These Tiny Experiments Will Change The Way You Grow

The main problem with procrastination is this negative view that we have of it. It's a signal from your brain trying to tell you something's wrong here. And instead of listening to that signal and try to understand what's wrong, what can we change, we try to shut it down and ignore it, which is not healthy and actually not very productive.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the near and Far Podcast. I'm Nir Eyal. So, as you probably know, I very rarely have guests on the near and Far Podcast, but today I have made a special exception because today I am speaking with Ann Lore Lecompf. She is a good friend as well as the founder of Nest Labs, and she has a new book called Tiny Experiments. Now, Ann Lohr started her career at Google. Then she transitioned to get her PhD in neuroscience and built a global community around mindful productivity and learning. Along the way, her work blends cutting edge research with practical, everyday strategies to help people think and work better. In her new book, she challenges how we think about success, growth, and personal change, arguing that small, iterative steps can be more potent than grand, rigid plans. We'll dive into our insights on curiosity, distraction, beliefs, and much more. Ann Lore, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it's so good to see you. Welcome. So, so much to talk about today. Super excited about your new book, and I think my listeners are going to love it. It gets right up my alley. So maybe you can first start by kind of introducing your background. You have a super unusual background in that you used to work at Google, then you got your PhD. So kind of walk us through that.

Yeah, absolutely. And it is actually kind of tied to the topics of the book. I separate my life and my work into two phases. The first one was very linear. I had a plan and I applied it. So I worked really hard in school. I got a good job at Google, and then I got promoted. I was working on digital health products there. And then when you work in tech, what is the next thing you do? After working at a company like Google, you start a startup. So I left, I did that, and I failed. And for the very first time in my life, I found myself without a plan, without knowing what to do next. And that started that second phase of my life, a phase that is completely nonlinear, where I'm kind of more embracing the fact that I don't know where I'm going. I went back to school, I studied neuroscience, I got my master's degree and then my PhD degree. And while doing that at the Beginning of my studies, I decided to document the journey, to learn in public. And I started the Nest Labs newsletter, which grew pretty quickly. We have about a hundred thousand people reading it now. And then I wrote this book. So that's where I'm at right now. I'm both an entrepreneur and an author, a researcher too, I guess, wearing lots of different hats. And I still don't know where I'm going. I'm having lots of fun.

Which is interesting because you talk about in the book about very French, the petite existential shock that you had. And it's interesting because you kind of, you think that it sounds like a bad thing, this existential shock, but you think it kind of made you who you are today. Is it? And. But it doesn't seem like something that many people take advantage of.

Sometimes when you speak several languages, you can't find in the second language the exact translation of what you're trying to convey. So in that case, I decided to keep that idea of the petite existential shock. And there were several steps for. For me to realize that I was completely lost and to embrace it at Google. First, at some point, they found a blood clot in my arm. And instead of deciding to take care as quickly as possible because it was threatening to travel to my lungs, I. I decided somehow to schedule the surgery around the schedule of my coworkers to make sure that I would not disturb any projects that we were working on.

Yeah.

And that was the first shock that you said?

Blood clot.

A blood clot, yes.

Like, not something you can schedule. No, an operation for.

Exactly.

And what did your doctor say?

They said, well, we need to schedule this as quickly as possible. And I was like, let me check my calendar. And then there were several other steps. Despite that, I kept on working at Google. I. I stayed for a little bit long until it kind of built up and I realized that I need to do something else. And that was the catalyst for me starting to think about, okay, what should I do? What should I change here? And I left Google. Accept that. And this is really what shows you that even when you think that you're going to start thinking in a different, in a like, more nonlinear way, there are so many scripts around us that we don't realize that we keep on following them. I decided to do just the next logical thing that you do in tech. And I started a startup. And when that didn't work out, only when that didn't work out, I finally accepted that maybe I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And maybe I didn't know what I wanted to work on next.

Yeah. In the book, you kind of. There's this theme around arguing with rigidity. Like you talk about goals in general, that you're kind of anti smart goals, which we've all heard a million times, you know, make them measurable and blah, blah, blah, you know, that we've heard this wisdom a hundred times. Why are you anti these type of goals?

Those types of goals can give you the illusion of control over where you're going in life. And we love that. Yeah, we love feeling like we have a framework, that we have all of those different boxes, and if we just fill them with the right things in the right order, then we're going to get to that place of success and happiness. And there are several problems with that. Well, first, just. Life doesn't work like that. Right. Things keep on changing. We don't have control over everything. And so very often we don't get to that place and we're disappointed.

Right.

But that's one problem. But also sometimes we get there and we realize that, oh, happiness was not hiding on the other side of that milestone. We're still the same person we were and we're also disappointed.

Yeah.

So to me, smart goals and all of those rigid frameworks, they're just a recipe for disappointment.

So what's the alternative? What do we do instead?

I advocate for a more experimental approach. I don't tell people, don't be ambitious. I don't tell people, don't pursue some forms of goals or anything like that. I just tell them, approach them in a more experimental way. And that means really taking uncertainty into account and embedding it into the way you design your goals. And that really means turning them into experiments.

And so how do we do that? Walk us through, step by step. Like what? What would we take away from the book? What do you show us that's better than the kind of current orthodoxy?

Yeah. So think about what a goal is, a traditional smart goal type of approach. You have a destination and you want to get there, and then you have a clear vision and a clear plan to get there. Now, I want you to think about a different archetype, a different type of person, and how they would approach this, a scientist, how would they approach an experiment? They would ask a question, they would formulate a hypothesis, and they would collect data. Whatever the result of the experiment, whatever the data says, there is no disappointment because they're not trying to get to a specific destination. They're just trying to learn more Right. That's the fundamental mindset shift to have here. And that means that instead of saying, I'm going to get there, you say, I'm going to design an experiment and collect the data. I have a very simple way to do this that I explained in the book. So what you do is that you decide on an action and then on a duration, and you perform that action for that duration, and you withhold judgment until the end, until you've collected the data. So to give you an example, we both write a newsletter. So I'm going to use. That traditional goal would be I'm going to get to 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year. A tiny experiment would be I'm going to publish one weekly newsletter until the end of the year.

Right.

And then at the end of the year, I'm going to see, you know, the data that I got out of this.

You're experimenting with the process, not the outcome, per se, because the outcome might be out of your control.

Exactly. And the outcome just becomes a data point that you can look at. And that's the other interesting thing about that, is that you can decide what data you want to look at because you can say, okay, I got 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year, so technically successful. Right. But maybe you hate it, sitting down every week and writing this thing. Right. That's the data point to that you should take into account.

Yeah, no, there's. There's a lot of parallels with my work around, indistractable around. For a lot of people, I think timeboxing sounds very rigid. Like, I'm a big advocate of timeboxing, but actually all I'm advocating for is not finishing anything in that time box. Like, people very much confuse timeboxing with getting things done that if they don't finish what they said they were going to do by the end of the timebox, and they fail, that's exactly wrong. The goal of timeboxing is just to sit down and do whatever it is you said you were gonna do for as long as you said you would. It's not about finishing. It's about the process. Then at the end of that timebox, then you can evalu. And I guess we're kind of saying the same thing. Whether it's an hour, a day, a week, a year, you're going to say, okay, in that period of time, how did that go? How much should I accomplish in that period of time? And then do I want to keep doing that or do I want to do something else? But I think what we're both saying is that if you don't have that time box, and maybe it doesn't matter how long that time box is, and give yourself the time to say, wait a minute, was that what I needed to be doing with my time? Or even worse, I go from thing to thing to thing to thing. I don't actually know how much I can accomplish in that given period of time.

Exactly. And you're really maybe without realizing it. I mean, you've read a lot of science for your own books. Right. But you're thinking like a scientist when you do this, because when you design an experiment, you don't stop in the middle and be like, I don't think I like what the data looks like right now. Let's do something else. Right.

Right.

You decide on the number of trials before you get started. You say, those are the number of trials. We're going to collect all of the data, and then at the end, we're going to analyze the data and decide what the answer to our question or research question was. Right?

Right.

And that's the same in your case. You finish the time box and then you decide. You finish the experiment and then you.

Decide, is there a time period that's too short or too long for these experiments? What do you advise?

Well, I do call them tiny experiments because in my experience, working with people, the risk is usually to go with something that's a bit too big because you need to finish the experiment in order to know if worked or not for you. Right. So sometimes people are a little bit too ambitious with the size. There's no really right or wrong length for it. But if it's your first experiment, I would go with something pretty short. Even two weeks sometimes can be enough to collect enough data. So you do need repeated trials. You can't do the thing only once. You need to do it several times. And then you also adjust it to what the experiment is. Right. If it's a weekly newsletter, you can't do it for just one week. But if it's going to bed at the same time every evening, two weeks might be enough to see if you're feeling better.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think you discovered that most people get wrong out there? Say, what's something controversial?

You believe in general? Or.

Well, let's keep with the theme of productivity.

The one thing that I see a lot of people do wrong is try to copy and paste the frameworks of other people. And I know why that's tempting. We're trying to be efficient and we Feel like this person has figured it out. Right? I'm just going to do the exact same thing. But the best advice out there, every time you see an author or a researcher or creator give productivity advice, the best one, they always have that little caveat at the end that says, hey, that's a starting point. You need to adapt this to your own needs, and you need to be willing to look at what works and what doesn't and almost create your own toolkit based on different approaches, different methods. So I think the cookie cutter approach is the main mistake that I see people making.

Right. Better to be a scientist and try different approaches and see what works for you. What about with procrastination? You have some. Some sharp opinions around procrastination?

Yes, procrastination. This is the one thing we love talking about at a conceptual level. But very few people like to admit that they've been doing it. And so I really wanted to have a deeper conversation around it. The main problem with procrastination is this negative view that we have of it. So if you go online and you try to find advice, terms of how to deal with it, a lot of articles are titled something like how to beat procrastination. That's very violent. Why do we want to beat it? Right. So procrastination, actually, when you look exactly at what it is, it's a signal from your brain trying to tell you something's wrong here. And instead of listening to that signal and try to understand what's wrong, what can we change? We try to shut it down and ignore it, which is not healthy and actually not very productive. So in the book, I explained that you can actually be a lot more productive if instead of using your willpower and pushing through and trying to beat that procrastination, you listen to it, you listen to the signals. And I share a little tool that's very, very easy to use. It's called the triple check. And the way it works is you ask yourself, why am I procrastinating? Is it coming from the head? Is it coming from the heart, or is it coming from the hand? If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not convinced that you should be working on that thing. If it's coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, you don't feel like this thing is going to be fun to work on. And if it's coming from the hand, it means that rationally you're convinced you should be working on this. Emotionally, you feel like, oh, that sounds pretty fun. But at a practical level, you don't feel like you have the resources or the tools in order to do the thing.

Okay, so let's, let's take a real life example. Let's take somebody wants to get in shape, but they don't feel like going to the gym.

Yeah.

How would they use this model?

Okay, so is it coming from the head? Do I feel like at a rational level I should be doing this thing? Yes or no? In that case, most probably you feel like, yeah, actually, you know, I've thought about it. I want to get in shape, I want to take care of my health, and I know this is something I really want to do. So head, at a rational level, this is aligned. Let's move on to the next one. Heart. Is this fun or not? Oh, maybe there's a problem here. Maybe you've designed a gym routine or something like this that's a bit daunting and or is anxiety inducing and you don't want to do it. So maybe that's the problem. Or maybe it sounds boring. Actually, you don't find going to the gym very fun. Right. Depending on what you found here, depending on the answer, you can then decide what to do to address this problem. So that might be designing a routine that's a little bit more fun. That might be hiring a coach that might be going to a gym with a friend, for example. If the answer here was no, actually, that actually sounds like fun. I actually to rationally, I want to go emotionally. Looks like fun. Why am I still procrastinating? That may be a problem. At a practical level, maybe when you go to the gym, you look at all of the different equipment and you're like, I have no idea. And so you don't end up going because maybe you don't want to look silly standing there and not knowing what to do. So, so same tutorials. Maybe looking at YouTube videos, getting a coach again could help here.

I feel like the problem though, for most folks is just so they just don't want to. Right? Like, I'd rather stay home and scroll through TikTok or Instagram or whatever, that there's always something else that's less effortful. So what do we do about the behaviors that we know what to do? So that's the head. Maybe we don't feel like it. So maybe we'll get back to that part. But we have the knowledge, we have the know how of I just need to go and I need to go on a jog or do Some push ups or whatever it is, I know I need to do it, but there's something else there. So, you know, everything good, everything worth having in life is always on this other side of discomfort. How, how do you, how do we get over that? I don't wanna feeling.

So that's the heart, right? You're really talking about the heart here. The heart is not in there. And this is where I would actually maybe question that assumption that it really needs to be hard because. And actually, you know, I went through it saying the gym, it's good for you, you need to go to the gym. Even at a rational level. Actually, maybe not. Maybe that's not the thing you should be doing. A lot of people who end up getting in shape, it's because they found their thing. Right, right. Maybe the gym. Exactly.

Or whatever they want. Yeah.

And so that's what I would question here, is that because my definition of hard is not the same as your definition of hard.

Yeah.

I get a lot of people who tell me you've been writing this newsletter every week for four years. That must be so hard.

I think that was me who said that to you.

No, it's not. I'm so excited. Every Thursday when I open my Google Doc and I start typing, I'm so excited.

The ultimate hack. How do you convince yourself that something that is currently sucky. How do you convince yourself that it's fun? How did you get in that head frame where something that was. Because at some point it must have sucked. Right. Or was it always fun?

Do you. Do you have to convince yourself or do you need. And that's kind of what I encourage people to do, to experiment with different modalities. So maybe the gym is not what you need to do. Maybe you should join a running club instead.

But to get better, I feel like a lot of stuff starts when you're super amateur. Like I wrote this article a long time ago about how you need to find your mia, your minimum enjoyable action when you're an amateur. So when you're an amateur and you want to write, you want to start a business, you want to date more, you want to whatever it is at the beginning, just find the enjoyable part. So I think we're very much aligned there. I call it the mia. Right, Minimum enjoyable action. So I used to be clinically obese and I made this mistake of, oh, I need to kill myself in the gym, I need to go on these fad diets. And they would work for a while and then invariably they would not work. And so not until I figured out this concept of a mia. I just started walking. Just walk. Just like, literally go outside. And I like walking. And I would listen to a podcast or call a friend or whatever, go. Or maybe go on a walk with a friend. And that was always mia. And so until this very day, if I don't feel like exercising, I just go back to the mia, because I like that. But then you reach what I call the okay plateau. The okay plateau is when you want to be better than an amateur at something. And to overcome this, like, stasis of I'm just okay at it, you have to push through pain. So, like, when I started writing, I just enjoyed writing. It was just fun. I did it actually, as a break from work. I would, like, toss down ideas, but I was an amateur and I wasn't very good. And to break through, to get good, I had to break through that okay plateau, which means I had to, like, put in the hours, and then it sucked. And then it was hard.

Right? Yeah.

And that's the part I think is really tough, like, to get. I. And I think that for the vast majority of people, probably like 80% of people, they're just going from, like, nothing to, wow. If I could just have a regular practice, that'd be amazing. But what if you want to be better than an amateur? Like, you really want to be great at something.

And you're right, we're saying the same thing, right? Because you need to try different things so you can figure out that minimal, enjoyable action first. And then when you get to that okay plateau, I love that, by the way, it becomes harder to get to that stage of mastery. But there's something that has changed for most people at that stage is that you want it now. You want it. And again, for you, you wanted to push through and go through that hard stage in order to get to the other side and become a better writer. But for someone else, it might be another thing that they want to push through. Right. So what I would do is, instead of necessarily worrying about that second stage, I would increase the number of minimal, enjoyable actions that you experiment with. And also accepting that not all of them will progress to the next stage.

Of mastery with the same behavior, with the.

No, no. With different ones. So, for example, you could say, I'm going to start running, taking care of my shit. I'm going to start cooking a little bit. I'm going to start writing a little bit. I'm going to start maybe hosting some sort of little, like, tea party at my place every week. I'm going to do all of these things.

So different life areas.

Different life areas. And I'm going to get okay at all of them.

Okay.

Even if you stop here, honestly, like, I think this is going to have a positive impact on your life.

Right.

And then I'm going to see. And that's really where it's important to pay attention to the signals. Right. I'm going to see where there's one where I'm like, actually, I would like to be better here. Like, that's something where I feel drawn to push through that phase of the hard work of getting to the side of mastery. Right. And I'm going to focus on that one. And I know it's going to suck for a while, but at a rational level, at an emotional level, I'm aligned. Right. I want to go there. And that's okay. If I'm still, like, at cooking, I'm just okay at cooking, Right. If I'm okay at writing, if I'm okay to going to a gym. But I want to become the best host on earth.

Yeah.

I want everybody to want to come and hang out and have tea at my place. And I'm going to read all of the books about how to be a good host. That's going to be the one where I'm going to be on the path of mastery. And it's going to suck and it's going to be a lot of hard work. But I want it now.

So does the. Is there like a phase change where you need a different technique to get world class at it?

Yeah. And this is not necessarily something that I cover in my book because I'm really about, like, helping people. Like, in that phase. A lot of people, they obsess so much to the. About the next phase.

Right.

That they don't let themselves experiment with lots of different things first. Right.

I think there's. When you want to get really good at something. The only thing I've found that really, really works is keeping those things that you learn from the MIA of setting a time box for that behavior, figuring out the internal triggers that are causing you to not want to do those things. Right. I think we both very much agree on that. And then in terms of putting your butt in the chair when you don't feel like it, I think pacts are super important. When you have some kind of commitment device, that's the only way I found to really go next level. Whether it's a deadline from your publisher, whether it's a coach that you pay, that's Gonna be angry at you if you don't show up. Whether it's. I mean, every book I've worked on, I always have multiple editors who are holding me accountable to get my deadlines and to write well. And I don't wanna embarrass myself in front of them. Right. So, like, having that accountability for me, like making a pact with another person. Like in indistractable, I talked about how I have this friend, you know, Mark, I think, and I bet him, like, literally I made with him that if I don't finish my book by this deadline, I'm gonna pay him $10,000. Like on one hand, you're like, why would you have to do that? Aren't you the guy who wrote the book? Indistractable. How could you? Well, that is why I'm indistractable is because I make these pacts, like those. If I don't do that, it won't work. I have to make that bet with somebody. But if I were to make that bet over an amateur behavior, I'd burn out. It's only like you said, it's because I've been married for 24 years now and I feel like that's in a good place and other things are in good place. But I can afford to say, okay, I'm gonn on that thing that now I really want to be good at.

Yeah. And it's really about commitment. I find it hilarious because I also use the term pact as a. To commit to the experiment. Finish the experiment.

Yes.

And so really it's at different levels. Right. You decide what to commit to. And I feel like when you're at that level of the minimal, enjoyable action, just commit to at least trying it out, collect enough data and then. Yeah. And then see, is that something where I want to progress to the next stage or am I okay? I think it's completely fine to not try to be excellent in every single area of your life. Right. You can again say, I'm going to just learn enough cooking so that when people come over, I can make something nice, but I don't have to become a mission start chef. Right. But then when you go to the next level, again, commitment, commit. You decide that's the. I'm going all in with this one.

Right.

And you commit to that.

Right, Right. Do you think that there's like a specific order of, like a hierarchy of what things should be, people should focus on in different phases of life?

Not necessarily. I feel like we're all different. And the. Again, I think the mistake A lot of people are making is maybe to try and copy paste what other people are doing at a specific phase in their life. Or even worse, not trying something new because it's too late. Because most people have done that already, maybe in their 20s, and maybe they're in their 40s, and they feel like, I'm going to look city if I'm trying this thing now or, you know, too late to start my startup, too late to start learning how to play the guitar, too late to learn a new language. And it's very unfortunate, Right? So, no, actually, it's the opposite. We should really feel empowered to try anything, experiment with anything at any age in our life.

Now, talk to me about purpose that you. You're not the biggest fan of thinking that people have a purpose. Tell me more about that.

I do know quite a few people actually who have a purpose. But what I disagree with is how do you find it? And because we have this idea that you need to live a purposeful life, a lot of people are making themselves miserable by looking for their purpose. They're looking everywhere. Where's my purpose? What's my purpose? How come I haven't found my purpose yet? Right. But if you start actually talking with entrepreneurs, writers, authors, any kind of people in any kind of work that have found their purpose, and if they're honest with you, they'll tell you, actually, I kind of stumbled upon this, Right. I was doing this thing, and then I realized I love this other thing. And now that has become the thing that makes me excited to wake up in the morning.

Right.

So instead of spending all of this time and energy trying to find your purpose, I think you should create a life where you have lots of opportunities to try different things, to experiment and see what emerges out of that.

Yeah. What's your take on habits? I think the general advice we get from a lot of coaches and productivity pros is like, just turn into a habit.

Exactly. And I think that's the assumption. That's the problem, is that we tell people, here are good habits and you have to build these, and here are bad habits and you have to break these. Right, Right. I want to question this. Why is a habit intrinsically good or bad? If you remove the really bad ones, like smoking or anything like that. Right. Why does it have to be so black and white? And why is a habit that's good for you necessarily good for me? Right. So I think before we decide to. Before we choose a habit and we say, I'm going to stick to this thing for the Rest of my life. Maybe let's try it for a little bit before maybe let's experiment. Let's say let me try it for one month, right. See how I feel. Is this working for me or not?

Yeah.

So I have a friend, for example, who experimented with going to bed the same time every evening. And that didn't work for him. His creativity was way better when he allowed himself to stay up until 2am and finish an essay and then he would sleep very late in the, in the morning and that was fine. He has the kind of life where he can do that and he was happier by not trying to go to bed exactly at the same time. Even though for a lot of other people that's really good. Right. So just trying it and then decide if you want to turn into a habit experiment, then. Habit.

It's funny because I think you could listen to this discussion and say, well, you're advocating for kind of being loosey goosey and don't have a lot of constraints, but actually you're saying the opposite. You're saying, have very strict constraints around the experiment and do it 100% and then you can do something completely different. Then you could be unconstrained, but follow through with that experiment to see, hey, does it work?

Work? Yeah, it's, it's all based on the scientific method. I'm a scientist. Right. So it's not about, oh, let's just see what happens. Right. It's about being intentional. Choose areas of your life where you feel like you could improve and then conduct experiments, collect the data and then decide. And don't necessarily try to do a thousand different experiments at the same time. Pick a couple of things, look at what works and what doesn't. And the great thing about that is that just like a scientist, even if you don't know where you're going, even if you don't know what the outcome is going to be if you keep on doing this, you're going to create growth loops where every time you get new data you can feed that into the next experiment and you're going to learn and grow.

Yeah. So as a scientist, how are you removing those exogenous factors? Right. Like you hear a lot of people biohacking these days and trying this and that. And you have people who are taking 100 pills a day and how do they actually separate, like what's working, what's not working? How do you make sure that you control, you create a good, valid, controlled experiment for you as an end of one.

Yeah. So I wouldn't even try to be honest, like, that's not possible outside of the lab and with the lives that we live, that's not possible. But what I would do though, is just try. That's why I tell people, tiny experiment, but long enough that you have enough data that you can have a feel for what might impact it. So, for example, when I conducted my meditation experiment, I did it for two weeks, but I had a big work travel in the middle. And I know that I needed to make the experiment a little bit longer so I can see, I could see if that impacted the results or not. Right. So you can see that's not super scientific. Right. But I'm just being aware of what's going on in my life and how that might impact it. And also just collecting data around metrics that matter to you, deciding what is important to you. Not everything. Right. But in my case, I could collect, for example, a little bit in my journal. I journal every morning. Right. So I might write about how I feel that morning, how rested I am, how anxious I am, because those are things that are important to me. But also might be a weird metric, but how I'm talking to my partner, if they're asking me to put the dishes away or something like this, do I snap back?

Do you ask them what they think or is it self assessment?

They'll tell me if I'm like cranky. But if you. You really practice paying attention, you get to a point where you don't even need people to tell you. You just notice you have this little hard to admit. Yeah. I didn't have to reply. I didn't have to talk to this person like that. Right.

Yeah.

And so that's a metric for me as well.

Yeah. If.

When I.

If you ever have kids and you have to apologize to your kid about something you know you did wrong, it's very humbling. Yes, we should all do it for our kids. But to say to your kids, I screw it up, I'm sorry.

Exactly.

It's even worse than your spouse.

But you need to pay attention to your actions, your behaviors to be able to notice this. Right. The step of actually apologizing is hard, but you're never going to get to that step if you don't even realize that your actions might not be done.

What other metrics are you tracking regularly?

So I think those would be the main ones. But I also, again, in my journal, I try to pay attention to how I feel when I sit down to work. And it's just in that first minute. Sometimes I'M dreading it a little bit. And that's very interesting to notice that. And why is that? And quite often I can look at my calendar and pinpoint, oh, there's this meaning coming up. And I'm a bit anxious about that, for example, or this deadline or something like that. And so instead of having this what psychologists called free floating anxiety, where you just feel anxious and you feel like. Like there's no valid reason for it, by doing this little detective work, you can usually find one or two things that might be the source of the anxiety.

So that happens to you when you have a meeting that's coming up that you feel anxious about. It'll keep you from feeling good about the writing or the task at hand.

Yeah. And it might be helpful in those cases to shuffle things around a little bit. So I might block half an hour to just have a look at the agenda for the meeting and prepare some notes and then I'll get back, back to whatever creative work I'm supposed to do and just feel better.

Very nice. Very cool. Tell me about uncertainty and control. I think that's fascinating about how we are so desperate for control and how we resist uncertainty and how that sometimes can help us, but oftentimes hurts us.

From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that our brains are designed to reduce uncertainty. Think about our ancestors in the jungle. The more you knew about the environment, the more you were likely to survive. So we constantly try to understand patterns, to find answers. And when we find ourselves in a space of uncertainty, we try to resolve it as quickly as possible. There's a term for that, liminal spaces where you're in the in between. It's not quite clear what you should be doing. Who are the other players? What are the rules? And our natural reaction to this is to try to get out of there as quickly as possible. And for a lot of people, too, we have something called compensatory control, where the more uncertainty there is, the more in control we try to get. That's where we try to apply all of the frameworks we try to really get clear answers to. What am I supposed to do here? How is that going to work? What is the outcome going to be? Right. And it can be reassuring. But when we do that, we close many doors to different opportunities that we might have been able to explore if we kept our options a little bit more open and if we embrace uncertainty a little bit more.

Do you think that leads to almost easy solutions where we want control? I'm thinking about the supplement industry that I don't really want to have to go to the gym and I don't really want to eat right. But I can take this powder and that's going to make me healthy. Is that about this search for control over something that's much, much more difficult to control than we're.

Yeah. Shortcuts. We go for shortcuts and the shortcuts are not necessarily wrong. Sometimes you can use a little like, quick, like heuristic to find a solution to a problem. Sometimes actually someone has found the exact solution to the exact problem you're facing. So it's not that it's inherently wrong, but you can't, you can't know for sure if you haven't at least looked at different possibilities before making that choice. So instead of going straight for the supplement, which might be the answer. Right. Have a look at other solutions and don't try to go for the most obvious shortcut.

How do we make sure that we're not taking a shortcut, that we're, that we're not just grasping for control to make us feel temporarily good as opposed to the long term solution?

It's really all about. So there's this concept in psychology called metacognition. And it just means thinking about thinking. It's observing your own thoughts. And this is a practice that can really allow you to notice why you're making certain decisions. So instead of just doing something, it's about really posing and asking yourself, wait, why am I doing this? You can't do this for everything in life. Right. There are some things we do in an automatic way that are actually very useful. Every time you're in front of a door, you don't ask yourself, why am I opening it this way? Right. Like you're just. You just do it.

Yeah.

But for important areas of your life, your health, for example, your relationships, your creative work, work. It might be worth taking a little bit of time practicing metacognition.

Do you think we're smart enough to be able to do it to ourselves?

Yes, that's exactly what it is actually. And this is something that is uniquely human. And this idea of a second level of cognition where you can observe our own thoughts so we're able to do it, but life is complicated. It gets busy. Right. And also we have all of those different distractions. And so. So the difficulty is not necessarily the practice itself. It's making space for it.

Yeah. Is there anything that you do or that is that you've had to question yourself and then decided, oh, that doesn't serve me something that's maybe a little unconventional. Julie and I had a conversation with a friend of ours, and one of the things we like to do with our friends is to compare notes, right? Like, how are you parenting and how are you taking care of your body and what's going on in your career and what are you learning? What doing are you, what beliefs are you challenging? So for me, one of the best things someone can do for me is to change my mind. I love it, love it. But I've also been called a contrarian because it gets kind of annoying for people to constantly have me asking them, well, why do you do it that way? So, like, one time, this friend, she said, you guys think too much. Because, like, we were talking about, you know, we homeschool our kid, which is super unconventional. We eat weird, we exercise weird. Like, everything we do is weird. And so at some point, Julie and I are like, whoa, are we weird? Like, maybe we should be a little bit more conventional because it takes a lot of energy to constantly keep asking ourselves, are we doing this right? Are we doing this right? Are we doing this right? But I don't know what's, what's the, what's the right way to do it? What's the balance?

I just moved back in with my husband after three years and a half of long distance. And I can tell you, everybody around us was like, what, what are you guys doing? Singapore, London, what? That's not even long distance. It's super long distance. Right. And that's something I'm a big proponent of, is just figuring out, co creating your relationships, figuring out together what you need out of the relationship, what works for you and what doesn't. And so that's why I'm. I really never judge whatever configuration people have and whatever, you know, rules they've created in their relationships and those rules can, can change. It's, it's really. When you're, you're building a relationship with someone, it's an ever evolving contract. And this is also why I'm a big fan of, again, that, that metacognition, that self reflection. The only thing you can do wrong, I think, is just to assume that whatever the default is is the right thing for you.

What's been the biggest thing you've changed in your life? Something that you used to think was right or a way of being that.

You no longer, I think, probably quit. I quit drinking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Completely.

Completely. It's been a bit over two years now. Yeah, it really used to be part of my identity. I'm French So I think I had my first glass of wine when I was 10. Prob that an adult gave me at a Christmas party, just being like, you're old enough now, but it's just part of the culture and, and it's very normal to drink with every meal in my culture. But very quickly it became a crutch for me. Every time I was feeling a little bit stressed or anxious or I had doubts, I would just pour myself a drink and immediately feel a little bit better. And it, it was actually a big change for me to have to relearn how to live without this thing that had become such a big part in my life. In the past, every time I would hang out with a friend, we would go for drinks, for example. And so I had to rethink what is. What is hanging out with a friend really and thinking about what are different activities that we could do together, et cetera. So that's probably been the biggest change in my life in the past few years.

Interesting. Did you use the tiny experiments methodology to test it or did you go cold turkey?

I went cold turkey. But I did experiment a lot with ways to replace that in my life. Because again, hanging out with friends or even managing my stress, all of a sudden I didn't have what I thought were tools at the time, but again were crutches. So I experimented with different ways to manage my stress, for example, because I was not going to just stay stressed every time I was feeling this way. Right. So I did have to experiment a lot that.

Did you have the techniques to deal with the stress first before you gave up drinking?

No, I didn't.

So what did you do in that interim? Like what. When you felt stress without the stress reliever, what did you do?

Different things. The first is that I. I asked around and I didn't know a few other people who had quit drinking. And I literally texted them, I said, hey, I know you haven't been drinking for a few years. What do you do when you're stressed?

Because I don't know, I don't have.

That thing I used to do.

Now it's a new skill. I think I just read the other day that this generation drinks like a bottle a week in France, I think it's a bottle a week. The average French person and the generation before it was half a bottle a day. And then the generation before that, it was a bottle and a half a day. Yes, it's incredible. So sorry I interrupted you.

I'm not surprised at all. And again, when I was. Was crying as A baby. My grandma used to give me a little bit of alcohol. Yeah, it's really.

Times have changed.

Exactly.

And a cigarette as well.

Wouldn'T be surprised, but wow.

So it was complete. Like it had always been your relief valve.

Exactly. So just asking around, I think, is a really good first step.

Yeah.

Because you don't really know what you don't know. And those other people have spent more time trying different things and experimenting. And then I tried those different things. I literally just almost systematically, every time I felt stressed, I was like, okay, let me try this thing. And I found some things that worked for me, others that didn't. So, for example, one of my friends said, oh, I just open a book and I start reading a few pages of something that I like, didn't work for me at all. I just started thinking more. I could not focus on what I was reading, so it didn't work for me. Me, Another friend said, go for a walk. That worked to an extent when I managed to go on the walk. But quite often I couldn't leave the house when I was very stressed. I was just again, overthinking, sitting on my sofa, feeling like something's wrong. And then the one thing that worked for me was just getting up and dancing in my living room. So that's something I do very regularly now. If I feel stressed, I literally close my laptop, I get up, I put some music on, and I dance for five minutes like no one's watching. And fortunately, no one's watching. And then I get back to work. Work.

Wow, that's amazing. It's. It's cool to see when someone can. Can find alternatives to these internal triggers. Right. That we all struggle with. That that is healthy as opposed to harmful is. Do you find that it's helpful to. If you're in for a penny, go for, you know, be in for a pound that you don't drink at all, or do you still let yourself drink from time to time?

It really depends on people. But in my case, I think I had definitely developed addictive behaviors around it. So I think it's healthier for me drink at all. But I know people who are able to just have a little liberatory drink here and there or nothing. But again, it's. It's really about knowing yourself. And I also learned that through experimentation. I did try to just have a drink here and there. But very quickly I would come back to that association between, I'm feeling bad, here's a shortcut.

Right.

And so that didn't work for me. And so now I. Now I know. No.

Is that why you, you quit? Or was there some kind of incident or, or turning point?

There wasn't an incident, but I did work with psychedelics to help me. And so that really, that was for me, the. Really the turning point that helped me make the change. And so I'm very grateful for that. But mostly I think the reason why I made that change, psychedelics or no psychedelics, is that deep down I knew something was wrong.

Yeah.

And I knew that the life I was living was not the life I wanted to be live.

So the psychedelics helped you see that there was another possibility that you hadn't seen before.

Yeah, I. As part of preparing for the psychedelic experience, I had to quit drinking for two weeks.

Oh, okay.

And on the other side of the experience, it felt really weird to me to start drinking again. I felt like, oh, actually I don't need that, I don't want that.

In a way, it was a mini experiment. Right. That two weeks, you didn't say, I'm going to quit drinking, you said, I'm going to quit drinking for two weeks so that I can do this other thing I want to do.

Exactly, yeah. And then I didn't start drinking again. Again. I experimented a little bit with having a few glasses here and there. Didn't work for me. So, yeah. So that's definitely the biggest change in my life.

Interesting. You talk about the. In the book, about beliefs and cognitive scripts. Tell me about how you use those.

So psychologists have discovered that we all follow certain scripts that tell you exactly to behave in a certain situation. So I'm going to give you an example. You go to the dentist, and let's say the dentist comes out and they tell you to open your mouth in the waiting room.

How would you feel in the waiting room?

In the waiting room in front of everybody? Super weird, right? It's because we all have this script, right, that you go there, you wait in the waiting room, they call your name, you go in the doctor's office, and then you open your mouth there. Right. So we have this script. Script, very helpful. And we have a lot of those different scripts in our lives. But what we don't realize is that there are decisions that we're making in our careers, in our relationships, where they're also an underlying script that is making us make certain choices or decisions. And in the book, I talk about three different scripts, the big ones, the three big bad ones that are having an invisible impact on our lives. So the first one is the SQL scripts script it's when we're making decisions based on the decisions we made in the past. So for example, if you finish university, you might only consider the kind of jobs that make sense based on what you studied because you want it to make sense to have a nice clean narrative. Right. Then the second type of script is the crowd pleaser. And this is when you write a script that is going to make everybody around you happy. That could be your parents, that could be your partner. And this is why you have a lot of people who end up up waking up one day and realizing, actually, I didn't want to be a lawyer or I didn't want to be a doctor, but they wrote a crowd pleaser.

Nobody should want to be a lawyer.

Yeah, I don't think any kids grow up feeling like that's what I want to do. That's my.

Sorry, all my lawyer, lawyer friends. There's a, there's a couple who like it, but very few do.

Yeah. And, and the third one is the most insidious one because this is one we actually celebrate as a society. And this one is the epic script. And this is the one where we believe that whatever we do, it has to be big. It has to be a Hollywood movie. We have to be passionate about it. And because of that, we don't pay attention necessarily to smaller things, curiosities that could evolve into something bigger in the future if we at least explored them, planted the seed instead of just dismissing them straight away because they're not big enough.

Right. So these scripts can serve us. Right. They give us these expectations of what we could become, but they can also hurt us. How do we make sure that they don't hurt us? How do we not become slaves to them?

It's really about knowing in which parts of your life you want to apply them. So for example, if you are in an environment where everybody is eating healthy and going to the gym and that's kind of the script around you, well, you know what? Good script? I'm going to use that one. This is great. But if you're considering the next steps in your career and everybody around you always goes for a very safe career, you can ask yourself, is that really the script that I want to follow here? The answer, by the way, might be yes. Actually that's what's important to me. I want a very safe career because maybe I have a bit more of a risky or non money making hobby on the side and I just want to use the money I'm making in my day job to do that thing so whatever the answer is, fine. Right. But it's about asking that question, which we rarely do.

So give us maybe a couple quick tips or takeaways that everyone can, can start implementing in their life right away.

An exercise that a lot of people I've worked with find very helpful is to spend 24 hours observing your life. So imagine that you're an anthropologist that is going to conduct a study about a new, a different culture that they have just discovered. They've never been there before, they've never talked to these people, and they go there with their notebook and they take notes and they ask themselves, why are we. Why are they doing things the way they're doing them? Why do they care about these things? Why are they doing this and not that? So take this outside observer stance about your own life for 24 hours.

Okay?

Literally take a notebook if needed. Or you can do that on your phone and take notes. And that could be things like, this thing is draining my energy. This thing is giving me energy. Interesting. Every time I have to be in this meeting or talk to this person or work on this project. Project, I notice a little bit of anxiety. Or every time I'm walking to go from work and going back to home, I just feel very alive. And this feels really good. And you take little notes based on that. Is there something you want to explore? Is there something that could be turned into an experiment? So if you notice, for example, that you feel good every time you decide to walk back home instead of taking the bus, what about saying, for two weeks I'm going to walk back home, home. I'm not going to take the bus and start collecting data. So that's a fun little exercise that I recommend people can do. Very easy. Takes 24 hours. And then you can conduct your first tiny experiment.

Yeah. Are you conducting any experiments on yourself right now?

Yeah. So I mentioned going to bed at the same time thing. So that's something I want to experiment with, actually. And I'm very curious about it because as I mentioned, it seems to work for some people and not for others.

So right now you go to bed whenever you feel like it?

Yes, that's what I've been doing my entire life, really. Just going to bed whenever I felt like it.

Oh, it's a life changer.

Do you go to bed exactly the same time?

Yeah, I mean, I go to bed when I plan to go to bed. So I never. And this is fairly recent. Right. Since writing Indistractable, I have a bedtime mostly because my daughter, when I was Telling her, probably yelling at her at the time, go to bed, it's past your bedtime. She looked at me and said, daddy, do you have a bedtime? And she was right. I didn't have a bedtime. So I was being a hippie hypocrite because I know sleep is important for her, it's also important for me. And yet I didn't have a bedtime. So I said, okay, fine, I'll have a bedtime. Stupid bedtime. So now I have a bedtime. Now that might change from time to time, right? Like if I in Singapore, sometimes I have to take late calls because it's morning in the States. But I know my bedtime at minimum the day before. I don't just let it drift and drift and drift. And most of the time I go to bed by 10pm and man, man, it's a game changer. Do you wear an apple watch or anything that tracks your sleep?

No, no, I don't.

Because that'd be an interesting experiment actually, like before you do a tiny experiment, see, like in order to quantify, like what is your sleep score now? Sleep score is there's pros and cons which we can talk about. But it would be interesting to see. Like, okay, when I let myself go to sleep whenever I feel like it, what's like my sleep, what's the quality of my sleep look like versus when I have a consistent bedtime. Is there any difference? Difference? For me, it was a huge, huge difference.

I love that. And I also love your approach of saying deciding your bedtime in advance versus having a strict bedtime. And I think that's actually more appealing to me.

Totally, so totally. If you want to am, that's what I advocate for. Like, it's not about living the way I live my life. You don't have to go to bed at 10pm if you want to go to bed every night at 2:00am, do it. You're an adult. You can do whatever the hell you want, but decide in advance. Don't do it because you, you know, are revenge procrastinating because you know you're trying to gain control of your life because it's crazy. Crazy, you know, or because you, you know, whatever it is, you want to make sure you know in advance what you're going to be doing with your time and attention.

Amazing. Thank you. And this is why it's really important to talk to other people where you run your experiments because then you get more information and you can design it better.

Yeah, yeah, let me know how it goes, I'd be so curious to hear how you feel because you're, you're so productive and you're I'm actually a little scared to see what's going to happen. If you're even more better rested and more productive, that's going to be interesting. So, as we wrap up, tell people where they can learn more about you. And, of course, course, Nest Labs, they can go check, check out your newsletter, but maybe give a little plug for the book as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So if you want to read the book, go to tinyexperiments.org and it has all of the options to order it. And if you want to read my newsletter, which I send every week on Thursday, you go to nestlabs.com newsletter fantastic.

Thanks so much for being here.

Thank you.