Why Your Goals Are Holding You Back (And What to Do Instead) w/ Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Amazing. Anne-Laure Le Cunff.

Hi. Hi.

How are you?

I'm great. How are you doing? I'm good.

It's so good to see you. And I'm so excited to get an insight into Tiny Experiments. You've got the book launch that just came out in the last couple of weeks and so many incredible things and some special surprises too for people that are still with us live. Regarding the book. But with that, I want to give you the stage. Welcome to the Creator Path Summit. Wait, can you hear me okay?

Yes.

Okay. Perfect.

Can you see my screen?

Yeah, I can see your screen. There you go.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for having me. I really liked in Chris's presentation how he said that you could start small and I feel like this is a really good segue to what I'm going to talk about today, how you can conduct tiny experiments to unlock big, big breakthroughs in your communities. So I'm Anne-Laure Le Cunff, I'm a neuroscientist at King's College in London. I'm the founder of NAS Labs, its newsletter, and its Circle community. And as Alexis just mentioned, I wrote a book. I don't know if you can see my camera while I'm presenting, but it's called Tiny Experiments And it's really all about living a more experimental life, having a more experimental mindset in both your work and your personal life. So first, I want to talk about a little paradox, the paradox of community building. Just ask anyone around, or maybe ask yourself in terms of how you relate to your current work. But as community builders, we're usually very, very good at at taking care of the people in our communities. We also understand that nurturing relationships and building trust and all of the work that goes into community building takes time. And still, somehow we're pushing ourselves really, really, really hard to achieve big success as quickly as possible, very often at the expense of our own mental health. And to understand this paradox, why is it that so many smart people torture themselves in this way when it comes to building their communities, we need to go back to the very definition of success. So success is something that we all want. We admire it, we praise it, we spend a lot of time measuring it. We might have some sort of KPIs and other metrics. We also very often measure our success based on the success of others, which obviously has been exacerbated by social media, where you can see how other community builders are doing. And you keep on comparing yourself to them and asking yourself, am I going fast enough? Is my community big enough? It's really as if we were all staring at this giant leaderboard just comparing ourselves to each other and comparing our success constantly. So what is this success we're so obsessed with? So if you go in a library, a bookstore, and you pick up a dictionary and you open it and you look at the definition of success, you're very likely to see something that looks like this: reaching a desired outcome. So now I'm a scientist. I hope you'll allow me to break it down into its components so we can really understand what is this definition of success we seem to all have agreed on. So reaching, there is the idea of movement, of progress towards what? Towards something we desire, something we feel like would be positive. And that something is an outcome. So this definition we've all agreed on implies that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan. And so this is very often what we do as community builders. We have this vision, we have this clear plan, and then we say, I'm going to work really, really hard to get there. And this might seem like the only definition of success. It seems so obvious, so simple. But it's not. This definition of success is actually based on something called linear goals. And again, linear goals are really based on this assumption that is not necessarily correct, that in order to be successful, you need to know where you're going. You need to have this clear vision, this clear plan, and then work really hard to get there. If you start thinking about this idea of linear goals, you will see that you're probably applying them in a lot of the ways you manage your business and and even maybe your personal life. So you might say, I want to get to this number of community members by the end of the year. You might say, I want to get to this revenue by the end of the quarter. I want to get this level of engagement. I want to get this number of likes, this number of followers. And you have those linear goals, those destinations, those fixed outcomes in mind, this vision. That is very linear. You have a plan and then you try to get there. It's very reassuring to have this sense of clarity, of certainty in terms of where you're going. But there's only one problem with linear goals, especially when it comes to building communities. Community building is nonlinear. It's inherently emergent. You need to figure out what works and what doesn't as you go. There is no blueprint, no linear step-by-step plan that you can copy paste in order to build a successful community. You need to navigate a very complex web of shared values, new technologies that keep on shifting, potential conflicts, your own boundaries, how you manage your time, how you build trust. Both between you and your community members, but also between the community members themselves. So community building is nonlinear and yet we try to cling to linear goals, which can only lead to frustration, overwhelm, and as we've all seen, and you've probably experienced already as a community builder, burnout. So what happens very often then is that we have this clear plan, this clear vision, we try to do it, and when it doesn't it doesn't work out, what happens is that we blame ourselves. And so today I want to explore a different definition of success. So do you know who has a completely different, different definition of success? Not the linear one that we just went through, a completely different one. Scientists. For scientists, success is not getting to a specific destination. It's not getting to a fixed outcome. For a scientist, success is learning something new. As long as you learn something new, this is success. And today I want to encourage you to adopt this mindset, to think a little bit more like a scientist when it comes to your community, to let go of linear goals, of those fixed outcomes, of this this copy-pasted definition of success so you can create your own. And so your community can emerge and you can create one that is uniquely yours, aligned with your values and aligned with the life that you want to live. And in order to do this, I'm going to go through 3 very simple mental shifts that you can start implementing right now. The first one is to develop an experimental mindset. So when a scientist gets an unexpected result, they don't go like, oh, I'm such a failure. I'm such a bad scientist. What is wrong with me? No, they look at whatever results that they get, whatever outcome they get, and they ask themselves, huh, what's going on here? What can we learn from this? Whatever the outcome, whatever the result, they're able to look at it without any self-blame or self-judgment. And the reason why is because scientists understand that failure is necessary for learning. Failure is an inherent part of learning. You need failure in order to learn. What's really interesting is that this idea that failure is a part of learning, implementing this experimental mindset and being more curious is actually aligned with the way your brain works. Or rather how your brain would like to work if you let it, in terms— instead of trying to cling to linear goals. So the way your brain works is based on something neuroscientists call the perception-action cycle. It's very simple. So first you perceive some information in your environment, some data, what's working, what's not working. Based on that information, your brain is going to make a prediction. Sometimes that prediction is correct and this is great. And sometimes this prediction is wrong and this is okay too. As long as you're still alive, the community is still alive, everything you're working on is still here, you haven't done something so wrong that you cannot backtrack, then your brain is going to register that new information, that new data, that new state of the environment and make a new prediction. And this is how we learn, and this is how we grow, by replacing the illusion of certainty by just being curious, observing, and then making a prediction and adapting our next prediction based on what we've observed. The reason why scientists are so good at having this experimental approach to challenges is not because they're smarter than any of us. It's because they've been trained to do so. If you remember your science classes from high school, you're probably familiar with the cycle, the experimental cycle. So it starts with observation, where you ask yourself, what is the current situation? Then you formulate a hypothesis. You ask, what could be different? You then collect data to test that hypothesis. And once you're done collecting data, you analyze it, you look at it to see what the result of the experiment is. And the reason why this is a cycle is because you then take what you learned from that data analysis to adjust your observation, look at what has changed in the environment. This experimental cycle only works if you pair action with reflection and reflection with action. So you need to first do something, try something new, And then observe, reflect on it, analyze that data, and then you can adjust your next action. And this is how you close the loop of the experimental cycle. And this is how you grow and you evolve and you learn, even when you don't know exactly where you're going, even if you're working on an emergent project, such as building a community. If you use those three kind of principles, those heuristics, you can almost see them as little equations. Using them together, combining them together, remembering that failure is an inherent part of learning, that curiosity always, always beats certainty, and that you need to pair action with reflection and reflection with action. Those three equations can become sort of an operating system for developing an experimental mindset. And you can use this to run your community and grow your community to try new things, stay curious, learn from on your failures. And every time you take action, reflect on it so you can make sure that whatever you learned can be useful in terms of deciding what your next action is going to be. The second mental shift that I want you to explore is systematic curiosity. And systematic curiosity is really the idea of being systematically curious, being curious about absolutely everything. Including the uncomfortable stuff that you might not want to look at too closely. And I know everybody listening to this is probably running very different types of communities with different business models, different sizes. So instead of taking an example based on community building, I'm going to take an example based on something we have all experienced. And this is something that we're all quite comfortable talking about at a more conceptual level, but we're always a little bit uncomfortable admitting to. And that thing is procrastination. So procrastination is when we don't do the thing we feel like we should be doing. We've all done that. You might be thinking that you need to redesign your community, that you need to schedule a new event, that you need to put in place a new partnership with a creator. To do some sort of marketing campaign, but somehow you've decided that now is the right time to do a deep spring cleaning of your kitchen or to go walk the dog or to repaint your podcast studio or whatever it is that is going to be a distraction and a way to procrastinate on the main task that you know you should be doing. And very often the emotions that are associated with procrastination again are self-blame, and self-judgment. But procrastination is just a signal from your brain. It's a signal from your brain trying to tell you that something is not quite right. And if you listen to it, if you have this conversation with your procrastination, you can actually learn from it and you can decide on your next course of action based on decoding those signals. So to do this, I'm going to share a little tool to help you be systematically curious. About procrastination in this case, but you can apply it to really any challenge that you're facing as a community builder, but also in your personal life. And I call this tool the triple check. So whenever you're procrastinating and next time, maybe you can even use that for something you're procrastinating on right now with your community. So instead of trying to push through and use your willpower and ignore that procrastination and blame yourself in the process, You can ask your procrastination, okay, where is the problem coming from? Is it coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that the task is appropriate. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, the task doesn't look like it's going to be a lot of fun. It doesn't look like it's going to be enjoyable. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that although your head is saying, yeah, I'm convinced we should be doing this. Your heart is saying, yeah, this, this looks quite fun. Your hand is saying that you don't believe that you have the right tools, the right skills, the right support system in order to get the task done. The task doesn't feel like it's doable. And as you can see, what's really interesting when you start actually being curious about challenges instead of trying to push through is that you can learn from them. And by being systematically curious in this case about your procrastination, you can also systematically find solutions. So for example, if the problem is coming from the head, you don't think the task is appropriate, you can redefine the strategy. So if you're working on your own, that means maybe going back to the drawing board and figuring out Is this task really the right task? Is that really aligned with what I'm trying to do right now with the community? Is that really the best way to approach this? Or even, am I the right person to do it? Maybe I should delegate this to another person, or maybe I should delegate this to AI. Your head is trying to tell you that this would be a waste of time to work on this task in this current format. So you need to go back to the strategy. And if you're working with other people, you can actually tell them, Hey, I've been procrastinating on this thing for a few days, and I think it's because the strategy doesn't work. This is not aligned with what we're trying to do. Can we go back to the drawing board together and brainstorm and figure out if there's a better way to approach this challenge? If the problem is coming from the heart, you don't feel like this task is exciting, then redesign the experience, make it fun. Maybe grab someone you like working with and say, hey, can we do a little virtual coworking half an hour so I can work through this and maybe we can chit-chat and catch up at the same time, or grab your laptop and go to your favorite coffee shop and get the thing done. It's going to be a lot more fun if you do that instead of trying to push through. If the problem is coming from the hand and you don't believe the task is doable, then raise that hand, ask for support, ask for training. Maybe it's coaching, maybe it's mentorship, maybe it's taking an online course, watching a tutorial. You can then get access to the skills, to the tools, whatever support you need in order to get the task done instead of feeling paralyzed. Ultimately, when you do this, it's all about defaulting to curiosity instead of having self-blame and self-judgment. And analysis paralysis is really about asking questions about any challenge that you're facing. It's about asking, what is going on here? No self-blame, no self-judgment, just being curious and trying to understand where the problem is coming from so you can systematically answer that question and then systematically find a solution. An example that I haven't really shared before is the title of my book. So as I mentioned, the book is called Tiny Experiments, but the title used to be Liminal Minds, and I found myself procrastinating so much trying to find ways to use this term liminal, which means the in-between, the transition, the threshold, beautiful word that actually captures a lot of the ideas I wanted to talk about, but I was really struggling to weave it into the book. And I was procrastinating as a result. By doing the triple check, I figured out that there was a fundamental issue here at the head level, where I didn't think that this was the right title, the right container for me to share the ideas that I wanted to share in the book. And so I went back to the drawing board and I actually brainstormed with my Circle community. I said, hey everyone, I've been procrastinating on the writing. I don't think the title works. Can you help me brainstorm a better title together? And this is something we can talk more about in the Q&A and how I brought everybody in this experience of designing the book together, co-creating the book together. But this is an example. Of someone as a community builder and a creator noticing the procrastination and instead of pushing through, being systematically curious about it so I can use that data to make better decisions. The third mental shift and last mental shift that I want you to consider implementing is continuous iteration. So remember this experimental cycle that I mentioned earlier. The great thing is that you do not need to have your own lab in order to use it. You can actually use this experimental cycle for any challenge that you might want to explore in your work and in your life by designing tiny experiments. And you can design tiny experiments for literally anything: work projects, creative ideas you would like to test, the way you manage your knowledge around your community, but also things that are probably a little bit more personal, but that might support your well-being in terms of being a community builder. A builder, having healthy routines, your parenting, building relationships, acquiring new skills. Tiny experiments work with anything in work and life. And it always, always starts with observation. I know, especially if you're a maker, a builder, there is a temptation to get going and build your first experiment as quickly as possible. But any good experiment always starts with observation. And for this, you can look back into your calendar. You can look at your notes, at your journals, if you're someone who likes journaling, and also paying attention to the conversations that you have. And what you need to do is really pay attention to what's working and what's not working. What is giving you energy? What is draining your energy? If you notice that every time you spend a little bit of time tweaking something, building something, or hosting a kind of event in the community, and you get a lot of energy, or equally, maybe There's some work where every time you feel like, oh, why am I doing this to myself? I hate this. Pay attention to this. Pay attention to the topics that come up in conversations, the ones where you light up versus the ones where you just want to go and hide in a corner and disappear because you're so bored out of your mind. Pay attention to all of the signals. Pay attention to the current situation. Observe the current situation. I like to call this self-anthropology because it's a little bit like being an anthropologist but where the topic of study is not another culture. It's your own life. It's your own work. It's really about taking little notes and asking questions like, why are we doing things the way we're doing them? Why do we care about that? Why have we been doing this with the same process for the past year? Really questioning all of your routines, your assumptions, your default decisions, but again, without any judgment. You're just an anthropologist studying this strange culture that is your work, that is your life, and that is your community. Once you've done that, once you've taken that time to observe the current situation, you have opened a window for experimentation and it's time to formulate a hypothesis. And for this, you can use a magic word, one of my favorite words in the English language: maybe. You can ask, maybe, maybe this would help. And that could look like, maybe we could host monthly in-person meetups to help members connect beyond the screen. Maybe we could develop a buddy system. Maybe we could build a help board feature where people can ask for or offer help. Maybe we could introduce community spotlights. Maybe we could allow community members to co-host events in the community. Maybe we could add collaborative challenges. Maybe, maybe, maybe. What could be different? Once you find something you're deeply curious about and you actually want to try, it's time to test your hypothesis. And for this, it's very important that you test it several times. When scientists design an experiment, they don't just do it one time and say, huh, We have the answer. You need to have repeated trials in order to see if what you observe is not coincidence, if there's an actual pattern. And to do this, I'm going to give you a very simple formula to design your own tiny experiments. It's like a mini protocol for experimentation. So when a scientist designs an experiment, they only need two things, two ingredients. First, they need to know what they're going to test. Second, they need to know the number of trials. When you design your own tiny experiment in your community, it's exactly the same thing. You need to know what you're going to test, the action, and the number of trials, which is the duration. Action and duration. I will action for duration. That's it. This is your mini protocol for experimentation. And I want you to see how flexible this is. So you could say, I will host one community check-in event every Friday for 4 weeks. I will interview 20 community members over 20 days. I will share a monthly community spotlight for 3 months. I will action for duration. All of these examples are things that I've seen other people do in building and designing their communities, but you can come up with your own. And you can even brainstorm with your community to try and find out interesting experiments that you could run over a certain period of time. The great thing about this again, is that it's just an experiment. You only commit to it for a specific duration. And the only definition of success that you have is learning something new. So if after the 4 weeks or the 20 days or the 3 months, it turns out this thing is not working. Well, now you know. You didn't know before, and now you know this doesn't work, and you can use whatever you learn to design your next experiment. In order to do that, to extract the knowledge from each experiment and close that loop, close that experimental cycle and decide what to do next, you can use this very simple tool that I call Plus Minus Next, which really describes what the tool is about. So plus, you look at your experiment and you ask what went well, what worked well, what was easy, what was fun, what was exciting. Minus, what didn't go so well. Maybe things that didn't go to plan, maybe sources of friction, of frustration, things that were a bit more complicated than you thought. Maybe things where you didn't have the right tools, support systems. All of that goes into the minus column. And then, And the last column with the little arrow, next. What are you going to do next? This is what I love about this review. It's that it's not just about learning what worked and what didn't work so well. It's again about closing this loop, about taking whatever you learned and using it to design your next experiment. So what are you going to tweak? What are you going to change? What is your next cycle of experimentation going to look like? This step is optional, but I highly, highly, highly recommend doing it. And it's about learning in public. It's about sharing the results of the experiment. You can do that in a very simple way, only with your team and just a Google Doc, and you send that to them. But you can also be a lot more public with this. So you can share that on social media, Instagram, on X or Substack, or even better, share it with your community. Make them part of the process, share what you learn with them. And in this way, they might even help you interpret the data in a way that you hadn't thought of. So maybe you thought that something didn't go so well, but then your community members will tell you, wait a minute, that was my favorite part of this. I actually really loved the way you presented this. So sharing your data with other people, learning in public is a great way to make sure that you learn better. And faster, and that those experimental cycles are even more generative. This is what we do in the Nest Labs community. It's all designed around experimenting together, and we have a specific section where people post their protocols and their notes as they update their experiments. And so this is a little screenshot from the community where you can see those are just the experiments that have been updated in, I think, yeah, the past couple of days, and there were more that didn't fit on the screen. So this is a very simple format. And as you can see, people are experimenting with all sorts of things. And I highly encourage you, if you decide to run your own experiments, either yourself as a community leader or as part of your community with your members, to actually bring them along for the ride and learn together and grow together so you can build your laboratory together. Tiny experiments can lead to big changes. What I love about them is that instead of building your community based on pretending to have all of the answers and being the expert, you can actually build a community that is a lot more human, a lot more authentic, where you're very transparent about the fact that you're still figuring out. And this is part of the fun because you're building this community with your community members rather than being the king or the queen that makes up all of the rules. You can actually get to figure out what works and what doesn't together. Thank you so much. Here are some links if you want to stay in touch. I think we have a little bit of time for a Q&A now, but thank you so much for listening and for having me.

Thank you so much for going so deep. And that was just beautiful. I, I think that we should share the book giveaway. Before we get into Q&A, because I know that you're also on a bit of a time crunch. So, there were people actually in the chat being like, "I know my next book. I know what I'm going to read next." And Circle has actually partnered with Anne-Laure and her publishing company to gift 100 copies to people that are— to folks that live in the United States. We will send you a— I wish we could send them to everywhere. But with logistics, we needed to send them to folks in the United States. But if my team can actually post the link to redeem a free book, I think we did this with Sawhill at the last summit, and the books like went out, went in a couple of minutes, and I'm sure that will happen now. So please, team, post the link and then we can start the giveaway for Anne-Laure. I see Cass is already chatting. And Anne, thank you so much for partnering with us on this book giveaway. This book is changing people's lives, and I am so excited to have you part of the summit, but also being able to do a book giveaway.

Thank you so much. I genuinely, I know it's going to sound very cheesy, but I'm still going to say it. Circle genuinely changed my life because it allowed me to go from me sharing my ideas randomly online to actually building a community. I was one of the very first Circle customers 5 years ago, 5 years ago. And for anyone who has been online like me for a while, you know that 5 years for a community is like 100 years in human years. On the internet, it's a very, very long time. And I'm very grateful that I was able to build something that is sustainable and where I've had members that have been active for 5 years.

Sharing that. Thank you for believing in the vision and being a Circle customer for 4.5, 5 years now. It's amazing to see your evolution too, from writer and community builder to now author. And so much of that has been fueled by your dedication, showing up and serving. And like, you really do have such a servant's heart and your desire to help other people is So pure and so consistent. And it's something I've always admired in you. And I just love all of the success that you are having with the book and the book launch, and you deserve every single bit of it. Um, okay. Do you have any, do you have time for questions? I know that you need to jump, so I want to be respectful. If you do, we can go into it. And if you can't, feel free to jump on.

I'm technically supposed to be in another meeting, but I can probably take a couple of questions and I will reply It will be short answers.

Amazing. Someone asked, what things would you do in order to get clarity of your current lifestyle in order to start your transformation?

I would design a tiny experiment. Uh, so I highly recommend, so I explained in the book that the self-anthropology exercise of observing your own life, I highly recommend doing this for 24 hours. And I'm not kidding. Get a notebook, like pretend that you're an anthropologist. And spend 24 hours taking notes about what's working, what's not working. When do you wake up in the morning? Do you have to wake up super early because of your current work? And that's not aligned with the way you want to design your lifestyle. Do you have to have, I don't know, do you have dozens of meetings every day? And that's not maybe how you want to design your life. So take all of those little notes based on that. Start with maybe, hmm, maybe I could do this differently. Maybe I could try that and then design a tiny experiment.

Perfect. I love it. And going back, and we will have the replay available too. So if you want to go back through Anne-Laure's frameworks, also for those of you, I love seeing all the people that have ordered the book. That's amazing. Anne-Laure, thank you so much. I know we've run a couple minutes over. Thank you for your time. You were the best. I hope you have a beautiful rest of your day, and I just appreciate you being part of the summit.

Thank you so much for having me. Bye everyone.