In their latest episode of the VALUE: After Hours Podcast, Tobias Carlisle, Jake Taylor, and Anne-Laure Le Cunff discuss:
- The Power of Shifting Between Different Modes of Thinking
- How Cognitive Scripts Shape Our Decisions and Influence Everyday Life
- How Tiny Experiments Can Help You Build Lasting Habits Like Meditation
- How to Turn Procrastination Into a Powerful Productivity Tool
- How to Live a More Experimental Life and Embrace Uncertainty
- From ADHD Research to Life Experiments: Anne-Laure’s Unique Approach
- Ditch the Ladder: How to Apply the Scientific Method to Life and Success
- How Experimentation Can Improve Investment Decisions and Life Choices
- How Defining Variables and Balancing Intuition with Data Leads to Better Decision-Making
- How Tiny Experiments Can Help You Build Lasting Habits Like Meditation
- How Self-Anthropology and Metacognition Can Help You Discover Meaningful Experiments
- How to Overcome Mimetic Thinking and Set Authentic, Personal Goals
- The Future of Thought Decoding: Exploring MEG Technology and Semantic Decoding
You can find out more about the VALUE: After Hours Podcast here – VALUE: After Hours Podcast. You can also listen to the podcast on your favorite podcast platforms here:
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Transcript
Tobias: And we are live. I am Tobias Carlisle. This is Value: After Hours. No Jake today. He’s chasing butterflies in Lake Tahoe. But my special guest for today is Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She’s written a new book called Tiny Experiments, and we’re going to talk about that today. Hi, Anne-Laure. How are you?
Anne-Laure: I’m very good, thank you. Thanks for having me.
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How to Live a More Experimental Life and Embrace Uncertainty
Tobias: My absolute pleasure. Welcome to the podcast. Let’s begin with, what is your book, Tiny Experiments, about?
Anne-Laure: It’s a book about how to live a more experimental life, how to embrace uncertainty and how to leverage your crazy.
Tobias: So, let’s start with the first one. How do we live a more experimental life?
Anne-Laure: It’s really about the idea of letting go of the linear definition of success. I think a lot of us have gone through that phase in life, or are still in that phase in life where we feel like we need to have a very clear vision and a clear plan in order to be successful. So, you have a goal, this big ambition you want to get to, maybe a big milestone that could be a number, that could be a promotion, that could be a cool job, that could be a startup, a relationship, whatever that is, and then we work really hard to get there.
The problem with this approach, is that it doesn’t take into account the fact that, first, quite often, happiness is not hiding on the other side of those goals. We get there and we’re a little bit disappointed, because we’re still the same person and our problems are still here. Other times, we change, the world changes and these goals become outdated and we still keep on pursuing them. They prevent us from exploring other opportunities, opening other doors, and making room for serendipity.
So, my book is really about replacing this linear approach with a more experimental one, where instead of starting with this fixed outcome that you have in mind and you want to get to, you start with more of a hypothesis, a research question almost where you feel like, “Okay, what’s going on here?” Or, “I’m a bit curious about that. Here’s something I’d like to explore. Let’s see what happens if I give this a try.” You don’t have this binary definition of success or failure. You’re just trying the thing, and seeing what happens and adapting your path based on that.
Tobias: Is that an approach that you have taken in your own life, or how has that been reflected in your life?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. The seed of this book was planted based on my own personal experience. And then, I did read a lot of research that was backing that I was definitely not the only one going through this. I think about my life in terms of two different chapters, almost. The first one was very linear. I did my best to do well in school, I got a good job at Google and I was pretty much always thinking about what was the next rung on the ladder, how I could maybe climb higher, be more successful, what was the next promotion, the next cool project and who I needed to work with in order to be able to achieve that kind of success.
And then, the second chapter in my life, I hope there will be many more chapters, but the current one I’m in at the moment is a lot more experimental. I don’t really know where I’m going. I’m working on a bunch of different things that I’m curious about. I just completed a PhD in neuroscience. I’m writing an online newsletter. I have this book coming out. What’s amazing, is that I am finding quite a bit of success in what I’m doing, but none of that is based on a fixed, pre-determined plan that I’m following. It’s really based on continuously experimenting, being open to new ideas, to new collaborations, and being okay with the fact that I genuinely don’t know where I will be in the next few years.
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From ADHD Research to Life Experiments: Anne-Laure’s Unique Approach
Tobias: I think you were introduced by Tom Owen Morgan, who we had on the podcast, who has a similar interest or perhaps, like, they rhyme a little bit the same ideas. So, how does your PhD in neuroscience lead you into this type of book and this idea?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. What’s interesting, is that it’s not really the topic of my PhD that led me to exploring this, because I’m studying– My academic research is about ADHD. So, it has nothing to do with what I’m writing about for the newsletter or my book. So, it’s more of the meta-science, how to conduct science, the science of conducting science.
I was really inspired when I rediscovered really the scientific method, and the way scientists approach challenges and problems in life. They have a completely different relationship to uncertainty. If they see something that they don’t understand, that’s unclear. If they have doubts, they don’t try to find a solution as quickly as possible. They don’t run away. They don’t freeze. They engage with that uncertainty. They ask themselves, “Oh, there’s something to explore here. Let’s have a look.” They design an experiment around that question, around that doubt. And so, that was the inspiration for the book.
A lot of my work was really taking that scientific method outside of the lab and asking myself, what would that look like to apply the scientific method in the way we navigate our life, our work and our relationships?
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Ditch the Ladder: How to Apply the Scientific Method to Life and Success
Tobias: Well, that’s an interesting idea. How do you apply the scientific method or the processes that you learned while you were doing your PhD into your everyday life?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. I think it’s useful to contrast it to the way we normally do things. So, I think about two different mental models. The mental model of success we normally use is a little bit like a ladder. You have those rungs, and you’re supposed to climb them and you’re supposed to almost collect all of the necessary artifacts and things at a level before you can go on to the next one. It’s very linear. Climb things in order. Because of that creates a lot of problems. We’re constantly looking at where everybody else is on their own ladder and comparing ourselves and our success. So, that’s the linear approach.
The experimental mental model is the mental model of a loop, a cycle, a series of cycles of experimentation rather than this linear ladder that you’re supposed to climb. So, the way it works is that you start with observation. You don’t try to do something straight away. You just observe, what’s the problem? What’s the space? Who are the players? How am I feeling? What are my instincts? What is my automatic response? You just observe the current situation. Based on that, you formulate a hypothesis, a little research question. This is really just in the form of saying, “Oh, maybe, maybe this is true. Maybe this could work.” Maybe, maybe, maybe, it’s really a magic word that you can use just to formulate any hypothesis in your life and in your work. Then you design an experiment.
The way I design all of my experiments in my life is using a mini protocol that you can use. It’s, again, based on the scientific method. You need to decide on what action you’re going to perform and for how many trials. Just like a scientist, you decide in advance how many trials you’re going to perform in order to collect enough data. So, you say, maybe this could work. Okay. So, maybe, actually, maybe I would enjoy writing a newsletter. This is inspired by my example. Maybe I would enjoy writing a newsletter.
A tiny experiment would be, I’m going to publish a newsletter every week for the next six months, and I’m going to withhold judgment until I’m done collecting the data at the end of the experiment. At the end of the six months, can look back at the external metrics of success, how many subscribers, open rates, do people like it? And internal factors, did I enjoy it? Did that feel good? Is that something I want to keep on doing?
Based on that, you can decide what your next cycle of experimentation is going to look like. Do you just keep going? Do you tweak something? Do you just stop it? Because maybe that was successful, but you hated every minute of it. So, [chuckles] you can make decisions based on data that you’re collecting. What’s great about this approach, is that you don’t know where you’re going like you would with the linear approach, but you can trust that you’re going to grow and evolve in the process if you keep on iterating.
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How Experimentation Can Improve Investment Decisions and Life Choices
Tobias: This is an investment podcast, so we’re often framing things in– I like the idea of experimenting as well, putting on a little position and seeing how that works out. I think one of the reasons for doing that is, so that you don’t commit a whole lot of resources to something and then find out it’s a dead end. So, I like the idea of experimentation.
I’m interested in the protocol of, what is the advantage of deciding that you’re going to run a set number of trials, and how do you arrive at, what’s a sensible number of trials for whatever you might be doing?
Anne-Laure: So, this is really based on the kind of experiment that you’re going to perform. So, in your case, for example, for investment– You can actually use 10 experiments also to just learn about different things. So, let’s say that you’re interested in the new investment space. Like, you can commit to saying that every Monday, you’re going to reach out to a new person, an expert on this topic, and you’re going to ask to talk to them and learn from them.
Again, you can say, every Monday, I’m going to do this for the next five, six weeks. I’m going to see if that was helpful. Do I feel like I was making better decisions based on running this experiment, or maybe that was a waste of time. So, if you’re running a daily experiment, maybe doing it for just a couple of weeks is enough. If it’s a weekly experiment, maybe you want to do it for a little bit longer.
Another way that I think about the length of my experiments, is if I’ve seen people run similar experiments around me, I just ask them. I just tell them, “Hey, I saw that you experimented with this.” This is also why I’m a big fan of learning in public when we share everything we’re experimenting with. “I saw that you experimented with this. How long did you feel like it took for you to feel like you had enough data in order to be able to make an informed decision based on that experiment?” That’s it. Just do the same duration.
The great thing with experiments, is that, again, in a bit of a meta way, the duration of the experiment can also be something you experiment with, where you can go for one round and if after two weeks, you feel like, “I’m still not quite sure, actually. I feel like I don’t have enough data yet. Well, let’s go for another round. Let’s do another two weeks and let’s see how we feel there.” It’s really all about going through a cycle, having a checkpoint, seeing if you have enough data to make a decision. If not, maybe just go for another one.
Tobias: I love the idea of the meta-approach to science. That’s something that we do try to do with this podcast. A lot of it is thinking about thinking, and it’s some of the books that I have written are about cognitive biases and behavioral errors that people make for a variety of different reasons.
So, one of the questions that springs to mind, is when you’re examining some of these things, how do you know whether you’re getting feedback that’s telling you that you’re going in the right direction, how do you know that it’s not just noise, how do you distinguish between the two as a scientist?
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How Defining Variables and Balancing Intuition with Data Leads to Better Decision-Making
Anne-Laure: It’s very important to define also your variables in advance, just so you know what is important to you. And so, when people run the same experiment, they might not be interested in exactly the same data. This is also why in science, it’s really when people publish their data sets, and someone can download this and run their own analysis on the same data set and they will explore different things.
So, similarly, you could have an experiment which looks similar in the way the action that you perform and what you’re trying to do, but you might not be looking at the same things, not interested in the same variables. What’s important in order to not be overwhelmed and confused is to decide beforehand, what am I interested in? What is my research question here?
So, for example, again, taking the example of I’m going to design a bit of a learning experiment where I design maybe a bit of a knowledge management process. I say, every Monday, I reach out to an expert, I interview them, I take my notes and then I use those notes in my decisions. I’m going to do this for six weeks. What are the factors I’m going to pay attention to? So, I might have external factors depending on your investments, like how long is that going to take for you [chuckles] to have a look and see if you actually made better decisions in doing this.
There’s also internal factors that you can start paying attention to straight away. Maybe you create a rating for yourself, that’s your level of confidence when making a decision. And you track that. Every time you make a decision, you track level of confidence out of 10. You can have a very easy before, after seeing if talking to other people and collecting that information before making decisions gives you more confidence.
It is really your own laboratory where you can decide where the variables are. You decide in advance, you collect them and you make your decisions based on this. If you feel like there’s noise and other things that you notice, it’s completely okay if you want to capture that and take more notes. That could inspire other experiments in the future, but it’s important not to get too distracted.
Tobias: When you’re conducting experiments, there’s an idea of a null hypothesis, and you’re always careful not to make errors of– You can have the error where you think that you’re right, but you’re in fact wrong, and the error on the other side where you think that you’re wrong but you’re in fact right. I forget the term for that. That’s type 1 and type 2 errors, in any case. How do you handle that with something like this, where the internal part can be noisy and you’re the easiest person to fool? So, how do you put some structure around that?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. I think that’s why it’s very important to look at both the internal and external data, how you feel, but also having some form of external, more factual metric. But I also think it’s important to never use one without the other. Only looking at the factual metrics and completely ignoring your intuition doesn’t work very well. Only following your intuition without looking at the external metrics doesn’t work really well. Some of the best decision makers are the ones who are really, really good at paying attention to both internal and external signals. And for that, you can literally write in your notebook or in your notes, internal, external and really sitting down and writing them down.
You talked about cognitive biases. But this exercise is really just an exercise in metacognition. It’s really about taking your thoughts and making them visible, so you can observe them, engage with them and make decisions based on them. So, to me, that’s the most important thing is just instead of making those decisions in an automatic way and just trusting yourself that you’ll have this balanced view of all of the different factors, just write them down, block a little bit of time, open your note taking app, or if you’re someone who likes having more of analog notebook, you do that. But write internal, external and list all of those different factors.
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The Power of Shifting Between Different Modes of Thinking
Tobias: After spending what must have been years researching and then writing a thesis for your PhD, which I imagine was 100,000 words or something like that, sort of scale, what inspired you to then go right back in and write a book which– How long was your book– A comparable sort of length? It’s totally different, right? They’re not overlapping.
Anne-Laure: No, but I did even worse than that. [Tobias chuckles] I did them both at the same time. [laughs] So, yeah, I wrote my thesis and wrote my book at the same time, which I know how crazy that sounds. But in a way for me, actually it worked perfectly fine, because I really liked having those two very different types of thinking and creativity in my life. Whenever I felt some resistance or I felt a little bit stuck creatively or intellectually on one of the projects, I could go and spend a little bit of time on the other one. And so, in a way, each project always felt like this amazing refuge for me to go to [chuckles] when I was very tired of the other one.
But it did create some tensions in the sense that it was a different way of thinking, different way of writing for scientific writing. It’s quite jargony, actually, and you’re really trying to in those three or four pages. A lot of journals have a limitation on the number of words to communicate, this very long research project that you conducted. Whereas with a book, you have more space, but you also have that temptation then to just write about a lot of different tangents that could be interesting. So, it also requires self-discipline.
So, yeah, that’s how it happened. Not one after the other, but the two projects at the same time. And yet, one of them is 100,000 words, and that’s thesis. And this one is about 70,000 words for the book.
Tobias: It makes total sense. Isaac Asimov, he’s regarded as one of the most prolific science fiction writers of all time. And his output is extraordinary. I just pulled up his Wikipedia page once to have a look at his output. And so, I was interested in how he did it. One of the ways that he says that he did it was he was writing 10 or 11 things at once. If he got stuck one, he’d just move on to the next thing where he had some inspiration and then he’d be able to write volumes again.
And then, when he just ran out, he’d just move on to the next thing. So, he was able to sort of keep his cup filled up by just moving from one thing to the next, so that it makes total sense, particularly if you’re going from something that’s quite technical and has fairly strict rules for writing, and then to go and write something else which is a little bit more free flowing. It seems like that would be a good way to have a break and from one to the other.
Anne-Laure: Yeah, absolutely. I didn’t know that, actually. I love his book, so this is great to know.
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Tobias: Now, you’re now doing a tour, you’re in Austin. What sort of things happen on the tour? Is this your first podcast or have you been talking to other people?
Anne-Laure: I’ve been on different podcasts. So, yeah, this is basically my life right now. I’m trying to talk to people. I’m organizing the launch. I really wanted to do it in person, which is why I picked Austin, because I had a lot of online friends who were living here, and I just felt like it would be a nice way to celebrate. And so, yes, it’s very interesting going from those years of just being me, myself, and I, in front of my screen, exploring these ideas and asking myself whether I was doing justice to the research that I was trying to translate in the book.
And now, finally, being able to have conversations with people and seeing what resonates– Sometimes being frankly surprised by what resonates with people. It might be something where I actually hesitated to include it, because I felt like, “Oh, maybe that’s only interesting to me.” And then, several people mentioned that something clicked when they read it. So, it’s an amazing experience. It’s my first book too. So, everything is new right now.
Tobias: What have you found that resonated with people that you were surprised by?
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How Cognitive Scripts Shape Our Decisions and Influence Everyday Life
Anne-Laure: So, something that I was going to just mention in passing and I ended up expanding quite a lot on out of sheer personal curiosity, because I loved the research, was the concept of cognitive scripts. Basically, if you put people in similar situations, they will tend to behave exactly in the same way, which is fine.
Tobias: Same person or different people in the same situation?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, different people in the same situation. So, just to give you an example, if you go to the doctor and I ask you, “What do you do when you go to the doctor?” Well, I go, I sit in the waiting room, I wait there. That’s why it’s called the waiting room. And then, when someone calls my name and I go in the doctor’s office. And if I ask you if the doctor came out of their office and asked you to get undressed in front of everybody in the waiting room, you would feel really weird, right? Why? Because there’s a script that we all agreed on and we never talked about it. But that’s just the script. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you go to the doctor.
We have scripts like these for going to the restaurant and having conversations. This is all fine, and I think this is helpful in society to just know in that situation I’m supposed to behave in this way. But then, scientists discovered that we actually follow similar types of scripts in lots of areas of our lives, not just going to the doctor or going to the restaurant. We use scripts to decide what our next career steps, to decide on our relationships, to decide on the kind of work projects that we’re going to take on. I’m not an investor, but I imagine we also use scripts to decide what we’re going to invest in or not and how we’re going to structure that investment.
So, that was something that I thought was absolutely fascinating. I included it, but it added quite a few pages to the book and I went a little bit longer on that chapter that my editor asked me to, and I still decided to keep it. It turns out this is one of the things most people resonate with and in terms of the scientific concepts that I explore.
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Tobias: Let me just give a little shoutout to the folks at home, so you can see we go out reasonably broadly. Bellevue. Andhra Pradesh, India. Boise, Idaho. Milton Keynes. Prince George BC. Valparaiso, Indiana. Toronto. Mumbai, India. Fort Geyauss Alberta. St. Julians, Malta.
London. Lausanne, Switzerland. Gerrards Cross. Tallahassee. York in the UK. Limerick, Ireland. Madeira Island, Portugal. Jupiter, Florida. Tomball, Texas. Kópavogur, Iceland. Chuzzwuzza, Australia. Tomball, Texas. Highland Park, Illinois. Pforzheim, Germany. Edinburgh, Scotland. Dunedin, Florida. Toronto. Barrow-in-Furness, UK. Petah Tikva, Israel. [chuckles]
Please don’t tell me I’ve missed the shoutouts. You made a pants party. That’s the last one. Thanks so much for bearing with me Anne-Laure. Tell us a little bit about what you did at Google to the extent you can and tell anybody about that.
Anne-Laure: Yeah. Absolutely. I started my career at Google in London, where I was working on product marketing. And then, I moved to San Francisco to work in the Mountain View office where I was working on digital health products. Some of them have changed names since then, but included what was called Android Wear at the time, which is called Wear OS today, and which is basically their version of the Apple Watch, except that they focused on software, exactly the same thing they did with Android for phones. I was also working on Google Fit, which is the equivalent of Apple Health for Google. So, a lot of that work was partnerships with other app developers and creating campaigns to encourage people to move more, eat better, meditate, take care of their health in general.
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How Tiny Experiments Can Help You Build Lasting Habits Like Meditation
Tobias: Do you think that meditation is important for people?
Anne-Laure: Oh, that’s an interesting one, because that was one of my tiny experiments last year to try and meditate, because– So, a way I identify interesting personal experiments, not necessarily in work, but for personal experiments, is when I hear myself saying, “Oh, I’m just not good at this thing.” It’s usually a good signal that that might be something I want to explore. There’s a bit of fixed mindset here. Last year, I heard myself say to a friend, “I’m just not good at meditation. Just not my thing. Can’t do it.” And so, I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Actually, let’s design an experiment around this.” I designed an experiment where I said, I’m going to meditate for 15 minutes every day for the next 15 days. I decided to do it in public.
So, I created a Google Doc that I shared with everybody on my newsletter and on Twitter, and I let everybody comment. Every day after each meditation, I would write some bullet points, notes, thoughts and let people comment and share resources. So, I would write things like, “Why am I so itchy and why is it so hard to [chuckles] stay in the same position?” People would share some tips. So, from the research, very, very clearly, meditation is good for you. It’s good for your creativity, it’s good for your mental health. It helps you sleep better. It helps you feel more calm. There’s really, at this stage, the research is so strong that there isn’t really any doubt as to how good it is for you.
The issue though, is that a lot of people cannot stick to it. It’s very hard to stick to it. And so, I would really encourage anyone who is and was in my situation to, instead of going straight to trying to build a habit, which is daunting and then when you don’t manage to stick to it you just stop, just design a tiny experiment first where you don’t commit to meditating for one hour for the rest of your life. You just say maybe 10 minutes every day for the next 10 days. Is that too hard?
Again, you can play with the duration. 5 minutes every day for the next 5 days. Too hard? 3 minutes every day for the next 3 days. Just design one tiny experiment that you can complete because I’m fully convinced that if you manage to have enough repetitions and you experience what it feels like, this is something you’re going to want to implement as part of your routine.
Tobias: So, one of the reasons for experimenting, is if you feel it’s too much of a commitment to do something for the rest of your life, or whatever the case may be, you might be able to get yourself to start doing it by saying, “I’ll just do a little thing for a little period of time. I trick myself into doing this thing.” And then, after you’ve done it for two weeks, you might feel some of the benefits, and so you might want to then keep on doing it. Is that the advantage of an experiment over a commitment for the rest of your life?
Anne-Laure: Yes. It actually also works well with the idea that– The problem with good habits, I want to say, is that we assume that if a habit is good for someone, it’s good for us. The problem with a lot of life decisions also, is that–
Tobias: It’s okay. I think that was at your end.
Anne-Laure: Oh, yeah. Okay. Great. [chuckles] The problem with a lot of life decisions as well, is that we think that if a life decision is good for someone, it is going to be good for us. And so, coming back to habits or anything that you commit to, we assume this is going to be good, we try to do it. If we don’t see the benefits straight away, we might stop. Whereas with an experimental approach, you’re not trying to convince yourself of anything. Actually, you can walk into the experiment being quite skeptical about it. That’s completely fine. You can say, “I don’t know, everybody [crosstalk] meditation–
Tobias: You expect this one to fail.
Anne-Laure: Yes.
Tobias: You expect it’s possible that the experiment can fail.
Anne-Laure: Exactly.
Tobias: Or, likely that the experiment can fail.
Anne-Laure: That’s completely fine. You can really say, “I’m pretty sure meditation is not going to work for me.” But that’s fine. I’m just going to collect that data and I’m going to make a decision afterwards.
Tobias: Yeah. When you said you meditated in public, I thought you meant you literally went outside and meditated in public. But you mean you did the learning process in public and that was the part that people were able to comment on. What were the results of your experiment? Did you feel like, was it worthwhile? Did it make a change that you could notice?
Anne-Laure: Oh, absolutely. I don’t meditate every day now, which some people might say, “Oh, so that wasn’t successful.” But to me, it was because now meditation has become part of my toolkit. This is something that I use when I feel quite stressed or I need a little reset, which would have never happened before.
Or, even last week, I was invited by someone I had just met in Austin to a meditation circle for a one hour sit. And I said, yes. Actually, this sounds great, let me join. I joined, we meditated for one hour and then we had amazing conversations afterwards. I would have never joined this before, because one hour sitting in silent would have felt like just a crazy thing that I didn’t necessarily want torture myself and have to do.
So, now, meditation is just part of my mental health/emotional regulation toolkit in a way that it wasn’t before. And also, just the practice of learning in public in this way was amazing. This is something now that I think about a lot more with my experiments, where if there’s something where I feel like there’s a bit of resistance, I might want to quit after two repetitions and I need a little bit more accountability. I try to think about how can I do this in public, so I have more motivation to at least complete the experiment and see how I feel when I’m done, not before.
Tobias: Some public commitment makes you feel like you’re letting people down if you don’t go and do it, so you feel obliged to show up even though ultimately it benefits you.
Anne-Laure: Yes.
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How Self-Anthropology and Metacognition Can Help You Discover Meaningful Experiments
Tobias: The process for finding the experiments is kind of interesting. You said before that where you feel some resistance, that’s when you want to lean into it a little bit. Is that how you find the things that you want to experiment on or you want to explore more deeply?
Anne-Laure: That’s one of the ways which is always quite fruitful, actually. And especially for anyone who wants to grow and get a little bit out of their comfort zone, that’s actually a good thread to pull on when you notice that there’s something where you feel like, “I’m just not interested or not good at.” You might want to explore this and experiment with it. But that’s not the only way.
I, sometimes, have ways where I’m a lot more proactive when it comes to designing my experiments, and that might be in phases of my work or life, where I’m not quite sure what I want to do next. Actually, I’m going to be in one of those phases very soon, because I’m done with the PhD. The book is coming out. And so, there’s this question now, what next?
It would be very tempting to just go and follow one of the several opportunities I’ve been offered that seem very exciting, but that feel a little bit linear to me in the sense that that’s just the logical next thing to do after what I just completed. So, what I do in those cases is, is that I call it self-anthropology, because it’s a little bit like being anthropologist but with your own work, with your own life as the subject of study.
What you do, is that for 24 hours or 48 hours, you pretend you’re anthropologist and you literally take field notes. So, you can do that on your phone, you can do that in a notebook. You observe your own life and your work and you take those notes and you ask questions like, “Why do we behave in this way? Why is this such a big priority? Why is our day organized like this? Why do we care more about this thing and not this thing?” exactly like anthropologist that would discover a new culture and know nothing about it. And there’s no self-judgment in this. You’re literally just capturing data and observations.
When you do this, I guarantee you for 24 hours to 48 hours, you are going to discover patterns of behavior and decisions that you’re making in your everyday life and work that you didn’t realize were automatic. You’re just going for the default way of behaving and thinking you’re in some sort of routine that you haven’t realized that you’re into, just because it’s the like path of less friction, it’s the easiest thing to do. You know what you’re doing.
This is gold to find new experiments that you can run, because you can start questioning those assumptions and ask yourself, “Okay, we’ve been doing things in this way. What if we did it in a different way? How can I maybe for the next two weeks, or for the next month or for the next two months, take that thing I’ve been doing in this way and do it in a different way?”
Tobias: So, you look for things that you’re doing unconsciously or automatically, and then think about the reasons why you might be doing them or the drives for doing them and then you think that there might be some that reveals something that you haven’t thought through properly or you can find a better way of doing. Is that the idea?
Anne-Laure: Yes, exactly. I think the two keywords are awareness and intention, which when you think about metacognition, the process of thinking about thinking, this is really all that is, right, metacognition. It’s really paying attention to your own thoughts and your own behaviors, having this second order level of thinking about the way you navigate your life and your work and being a little bit more intentional.
The reason why I called my book Tiny Experiments, is that people might think that you’re supposed to overhaul everything, and change everything and experiment with everything. That’s really not what I’m saying. There might be things that you’ve been doing in a specific way for a long time, and they actually just work and you might not need to change them. But it’s really about questioning that. Look at the way you’ve been doing things. And then, in a very intentional way, you can say, “Actually, you know what? this works great. No need to change anything.”
Whereas in another area you can say, “You know, I’ve been having this feeling, or now that I pay attention, I’m noticing that I’m uncomfortable with this, or I feel like maybe I’ve been taking too many risks in that area and so far it’s been okay, but I just feel uncomfortable. There’s something to explore here.” That kind of tension can be very fruitful when it comes to designing an experiment.
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How to Turn Procrastination Into a Powerful Productivity Tool
Tobias: I have some questions from our listeners. I’m going to ask this first one. Tyler. I’m going to ask you a second one first. “Can you elaborate on turning procrastination into a useful tool?”
Anne-Laure: Yes. Absolutely. So, I want to just go back to how we treat procrastination with our natural reaction to procrastination. Procrastination is, I think, across the board in most societies considered bad. Actually, in the book, I have quotes that are from ancient Greece, where they’re already saying that procrastination is really bad thing and it’s going to waste your life and ruin your life. And so, we don’t really like procrastination. If you go on google and you search for solutions, it’s going to tell you how to beat procrastination. It’s pretty violent.
So, the first step is to just stop doing that. Stop seeing it as something negative, something you need to squash, something you need to destroy. And instead, treating it as a signal. Procrastination is just information.
So, when you notice that you’re procrastinating, instead of trying to push through and use your willpower, and very often in the process, for most of us, blame yourself for not being able to do the work that you said that you were going to do, you can pause and just observe that procrastination and ask, “Okay. Hello, friend. You’re back. You have some information that you want to share with me what is it?”
In the book, I share a little tool that I personally find so helpful. I use it all the time when I’m procrastinating. So, you look at your procrastination again. No self-blame. What are you trying to tell me, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart or from the hand? If it’s coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you might not be convinced that this is the right task to work on, or maybe you’re not the right person to work on it or maybe it’s designed in a way that makes no sense.
You’ve just been trying to do it because maybe you agreed to do it in this way with your team, but there’s something at a subconscious level that tells you that, this doesn’t feel right. So, when it’s coming from the head, you can maybe go back to your team or go back to your notes or to the strategy that you have in place and just try and figure out, is that the right approach here? Then if the head says “Okay. Actually, no, this is the right thing to do, why am I procrastinating?” Maybe the problem is coming from the heart. That means that even though at a rational level you’re convinced that it’s okay, at a practical level– Sorry, at a– Can you still see me? or–
Tobias: No. We’ve lost your vision.
Anne-Laure: You lost me. Again, let me try and reconnect the camera. One second. Technology.
Tobias: Just while we’re waiting for Anne-Laure. Tyler, yeah, I’ve understood your first question. Okay. Combat mimetic thinking to make your goals more personal. Okay. Lotto. “Can you expand a little bit on the semantic decoding and the meta paper?” I’ll ask it. — Do you think that Anne-Laure will know the answer to this?
Anne-Laure: I can still hear you. I’m just fiddling with my camera. If that doesn’t work, I think we can just finish with my MacBook grainy camera instead. Looks like I’m back.
Tobias: No problem.
Anne-Laure: Okay. So, I’ll just finish quickly on the procrastination where I was saying, if at a rational level you’re convinced, maybe at an emotional level, you’re not convinced. That means that you think this task is not going to be fun or enjoyable. So, in that case, just make it fun and enjoyable. Grab a friend, a colleague, go to your favorite coffee shop. If at a rational and emotional level you’re convinced, but you’re still procrastinating, then it might be coming from the hand, which means that at a practical level, you feel like you don’t have the right tools, skills or resources in order to be to do the task.
In that case, just raise that hand, literally tell people around you, your colleagues or whoever could help that, “I’m struggling, I’m stuck with this thing. Can you help?” That could also seeking be mentorship, coaching, online courses, tutorials, installing a new tool. Asking AI also works really well if the problem comes from the hand. And so, what’s great about this is, is that all of a sudden, you’ve shifted your approach from, “Oh, why am I procrastinating? I’m such a bad person, I’m not productive,” to “Okay, interesting information from my brain, let’s listen to it and let’s make an informed decision based on that.”
Tobias: And the heart?
Anne-Laure: The heart is just making it fun, making it enjoyable.
Tobias: Ah, making fun. That’s right.
Anne-Laure: So, you know you want to do it, you have the tools and resources, but you’re still procrastinating. It’s probably just– Yeah, maybe a bit boring, repetitive. There are things like this that you know you should be doing. And so, yeah, go do it with a friend, do it on the walk, go to a coffee shop.
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How to Overcome Mimetic Thinking and Set Authentic, Personal Goals
Tobias: So, the question that I have is, do you have any advice around combating mimetic thinking, so that you make your goals more personal?
Anne-Laure: Yes. I actually do talk about mimetic desire in the book. In particular, when it comes to those cognitive scripts that I discussed earlier, very often, we copy paste those scripts from others around us without realizing it. I think, again, metacognitive thinking is one of the best skills that you can develop that really applies across the board to better decision making and just navigating life in a more intentional way.
Whenever you have a doubt, first, the fact that you’re asking this question shows that you’re already at that first level, which is great. Questioning the origin of your goals and your ambitions. And then, really building that muscle where every time you have this new goal or new ambition, just taking a moment to ask yourself, “Oh, wait a second, where is that coming from?” Again, you can do that through writing, if you have–
I know I have a couple of these and I think it’s amazing if you can find them in your community. But if you have a thinking partner, either a friend or a colleague that you feel comfortable, actually sharing ideas in a very honest way with and brainstorming together, telling them, “Hey, I’ve been thinking about doing this thing, pursuing this goal. What do you think?” And so, really, again, practicing metacognition, the act of making your thoughts visible, so you can observe them in an intentional way is really, really good.
Lastly, which I think is really important. Sometimes it’s okay. Mimetic desire can actually be okay, again, if it’s intentional. If you realize that the reason why you’re pursuing this goal is because your best buddy has done this thing and he looks so happy and you want to try this thing for yourself as long as you go into it with this experimental mindset of saying, “Looks like it worked for him. I’m going to try it too. Might not work, but that looks worth trying,” then you’re going to learn something new. That’s success really, when you think about it.
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The Future of Thought Decoding: Exploring MEG Technology and Semantic Decoding
Tobias: I love that response. I’ve got a question that I don’t fully understand this one, so I’m hoping that you know what this question is about. “What is your view on semantic decoding and the recent meta paper where they took MEG data and output thoughts? Where will this go?”
Anne-Laure: Yeah, I’ve seen the paper.
Tobias: [unintelligible [00:43:08]
Anne-Laure: Was it meta? Don’t quote me on this. I think it was meta, where they had this MEG scanner and they had people type thoughts and then basically by training the– It’s doing this again. I think I’m just going to switch to– I’m sorry everyone, I’m going to be on just my MacBook. I don’t know what’s going on with my camera. Video? Okay. [chuckles] So, I think what they did, is that they asked people to sit in front of your computer. They were typing thoughts, and so they were collecting both the MEG data and the actual output of typing and based on this they train some machine learning algorithms to actually decode the thoughts.
Again, don’t quote me on this, but I think they’re almost at 90% accuracy. So, they’re reading thoughts. But a better way to think about it at this stage, is that it’s a brain powered autocorrect, because it was trained on that specific set of data. And so, what they can do now, is that if people are typing something and they make a typo and they’re also thinking about what they’re typing, you can actually autocorrect what they wrote based on what they meant to type, which is amazing. So, it’s an amazing–
Tobias: That would be very helpful.
Anne-Laure: Yeah, it’s an amazing first step, but at this stage you still need to be sitting in this giant MEG scanner. So, it would also require something a bit more portable, I think, for us to be able to use that technology in a more meaningful way.
Tobias: So, I’m conscious of the fact, Anne-Laure has to get going at 20 minutes past the hour, so we’ve got about five minutes left. I have a question here for you, which you can feel free to answer this from your personal experience or from your professional experience. But the question is, what would you recommend to someone who needs to finish writing a book?
Anne-Laure: Learn in public. I think that’s really the best way to go about it. I think for me, it really helped that. I announced that I was writing the book even before the first page was written. I’ve been sharing updates over the past few years. I’ve been asking for feedback. Because of that also, it helped me connect with a lot of people who had advice, who had resources, people who shared research papers with me that are not included in the book.
And so, similar to what I did with my meditation experiment, don’t just do it behind closed doors. Don’t wait until you feel like you’re ready, because you’ll never feel ready, especially with something as daunting as a book. So, just say that you’re going to do it and then keep track your progress and share it in public.
I also have uploaded on my website for people who preordered the book. I actually have an entire one-hour workshop, where I walk through the entire process of getting an agent writing the book proposal and all of that.
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Tobias: Through your writing and through your experimentation, what have you discovered that you wouldn’t have thought was possible or might have– like was a little bit counterintuitive that you didn’t expect?
Anne-Laure: I generally thought when I started writing this book that it was too late to write a book, especially in the current landscape with all of those AI-driven tools and where a lot of people are reading summaries of ideas instead of reading the actual original article or blog post. But I’ve been incredibly surprised at how much people are actually craving the experience of losing yourself into someone else’s ideas and going really deep and connect with the research and the content. So, that was actually, a really beautiful surprise, and that gives me a lot of hope when it comes to the state of humanity and then just the state of intellectual creativity and connection.
Tobias: For folks who want to purchase the book or follow along with what you’re doing, what’s the best way of doing that?
Anne-Laure: For anyone on the live stream right now, the book is called Tiny Experiments. It’s available, literally, anywhere books are sold. So, you can go on Amazon or you can support your local bookstore by ordering your copy there.
Tobias: Anne-Laure Le Cunff, thank you very much for spending time with us today talking about your book, Tiny Experiments.
Anne-Laure: Thanks so much for having me.
Tobias: And folks, we’ll be back same time next week, same bat channel, hopefully with JT. He’ll be able to share some of his learnings from chasing butterflies.
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