Unconventional Success: How Tiny Experiments Change Everything | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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Episode Transcript:

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:00:00] The doctors found a blood clot in my arm, and it was threatening to travel to my lungs. And my first reaction was to. That was one moment where I caught myself and felt like something is really wrong with my sense of priorities right now.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:17] Anne-Laure Le Cunff is a French-Algerian neuroscientist, entrepreneur and writer. After leaving a prestigious role at Google, she founded Nest Labs, pursued a PhD in psychology and neuroscience, and champions this idea that life is a series of curious experiments rather than a linear path. In her new book, Tiny Experiments.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:00:37] A scientist doesn’t feel like a failure when they get an unexpected result, and this is something that they can learn from and use to design their next experiment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:48] And all of this leads to a different philosophy.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:00:52] I wish I could tell you that I went from this moment of realization to then starting straight away, to experiment more and live more freely. But that’s not what happened. I was working at Google. I had a really good career there. Um, good salary, good team. I was working on interesting projects, and I had a healthcare where the doctors found a blood clot in my arm and it was threatening to travel to my lungs. But they said, don’t worry, if we schedule the surgery pretty soon, it will be okay. So let’s do that, right? And my first reaction was to open my laptop and check my calendar so I could make sure to schedule this when it would not disrupt any of the product launches that we had planned with the team. That was the first thing I thought about. How can I make sure that I’m not disrupting work for others? So that was one moment where I caught myself and felt like something is really wrong with my sense of priorities. Right now. I might be a bit too focused on my career, and the other moment was a few months later I did do surgery. It went well and I went back to France to visit my parents for Christmas, and someone in my family asked, how’s life? And I don’t know why, but for the first time I really listened to the question and I paused and I asked myself, how is life really? And on the surface it was great. Work was great. I again, I was living a fairly exciting. I was living in San Francisco, working for one of the best tech companies that you could work for at the time. But I felt a little bit empty, and this is when I started questioning my path.

Jonathan Fields: [00:02:33] What was it? What was the feeling when you sort of paused for that moment? Um, this is going to sound like a weird question, but what was the feeling of emptiness for you?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:02:42] It’s, uh, I describe it as, um, being burned out and as if. As if someone had spoiled the movie for you and that told you how it finishes, and all of a sudden you’re not really interested in watching the movie anymore. That’s how I felt like I had this sense of clarity as to where my career could go. The steps that I had to follow, what success looked like, what was expected from me. All of the rules of the game were pretty clear to me. But because of that, there was no sense of excitement, of wonder anymore.

Jonathan Fields: [00:03:19] I’m really curious now. Did you have sort of growing up? Did you have an ideology or a sense of philosophy of what, quote, work was supposed to be like in life that came from family or friends or local community that you kind of tracked yourself into and said, I’m doing the thing, um, before this happened.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:03:39] Oh, absolutely. I think it’s very rare for to meet people who are not in that situation. A lot of us end up following the scripts that we’ve been taught unconsciously, and I was a very curious kid, as most kids are. If when you ask me, when I was a kid, what I wanted to be when I grew up, I said, uh, a writer or a paleontologist. So, you know, I was keeping my options open. But, um, coming from an immigrant background, my parents really pushed me to optimize for safety and stability, making sure that I would always have a roof over my head and food on the table. These were the factors that was optimizing for. And so I chose my studies, and I chose my first job, and I designed my career around optimizing for safety.

Jonathan Fields: [00:04:30] So when you’re home and this person asks you how how you are, and you pause for a moment and you realize, okay, on paper, objectively, I’ve checked all the boxes that I was supposed to check, you know, but why am I not feeling the way that I’m feeling? Um, where do you go from there? You know, because if you sort of like, you’ve tracked it, you grabbed the brass ring and you got it. Um, was it disconcerting for you to sort of, like, in that moment, say, what’s happening here?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:05:02] It was. And that’s what’s interesting, is that I wish I could tell you that I went from this moment of realization to then starting straight away to experiment more and live more freely. But that’s not what happened. I realized something was wrong. And so I said, that’s probably a sign that I need to quit my job, and I need to start something new, and I need to build my own thing. And so I quit my job at Google and I started a startup. What I didn’t realize at the time that I know now is that I was yet again following another script, because that’s what a lot of people around me were doing. You start your job at a big tech company. You stay for long enough that you can save a bit of money and build your network, and then you raise money and you start a startup to save the world. Anything less than that is failure. So I followed that script again, and it’s only when my startup failed that I found myself again in that state of okay, what next? But this time around, I decided to really sit with the uncertainty, to really explore it and not try to just go and do the next logical thing that you’re supposed to do when you’re feeling this way.

Jonathan Fields: [00:06:19] Yeah. I mean, it is so interesting the way you describe it because, you know, I think maybe if you’re especially if you’re not in the tech industry and you look at somebody who’s at Google building this incredible career and then decides to just completely leave, walk away and start their own business, a lot of people would raise an eyebrow and say, how could you ever do that? But in the space that you were living in, in the tech world, that’s actually a pretty normal linear path. You know, it’s almost like the equivalent of the investment banking path. You know, like you sort of, you know, you go, you become an analyst and then you go, you get your MBA and then you go back and you become like deeper embedded. And then you go out and oftentimes start your own thing or start your own firm or like, um, and even though you’re doing your own thing, it’s actually like really following a script still. Um, so when when that startup fails, then, I mean, imagine it was just brutally hard for you anyway, because then when you have your own thing that fails, I have been through that. It’s not fun. Um, how do you how do you think through at that point? How to do the next move differently?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:07:24] Yeah, I, um, it was very difficult, but once I had processed the grief because that really what the emotion was like, it really felt like grief when my startup failed. I actually felt a sense of freedom that was very surprising to me. I did not expect that that was going to be the next emotion to show up after grief. Freedom. Freedom to do whatever I wanted to do, but also a little bit of, um, a fear Here around this, this freedom. Because all of a sudden I didn’t have a next step, didn’t have a blueprint, and didn’t want to follow a script. So what I did was that I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, what would you be interested in exploring even if nobody was watching, even if money was not part of the equation, even if you removed any kind of thoughts around outcomes and success and achievements, what is something that you would like to explore? If you could just wake up in the morning and do that thing just because you want to do it, and you’re curious about it in and of itself. And for me, that had always been the brain. I had always been curious about why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. And so I decided in my late 20s to go back to university and study neuroscience, which also raised a few eyebrows, actually, because a lot of people around me said, what are you doing? You don’t become a neuroscientist at that age, right? Those are very long studies. You don’t just do that. Like maybe pick something easier. Um, and and going back to university, how are you going to pay for this? And so it just, you know, maybe looked a little bit crazy from the outside, but it felt really grounded for me because I knew I had made this decision not based on trying to achieve a certain version of success or following a certain script, but just because that was genuinely the thing that was the most curious about in that specific moment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:09:26] Yeah, I mean, it’s such a powerful move when you reach that moment where you decide that the the script of others expectations is no longer going to guide your choices and your work and your life. But that is a brutally hard thing for most people to do. There’s so much you know, there’s fear of being rejected, fear of being outcast from the people you want to be seen as being the accomplished one, the smart one. The one is like doing all the good things. Um, did you have any sort of internal battle? Um, when people were really raising an eyebrow and questioning this?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:10:00] In that moment, I felt so strongly about my decision that it was actually fine. But in the years afterwards, especially when I talk to former colleagues who stayed at Google and had another promotion and a raise, and then they bought their house, their first house, and then their second house and or other startup founders that I knew who their first startup failed, but they tried again in the second one was successful. And obviously you’re going to compare yourself to these other people and and you’ll have your moments of doubt. So I never tell people that it’s about getting rid of doubt. It’s really not about getting rid of doubt. I think if you’re a human being, you are going to experience doubt. We’re social creatures and we’re going to actually keep on comparing ourselves to each other. It’s more about the response that you have when you experience that kind of of doubt and uncertainty and embracing it as part of the process, knowing that it’s normal and that actually it might be a signal that you’re doing something interesting.

Jonathan Fields: [00:11:00] Yeah, I love that. And that’s been a big part of the way that I tend to look at work and life as well. Um, you know, but we we are I remember doing research on this years ago when I was working on a book and, and it was all about how we deal with uncertainty in high stakes environments. And, you know, and you can see fMRI studies where the fear centers of the brain light up. And, you know, this is something you talk and write about as well, you know, and we’re literally we’re soft wired to have this physiological and neurological response that makes us want to run from uncertainty. So walk me through some ideas and some sort of like strategies, because everybody’s going to experience this when we start to think about doing something that’s maybe not the mainstream. Take me into this a little bit more about how we sort of explore handling that psychology and physiology.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:11:50] I think two things. The first one is just in the way you approach experimentation in general in your life. I took that big leap. I don’t think I had to do that right. It is absolutely possible to experiment in areas of your life where it might feel a little bit more comfortable and elicit a little bit less fear. So you could say, I’m actually happy to stay in that linear career where I know what I’m doing. I like my team. It’s a good salary, but now that I have this sense of safety here, I might be able to experiment in other areas of my life. Maybe I’ll experiment with health, the way I push myself and challenge myself in terms of running or different types of sports. Maybe I’ll experiment when it comes to my creativity, to side projects, how I show up in my community, how I build my network in my relationships. So you don’t have to experiment with absolutely everything, and you don’t have to take a crazy leap and quitting your job or anything like that in order to experiment. So I think in terms of managing that fear in the first place, maybe you don’t have to put yourself in a situation where it’s overly scary, but they’re still going to be always a little bit of fear when you do something new, when you’re you’re uncomfortable. I think understanding why you’re feeling this way from a neurophysiological perspective can be helpful. From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense that when we feel like we don’t have enough information, we don’t understand what’s in front of us.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:13:20] We want to get out of there as quickly as possible. And when we were in the jungle, not knowing who the other players were, um, what that noise in the bushes was and where the resources were could actually mean death. So your brain is also optimized for your survival. And so knowing that that’s a natural reaction, this fear is natural, but that today, in your modern environment, your your ambition is not just to survive, but to thrive. And so you want to play with that fear. And again, from a neurophysiological perspective, something we can do that to the extent that we know other mammals cannot do, is that we’re able to practice what is called metacognition, which is observing your own thoughts. And so you can actually decide to have this activation in your prefrontal cortex where you look at the fear and you say, hello, old friend, you’re back. What do we do? What are you trying to tell me? Why are we feeling this way? So it’s a little bit like I describe it like a two step dance in the book, where you are able to move through, really trying to understand the subjective experience of fear and then working on the objective consequences. Is something really scary happening that you need to deal with, or is it just this kind of primal fear that we all experience when we do something new?

Jonathan Fields: [00:14:51] Yeah, and I think we will all experience that at some point. I mean, maybe it’s not your work or your job. Maybe it’s literally just approaching somebody you’re interested in for friendship or romance, you know, like at a dinner party or when friends are around. It’s we don’t know if it’s going to work out. We don’t know if they’re going to reject us or accept us. You know, there’s there are these micro social moments all the way up to the really big things in life where the stakes are incredibly high, but it’s like our brains still go to that same place. Um, so you’ve described this experience where you’re, you know, like you’re tracking in this linear life, this path, and you’re, like, doing all the right things, quote, succeeding by everybody else’s metrics. And then you decide to, um, go completely different direction. Um, take me more into this notion of the linear life because this was something that you were living, but this is something that you write and speak about. This is a really broad phenomenon. This is sort of like there’s a philosophy or there’s a way that you’re supposed to build your life and your living that so many of us buy into. Um, map this out a little bit for me, I.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:15:57] Think about it as a mental model, like how you visualize your life. I think the way we visualize our lives, and that has a lot of downstream consequences on literally everything and all of the decisions we make. A lot of us think about our lives and success in general as a ladder that you’re supposed to climb, and so you’re supposed to go through each step, each rung of the ladder and a little bit like in a video game, you’re supposed to collect all of the points and the artifacts at a certain level, and then you’re allowed to move on to the next one. And so you try to to climb this ladder and ideally get to the top before you die. That’s the idea. And this seems like such a simple mental model and such a harmless one. But actually, when you think about the way it makes us navigate life, it again has a lot of consequences. One of them is that we keep on comparing ourselves to each other, because it’s very easy. If we all have our ladders next to each other, to just look right and left and ask yourself, am I going fast enough? Am I high enough on this ladder? How come this person that was in school with me is already there and I’m still here? So that linear approach really creates comparison. Social comparison. So that’s one thing. The other one is that it’s based on a lot of assumptions. It’s based on the assumption that if you get to a specific point, a specific outcome or milestone, you’ll be happy. We all know that once we’ve had several experiences of success, we all know that that’s not the case.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:17:26] You get there and you realize that, oh, I’m still the same person. My problems are still here. I’m not particularly ecstatic to be here. And once you have this sense of short lived achievement, what you do is just feel like, oh, maybe I’m not on the right rung yet. I need to climb a little bit higher and then I’ll be happy. The other assumption it makes is that you know what outcome you want, and that’s the one that I feel like is the most dangerous. It assumes that the person you are today can imagine the kind of success that you’re capable of. And so you design your outcomes, your goals based on what you think is possible. But the person you’re going to be in two years or three years or five years is going to know a lot more things, have more skills, have more experiences, know more people, have lived more and will be able to imagine more. So to me, a ladder is and this linear model is optimizing for achieving a very narrow definition of success, where you might get to that place that you have predetermined before you got started, but it’s going to limit what you’re capable of and what you ideally want to do in life, I think, is get design your life in a way where when you look back in five years or in ten years, you feel like, huh, I had no idea the place I’m in right now existed. I had no idea I could get here. Mm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:18:55] No, I think that resonates so deeply. I think, you know, so many of us, we we pursue our lives and our livings in chasing a feeling that we think we’ll want to have ten years from now if our life looks a certain way, if our work looks a certain way, if our health and relationships look a certain way. Um, and assuming that we know like we know ourselves, we know the thing that we want, we know the way that we want to feel, and we know the things that will make us feel that, you know, like five years, ten years, 15 years, maybe even 20 years out. Um, and all the research says it’s completely wrong. I remember years ago reading Dan Gilbert’s work on effective forecasting. He’s like, we are literally worse at predicting how we’ll feel. You know, like at a certain point in our future is then we ask if we ask a total stranger who’s in that same situation ten, 20 years from now, like they’ll actually be more accurate and like describing how we would probably feel. But we think we’re really good at it. Like, we really delude ourselves and think like, no, we know we know ourselves, but we really don’t.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:20:03] We’re so bad at it because we feel like it’s also the the illusion that we feel like the more information we have, the more clarity we’ll have about the future. And so we think that I know myself, right, which again, is another assumption. A lot of us don’t know ourselves very well either. But also, yeah, we don’t know what’s in front of us and how each experience and each person we meet is going to shape us in ways that are impossible to imagine for us today.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:31] That makes so much sense to me, you know, and tell me if this is right. I think what I’m reading from what you’re describing here is that we end up effectively doing harm to our future selves by limiting all the actions we’re taking now to just tracking along this one sort of like linear path that we think will get us to this place and make us feel the way we want to feel. And we don’t realize that a we probably won’t feel that way even if we get it, and b we kind of put blinders on and then ignore all the other possibilities that may be so much more energizing and fulfilling for us. And does that make sense?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:21:10] Absolutely. And and again, there’s research on this. But also you don’t even need to read a research paper. If you go and grab someone a little bit older and ask them if they have any regrets in terms of the way they live their lives. A lot of them will tell you that they regret that they they didn’t pursue that random thing. They were curious about that they didn’t explore more. They didn’t jump on that plane to visit that country and take that holiday. Even if their boss said that we were busy at work, right? None of them will tell you that they regret not sticking better to the career ladder that they were supposed to climb at work. So I think at an instinctive level we know this. But again, the the fear of uncertainty and this illusion of control that we cling to, feeling like we can predict what we want and what the future will look like, is so strong that despite the intuition that this is really not the right way to design our lives, a lot of us still cling to the linear model.

Jonathan Fields: [00:22:11] Yeah, we want we want that safety. We want the feeling of like ground beneath our feet. It in my very early career, I was a lawyer and working in a large firm in New York, and a couple of years in, I decided to leave and I sent a memo around, which is what you did back then. Like, everyone would send a quote, a departure memo with land on everybody’s desk, kind of. And most of the members were like, oh, I’m going to be like general counsel in this firm, and I’m going to like do all these different things. And my memo was the equivalent of saying, I’m leaving the practice of law to go lead people up mountains and help people. And, um, and what was interesting, and I’m curious whether you got anything similar at Google when you left. The the response from people who were sort of like, at my level, mid-level associates in the firm were kind of like, oh, what a shame. Like, he couldn’t cut it, you know? Or he’s like, how could you leave? Like, this is the job that everybody wants. How could you, like, leave all this behind? And then I got some, some notes from sort of like, you know, like senior partners in the firm who were saying, God bless, go do this. Keep me in the loop. Tell me how it is. This is amazing. That was such a huge signal to me. I wonder if you experienced anything similar. If you’ve talked to people who’ve experienced something like that?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:23:22] That’s very interesting because, uh, I actually also at Google got really nice notes from very senior people. Uh, and yeah, the number three person at the company, sent me an email reply to my email and told me to have fun, enjoy, explore and it was mostly my friends at my level who were worried for me, and who thought that maybe I was making a terrible mistake, and who also very reassuringly and kindly told me, you know, if you ever need to come back to Google, we’ll help you.

Jonathan Fields: [00:23:58] They’re there for you, and we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. So when you decide, okay, I’ve left Google, I’ve done my own thing. It didn’t work out, and now I really have to take a different path. You end up basically creating your own entity, which ends up evolving into Nest Labs and where you’re running a lot of experiments learning, writing, exploring. You go back to school, even to pursue a degree in neuroscience. And all of this leads to a different philosophy the experimental life philosophy. So tell me how this this starts to emerge.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:24:36] For me, it started with going back to school, studying neuroscience, and getting reacquainted with the scientific method and the scientific mindset. And I absolutely fell in love with this way of thinking, where instead of reacting with fear, when you’re faced with uncertainty, you react with curiosity. Uncertainty becomes almost an opportunity, something that you want to explore, something you want to experiment with. And that’s how scientists design their experiments. They see something they don’t understand, and they ask themselves, what kind of experiment can I design around this? The other thing I really liked was that instead of defining an outcome in advance and saying, this is what success looks like, they taught us to start from a hypothesis. And so you say, I think this might be the case. I’m not quite sure. Again, I’m going to try it and I’m going to see what happens. And that really completely changes your relationship to success. Because as long as you complete the experiment and you collect the data and you learn something new, whatever the results are, this is success. You learn something. And so I started asking myself, how can I start applying this in my own life? Because the contrast between this approach and the linear approach that I had been following before was so obvious that it felt like an interesting avenue to explore. And so I started running more and more experiments in my life. Personal experiments, really taking that mindset out of the lab and using it in the way I wrote. So conducting writing experiments, and I conducted experiments around meditation. My current experiment is around walking. Just walking more. Um, and, and I started writing about it in the newsletter, and then a lot of other people joined and decided to also run their experiments with me. So that’s how this entire kind of, um, I don’t really like, honestly calling it a method because I tell everyone you should also experiment with the way you do this instead of copy pasting the way I do it kind of meta, but this, uh, you say philosophy. I think this is the right term. This is how it emerged.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:46] Yeah. I mean, that makes so much sense to me. And I love how you took the the scientific method and really adapted it for life. You know, could you imagine a scientist starting like a PhD program saying, like, I know exactly what outcome I’m working towards, and I’ve seen it replicated a whole bunch of times before, so I’m going to do it again myself for the next five years. I mean, that would be insane. And that’s how we live our lives. Yes.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:27:13] Oh, I love that how you’re putting it. And it’s true when we say it this way, it actually sounds completely absurd. And that would explain why so many people get both burned out and burned out at work. But somehow that’s still what we do. And what a lot of people decide to follow in terms of path.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:30] Yeah, it’s that safety thing. Right. And and I guess you could also make the argument that, I mean, there’s been a lot of turmoil in the world of science over the last decade or two. Um, and you can make an argument that some of it is due to people saying, well, I want to actually take the safe option. Even within the field of research I need how can I create the perception of doing something, but really play it safe so that I’m protected? My lab is protected, my reputation, my salary are protected. And this is a very human instinct, you know, um, you know, and so you’ve seen that even kind of in moments in the world of science and research.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:28:12] Absolutely. And I think that’s why it’s very important, even when you have decided and committed for yourself to living a more experimental life, to still keep on questioning your scripts, questioning your behaviors and your actions. Because, you know, we talked at the beginning how I thought I was finally free and doing my own thing. And I didn’t realize until later on that I was following yet another script. And it can absolutely happen that you think you’re experimenting. And really, if you take the time to really look inside, within and pay attention to where you got that experiment from or or maybe what outcome you’re hoping to get now, you’re not truly experimenting. You’re performing something that looks like an experiment from the outside, but really you’re hoping for a very specific form of success.

Jonathan Fields: [00:29:04] I mean, you know, in research you call that curve fitting, right? It’s like you’re really you’re, quote, running the experiments, but you’re really kind of manipulating the data to get you to the outcome that you want at the end of the day. Um, so you have you developed a framework, a really simple and super useful framework to actually run these experiments. Um, you know, so I’d love to drop into that kind of walk through the elements of it and, um, and then explore what it’s like to apply that in different domains of life. You shorthand it with the acronym Pact. So take me into this.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:29:41] So just like a scientific experiment has a protocol that you write before you get started, I recommend creating a pact. And I called it a pact because it’s a commitment to curiosity. You commit to completing the experiment, and only when you’re done, you will analyze the results and see if you want to keep going or tweak the experiment. The format of the pact is also inspired by the scientific method, in the sense that a scientist, when they design an experiment, they say, we’re going to conduct this test and we’re going to have this number of trials. And it’s very important to have several trials. So, you know, whether there’s actually an effect happening here. Right. And you conduct the same test and you do it over several times and you collect that data and then you analyze it. So a pact follows this very simple format. You say I will insert an action for insert a duration. So action and duration. Those are the two ingredients for a pact. And I mentioned that my my current pact, my current experiment that I’m running is around walking. And my pact is I will walk for 20 minutes every day for 20 days. So that’s an example. You can do that with literally anything with your health routine, your diet, your relationships. I know someone in my community, for example, who realized that they were losing touch with their friends, and so they designed a pact where they said that every week they will send a voice note to one friend that they haven’t talked to in a while. Just ask for some news and tell them how they were doing. That was their pact. So that’s a pact, a commitment to curiosity, a commitment to complete your experiment and collect the data, and a commitment to not judge whether it worked out or not until you’re done going through all of the repetitions.

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:31] So I will and then insert what the thing is for a particular duration. Um, and then suspend judgment. Like don’t try and analyze it along the way while it’s happening. So let’s go with that first part, that thing where you’re going to say, okay, so this is experiment. This is the behavior, this is the action I’m going to take, whatever it may be. How do we choose that? How do we. Because that in itself is kind of an experiment. Like how do we actually decide what is the thing that we want to be the source of the experiment that we want to run?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:32:02] Yes, it always starts with observation, always starts with observation. And I know for a lot of people, they want to get into the pact and start running the experiment. But it’s very important to have a little phase where you don’t do anything. You just observe. And I call this self anthropology because that’s really the way you want to approach it. You want to pretend that you’re an anthropologist, but with your life as the subject of study. And just like an anthropologist looks at a new culture and they ask questions like, why are they doing things like that? Where did they care about this? Why do they communicate in this way? Why do they design their days in this way? You can do the same with your life. And a simple exercise that you can do is for 24 hours, you literally take field notes, just like an anthropologist. And throughout the day you can do that on your phone. Or if you have a notebook, you can do that on your phone. It’s usually a little bit easier. You take little notes throughout the day and you write things like, oh, I felt like I have a lot of energy after this conversation, or I was scared to give this presentation, but actually it was fine. And maybe I’m really good at this, or I noticed that I’m not productive at all right? After lunch.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:33:14] Or I snapped back at my spouse when I got back home tonight for no reason at all. And you can write down those little things and you can ask yourself also, why have I been scheduling those meetings exactly at that time every morning? Why have I not been taking a break? Why? Maybe you’re eating at your desk. It can be literally anything that you notice and you write it down. You would not be able to do that for a week just for 24 hours. You’re an anthropologist observing your own life. Based on that, you will see. It’s really incredible. I’ve really I’ve helped already thousands of people run this experiment in the Nest Labs community, and they all say it’s absolutely incredible the number of decisions that I make subconsciously, or that I consider obvious on a day to day basis. I don’t even question. That’s just the way I’ve been doing things, and it’s eye opening for a lot of people. Based on that, you can say, maybe I could do this thing differently. And that’s the beginning of an experiment. That’s the formulation of a hypothesis that’s just looking at how things currently are and asking yourself how they could potentially be.

Jonathan Fields: [00:34:22] If I understand this, and basically take 24 hours and just jot down all the different things that you’re noticing about moment, circumstances, decisions you’re making, interactions that you’re having. And probably also note like how they’re making you feel and like, did it go the way that I would like it to go? And then reflect back on that. And maybe for the things where it didn’t actually feel the way you wanted it to feel or go the way you wanted it to go, maybe those become really interesting sources to run experiments around. Is that right?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:34:51] Absolutely. And this is the more active practice of finding experiments. But once you’re used to looking for experiments everywhere in your life, you’ll also have other ways to do it. One for me is anytime I say something that sounds like it’s a fixed mindset, it’s a very useful one. Also a good signal. So my meditation experiment, for example, started after I heard myself say to a friend, I’m I’m just not good at meditation. It’s just not my thing. And now whenever I hear myself say something like that, I’ll go. Oh, interesting. Why am I so convinced that I’m not good at meditation? Maybe I’ll run a tiny experiment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:31] Yeah, I love that. I had a friend who. She had a rule. She said, um, anytime I hear myself complain about something three times, then I’m a I’m not allowed to complain about it again. And b, I need to fix it. Um, whether it’s like something in my own behavior or whether it’s something that just bugs you, you know, like, not the way somebody else does something or product or service. She’s like like like I literally like like that’s my trigger. Like there’s my rule. Like, I need to run the experiment of, like, how can I fix this now? This is.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:36:01] Amazing.

Jonathan Fields: [00:36:02] Yeah. And she literally ended up building, like, a series of companies. Um, in no small part because of that, you know, that brought so much joy to thousands and thousands of people. So, um, so, so those are some great ways to think about. Okay. So what experiments could I even think about running? You know, because a lot of people probably, I would imagine and I’m curious whether you see this, you know, with the community in Nest Labs, I would imagine a lot of people start out thinking like, oh, there’s this big thing. Like, I need to like, run, experiment, doing completely different job or changing relationships or, um, but there are probably a lot of just really tiny ones. And this is your whole philosophy, like the literally the name of your book, tiny experiments that are going to feel a lot more accessible and doable to us. That’ll get us into the habit of experimentation. Does that make sense?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:36:52] Oh, absolutely. I, um, I call this the maximalist brain, and it’s our tendency to think that we really need to always go for the biggest, most impactful version of whatever project we’re starting. And and I see that when people design experiments, and this is why I tell them, don’t get started yet. Go back to that place of observation and have a look, because very often you’ll find very fun, interesting things that could be, you know, the the basis for an experiment that might not be the big ambition, the big change that you had thought about in the first place. So in terms of the kind of experiments that you can run, you can think about different categories in your life as well. So that could be in your work. A lot of people do that with the way they manage their time, their productivity, their schedule, their meetings. So those are some of the the easiest ones sometimes to run, and especially if you’re in the kind of work where you have a little bit of freedom over the way you organize your time, you can experiment with relationships. So I’ve seen people experiment with saying, okay, for the next two months, every two weeks we’re going to go on a date with my spouse, and we’re going to alternate, and one of us is going to organize it for the other one.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:38:07] And the great thing about that is that you’re not committing to it for the rest of your life, right? You’re just saying, let’s do it for two months, and at the end of the two months, we can decide if we want to keep going or not. Another relationship one is the one I mentioned earlier about reaching out to friends you haven’t talked to for with in a world that’s a good one too. You can experiment with your studies, with your health. You can experiment with even where you live. A lot of people will want to make a big move to another city. If you can, and especially if you’re in a remote job, it might be interesting to go and experiment and say, for the next year, I will spend one weekend in a different city every month, and I’m going to go and see if I like it. If you can afford to do that, that’s the kind of travel experiment that you can run. So you can really run experiments in all areas of your life. And whenever you’re in doubt in terms of the scope and the duration, always try to think, tiny. What’s the tinier version of this that I can run?

Jonathan Fields: [00:39:05] Yeah, I love that. So let’s dive into the duration side of it a little bit more. Also, as we’re having this conversation, I’m in Boulder, Colorado, But I spent literally my entire life in New York and my entire adult life in New York City for 30 years. And we came out here as a family in September 2020, after New York was a very scary place, and we looked at it as an experiment. We’re kind of like, you know what? We’re going to come out here for 2 or 3 months just to see how it feels. And we pretty much assumed that we would love it. But, you know, we’re New Yorkers. We’ll go back. Um, and, you know, four and a half years later, I’m still in Boulder and we’re still here. But had we I mean, this this goes to what you’re saying, the psychology of the duration. Had we at that moment said, okay, let’s move to Boulder, Colorado, we would have probably looked at each other and said, not happening. There’s just no way. It’s too big. It’s too disruptive. But we ran this, you know, in our minds, we were committing to a couple of months, and that led us to say yes to making the change in behavior. So take me, take me deeper Into how we think about choosing what feels like a psychologically sustainable commitment for duration, but also something that’s maybe long enough for us to experience to gather the data that we need to actually like, like run a successful experiment.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:40:31] Yes, it’s it’s really based on the nature of the, the action itself that you want to test in your experiment. So if you’re doing something daily, for example. So let’s say you want to experiment with going to bed at the same time every evening for two weeks. Two weeks might be enough. A couple of weeks might be enough to start seeing changes and see if that has any impact on your mood, your energy levels. Right? If you want to run more of a creative experiment similar to what I did with steps, and you say you want to experiment with a weekly newsletter, well, obviously you can’t do that for just one week, and maybe two weeks is not enough. So you can commit to maybe six months, But maybe you’re not quite sure, actually. And in a lot of cases, what’s great is that although we’re not all climbing the same ladders like in a linear model, it is likely that you’re not the very first person ever to come up with that particular experiment. And so if she knows someone who has experimented with something similar, you can actually ask them and say, hey, how long did it take you to feel like you knew whether you wanted to keep going with this thing? And this person will tell you and you say, okay, cool. So you’re telling me three months, I’m just going to commit to that three months. And the great thing about experiments is that if that duration was wrong, if after three months, you’re still not quite sure, well, that’s an experiment. So you can say, actually, let’s collect more data, I’m going to redesign my pact, and I’m going to say that it’s going to be for you. I’m going to run it for another two months. Just see if I feel clearer after two months. So you can also experiment with the duration of your You experiment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:42:11] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. You know, as you’re describing that the thing that came to mind for me is we’re having this conversation under this umbrella of Good Life Project., which was launched 13 years ago. Um, people thought I was like, a little off my rocker when I actually said, okay, so we’re going to start producing video and audio and all this stuff at a time where nobody was doing this in long form, but the name of, you know, what? What became a business and a community and all sorts of other stuff has baked into it the notion that from the beginning this has been an experiment. It’s called Good Life Project. rather than, you know, like, whatever, not having this, you know, the good life, success stories. A good life. Because for from the very beginning, I had no idea what was going to happen with this. I’m like, if I literally just call it a project, then I kind of let myself off the hook. If I decide six months in a year, in two years in okay, the project has run its course and who knows if and when it will, but it really changes the psychology in a powerful way of you being willing to take the first step. Um, and, and I found that really, um, powerful. Shortly before I started this, I started something that nobody knows about called the Being Project. And that was basically me, um, sharing things on back in the day when blogging was a big thing and it started to grow really quickly. But I had delusional aspirations around how I would measure growth, because I was comparing myself to other friends who were doing something similar in the space. So I guess my question around this is how do we set realistic expectations when we’re running our experiments? How do we measure what you know, the learning looks like, what success looks like for us in a way that is true to us, without being caught up in how others have run similar experiments and gotten better or worse results.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:44:13] Yes. It’s, um, it’s really about letting go of the idea of getting to a specific place, a specific destination, because this is what causes a lot of misery. It’s the idea that and very often, again, copy pasted from others, we see that this person has 100,000 subscribers or YouTube like followers or, or that this person is making this amount of money, or they have this big house on the other side of town, right? And we compare ourselves to each other. Those are specific outcomes. They’re a destination and they are. What caused this? Also a rival fantasy where we feel like, if only I get there and I just need to work harder. When you experiment, the only thing you’re trying to achieve is to learn more about yourself, about the world, and about your work and your relationships. You’re just trying to learn more. You’re just trying to complete the cycles of experimentation where you just collect data. So first, there’s no specific outcome. So what are you measuring then? What you’re measuring is based on your hypothesis. You always start from this hypothesis. And if when you design your experiment it started from this. Huh. Maybe I would like this. Maybe I would enjoy that. Maybe I would be good at this.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:45:38] Maybe this would make me feel more productive, more creative. Maybe my mood would be better. Maybe that would improve communication with my friend or my spouse or my my manager. And you’re only testing whether that hypothesis was correct or not. And so if at the end of the experiment, it turns out the hypothesis was not correct. So let’s say for example, in my case, I can give you an example of an experiment that could be considered as failed based on the normal definition. Traditional definition of success. As I write a newsletter, I love writing and a lot of people around me started YouTube channels and they were very successful with that. And so I formulated that hypothesis maybe like I would like that to, and maybe this would be a way to engage with more people, connect with other people. And so I started publishing weekly YouTube videos, and I said, I’m going to do that for the next six months, which was roughly until the end of the year. So for the next six months, I’m going to publish one video every week. What did I measure? Two things, and I think it’s very important to always do that. Internal and external metrics of success.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:46:46] So external metrics of success at the end of the experiment were pretty good actually. I got to about 10,000 subscribers, which was fairly good. People seemed to love the videos. Internal metrics though I was dreading it every time I had to sit in front of the camera, every time I had to do it. And because of that, I was procrastinating on every single other project on the days that I was supposed to film. And so this was actually having a pretty negative impact across the board for all of my other projects and even my mental wellbeing. And so at the end of the sixth month, I said, well, no, actually I’m done. I don’t think YouTube is for me. I like writing much better. And so some people might say, oh, she felt she, she tried to build a YouTube channel and she quit after six months. But to me that’s success because I actually didn’t know if I would like it or not, if that was something for me or not. Before I run the experiment, and after the six months, I had data, actual real world data based on my experience that was telling me that actually that was not the thing that I wanted to pursue.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:48] So how do we frame that hypothesis then, so that we don’t trap ourselves? Um, you know, because like that experiment, if we use it as an example, you know, the you had basically these two measures of whether it was successful or not. One was external and like you said, like objectively check, you know, you grew really quickly. People were loving what you’re doing. Then there was the internal measure, which is like, how’s it making me feel? Um, how do we frame that in a way where it’s a hypothesis and not a want?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:48:25] It’s really this magic keyword. Maybe. Maybe you just start the statement with maybe, maybe if I do this action for this duration, this will happen. And it might be the case that if I perform this action for this duration, something else will happen. That’s not what I expected. And that means my hypothesis was wrong. But that’s okay. A scientist doesn’t feel like a failure when they get an unexpected result, and actually, they might even celebrate it because they did not see that coming. That is something new that was outside of the realm of what they expected. And this is something that they can learn from and use to design their next experiment.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:07] So what happens then when you run an experiment? I’ll go back to your YouTube experiment. Right. You run it. You have kind of like two different metrics. Um, and they end up conflicting with each other. One is like, yay, like like, um, the other is like, um, no. Um, and especially when one of those metrics is something that will get you social acceptance, acclaim, maybe status, maybe money. And these are all things that matter to most people. Even if we say we don’t want them to matter, they do. Um, it’s a really hard dance, right? To kind of say, okay, so all these things, um, like, were proven out by this experiment. Um, but there’s one metric like, which is really, you know, like critical to me that is telling me that this is not the thing that I want to move forward with, like, so you’ve got to do this dance is like, how do I how do I resolve this?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:50:06] Yes, I, I think you should always optimize for making sure that as a basis, at least, the internal metrics are aligned and they work. There’s no point in being successful externally if you’re miserable. We have so many examples. We know a lot of us have probably and have been through that where again, successful externally, but feeling very empty or burned out or overwhelmed. Right. So as a basis, having that those internal metrics sorted out, making sure it feels aligned, it brings you a certain sense of joy or excitement or curiosity or whatever it is that you want to optimize for at an internal level. And then for the external metrics, this is where it’s interesting is that once you have that sorted, you can ask yourself whether the external metrics are important or not In some projects, the internal metrics are enough. You’re not optimizing for any kind of external success. You’re just trying to maybe explore a new hobby or do something like that. And it doesn’t matter how successful it is, but it might be that in other areas, those external metrics also matter. I’m going to give you another example, which is not necessarily an experiment, but I think is a good illustration of this where I’m, you know, I’m publishing my first book and there are external metrics of success.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:51:29] There are very clear in terms of book sales and all of that, and the reason why I’m okay with optimizing for that and working pretty hard, actually, to to make sure that many people get to read my book is because it actually does feel good. It actually feels good, and it gives me a lot of joy. So I have that basis sorted. So if you think about the different scenarios you can find yourself in, right? I would say that if the external is not working and the internal is not working, that’s pretty clear. You should stop this experiment. And this is not running right. If the internal is working but the external is not working, then it’s about asking yourself, is that okay? Is that the kind of project where actually the external doesn’t matter? And if the external is working that the internal is not working? I would also argue that something needs to change, and it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to completely quit the project, but you should not keep on going exactly in this way because you’re just going to burn out. That’s the outcome usually that we get when we do that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:52:29] Yeah. And I think that’s the state of so many people’s lives, you know, and in all the different domains, you know, there’s another really interesting lens that you bring to the notion of just literally living your life as a series of tiny experiments. And this is the impact on decision making. Like we hear that there’s decision fatigue with everything. You know, there’s so many things coming at us all day, every day, and we’re overwhelmed and we’re burned out. We’ve got to make a million decisions. And and by the time you get home and, you know, like you’re like, what am I having for dinner? Like, literally like you can’t function anymore. You can decide. Um, so many of us, we try to decide about, like, what’s the next step? Like, what do I do with this relationship, with this job, with my health? We try to reason it out. We try to think ourselves to the answer. Um, and, and I think there is value in trying to, like, gather data and sort of like, okay, so let me like, see what the research says and talk to authorities. And um, but at a certain point, you know, you get to a place where you can’t you can’t get to the answer by just thinking your way to. You have to do your way to it. So I love that you centered this as a part of the conversation.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:53:46] There are actually a lot of decisions that you make in your life where you’re wasting a lot of time and energy trying to figure out what the right path is, and it would actually not be a big deal if you chose the wrong one. You can either backtrack and try the other one, or actually continue forward and realize that it was okay. Both choices were completely fine.

Jonathan Fields: [00:54:06] Yeah, um, I think that is the the typical dinner choice. Also, most of the time you’re really going to be fine no matter what you choose. But like, you know, so the half hour of angst that you cause yourself to try to figure it out is that half an hour you could have been living your life and doing something else or talking to a loved one. Um, you know, so as we have this conversation, I’m a little over a year into what I’ve been calling my two by 20. Um, so I decided that I have a big birthday coming up at the end of this year. And like two years before that, I said, you know, um, I started asking the question. I said, do I feel the way I want to feel with the work that I’m doing, the way I’m living my life? And, um, when I hit this milestone birthday, do I want to keep feeling this way? I’ve always had the same philosophy as is you like I do pretty much everything in my life, especially in my work life. As a series of experiments, I said, what if I spent two years running experiments to figure out, like, what could I learn, do, or build over a two year window that would potentially allow me to step into the next 20 year season of my life, experiencing more joy, more significance, um, and more simplicity. And what’s interesting is that, like most people here, the two years, they’re like, oh, that’s really cool.

Jonathan Fields: [00:55:27] You’re running a series of experiments over two years and some of them have lasted minutes. Some of them have lasted months, some of them have cost a substantial amount of money. Some of them are completely free. Um, but people get hung up on the 20 year thing. And I’m curious what your take is on this, because as we were discussing it earlier in our conversation, how could you possibly know what something is going to make you feel like, you know, 20 years from now? But I found it to be a really interesting decision making criteria when thinking about what experiments to choose to fit into this two year window. Because it it allows me to eliminate a whole bunch of things that I just know that like, there’s no possible way this is going to stain my interest, my curiosity, my passion, my purpose for anywhere longer than like a hot minute, let alone a couple of years. So do I know that anything that I end up with is actually going to keep me busy or like, really engage for 20 years? I have no idea. But using that as a decision making metric lets me eliminate a whole bunch of stuff and run experiments that I found really much more valuable and fruitful. So I’m curious what your take is on that.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:56:35] Yeah, I think thinking about your experiments in terms of whether they’re going to sustain your curiosity for a long time is actually a really good heuristic. And that’s not a problem at all, because you’re not trying to you’re not saying this is the outcome I’m going to have in 20 years. This is where I’m going to be in 20 years. You’re dressing the person I am today. Feels like this is the kind of thing I’m curious enough about, that it might be able to sustain my curiosity for a long time, and especially when you’re very curious about a lot of different things, that’s actually a really good way to make that choice.

Jonathan Fields: [00:57:09] I love that. Okay, I feel better now. Um, but because it’s been incredibly useful for me to do this process, I run like so many different experiments. Now. Like I said, a lot of them are really tiny, and some of them are like months long and pretty substantial. But, um, I’m thankful that I said no to way more of them because I had that sort of like one decision making criteria. Um, that let me really do things that are much that I feel are have ended up being much juicier. Um, well, I mean, I love the take. I love what you bring, sort of like the way that you bring together neurophysiology and this really beautiful. It’s an elegant philosophy of experimentation. It’s simple, it’s meaningful, it’s impactful. Petrol. Anybody can do this. And you know when you release it in the lens out and think about like, how can I live my life in a way that is maybe more likely to allow me to feel the way I want to feel and and keep feeling that way over time? This feels like a beautiful approach.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:58:11] Thank you so much and I absolutely love your questions as well. It’s always nice to hear about people’s experiments. And this is what I love about this approach is that I myself cannot really predict how people are going to use it, how people are going to apply it and make it their own.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:26] So I always round out these conversations with one question and this container of Good Life Project.. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: [00:58:37] To live a good life is to have the freedom to experiment. Mm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:58:44] Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you loved this episode, safe bet, you’ll also love the episode where I shared my 2×20 project all about my own tiny experiments. You’ll find a link to that episode in the show notes. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young. Kristoffer Carter crafted our theme music and special thanks to Shelley Adelle Bliss for her research on this episode. And of course, if you haven’t already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app or on YouTube too. If you found this conversation interesting or valuable and inspiring, chances are you did, because you’re still listening here. Do me a personal favor. A seven-second favor. Share it with just one person. And if you want to share it with more, that’s awesome too. But just one person even then, invite them to talk with you about what you’ve both discovered to reconnect and explore ideas that really matter. Because that’s how we all come alive together. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.