is about. It's about reimagining your relationship to uncertainty, to those liminal spaces. So whenever you find yourself a little bit lost, not quite sure what should happen next, instead of freezing with fear, you lean in with curiosity.

And this is where experiments come in. Is that right?

Yes, exactly. There's the mindset, the experimental mindset, and then there's running experiments. And running an experiment is basically just designing a protocol to capture the mindset I just described. And so it's saying, hey, I'm going to try this thing for a specific trial period, and that's it. That's the big difference between a goal and an experiment, is that a goal has a binary definition of success and failure. So either you reach that goal that you have defined in advance and that's success, or you don't, and that's failure.

So take that off the table. Take success, failure.

You take that off the table. You really let go of the outcome in the sense that you're running an experiment because you generally don't know what's going to happen.

You just want feedback.

Exactly. You're just collecting data. You're just collecting data. And so you say, I have a hypothesis, I'm going to try this thing and let's see if my hypothesis is correct or not. But there's no failure. If my hypothesis is incorrect, there's just new knowledge being generated. So that's the big difference between an experiment and a goal. And then the big difference between an experiment and a habit is that with a habit, you commit to this change for the rest of your life. You say, from now on, I'm going to run every day, or—

There's still an element of success and failure there.

Yes. You're supposed to stick to it and that's forever. Whereas with an experiment, you say, I'm going to try this for this specific duration. And if at the end of the duration I feel like, you know what, this is not working, this is really not giving me the, the results or the impact that I was expecting, this is really not helping, you can stop. And again, that's not failure because now you know, now you know.

How does someone pick an experiment? Is it interest that I have?

I created a very simple little— there are very few acronyms in the book. That's one of the only ones, maybe the only acronym actually in the book. But to me, it's a nice way to remember the 4 aspects, elements of a really good experiment. The acronym is PACT, P-A-C-T. So a good experiment, you want it to be purposeful and by Purposeful, I mean something you're actually curious about, something you're actually excited about, something where you feel like intuitively that maybe this could help. Not something random, not something you copy-paste it from someone else, something that feels quite personal. So that's the first one. And the nice thing is that when each of your experiments is purposeful, you don't need to have this big purpose in life because you keep on experimenting and each experiment gives you this sense of purpose. P for A, actionable. So you need to pick an experiment that you can start right now. It's very easy to hide behind the fact that you don't have the time, you don't have the money, you don't have the network, the resources, and you can't start the experiment. So you should really pick something that is actionable, something you can get started with right now. See, continuous. So you don't want a one big thing that you do once and it's not going really to teach you anything long term. So Hosting a big conference is not a tiny experiment, but saying, I will host a, an online workshop every month for the next 6 months. That's a tiny experiment. You need this sense of repetition.

You want them to be small. You want them to be—

you want it to be small and you want to have repeated trials, just like in an experiment, because if not—

more data, more data.

Exactly. You're not going to know whether it's just a coincidence or if there's an actual pattern. So. Something you can do every week, every month, every quarter, doesn't matter, but continuous. And finally, T is for trackable. And this, this is in contrast with the measurable of SMART goals. Measurable is the idea that you need to capture all of those different metrics and have a dashboard and measure every single aspect. Trackable is just tracking whether you did it or not. Did you do it or not? Did you show up and did you do the thing? That's it. You just track whether you showed up, because again, at this stage, you're not looking at the outcomes. You're really just collecting your, your own data in the sense that, is that helping? Does that feel good? Is that something I want to keep doing?

This seems universally applicable, like a project, the next job or role, products, you know, whatever.

Absolutely. Your, your health, your relationships, uh, the your, your dating life, the way you, you start conversations, the way you run meetings. You can experiment with anything you're curious about.

So I did like your take on purpose. You were kind of shooting down this whole— I think you said something like the tyranny of purpose, you know, where it just— we're seeking this grand scheme of our lives, and it can, it can really put us in negative states, right? I mean, if you're— if you can never find this purpose— I mean, there are many ways that purpose can be tyrannical. But I'm curious, you talk about generativity versus legacy, right? Because I am now at this point in my life thinking about legacy and what that means, meaning in life, these things I'm going deeper and deeper into. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you would prefer generativity versus legacy and what generativity means to our audience.

So legacy is the idea of— it's really around what you leave behind when you're gone. What are people going to remember about you once you're no longer here? Generativity is about the impact you have right now in the present moment on your community and on all of the fellow human beings who are sharing this planet with you right now. And so it's a slight shift in focus in the sense that you're really optimizing for having a positive impact that you can see right now, instead of hoping that maybe people will remember you positively in the future. And I argue that if everybody was more focused on their, on generativity rather than on their legacy, they would actually end up building better legacies as a nice second-order effect. We would end up having collectively a more positive impact. So this is really the, the difference between the two.

You know, I, I noticed, and related to this, that I've had some people dear to me pass away here in, in the recent— in the last few years, and I noticed more and more that sometimes we say things at a funeral that we should have spent a lot of time saying when they were alive. To your point, say what these people mean to you now. And I mean, part of me was like, oh man, how can we— we should have these formal events before a funeral where we honor our friends and our loved ones and our parents and our— and we do birthdays, you know what I mean? It it is cumulative, but I've been thinking a lot about that. It's like, okay, you know, life is short and it's becoming shorter, so I need to tell people what they mean to me now versus when they're not going to necessarily hear it, depending on what your view of metaphysics is. So you talk about Kronos time, and is it Kairos? Am I saying Kairos? This is linear versus quality, but is that right?

Well, I mean, if you, if you ask a Greek person what exactly Kairos means you'll honestly, I have Greek friends and they all give you a slightly different definition of it. The way I define it in the book is chronos is a more quantitative definition of time. So it's the time of seconds, of minutes, of hours and weeks. It's the time of our calendars. It's the time we used in order to have this conversation, you and I, because we said, let's meet at this time and let's have this conversation. And that's Kronos, and most of our lives are spent in Kronos time in our modern societies. Kairos is a qualitative definition of time. It's the depth of time. It's the time of beautiful sunsets shared with friends. It's the time of reading a bedtime story to your kid. It's the time also that we can experience here right now when you lose yourself in a conversation and you actually lose track of Chronos time. And we've all had that, right? Where you have such a fun conversation with a friend that at some point you look at the time and you're like, what happened? Oh my God, I'm late. I have to leave. Sorry. Because the conversation was so good and you really lost track of Chronos time. So Chronos, more quantitative. Eros, more qualitative. And, uh, I argue that we should all make a more conscious effort to make more space for Kairos time in our lives. It's very easy to be constantly in Kronos time and to really ask ourselves, what does a Kairos moment feel like to me? And how can I inject more of that into my life?

Yeah, there's this concept, uh, Japanese term ichigo ichi, which means one moment, one time. And that word is kind of like a mantra for me. It's like if, you know, if I get kind of caught up and I'm not present— have you seen the film Perfect Days? You should. You— I think you will like it. You should see it. It's an odd movie. It's beautiful. It's just about a Japanese man. There's very little dialogue, who cleans toilets in Tokyo. But he— it's obvious he loves his life and he is taking every moment to appreciate. It's, it's a meditative type movie. You got to be settled to kind of watch it. But anyway, to your point, what was amazing is it's depicting this person who is going deep in moments, and because of that, and really enjoying his life because he's present regardless of what he's doing for a job. And Again, to your point, is that this Kronos time is forced on us anyway, so we have to break out of that to get into the quality. Is there anything pertinent to this conversation that we need to— you, you should say, or we, we need to get out here around living an experimental life or reframing how we live based on experiments or, or what have you?

I actually I really like that you're jumping all around because a book is a very linear kind of format, which felt really constraining to me when writing the book. I really, I used to like the choose your own adventure kind of books. And so I wish I could have maybe written it like, like that. So I like that you're jumping around. In terms of topics, another topic that I am very passionate about in the book is learning in public. It's really this idea that you could, if you wanted to, apply all of the principles in the book on your own, solo, without anyone else knowing, just running your own tiny experiments on your own and trying new things on your own. But I do think that when you share with others what you learned, and especially when you're surprised by the results, so you try something with a hypothesis in mind and then something different happens. When you take that extra step of sharing what you learned with others and learning in public, you not only learn faster because everybody's going to contribute, going to share their own experiences, they're going to tell you, oh, that's funny because, you know, I tried something similar last year and I got this result. So you all learn together, but also it makes it more fun. It makes the journey a lot more fun when you experiment with others.

Tell me, is that just telling friends what you're learning or doing, or is— and/or sharing on social media? Learning in public is, hey, I'm— is it just conversations with people that, hey, this is what I'm trying?

I define learning in public as there is at least one other human being on earth who's aware of your experiment, and that's it. And so that could be one friend where you just have a conversation. I've seen people in my community schedule weekly little coffee catch-ups experimental coffee catch-ups where they'll just see a friend and say, okay, how's your experiment going? How's your experiment going? What did you learn? And that's it. It's just an opportunity to catch up. And then I've seen people post the result of their experiments in their newsletter or on social media, or even people at work doing a short presentation where they share with their team something they tried recently and what they learned. So The format doesn't matter, the number of people doesn't matter. It's really just as long as there's one other person who's aware of it.

One of the things I wanted to say that I really liked was this idea of self-anthropology. You use the metaphor of being an anthropologist to kind of encourage, encourage observational— be curious about your own life. Your life is— you're studying your ideas and, and your life. I love the anthropology, Bacardi. You know, you're doing this in-the-field study, you have a little bit of objectivity. Because I thought about meditation, Anne-Laure Le Cunffff, about— that's what meditation is to me. I'm an anthropologist with my own mind. My consciousness is this topic of study. But you can apply it to, you know, I don't know, job or employment anthropology, you know what I mean? It's a great heuristic on being curious, right? It kind of puts you in that mode. Okay, I'm just going to be an anthropologist about this topic. Okay, just see what I find out.

Yeah. And a very important part about being an anthropologist is the nonjudgmental aspect. So you're really pairing high curiosity with very low judgment. You're really just observing and you're asking, huh, why are we doing things like, like this? Why do we care about that? Why do we spend our time like that? Why is that work? Does that work like that? But not in a judgmental way, in a highly curious way. So when you pair those two together, you're in the field just observing, highly curious, but you're not really judging. There's so much you can learn.

So the book is everywhere, so I encourage people to read it. It's really good. I'm still kind of going through it, uh, and I am— I'm taking my time versus trying to speed read it because it got a lot of highlights. Got a lot of highlights. So where can people find out more about you and what you're doing? I think you have a newsletter. Is that right?

Yes. So if people go to nesslabs.com, N-E-S-S-L-A-B-S.com, you can subscribe to my newsletter, which I send every week and where I discuss a lot of the topics we talked about today. And as you mentioned, the book is called Tiny Experiments and it's available anywhere books are sold.

Anne-Laure, am I saying your name right? Anne-Laure or Anne-Laure?

Almost. It's Anne-Laure. Anne-Laure.

Anne-Laure.

At the end is silent.

That's that up front. Okay. Thank you so much for coming on.

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. It was such a fun conversation. So thank you.

Well, that's a wrap. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed it, do share it with your friends and on your social platforms. Big thanks to Sam Williams, my audio guy, and the beautiful bumper music you're hearing is Michael Petrovic's Bella Luna. For all my show notes, notes or resource links, visit LarryWeeks.com, and we will talk again soon.