Why Smart People Feel Stuck | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Days can't be counted by the money spent. Today was just another better left unsaid. Days can't be counted by the time till rent. Tomorrow's just another like the one that comes next. The car on the highway that leads to the job. At the desk by the boss with the elegant watch. The tick of the clock and the tick of the clock mark the moments till the ticking stops.

All right, today's podcast, it's with Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is the founder of NessLabs and a neuroscientist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Neuroscience, where she studies the evolutionary neuroscience of curiosity and its applications to ADHD, AI, mental health, and lifelong learning. Her research focuses on applying neuroscience insights to support people throughout their education, career, and personal development. She has a new book, it's called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Enjoy the pod. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks so much for having me.

The week I read your book, I found myself in several conversations with folks about various disruptions in their lives that had actually led them to make pretty big changes. And this is something that happened to me that I've talked about in the podcast before, but my friend Allison Holzer told me that she experienced this severe weather event called a microburst, which really damaged her home. But it also led her to make a big pivot in her life, which was seemingly unrelated. And you note early in your new book that Irvin Yalom wrote about awakening experiences, which I think is a similar idea. And you experienced something like this yourself when you were on the fast track to Google and woke up one morning and your arm had turned purple.

Yes, um, that's one of the big reasons why I wrote this book. Unfortunately, it very often takes one of those very difficult awakening experiences, a trigger, a life event, something very challenging for us to wake up and realize that something might be wrong in the way we're living our lives. And that's when we make a change. One of my hopes is that this book might help some people realize that maybe there are some things they want to approach differently in their lives without needing such a big shock. Such a big lifequake in their lives. In my case, that blood clot. So, as you mentioned, I was brushing my teeth, getting ready to go to work when I was working at Google, and I realized that my arm had turned purple. And so, I went to the Google infirmary because we had that at the time on campus. And the nurse looked at my arm and said, you need to go to the hospital straight away. So, I went to the hospital in Stanford and the doctor looked at my arm and said, you need to get surgery as quickly as possible. There's a blood clot in your arm that is threatening to travel to your lungs. And in that moment, how did I respond? By saying, oh, wait a second, I need to check my calendar. And this was almost like an out-of-body experience where you see yourself do something so absurd, so absurd that you're almost wondering, who's this person doing this? Like, you know, when you're in a movie and you want to shake the character and say, hey, look behind you, don't be stupid. That's how I felt in that moment. And so for me, that was my awakening experience that started making me question my priorities.

There's so much to unpack there. So there's unpacking, you know, when we're on the treadmill at work and we're just, we're thinking, that it's a linear road and it's not. You're unpacking a very core improv idea. So one of our adages is you need to see all obstacles as gifts. So, and that's so much what this book is about. You turn that moment into maybe this is a signal, maybe this is telling me something, there's an opportunity here. It reminds me of post-traumatic growth a little bit that you can take these pains, these traumas, the grief, all of that, make it kind of work for you, but it requires you to kind of seed the way everyone else is operating. So one of the concepts you talk about is embracing this in-betweenness, this, this period where you quit your job. A thing I did actually here, and I always joke about the fact that the only reason I ended up staying at Second City is because I quit. I needed to find my— whatever my pivot was, and luckily it kept me here, but it might have taken me elsewhere. But for you, it kind of led to like some fits and starts. And this is not, this is not a perfect journey of some ladder.

Absolutely. You hear a lot of stories and there is a temptation once you get to a place where you're quite happy with what your life, your work, your career in general looks like. There's a temptation to simplify the story, to create a nice narrative where it looks like it was almost inevitable. That you would end up here. It's just nicer. We love stories as human beings, right? So, we like crafting these stories. This is why I always try to make an effort to really be faithful to what actually happened and to actually honor the messiness of the process. And what happened after I left my job at Google, I wish I could tell you, oh yeah, and then I figured it out and I found what I wanted to do next. But the reality is that I fell back straight away into the same patterns that I was following at Google. So I left my job at Google. And what do you do when you leave your job at Google? You start a startup. So that's what I did. I didn't even question it. That was just the obvious next step. I read all of the content about how to start a startup, how to find your co-founder, how to find a great idea, all of that. And I started working on my startup. It was actually fairly successful until very fortunately for me, the startup failed, which meant that it created— you talked about those transitional spaces, right? It created a liminal space. It created an in-between where for the first time in my entire life, I had to admit to myself that I was completely lost. I had no idea what I wanted to do next. I thought this was going to be terrifying, but it turns out it was one of the most liberating experiences of my entire life. And this is what opened the door to what came next. The exploration, the experimentation, the going back to university, studying neuroscience, starting writing online and working on a lot of projects where seeking success, seeking certainty, seeking control was not the goal anymore. I was just following my curiosity.

So you don't live in the United States, correct?

I don't. I live in the UK.

Okay, so I don't know, I don't know how much you're paying attention to what's going on over here. It's not good. Um, and but this, this week the president keeps talking about Amelia Earhart and he's releasing the files on Amelia Earhart. I don't know if you've seen this, but I— you talk about Amelia Earhart early in this book, and I can't imagine you thought those two worlds would ever collide.

No, definitely not.

So why do you have Amelia Earhart in your book? Because I'm sure it's not the same reasons that Trump is talking about Amelia Earhart.

Definitely not. I included her as an example of someone who really valued curiosity and adventure for the sake of curiosity and adventure. And I know there is quite a bit of controversy around her life because we don't know how much of these decisions were her decisions or those of the ones she was working with and how, you know, some people think she was manipulated in making those decisions. But I did read some of her writing and autobiographical work. And to me, although it is absolutely possible that this sense of curiosity, this sense of adventurousness was manipulated by other people. That is absolutely possible. I do think that it was there in the first place, that she was curious, that she actually wanted to try new things, that she was excited by the idea of experimenting in parts of her lives where she wasn't sure that it would work out, where failure was always for her an opportunity to learn. And so I think it's very possible. I actually wrote an entire newsletter about this, about how I think we've become a little bit, and I think it's due to maybe social media, the news cycle, but we're almost expecting from our heroes to be perfect in every single dimension of their lives, of their work, absolutely flawless and perfect. And I don't think that's possible because our heroes are ultimately human beings. So they're not going to be perfect. So personally, I like to create a patchwork. Of qualities that I admire from different people. In Amelia Earhart, it was this curiosity. It was this sense of adventurousness. And it was what I call in the book an experimental mindset.

Your second chapter is titled Escaping the Tyranny of Purpose. So I think for a lot of people, they won't understand why, like, because purpose is so important. There's a lot of social science around that. But what you're talking about is this idea of a singular purpose, which can somehow trap us. And this is certainly something that I've experienced in, in my life, especially it was the biggest reason I, I stepped down at Second City because I had a lot of success as a producer and I saw myself as a producer who hired famous people and put on, and all that was true and the shows were great, but I had lost sight of everything else that was happening. But it took this disruption for me to then be like, oh, I'm many things. And maybe it's more interesting for me to explore my many things than my one thing.

Absolutely. Purpose, as you said, the idea of a singular purpose is very dangerous. So one of the problems is that first, if you haven't found your purpose, you feel miserable. You compare yourself with all of these other people who obviously know what they're doing with their lives, and you feel like maybe your life doesn't have as much meaning. Maybe you don't have the same sense of self-worth because you're comparing again the life that you have right now, seemingly without purpose, compared to the life other people are projecting where they look like they know what they're doing. They love what they do. They wake up every morning and they're passionate about their work. They're changing the world. So that's one part of why it's so dangerous. Another reason why it is dangerous is that when you put all of your eggs in the same basket. So even if you do find that purpose, what happens when that part of your life doesn't work out as expected? We see that very often with startup founders where their entire identity is tied up to their work, and when the startup fails, we see very high rates of depression. The opposite of that is what psychologists call self-complexity. It's when you have several identities. And so, you could say, I want to be, I want to be a great producer. Yes, but I also want to be a great friend, and I want to be a great parent, and I want to be a great cook, and I want to be all of these things. And I know that I won't be able to be great at all of these things exactly at the same time at any given point in life. There's going to be fluctuation. And so, there might be weeks at work where things are not going so great, but maybe when I go home, I can cook a really nice meal for my family. Or there are times where I'm going to try and make a really nice meal and I'm going to burn the pie. But I know that I have this other part of my life where maybe I can listen to my friends and listen to what's going on in their life and be a great friend and give them great advice. Self-complexity, that, that's the opposite of one purpose. Self-complexity is the idea that you can have many purposes in life. And that these purposes can change. If at one point you get tired of being a producer or you're not interested in cooking anymore, you know what? No one's forcing you to keep going. You can experiment with something different.

One of my favorite things that we did last year is we had all the sort of, uh, we have a creative depth group that meets every week, and so these are all people who've been around Second City a long period of time, and everyone My opening question was just tell me how you got to where you are right now. I assumed that was just going to be my first question. It was the only question because every single person, their path was so wild and so not what they set out to be. And we're just laughing at each other because we're like, well, the common denominator is we all either quit or were fired from this place. So that's hilarious. And then it was true. And I've recommended it to a lot of people of going, just listen to these stories because everyone it is a wild ride when, you know, I didn't, I thought I was gonna be a rock star. You know, that's, that's kind of what I, that's what I was banking on for a period of time. You also, there's a thing that I say in our work is that meaning is made in moments. You say in the book, not all moments are created equal. And just earlier this morning, so Second City is housed at the corner of North and Wells in Chicago, and there's a Starbucks on the corner. So that is our Starbucks that we go to. And the manager is Miranda, who I see every morning. And she's got a big smile on her face. And she writes a nice little thing on my cup. And we chit-chat. Or she wants to look at pictures of my puppy or all that stuff. And our Helena, who is our interim CMO, she doesn't come to Chicago that often. She's based in New York. And she comes up to my office. She's like, the most amazing thing happened to me downstairs. I'm never here. I've only been here a few times. And that woman behind the counter saw me and gave me my drink. She's like, how did she know who I was? And I'm like, because Miranda pays attention. Because Miranda lives in the moment. It's again, an improv thing to be fiercely in the moment. And this is what I think you're talking about when you talk about having a deeper sense of time.

Yes, in the book, I talk about two different concepts of time that the ancient Greeks have. So they talked about Kronos and Kairos. In today's world, we mostly live in chronos time. That's the same root as the word chronometer. It's a quantitative definition of time. It's the time of seconds, of minutes, of hours. It's the time of all of those little boxes in our calendars and the to-do lists and trying to be as productive and as efficient as possible, trying to make the most of your time, again, in a very quantitative way. But the ancient Greeks had another definition of time, kairos, which is a qualitative definition of time. It's the time of watching a beautiful sunset, reading poetry. It's the time of reading a bedtime story to your kid, or maybe having a long conversation with a friend where you lose track of Chronos time because you're so deep in that experience. So it's really about the depth of the experience. And in the book, I argue that unfortunately, again, our society is designed around chronostime. We're having this conversation, you and I, right now because we put it in our calendars and we said, let's meet at that time and let's have this conversation, right? So it's not about completely getting rid of chronostime. Chronostime can be very useful. The problem is that We're spending all of our lives in Chronos times. So what you want is to make sure that you have a little bit of space for Kairos time. That can look like actually saying, every Sunday afternoon, no touching my phone, no touching my laptop. I'll read a book, I'll just relax, and I'm not going to look at the time. Or if you cannot do something like that because you have too many other obligations or you're taking care of other people, you can have those micro moments of chaos that can be getting up from your computer, putting some music and dancing for 2 minutes like no one's watching. Hopefully no one's watching. And you, that can be something like taking a short walk around the block. That can be something like making yourself tea and really taking the time to enjoy it and really feel and experience the warmth. Those are micro moments of chaos that you can inject in your everyday life. And so even if Kronos is taking 80% of your time, you can still have a little bit more depth to your experience.

So increasingly I'm seeing more and more folks write about the fact that you have to be aware of how your environment is shaping your behavior and the culture you live in. And I think one of the things that you talk about, and it's very funny because I've traveled Italy, I love Italy so much. It is a it operates very differently, differently than America. And I think the UK too, where I've spent a great deal of time. So, you know, and there's pros and cons to all of that. Like, do I like that I can kind of trust that my mail is going to come on time in the US? I guess. Would I prefer to be able to go to that little corner coffee shop and have this incredible coffee while I'm staying? Like, yeah, kind of. I want that. So talk a bit about why you do that juxtaposition.

Which, by the way, just because you mentioned Starbucks, I only very recently discovered that Starbucks supposedly is supposed to be Italian coffee or reproducing the Italian experience. So that's what the, the founder says, that they went to Italy and they brought back that experience to the US. Uh, I think fortunately not many Italian people know that because they would be very offended. And I'm only mentioning it because you mentioned Starbucks. And you're right, our environment—

both things can be true. Sorry, I just said both things can be true.

Yes, absolutely. And you're right that our environment plays a very important role when it comes to our behaviors. I think it's important to consider in two ways. The first one is just to practice a little bit more self-compassion and self-kindness when we're struggling and we're a little bit overwhelmed, because a lot of it is just due to what the world feels like at the moment, and we don't have a lot of control over that. So I think number one, just knowing that a lot of the, the overwhelm, the anxiety that we're all experiencing right now is due to all of those environmental external factors that unfortunately are out of our control. But the second one is that at a very local level, when it comes to your local community, your life, your desk, whatever, you know, your environment looks like. You do have a little bit of control actually, and there are lots of small changes that you can implement to live a better life and to feel better. And my book is really a lot about reconnecting with the sense of agency and knowing that yes, you maybe you can't change everything. Maybe you can't quit your job. Maybe you can't do all of those big changes, but you can conduct tiny experiments. You can try small changes in your life and see what works, what doesn't, what feels good, what you want more of, what you want less of.

Your chapter on procrastination was really interesting to me, and it's, it's, it's stuck, right? So You talk about having a different relationship with procrastination because what I realized is, and I've read a lot of social science, right? I mean, I've been doing this thing for like 7 years, reading 3 of these books a week. But I, I'm working on the follow-up to my book 10 years later. And, uh, I'm almost done with the sort of proposal part of it. I have 2 co-authors, but I needed to do the bulk of the writing and I was procrastinating on this bit. And I was saying to myself, it's because I'm a moral failure. And then when I read your book, I'm like, oh no, this is just classic imposter syndrome. I'm not hitting send on this because there's part of me that's like, should I really be writing this book? And then when I interrogated that idea, go, absolutely, I should be writing this book. The first one did really well and I've got more stuff to say. And I finished it. I literally, it was, and it was because of you. It was because of this book.

Amazing.

I want you— let's get into this because I think this is for— and I believe me, I brought this to colleagues. They've literally said to me, I'm procrastinating. I'm like, well, I've got something for you. And the look in their eye was sort of like, oh, I can reframe this. So let's, let's dig in. What— and I imagine this comes from a personal place, right?

Yes. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I, I actually also procrastinated a lot on certain parts of the book. And funny enough, I procrastinated a lot I'm writing the chapter about procrastination, which is very meta.

Of course you did.

This is part of why I really enjoyed writing this book as well. It was an opportunity for me to use, to apply the tools that I was talking about, that I was sharing in the book to my own work as well. So this idea of reframing procrastination, it's not even just reframing it. It's really just understanding its nature. What is procrastination? And procrastination is not, as you said, a moral failure. Procrastination is a signal from your brain. That's it. It's a signal from your brain that something is not quite working right now. The problem is that we've been told that if you're procrastinating, you're being lazy, you have no discipline, you have no willpower. And so when we procrastinate, we experience self-blame and self-judgment. Not helpful at all. If you know what procrastination is and it's just a signal, what can you do then? Well, listen to that signal. What can you learn from it? And so really the idea here is to— and I know it's going to sound maybe a little bit silly, but really welcome your procrastination. Say, hello, welcome back. So what are you trying to tell me here? Obviously we're not happy with the situation. What's going on? Where is the problem coming from? 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, you're not fully convinced you should be working on that task in the first place. So maybe the task is badly designed. It's not aligned with your ambitions, with your values, principles, whatever you're trying to achieve at a larger scale. Or maybe it's the kind of task, you know, when someone puts something on your to-do list and you say, yes, I'll do it. But actually, once you start trying to do it, it makes no sense at all. And so you procrastinate. It's again, your brain trying to tell you this thing makes no sense. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't feel like this is going to be fun. So logically speaking, rationally speaking, you think, yeah, we should be doing this. But emotionally speaking, you're like, oh yeah, dragging my feet a little bit. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills, the right tools, the right support network in order to complete the task. And what's great is that when you start listening and asking these questions, where's the problem coming from, you can also systematically figure out solutions to get unstuck. So if the problem is coming from the head, then go back to the actual task and maybe grab your colleagues and say, hey, I've been procrastinating on this thing. I'm not fully convinced. Can we go back to the drawing board? Can we take 15 minutes, maybe a little brainstorming session, thinking about the strategy behind this? And figure out what might be a better way to approach this. If the problem is coming from the heart, then make it fun. Grab a colleague that you love hanging out with, do a little coworking session, go to your favorite coffee shop. And if the problem is coming from the hand, I always tell people, well, raise that hand, actually ask for help. Don't stay stuck. And so that can be coaching, that can be mentoring, an online course, a tutorial, whatever it is. For you to feel confident that you are able to do the task.

Here's my irony: the chapter that I was procrastinating on was called Just Start.

I think, I think there's something deeper going on here. I don't know exactly what it is, but I find this hilarious.

I know. Well, okay, let's actually dig into it. I think what it might be is we already know what the problem is and we have a solution for it. And with it, but there's that little part in the back of us going like, yeah, is it as easy? Because it's not as easy as that. And I have so much compassion for human beings on this journey, especially knowing that like you're, when you come to study at Second City, let's say you're a beginner, you're like in your level A, class, what are we teaching you? We are not coming in teaching you jokes. We're not coming in teaching you like all these cool improv moves. We're teaching you to reserve judgment of self and judgment of others. We are teaching you to like take away your fear and shame brain. We are encouraging you to fail in front of others in class because you're going to build up that muscle of like, oh, this is— I didn't die. I didn't die. I can just— I can do this over and over again because that is a replica of your life. You are going to fail more than you succeed. You're going to get it wrong more than you get it right. And all the sort of signals to us is that it should be the other way around when it never, ever was. So we're victims. We're swimming in the water we swim in that everyone else swims in.

I think you're right, because I know that when I was writing my chapter about procrastination, or rather trying to write it and procrastinating, there was this voice in my head telling me, 'Who are you to write this chapter about procrastination when you still procrastinate all the time?' And it actually ended up shaping the content of the chapter and even shaping my own relationship to procrastination in the sense that I'm not telling people to beat procrastination, to get rid of it, to avoid it completely. I don't think that's possible. And I see a lot of advice online telling people, 'Here's how to beat procrastination.' I don't— it's very violent, first, and second, I don't think it works. So, it's really about accepting the fact that yes, you are going to procrastinate. Second, it doesn't mean anything about your value as a human being, about your level of commitment or excitement. It doesn't mean anything about your worth. It really just means that something in the current configuration, in the interaction between you and the work is wrong. And you can figure it out.

Yeah, I think this also ties to the next chapter, which is about intentional imperfection. Again, in our work, there's a concept that we have, which is the good enough show. Like when you're in, I don't know if you know this, but the way we create our shows at Second City is over a 12-week process in front of an audience. The shows never close here. They sort of flow into each other, but there's this period where we're testing stuff out and we're doing it in a late night improv set, which is free. So it gives a little bit of protection. But ultimately there's a point at which we are just like, we're going to put something out that's not done. And what we found over a period of time is if you're just smart about how you arrange that, the audiences are very forgiving and they're very excited about seeing you, you do new stuff. But it means you have to have a different relation to your work because the road to excellence is not a snap of the fingers.

Absolutely.

Right.

Yeah, it takes trial and error, and the journey is a lot better if you're not torturing yourself every time there's an error in each cycle of trial. I, again, I think there's no way to completely get rid of failure, uncertainty, mistakes. What we can change though is our response to finding ourselves in those liminal spaces where we feel like we don't have a lot of control. And we can either respond with anxiety, trying to regain control by any means possible, or we can respond with curiosity, a little bit like a scientist when something happens that they didn't expect. Or when they don't really understand what's going on, they're not anxious. They don't, and they don't say, you won't hear a scientist say, oh, I didn't get the results I expected. I'm such a bad scientist. I'm going to quit. I'm going to change careers. I'm terrible. I'm a bad human being. No, they're just going to say, oh, interesting. What's going on here? What can we learn from this? Ooh, juicy, exciting. And I think when we have this mindset, we can not only grow faster, but we also make it more fun in the process.

Yeah. Our phrase for that is replacing blame with curiosity.

Oh, yes.

That you can immediately, immediately go to that negative and, and if it to interrogate like, well, what's— I, I have now said this quote on like every single podcast and my listeners are probably tired of it, but it is so smart. Morgan Housel's brother-in-law— we had Morgan on the podcast a few weeks back— his brother-in-law said to him, everyone's behavior makes sense if you have enough information.

Really? Yeah, that's amazing.

Isn't that really good? Yeah, I've never heard that phrased like that. Yeah. And so, so, like, and of course, that's true. You know, like, if you were— if you cut me off, you're gonna, you're gonna have a reason. I might not love it. At the end of the day, but it's actually going to be reasonable. Like, oh, I see why you did that. And that's not how we operate. You have to work hard to think like that throughout a day.

And I would add to this that that idea that if you have enough information, anyone's behavior is going to make sense, you can apply to yourself as well. Very often, Again, we blame ourselves because we feel like, why am I behaving like this? Why am I doing this? Again, so bad, no self-control, whatever that is. When in reality, if we listen to the signals, we'll be like, huh, you know, very often I'll realize that I'm just tired. I haven't had a glass of water in 3 hours. Or, you know, I have 3 deadlines this week. And so maybe, maybe that's why I'm a little bit anxious. And once I take the time to pay attention, half of the anxiety is gone because I realize that, yes, my response is completely normal. I'm just, I'm a little bit overwhelmed. I'm a little bit tired, maybe a little bit thirsty, whatever that is. And so I think it's always worth it whenever we're struggling, whether we're feeling stuck, whether we're feeling anxious, we're a bit stressed or overwhelmed, just to pause for a second and just gather a little bit more information about the situation and about ourselves in that situation.

You have a lot of really practical advice for people, things they can do, which is always great in these books. So my wife Anne runs a comedy major. She's, she's a tenured professor of comedy. And one of the things that she teaches her students is that they need to carry a notebook around them and they have to constantly be writing around the things they observe, that this is, this is if you want to be a comedian, you're, you're drawing from these things. And human beings are really funny. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, uh, you have a thing called Field Notes, which seems a little bit similar, not for people who want to be comedians, but for people who are trying to live their best life.

Oh, I love that. I love that your wife recommends this. And yeah, it's, it's not for people who are trying to be funnier, although I do think that when you start actually observing your life and what is happening every day, you always find funny things happening. So it might be one of the bonus benefits of that practice. And I do talk about what I call self-anthropology in the book, which is the idea of pretending that you are an anthropologist and observing your own life. Why do I use the anthropologist as a metaphor here? Because when an anthropologist goes and studies a new culture, they have no preconceptions, no assumptions, no judgment. They're just observing. And they take little notes, little field notes. They go in the field, they take field notes. And they ask, why do people care about this? Why do they spend their time, their energy, and their attention like this? Why do they seem to find this more important than that? And that's it. In a very nonjudgmental way, you can do the same thing with your life, just taking little notes. It can be in a little notebook like your wife is saying. It can be on your phone in the Notes app and just taking little notes throughout the day and asking yourself, What gives me energy? What drains my energy? What am I curious about? What am I excited about? Or the opposite. Whenever there's a meeting or a conversation and you just want to go and hide in the corner and be somewhere else, that's also important information that you can capture. And I guarantee you that if you do that for just 24 hours, you will notice interesting patterns, parts of your life that you've been maybe doing without really thinking about very much that might be worth experimenting with?

I, I'd say across all disciplines, the idea of writing it down comes up over and over and over again. And it's a little bit like you mentioned drinking water. Like, I— we joke about that in the office because I'm like, my feet are cramping, and I was like, I realize I have not drank any water today. And it's like, why do I— I know the solution to this, And the writing it down is simply like cleansing yourself of all the inputs that are coming in because there's so much, especially living in the world that we live today. Like, future generations will look back at this period and be like, you mean you communicated at the same time through email, through text, through messages, through all these different apps, through all these social media, on LinkedIn. That's nuts. No one should have to juggle. And every time I, you know, hear as a business, they're like, "Hey, we're going to have a new way that we communicate in the office," or like Slack. I'm like, "No, no more." And by the way, if you're going to Slack, what are you taking away? Which leads me to tell us about the plus-minus-next practice.

It is actually linked to writing things down, as you said. So, I talk about, in the book, I talk about what is called metacognition. Metacognition just means thinking about thinking. It's really the practice of observing your own thoughts, and writing is a great way to do that because you can put your thoughts on paper and then observe those thoughts and actually think about what they mean. Do you want to keep having these thoughts? Do you want to change these thoughts? Do you want to change the behaviors that are associated with these thoughts? And so in the book, I share a very simple metacognitive tool that you can use in order to take these thoughts out of your head, on paper, and then observe them. And I call this tool Plus Minus Next. It's very, very simple. It has 3 columns. The first column, Plus, is where you will write everything that went well, and it can be just quick bullet points. In the second column, Minus, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, next, where I use a little arrow, you list everything you want to tweak, you want to try, you want to experiment with next. What's great about this approach is that first, it allows you to take stock of what you achieved. A lot of very ambitious, very curious people, they finish something and then they just move on to the next thing and then never take the time to celebrate what they just did. So, the plus column is just an opportunity to give yourself a little pat on the back and say, oh wow, we did all that. That's great. The minus column is a way to also keep yourself honest about what could have been better, potential areas of growth, or even external sources of friction, things that you didn't see coming and that made it harder. And what makes it really, really powerful is the last column, next. The idea here is not to have a static snapshot of what went well and what didn't go well. It's to extract lessons from those experiences and create cycles of experimentation to iterate, really. So to close that loop, take everything from the plus and the minus and decide what's next. What I love about this approach is that you don't need to have a 5-year plan. You don't need to know where you're going. You don't need to have a clear vision. You don't need to have a big purpose. You don't need any of that. All you need to do is to make a little bit of space for checking in with yourself on a regular basis, asking yourself those questions, iterating, tweaking every time you go through a cycle, and trusting that when you do this, you will grow without knowing exactly where you're going.

It's funny, I— my sense is the idea of a 5-year plan is ridiculous.

Oh yeah.

Like, like you, okay. You agree because like, just, just let's go back 5 years. Are you telling me like 5 years ago we could have known the, how to respond to, oh, I don't know, the, the political environment, the social environment, AI, like, you know, all of that. No, we, no one's got a crystal ball in that way. And so a much healthier thing is not to not plan, but, you know, and again, very improv thing. The planning comes in preparing myself to see and to hear, to listen, to understand at any given moment, because everything changes. This is why all those books that are like, here's your 5 steps, you know, it's like, no, the minute context changes, step number 3 is no longer relevant. So what am I doing?

So, yeah, is that jive with you? I'd like to take it even further. It would be really sad if we knew where we were going to be in 5 years. Imagine, that would mean that there would be no growth, no change, no new relationships, no opportunity for becoming a different person. That would be so sad. I think it's a really good thing that we don't have that kind of visibility.

Yeah, completely agree. All right. In a moment, I'm going to ask you for your Yes, Anne story. But one more question before we hit up that. You have really good chapter titles, I'm realizing as I'm looking at my notes. So Chapter 9 is How to Dance with Disruption. And you write in that chapter, quote, Waltzing with chaos isn't just about survival. It's about feeling alive and open to the world, welcoming change as a source of growth, and finding humor in life's trickiest moments, end quote. If that doesn't speak to like, you're living in the world we live in right now and you're saying, you know, it could be okay because everyone says it's unprecedented times and you're like, I think it's pretty precedented. If you really look at history, this is not new.

Yes, it is definitely not new. And we know, you know, it's a bit trite to say this, but it's true. History repeats itself, right? Again, I think unfortunately we have very little control over the geopolitical situation and world events and all of that, but you have control over two things. First, your responses. And again, you can respond with anxiety or respond with curiosity. You mentioned blame and curiosity in your case and the way you work with people. So your responses, and your responses include how you respond at an individual level, but also how you show up for other people, how you support other people around you. And those are aspects where it doesn't have to be perfect all the time. We're human beings, but you can really, you know, try. Oh my God. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. You caught me with one word in English where I always struggle between thrive and thrive, thrive. Yeah, that's right. You can thrive to— I'll do this one again. Um, sorry, producer, but you can try your best to show up in a way that is supportive of other people around you, where you actually grow together, you support each other. So that's number one. And the second part where you have a little bit of control again is just your local environment. And by local, it can be hyperlocal. It can really genuinely be your office, your house, your home, your family, your neighborhood. And this is a space where you can actually experiment. You can see what might change. You can actually see the impact of your actions on a day-to-day basis.

All right, we always end the podcast with our Yes I Am story. Do you have one for us?

Actually kind of relevant to the work you do with improv. So when my book came out, I was invited to give a big keynote in front of 1,200 more people. Like, I can't— I think it was almost 2,000 people. Huge audience. I had never done that before. I used to be very, very scared of public speaking, and I said Yes. And for the first time ever, I'm not going to try to script it. Ah, so that was scary, but in a good way. And I actually did so much better by just having a rough outline, slides, just so I didn't have to memorize everything, but not clinging to having written the entire script. For me, it was also a big moment of growth because English is not my first language, so I think there's the added level of, of fear and anxiety around this that sometimes I— am I going to forget everything? Am I going to start speaking in French in the middle of it? So being able to do that was really an amazing experience. That was a recent yes, and that felt really good.

I love that. I— there was a period where I did, I think, 6 TEDx's, like, over like 3 years. And the second or third one, I was like, well, I should try scripting it. And it was a disaster. Like, I forgot where I was going and I improvised it because I can do that. And it was sort of a lesson to me of like, I'm already prepared. I have my stories. I'm like, public speaking has never been hard for me. There's plenty of things that are hard for me. This just happens to be one that isn't. And that's just a good thing to remember when we're thinking about all of us. Because I, again, we, we tend, and your book is so much about this, which is we tend to go back to A plus B equals C. We tend to go back with right or wrong. We tend to go back with it's this one thing and it's never that. It is always us in relation to many things. And is that hard? Sure. But, but actually it's the better place to be because we're not alone.

Yes, I love that. Thank you.

The book is called Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.