Why She Quit Google to Build a Life She Loves | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Google was my dream job. I felt really lucky that I got this job until one day I had a health scare.

When a wake-up call hits, everything changes. Today in this episode, I'm joined by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, the ex-Googler turned neuroscientist and the founder of Nest Lab.

We used to talk about burnout only from the perspective of having a horrible, highly demanding job, terrible manager that would force force you to work long hours, but burnout can strike the people who cares the most. A lot of people are actually burned out because they care about their job and they're really trying to sit with the uncertainty, be comfortable in those phases of transitions.

So she turned discomfort into tiny experiments. Each experiment is sealed with a simple pact.

What I call a pact is really a commitment to experimentation, a commitment to curiosity. You can almost it as a mini protocol.

And sometimes it all leads to a perfect kairos moment.

And exactly at that moment, the clouds parted and the sun just hit my cup of cacao exactly in that moment as I was sipping it.

Anne-Laure now helps hundreds of thousands of other people to rethink productivity, burnout, curiosity, and the design of life. If you're also wondering what's next for you and not sure where to start, This episode is for you.

Hi, Anne-Laure.

Hey.

Thank you so much for joining us. So this podcast called Escape 9 to 5 is a very selfish podcast for myself because I'm on the way to figure out all the tiny experiments on my escape 9 to 5 journey. And when I come across your book, Tiny Experiments, maybe 5 pages in, so that I wrote you a message on Instagram. I have to invite her on my podcast. Here we are.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited.

So usually when I start my podcast, I do this Two Truths and a Lie. I ask my guests to share two interesting experiences or random facts about themselves, big or small, serious or funny, and then one totally made up so I can guess which one is the lie.

Nice.

Let me have a think. Two truths and one lie. Okay. It's probably going to be a very boring version of this. Apologies in advance to anyone listening to this. I, I used to work at Google. I published a book when I was 14. And I have a pilot license.

Those are not boring at all. It's just because I've read a book, so I know that the first one is true and we'll dive into that later. I think you didn't publish a book when you were 14.

No, that's true.

That's true. So the one with the pilot.

I don't have a pilot license and I published a book when I was 14, self-published a book when I was 14 with a bunch of friends.

What was that about, the book?

It was short stories, so everybody contributed a short story. We designed it together, and even the book cover is an illustration that shows each of us, that represents each of us. It was a really fun project.

I know you're French. What's the name of the book? Maybe we can look it up.

It was called— actually, it had an English name, but it was written in French. It was called The Witty Book, and it had to be witty stories.

It's so cute. Can I say Minyou? Yes, that's correct. Okay, um, so we're gonna dive into your Google story. That's one of my favorite parts of my podcast because I wanted to learn about people's origin story. What was the exact moment that you knew that you had to step off the safe corporate path? And you, do you remember that day you make the decision that you want to quit?

Yes, Google was my dream job for a while. I was very excited to work there. I had an amazing team. I was working on really interesting projects, and I felt really lucky that I got this job until one day I, so I had a health scare. I was brushing my teeth and I saw in the mirror while brushing my teeth that my entire arm had turned purple.

Oh gosh.

So I went to the Google infirmary because they had that on campus. In Mountain View and the nurse looked at my arm and said, you need to go to the hospital. So I went to the hospital in Stanford and the doctor said that I needed to have surgery as quickly as possible because I had a blood clot in my arm that was threatening to travel to my lungs. And here in the doctor's office, when they said you need to get surgery as quickly as possible, I said, wait a second. I need to look at my calendar because I wanted to schedule that surgery around all of the product launches I was working on. And in that moment, I realized that something was really, really wrong with my sense of priorities when my to-do list had somehow become more important than my own health. That was the trigger that really started this reflection around my relationship to work, my relationship to productivity, my relationship to my career. And made me question what I actually wanted to focus my time and energy on in my life.

I remember I read it in your book and your manager didn't know that you did the surgery or something.

I didn't tell, no, I didn't tell my manager that I scheduled the surgery around our product launches. So she didn't know that I delayed that surgery to make sure that I was not disturbing any of the projects that we were working on as a team.

Do you think that she will ask you to prioritize your surgery if had she known?

Yes, yes, she was, she was a good human being. She would have absolutely told me to get the surgery. So yeah.

Yeah, that's, I think that's the main difference between a tech firm because I've worked in the financial industry for 10 years. I was a banker for 10 years until I left. I remember back in the days, back in Hong Kong, my One of my friends, so he's, he's manager. His manager had some kind of family issues, like her father was in the hospital, but she needs to go somewhere. No, I think her father actually passed away because of a health issue. But her manager, like my friend's boss's boss, the first email he replied is like, who's going to take care of the project? I think it's insane to think of the baseline of these corporate is so different, which is why sometimes I interview people who work in like consulting firms, who used to work in consulting firms or banking, makes a lot of sense when they think of that moment they want to change. It's almost always about something external. They couldn't take it anymore. But it feels like for you, it's something that the healthcare triggers something inside of you. And how long does it take before, um, from that point you made the doctor's appointment to the point that you decide to leave? Is it like a gradual process?

Yeah, it was a gradual process. And I think you touched upon a very important part of what I experienced. And I think a lot of people experience nowadays is that we used to talk about burnout only from the perspective of having a horrible, highly demanding job with a terrible manager that would force you to work long hours, but A lot of people are actually burned out because they care about their job and they actually want to make sure they keep on showing up sometimes to the detriment of taking care of their own physical and mental health. And so I think we do need to have this wider, more inclusive definition of burnout that also includes the kind of burnout that we almost, when we almost do it to ourselves, there's nobody actually doing it to us. And that was my case. So it was a gradual process from this trigger, this health scare, to then starting paying attention to all of these different signals and starting having conversations with people. And when people were asking me things like, how are you doing? How's life? How are you feeling? And just noticing how something felt disconnected. So it took a few months in between that first health scare and me finally deciding that I needed to do something different and to leave my job at Google.

Yeah. Well, thanks for sharing that. Sometimes when you're obviously on a, you know, straight A path, graduated from top university, and then got a dream job at Google, when you decided to leave, what kind of actions did you get from your friends and family?

Quite a few of them were a bit confused. My mom was really worried. She really thought that I was headed for the homeless shelter, not that I didn't have this job. So it took a lot of assurance for for reassurance to her, to make her feel like I was going to be okay. And in addition to all of the confusion and the questions I was getting from my friends and family, there was also the internal confusion of not really having the sense of identity, the self-identity that I had developed around this career, this job, and this role at Google where— this is something we don't talk about enough, I think, how working at a prestigious company, or you mentioned going to a top university, anything that gives you this easy label, this easy narrative that you can use whenever you introduce yourself in a social circle and where you can say, hi, I work at so-and-so, I work at Google, I work at this big company, or I graduated from an Ivy League university. It does remove a lot of the kind of friction and anxiety that you might have when you introduce yourself, because people are immediately going to assume good things about you. They're going to assume that you're probably smart and hardworking and all of those things that we associate with being successful in our society. When you quit your job or when you don't have those labels anymore, all of a sudden you have to introduce yourself just as yourself with nothing else, no crutch that you can use. And that is actually a very uncomfortable transition to make.

Agreed. Yes, I have experienced this. Obviously, I'm still early on in my journey. I'm experiencing in the past year and a half or so just to try to figure out what is my identity, what should I label myself to other people when I talk to people, introduce myself. But for you, after you leave Google, you didn't— you start another identity that most of people would associate with prestigious, which is entrepreneurship. You start your own company, and then that's the NetLabs. How did the entrepreneurship specifically at the beginning when you decided to go on that path?

Yeah, at first I started my entrepreneurship journey for all of the wrong, the worst reasons possible. So, you know how I just mentioned how uncomfortable it was, this transition of all of a sudden not having this neat label that you can use. I was actually so uncomfortable with that situation that I just jumped into the next socially sanctified activity that you can have after leaving a tech company, which is starting a startup. So I started a startup, I found a co-founder, and we did work on something I cared a lot about, which was an app to help people manage their own diabetes. But the reason why I was working on this startup, at a fundamental level, once you peeled off all of the layers, was really because I needed this sense of direction. I need to know I was working on something that had purpose and that was easy to share with other people whenever I was asked, what are you working on? So fortunately for me, which is easy to say now, but fortunately for me, that startup did not work out. And so I found myself in a place where I was completely lost for the first time in my adult life, in my career. I didn't have a clear next step. I didn't know what I wanted to work on. I didn't know what I was supposed to do. There was no blueprint, no recipe, nothing I could just follow. And so I had to ask myself, what is it you're actually curious about? What is it you want to explore? What do you want to do? If you remove from the equation the traditional definition of success, if you remove from the equation this fear of being judged or fear of being misjudged, what is it you would be excited to explore? And for me, that has, that had always been the brain. I had always been curious about the way we think, the way we feel, the way we communicate, the way we perceive the world and navigate the world. And so I went back to university to retrain as a neuroscientist. And that was the beginning of my journey with Nest Labs. Where while I completed those studies, I decided to start writing a newsletter. And that then turned into a business that turned into Nest Labs, but in a much more organic and emergent way, not in a, I need the label kind of way, more in a, I'm going to experiment with this. I'm going to follow my curiosity and we're going to see what happens.

Yeah. I think that's why your book has resonated with many, many people. There's a lot of people who are writing maybe similar concept in their own way, but I found that your book all of a sudden just explodes across all social media. Everyone I follow is recommending your book, and then I picked up the book. You said about crafting your story, you said that when thinking about your life, pretend you want to craft a captivating story, the kind that breaks free from well-trodden narratives. And you also, I think you mentioned in some other podcasts, the failure of the startup is kind of like a grief followed by freedom, and that's when you start Next Lab. So now we can transition to talk about the book Tiny Experiments. I really love the book, and you have some very good practical steps. For example, the PACT framework that helps to test life changes and do the tiny experiment. Maybe you can walk us through how can we design a simple PACT for people who want to try something different.

So what I call a PACT is really a commitment to experimentation, a commitment to curiosity. You can almost see it as a mini protocol for personal experimentation, and it works in exactly the same way a scientist would design an experiment. So when a scientist designs an experiment, they need to know two things. The first one is what they're going to test, and the second one is the trial period. A pact follows the same format. You need to decide on an action you're curious to explore and the duration. Action and duration. So you say, I will action for duration. I will write a weekly newsletter for 6 weeks. I will reach out to an expert on LinkedIn every Monday for 3 months. I will meditate every morning for 10 days. I will action for duration, and it works for anything you're curious about, anything where you feel like there might be a bit of doubt, or maybe the potential for growth, you can turn into a tiny experiment by creating this kind of pact with the action and the duration.

Yeah, I think that's a very helpful framework. I kind of stumbled across upon this similar framework when I lost my job a year and a half ago. I said to myself, I'm going to start a 60-day challenge. I didn't know what it is. And then on my birthday, I just decided to give myself a birthday gift. I'm going to start a podcast, which is called Bite-Sized Climate Tech for 60 days nonstop. It's very tiny because each episode is only 5 minutes. So I did that for 60 days. Then I'm now doing season 4. I keep running these like tiny experiments in the past year. I found that once you set that goal, like doing something in a period of time, it kind of become That fun, it's like gamified. I'm just going to put it on top of my to-do list. For a lot of people though, they might not have either the trigger in life or have the time to think of something like this. How would you say to your friend who's maybe like stuck in a 9 to 5 job? They just, I have friends come to me saying the same thing. They will be like, oh, I want to do this, but you know, after work I'm tired, I'm this and that. How can people start small by using your method?

This is why the book is called Tiny Experiments. It needs to be very, very, very small. The problem very often is that people aim too big too quickly. At the beginning, you want to start with something that is so small that it feels so easy to do. There's no way you cannot do it. So if you start designing an experiment and it feels overwhelming, this is a signal that the experiment is too ambitious for your current circumstances. Make it smaller. So if you're designing an experiment and you say, I'm going to do this for 6 months, how about 6 weeks? Do you still feel overwhelmed? How about 6 days? And so keep going like that and making it smaller until you get to a duration that feels doable. Another is that people always assume that conducting an experiment is about adding more stuff, doing something. But you can also conduct experiments that are about doing less, removing some things. An experiment that I love, for example, is I will not bring my phone with me in the bedroom for the next 2 weeks. That doesn't add anything. It is not more work, but it is very likely to have positive downstream effects on your mood, your sleep, obviously, but then your creativity, your productivity throughout the day. And then you can start stacking these because if you feel better, you might have a little bit more energy and then you might have a little bit more creativity and you might want to do another tiny experiment. So I would start very, very, very small with something that feels very doable. And if whatever experiment you're designing doesn't feel doable, don't respond to this by saying, oh, something's wrong with me, or I'm too busy, or I'm too tired. Respond to this by saying, "Huh, interesting. That means the experiment is still too big. How can I make it smaller?" Yeah, this is brilliant.

I didn't read that from your book. Maybe I forgot, but I think this is a great— this is a great tip. I've been trying to do digital detox for the beginning of this year, just every day after 11 PM. I can never achieve that. It's a good place to start. So this is one, to do the minus. The other, like, for people who doesn't know how to start, like, what interest area, what would you share with people usually where they can look into to start the tiny experiment?

So designing an experiment always, always starts with observation. And I know when we hear about experiments for the first time and designing tiny experiments, we might be really excited and tempted to just start running 1,000 different experiments, and then it becomes again quite overwhelming. To design a good experiment, just like a scientist, you start by observing the current situation, which will allow you to then form formulate a hypothesis. To do that, I have a little exercise that I describe in the book that I recommend doing that I call self-anthropology. The reason why I call it this way is because you're going to pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And so what does an anthropologist do? They have their notebook and they go in the field and they take Field notes. Very importantly, they don't judge. They just observe. So you can do the same thing with your own life and work. And you can ask yourself, what gives me energy? What drains my energy? What am I curious about? What do I find really boring? What do I want more of? What do I want less of? Why do I respond in this way? And just capturing all of these little observations without any kind of self-blame or self-judgment. You're just observing. You're just an anthropologist. Based on that, once you know how things are, you can start imagining how they could be. And you can use a little magic word that I love: maybe. Maybe this could be different. So let's say that you've noticed that every time you're supposed to give a presentation, you're feeling really anxious. You have this knot in your stomach and you can't sleep. You could say, maybe I could take improv classes. To build my confidence. Maybe I could practice those presentations in advance. Maybe I could get public speaking coaching. Maybe, maybe, maybe. If you notice that every Monday when you wake up, you are also a little bit stressed, not necessarily looking forward to the week, you could say, maybe a mindfulness practice like meditation could be helpful in order to better manage my stress levels. And once you have an interesting hypothesis, you can turn it into a pact by saying, let me try this for a duration. This is my action. This is my duration. What's really important about the pact is that first, you're not trying to be successful. You're not trying to get to a specific outcome. You're just collecting data. You're just trying to see if this action is helpful in any way. If the answer is no, actually meditation is not helping, or actually improv is not helping, then this is fine because now you know and you can use that new knowledge to design your next experiment. And second, you're not creating a habit. What you're doing here is testing a hypothesis. So that's why you have the duration. You're not committing to this for the rest of your life. You're just committing to it for the duration of your mini protocol, of your pact.

Well, yeah, that's so many, so many good tips. I think observing is something that's very refreshing as a concept because most of the time we're not aware of our own being. We're just busy doing. We become human doing, not human being sometimes. And you also have this concept in your book. It's called— is it Kairos moment? Kairos moment. You define Kairos as a moment where this moment right now feels Perfect. Do you, can you share a recent Kairos moment that you've experienced and how other people can use this concept to incorporate into the field notes or to observe themselves?

So the ancient Greeks actually had two words to talk about time. The first one, Chronos, is the one that you will find in a lot of time-related words that we have in English, like chronometers, for example. Or chronologie. And, uh, this is the quantitative definition of time. It's the time of seconds, of minutes, of hours and weeks and months. This is the time that we use to look at our calendar and decide when we're going to meet, how long a meeting is going to be. And, uh, just in general, the kind of time we use to be efficient and productive and make the most of our limited time on earth. Kairos is a qualitative definition of time rather than quantitative. It is the time of beautiful sunsets on the beach. It's the time of deep conversations with friends. It's— this is the time of losing yourself in creative flow when you're writing an essay or when you're drawing. It's really when you lose track of Chronos time because you find yourself in Kairos. Time. And it's also the idea that they are opportune moments, moments that are kind of special in a way that those times should be spent doing certain things rather than others. And our society today is really designed around the idea of Chronos time. We spend most of our time in Chronos. And so the encouragement that I have in the book is to try and have a little bit more Kairos time in your life. So maybe asking yourself, is right now a moment where I should be working on that presentation? Or maybe I should spend this time reading a bedtime story to my child. Is this a time where I want to be obsessing over this admin task on my to-do list? Or is that a time that I want to use to take a walk with a colleague and to have a little brainstorming session? And so really being a little bit more intentional with our time and optimizing not only for our productivity levels and trying to do as much as we can with our quantity of time, but also optimizing for the quality and the depth of each experience.

That's so beautiful. Thank you so much for walking us through the two different type of, uh, definition of time. I think is it similar to people getting into a flow? And to this point, we have to explore this concept that you also mentioned in your book, is mindful productivity, because you are very busy, right? You're running your own business, you have your book launch, and congrats on recently, I saw your post, joining the Remarkable Science Advisory Board. How are you going to balance all of these commitments together with enjoying the Kairos of time every day? How do you do all that, if you can share with us.

I think that actually goes hand in hand. I pay a lot of attention to other resources beyond purely chronostime. So again, we live in a chronosociety, so I do have a calendar, I do have meetings. This is how we're having this conversation right now because we decided to meet at a certain time and to log in and have this conversation. That being said, I also pay attention to other resources. My energy, my executive function, attention, working memory, my emotions as well. And as much as possible, I try to adjust what I'm working on based on these other resources. So for example, I know that the morning is really good for me in terms of creative energy. So I will usually try to protect that time for writing, for research, for brainstorming. I know that in the afternoon I'm usually a little bit more tired. And so I will schedule meetings, podcasts, conversations where it doesn't require as much brainpower. And I will do my emails and all of these kinds of things. And in the evening, I like to have a little bit of time for moving. And so I know some people, for example, go to the gym first thing in the morning. That would be completely impossible for me. And so usually what I do is that when I'm done working, I will close my laptop and I will either go for a walk or I will go and take a class or dancing or anything like that that will help me move my body after the day of work. So all of this is really based on how I feel in the moment. I try to give myself that flexibility. And that means that my days are a little bit more flexible. It might look a little bit messy from the outside, but that means that the work gets done without me burning out in the process.

Yeah, that's such a good, uh, a day in life. Thanks for sharing with us. There's a lot of people, they all even ask me how do I do my day. Also, everyone is different. I, I kind of, I follow my energy level. I do the same thing as what you do. I schedule all my meetings in the afternoon, and then I think everyone just have their own way of doing things. If you can share, because you, you must have run a lot of different tiny experiments in your life. If you can share one recent tiny experiment that you have finished or on the way with us.

I actually, I think a funny one was while writing the book. And because it does show you that sometimes you can have a hypothesis and you're completely wrong. So while writing the book, I thought that being as consistent as possible would be the most helpful approach in order to write the book. And so I designed a tiny experiment where I said, I will write for 1 hour every morning on weekdays, and I will do that for the rest of the year. I started the experiment and it really didn't work. So there were many mornings where I would sit down to try and do the 1 hour of writing for the book, and I was not inspired. I was staring at a blank page. I felt completely stuck, didn't manage to write anything. And then I felt like crap the rest of the day because I felt like, how am I even going to finish writing this book? I'm not making any progress. My publishers are going to regret working with me. Everybody's going to be disappointed, catastrophizing the entire situation because I couldn't write that morning. So I ended up changing the format of that pact and I said, I will write for 5 hours every week until the end of the year. It's interesting because if you look at it on the surface, you would say it's the same, right? You, you said 1 hour every weekday, and now you say 5 hours a week is the same. But what it changed for me is that it removed some of the guilt on the days where I really couldn't write. And so there were some weeks where I actually still ended up writing 1 hour every weekday, and that was great. But the weeks where I felt a little bit stuck, sometimes I would just spend 5 hours on Sunday writing nonstop when finally I felt like I found the idea, I found the angle, the perspective that I wanted to use for a specific chapter. And because of that, that meant that there wasn't a week where I didn't touch the manuscript. Every week I wrote something, but it didn't mean I touched it every single day. Small tweak in the pact that changed everything for me. And so I think this is a very important part of having an experimental mindset and running your tiny experiments is paying attention to the signals that you're getting from your brain and your body. And sometimes a sense of resistance can actually be a very useful source of information for you to figure out how you might need to tweak that experimental protocol that you've designed for yourself.

Yeah.

I think sometimes the resistance is a sign or signal for us to figure out what's the best for our own body to, because we all have that juice inside of us, right? It's about like, how can we manage that so that we achieve our goal. It's easier said than done though. Now that your book is a success, what's next for you? The exciting project coming up 2, 3 years down the line, do you have anything that's coming next?

Well, I'm not 100% sure, and I think it's a good thing. I try to really keep it open and keeping on experimenting. At the moment, I'm very excited about spending a bit more time on my academic research at King's College London where I study ADHD I want to start a Substack newsletter that is all about my ADHD research, which would be separate from the work I do at NessLabs. That might become a book in the future. I don't know. We'll see. So I'm currently in a bit of a liminal space after the book launch, and I don't want to rush into my next project. I am really trying to practice what I write about in the book and really trying to sit with the uncertainty, be comfortable in those phases of transitions, and not clinging to the first projects that I have in front of me just to feel like I know where I'm going.

Yeah, allowing the liminal space. Sometimes we finish one project, we immediately want to jump to the next. If you can also walk us through about the liminal space with the audience, and we can apply to our own life.

A liminal space. So the word liminal comes from the Latin limen, which means the threshold, the transition, the doorstep of something, the doorstep of change, the in-between. And being in the liminal space means that you're in between two different phases in your life, in a project, in a situation. So some very common examples are maybe you are engaged but not married yet. Maybe you graduated university, but you haven't started your first job yet. Maybe if you're writing a book, you have submitted your book proposal, but you haven't started writing the actual book yet, or you have submitted the manuscript, but the book is not out yet. And so all of these are in-between moments that are very uncomfortable and where there might be a temptation to just get out of the liminal space as quickly as possible. But if we learn to sit with the uncertainty and the discomfort of being in the liminal space, these can actually be amazing sources of growth and self-discovery where you can figure out what you actually want to do next, what you care about, what is meaningful to you. And so it is a really good practice whenever you notice that you find yourself in one of those liminal spaces in life to say, okay, I know everything in me, my entire brain is screaming for me to get out of here, but let me stay in here for a little bit longer. Let me learn, let me observe, let me see where my curiosity wants to bring me next.

Yeah, allowing the space and permission for ourselves to discover more in the in-between phases. I wanted to ask you to share one Cairo moment of your life recently. Because I think that would be really beautiful.

I go to something called ecstatic dance, which is a way, a form of free flow dancing. And sometimes they serve cacao at the beginning that you can drink. And last week I went and I sat down and I had my cup of cacao. And exactly at that moment, the clouds parted and the sun just hit my cup of cacao exactly in that moment as I was sipping it. I had this little moment of gratefulness that I could be here, that I had that time on a Sunday morning to come and move my body and drink this cacao and take a little break from the busyness of life. And that I could still move my body, that I was healthy and able to do that. That was a kairos moment for me of just gratitude for everything that life has given me recently.

Oh, that's so, so beautiful. It feels like a, movie set almost, like you would open the cinematic view. So my first lightning round question is, if your life was a Netflix show, what's the season called?

That would be the Season of Change.

Season of Change. Yeah, because change allows everything, all the tiny experiments and all the possibilities. What's one book or idea you find yourself frequently recommending lately?

I've been reading the Tao, Alan Watts' The Watercourse Way. And I started reading it during my book tour, finished reading it, and I keep on coming back to it and recommending it to friends. And it's really about, it's about the Tao in general, but more generally about embracing the flow of life, whatever comes your way, especially again in liminal spaces where you feel like you don't have a lot of control. I feel like it's a very helpful book.

Oh, great. What's the something small that brought you unexpected joy recently?

I just learned how to to make my own hand creams. It's a small thing, but I really enjoyed doing that, and it was a really nice non-screen-based activity. I always enjoy these— any excuse to close my laptop and do something that is a little bit more crafty and practical. So that was fun.

The craftsmanship. Yeah. Yeah. So the final question of the lightning round is, if you could have one extra hour every day, how would you most enjoy spending it?

Probably that, doing something, crafting something. There's a lot of joy in making your own stuff, whether that's cooking or anything like that. I would probably spend a little bit more time doing these kinds of things.

Yeah. I have to ask, how did you learn to do your own hand cream? Is that a workshop or somewhere?

Yes, it was a workshop. I went to a workshop and we went to the garden, we picked some herbs and we learned to make the cream from scratch. And so now I have extra joy of using this cream because I made it.

That's so cool. Okay, so we've reached to the end. We have a closing tradition. You are going to answer a question from the previous guest. So his question is, what's the worst advice you've ever received?

Probably stay focused. I was told when I was younger in my career that if I wanted to be successful, I had to I had to pick one thing and I had to be super focused on it and just work on that. And that's how you become successful. I think it works for some people, but I, for me, exploring different projects, trying different things, allowing myself to have different identities and to change has been a big part of being successful in a way that feels aligned with the kind of life I want to live. So that for me was not good advice.

Yeah. I think that's very common advice. I've received it many times. But there's a book by— what's the name? There's a book about like, actually everyone can take on a lot of different projects, but still all the projects will create synergy. So maybe that's the approach to go. Can you leave a question for the next guest?

Yes. When was the last time you were truly scared?

Oh, I love this question.

Great.

Oh, thank you so much, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I really, really appreciate your time. And I hope that one day we can meet in person. Where can our listeners find you and all your work?

They can go to nestlabs.com where they can sign up for my weekly newsletter where we talk about a lot of the topics we discussed together today. And my book is called Tiny Experiments. It's available anywhere books are sold.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Hopefully one day we can meet in person and yeah, and have another conversation.

Bye.

So that's another episode of Escape 9 to 5. Escape 9 to 5 is my way to help people visualize and and see the stories behind those who have changed their life from a traditional 9-to-5 job to a different portfolio life. If you like this video, you might resonate with this video as well. All the links would be in the show notes, and you feel free to check out. If you listen to this on Apple Podcast or Spotify and you feel like it, don't forget to give us a 5-star review. It really helps the podcast to be discovered by other people. And if you like any specific clips or mantras or any takeaway from this video, please share with us in the comments down below. Share with your friends and family. That really, really helps the podcast. Thanks for being on this amazing journey. Until next time, I hope this episode gives you a little bit of inspiration, nudge you a little bit to do something on your own or just try something out for the first time ever. We're here with you. We have this whole community and all the guests coming. I'll see you next time.

Bye! Oh, you have a jacket now.

It's cold sitting outside. Don't worry, I can cut anything that's not relevant. Don't worry about it.

The sky also changed color. It's really funny. It's like, it's like a different season.

Recording in open space, that's why. But yeah.