How To Succeed, Sanely—Without Toxic Productivity, Preconceived Notions, or Fear of Change | Anne-Laure Le Cunff

27:26So we can actually figure out what we want. We can actually live a life that feels meaningful and fulfilling in a way that actually feels good. I find that very attractive. You list some tools in this regard, the practical tools that are helpful in this regard. They include things like energy syncing, the magic window, sequential focus, conscious movement. I just threw out a bunch of terms. Which of those feel right to discuss? I would say probably energy thinking is the one I use the most and that provides the biggest unlock for people when I mention it. When you think about the traditional definition of productivity, which very often leads to toxic productivity, it's really based on this idea that your most valuable resource is your time.

28:18And so you need to make the most of your time. And this is why we have those calendars that look like a series of boxes and we're supposed to fill this calendar and stuff it with as much work as possible so we can feel like at the end of the day, we've done some good work and we've been productive. The idea of energy syncing is to pay a little less attention to that time aspect, which obviously you can't completely ignore because we live in a society where a lot of projects and the way we work and collaborate together is actually based on time and those calendars. But as much as you can, trying to adjust the way you work based on your energy levels.

29:01And you can do that at a micro and at a macro level. So at a micro level on a day-to-day basis, start paying attention to when you feel like you have more creative energy versus when you feel like your energy stores are depleted and try to organize your work in this way. So if you have a lot of creative energy in the morning, you should not wake up and open your emails. That's going to suck all of that creative energy out of you. You should probably block that first hour, not check your emails and whatever kind of work that you do, do your deep thinking in that first hour. And if that happens at another time in the day, you can protect that.

29:40You can also use that energy sinking idea to even figure out what to work on. If you have a few tasks on your list and you're not quite sure where to start, actually paying attention to where your energy is calling you, what is more interesting to you right now. And that's going to make the work a lot easier. So at a micro level, you can do this. At a macro level too, we don't think enough in terms of seasons. People didn't used to work nonstop at the same level of intensity throughout the year. So you can also think about your work in this way. What kind of work should you do in the winter? What kind of work should you do in the summer?

30:18Again, I realize that in a lot of professions, you don't have full freedom to do that. If you're a freelancer or a solo entrepreneur, that's probably easier. For lots of people, that's not possible. So can you carve out a couple of hours every week where you follow your energy to decide what you're going to work on. That's a way to start practicing mindful productivity, even if you can't do it all the time. Yeah, I would acknowledge that I'm in a very lucky position in that I'm my own boss and I can set my own schedule. But I have found, I don't know that I was calling it energy syncing, but I have found that what you're describing, which is kind of doing some self-anthropology to get a sense of how my energy flows through the day, that when I wake up in the morning, I do spend 60 to 90 minutes off the phone, often outside if I can handle whatever the weather is, doing really creative work for the first part of the day.

31:18And then my energy goes downhill from there. So everything else is pushed off until later in the day, including podcast interviews, sad to say, although it's two o 'clock in the afternoon as we're recording this, so I'm not yet brain dead. But so I found it incredibly, incredibly helpful, just to say. I know I listed four practical tools, energy syncing, magic window, sequential focus, conscious movement. I think we can intuit conscious movement is it's helpful to move your body through the day. And I've really found that really helpful. Sequential focus instead of multitasking, can you monotask?

31:53But what do you mean by the magic window? That's the least obvious. So magic windows are those moments where you completely forget your sense of time, of tasks, or of responsibilities, and you really lose yourself in the moment. It's inspired by the two different words that the ancient Greeks had for time. So they had two words. One of them was chronos, which is kind of the same word we're still using today. You have it in chronometer, for example. So that's the time of seconds and minutes and months. That's the quantitative definition of time. But they had another word for time, which was kairos, which is the qualitative definition of time.

32:36And that's the time of sunsets. That's the time of long conversations with a friend. That's the time of playing with your kids. That's kairos time. Magic windows are ways to intentionally create more Kairos time in your life. So it's figuring out what is a little ritual that you can create for yourself. When you're stuck in Kronos time, you're doing your in toxic productivity mode, long task list, stressed and anxious. What is a little ritual that can reopen that magic window that can put you back in that Kairos frame of mind? I interviewed a bunch of people to ask them how do you do that how do you reopen a magic window when you feel like you're just being rushed and pushed and you have no control over the way your energy is flowing and in the book I list some examples some of them were really funny but I have simple ones where I was like okay yeah I can see that where people say I go in the kitchen and I make myself a cup of tea very slowly and I pay attention to every single gesture and the smell and the heat in my hands and all of that.

33:44I had people say they walk in a circle in the room a few times until they feel like they're reconnected to themselves. So they get up from the desk and they do that. I had people say they just go and get in a little bowl on the bed and stay there and just close their eyes and take a mini, mini nap. It's not really a nap. They don't fall asleep. But again, they're acting like a child a little bit for a moment until they feel reconnected with that sense of playfulness. And so, again, this is something I really would encourage people to experiment with, to figure out what it is for you. What is something you can do to reconnect with that sense of Kairos time, with feeling alive, feeling grateful to be in this moment, feeling connected to yourself, and then you can get back to work.

34:32But reconnecting with that sense of Kairos time. That's really helpful. This is something I also was kind of doing without knowing I was doing it, but I'll take a break and, you know, go motorboard one of my cat's bellies or start a playful argument with my wife or my son or toss a ball around or something to get me out of the sort of headlong, mindless forward momentum. momentum. One other thing you say about mindful productivity that I found really interesting is that we might be unfairly vilifying procrastination. Yes. Procrastination is really treated as the enemy in actually most circles.

35:15I find procrastination fascinating because this is something that a lot of people are happy to talk about at a very conceptual level where they say, oh yeah, procrastination. Yeah, I know that's a challenge, but you never hear someone walk to their bus and say, yeah, I haven't finished the presentation because I was procrastinating. Nobody does that. So we never have an honest conversation. We never really admit to the fact that we're procrastinating because there is a lot of shame and taboo around it. But when you really look at what procrastination is. Procrastination is just a signal from your brain that something with the task is not quite right.

35:57And what we do instead of listening to that signal and trying to figure out what it means and what is wrong with the task, we try to push through, we use our willpower, and we blame ourselves in the process for not doing the thing that we think we should be doing. So in that chapter of the book, which is titled Procrastination is Not the Enemy, I encourage readers to actually have a conversation with their procrastination to say, hey, welcome back. So you're trying to tell me something. What are you trying to tell me? What is the signal trying to tell me? And I share a very simple tool that allows people to have a a bit of a more structured conversation with their procrastination to really ask, where is the problem coming from?

36:43I call the tool the triple check because what you ask is, okay, is the problem coming from the head, from the heart or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, although it might not be conscious, you don't think that you should be working on this task in the first place. And that might be for a lot of reasons. someone asked you to do it and it has become outdated. You're not the right person to do it. Makes no sense. It's not aligned with the company's priorities, but you should not be doing this thing. And part of you knows that. And so that's why you're procrastinating.

37:20If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that at an emotional level, although you think, yeah, we should be doing this, at an emotional level, you don't feel like that's going to be fun. That doesn't look like it's going to be exciting. And so you're procrastinating. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that although the head is saying, yes, let's do this, the heart is saying, that looks like fun. At a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills or knowledge or tools or support network in order to do the task. And all of a sudden, when you actually start having this conversation and asking, why am I procrastinating without self-blame or self-judgment, you can actually start systematically thinking about solutions as well, whether it's addressing the rational aspect, the emotional aspect or the practical aspect.

38:13This is another thing that I have found very helpful, again, not having labeled it any particular way. One of the most annoying cliches is this idea of listening to your heart. But as I often say, cliches get to be cliches for a reason because they're true. and I have found in a productivity context that often it's really helpful if I'll do the thing that I want to do, that my heart wants to do. If I've got a long to-do list, which thing am I going to pick? Which again, you talked about a few minutes ago too, which thing am I going to do? Which chapter am I going to work on in my next book? Somewhere my heart, some wisdom below the neckline has an instinct.

38:58Listen to that. Yes, I love that. With some below the neckline. I'm a neuroscientist. There is, for me, I know always a temptation to find an explanation at the cognitive level. But I have found time and time again that if you want to be able to paint a full picture and really understand what's going on, you need to go beyond just a rational explanation. There's always something going at the emotional level or at the practical level as well. Yeah. Somebody said the problems of life are arterial. You know, as a poetic statement, I agree with it. The other thing you talk about in this section of the book around mindful productivity is this phrase, intentional imperfection.

39:46Can you describe what you mean by that? So I talk about intentional imperfection in the sense that a lot of people who are quite ambitious and who want to be successful have this tendency to try and be absolutely perfect in every single area of their lives at all times. When you put it like that, you know it's impossible. And yet that's what a lot of us are trying to do. So we're trying to perform at 100 % across our personal lives or professional lives. We're trying to be the best friend possible, the best spouse possible, the best manager possible while taking care of our health, while doing all of the different things and commitments that we have in life.

40:28And obviously, we end up failing at one of those things, not being 100 percent. And we feel like we did something wrong. Intentional imperfection is just accepting the fact that you cannot be perfect at everything at all times. and you would suffer a lot less and actually perform better if you were intentional about it. If you embraced it, accepted it and decided in advance, this is where I'm going to try to be at 95%. And this is where I'm going to drop the ball this week. And that's okay. The great thing about this approach is that not only it allows you to actually perform at 95 or 100%, wherever you want to perform at that level in that area of your life that week, because that's where you've decided that your energy is going to go.

41:14But it also allows you to first not blame yourself for not doing your most in other areas, but also communicate that to others. So you could tell your spouse, I have this big presentation coming up on Thursday. And so I might not be helping as much in the next couple of days at home. And I'm sorry in advance. I promise I'll help again a little bit more at the end of the week. And by the way, if there's something really important and urgent that you need me to do that you feel like I'm not doing because I'm so focused on that other thing, let me know. Because I might be distracted by that other thing and I don't want you to feel like I'm not doing at least the 50 % that I'm supposed to do here.

41:57and all of a sudden you're able to perform in that area where it makes sense for you to focus right now while still being pretty decent in other areas because you've decided that you were going to be at 50 % in advance and you communicated it. One of the tools you recommend in this section of the book is something called ambition dials. Yes. It's exactly what I just described is really it's more of an image and it's imagining that you have this kind of dashboard in front of you with all of those dials where you have your ambition levels and so you have your ambition dial as a dad this week as a manager your ambition dial as a gym goer as a spouse as a someone who tends to cook their meals at home or whatever it is those things are important to you as a friend and just knowing that it cannot be 100 % everywhere.

42:58And so how are you going to adjust those dials to get to a level where you look at the dashboard and if you're being honest with yourself, you can say, okay, this actually looks achievable. It's not perfect because that's not what we're trying to do, but it's doable. I like it. Part three of the book is called Collaborating with Uncertainty. I think I know what you're pointing at there, but can you say more? Yes, you've probably understood from the conversation we've been having so far that as a scientist and also from my experience in my personal life, I do believe, and this is one of the key messages in the book, that we would all live much happier lives if we accepted that we don't know where we're going.

43:46and that there is actually a lot to learn from uncertainty. There is a lot of opportunity in uncertainty if we allow ourselves to stay in it, to explore it, to ask questions instead of trying to escape it as quickly as possible and clinging to that illusion of certainty. So that entire section of the book is really about how to navigate uncertainty, how to embrace it, how to learn from it. And it includes some tools and ways to really navigate moments where things are not going to plan, you're not quite sure what you're going to do next, how can you actually turn these moments of uncertainty into fruitful moments of opportunity?

44:29One of the things I think about a lot, and it's kind of a rap I deliver on this show, not infrequently, but there are so many great things about the human operating system, but this design flaw is just glaring. There are many, But the one question here is that we live in a world where change is non-negotiable. Everything's changing all the time. And yet we are allergic to uncertainty and addicted to certainty as some sort of defense against relentless flux. Does any of this sound right to you? Oh, yeah, no, absolutely. It actually makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective. So if you think about our ancestral past and the conditions in which we were evolving, the more certainty you had, the more likely you were to survive.

45:20Yeah. So if you knew where you could find the resources, what was that weird noise in the bushes and who were the people you could trust or not trust in the tribe? All of that kind of information added to a sense of certainty in terms of your environment where you could make good predictions and you were more likely to survive. And so in that sense, if your goal in life is to just survive, your brain is perfectly designed for that. It's perfectly designed for survival. And the issue is that I think a lot of people today want more than surviving. They actually want to thrive. They want to grow.

46:00They want to live a meaningful life. And that's when that mechanism where we try to reduce uncertainty as quickly as possible can get in the way. That's a mistake I've made many times. Continue to make it. On the practical tip here, there are, as you referenced earlier, some things you recommend. One of them is something called growth loops. Yes. A growth loop is when you put it all together, you could conduct tiny experiments forever. And if you keep on doing the exact same thing over and over again, without learning from the experiment, then you're just going to go in circles. If you want to actually grow, you need to pair action with reflection.

46:45You need to make sure that you learn from what worked and what didn't. And based on that, you iterate on the previous experiment. And this is what I call a growth loop. This is when you create those loops where each experiment provides you with more knowledge, whether that's self-knowledge or knowledge about your work or knowledge about the world, and you use that new knowledge to design your next experiment. And again, it's a loop, not a ladder, in the sense that you don't have this linear sense of having a step-by-step recipe that you follow to get to a specific destination. It's the idea that you're going to keep on growing through each of the loops that you complete, even though you don't know what that's going to look like.

47:29So how do we actually create these growth loops practically? How do we make this part of our lives? So putting it all together, you start with observation. This is what we did with the self-anthropology. You just observe what is. Once you've observed what is, you can start imagining what could be different. And this is when you design a tiny experiment. You keep it small and you try something new. And that can be, as you mentioned earlier, across your health, your work, your relationships, any area of your life where you feel like something could maybe work better. You conduct a tiny experiment.

48:06And in order to close the loop, you need to actually reflect on that experiment. So at the end of the experiment, I recommend using a little tool that's very, very simple that I call plus minus next. The name really describes what it is. It has three columns. In the first column, you write everything that went well with the experiment. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, everything that you might want to try next, what you want to tweak, what you want to focus on in the next iteration. The reason why this little tool is so powerful is because first, you take the time to acknowledge what went well.

48:47You celebrate the wins. Some things went well. And even if the experiment didn't go as planned, there is always something positive. Just find something and put it there. And sometimes there's lots of positive things. but you celebrate your wins. Second, you're honest about what didn't go so well. So you just write what could have been better, what was unexpected and not a really good way. And finally, instead of just having the static vision of what worked and what didn't, you can actually extract that knowledge and decide how you're going to grow thanks to that knowledge. And so that's the last column.

49:25Next, this is what closes the loop. observation, then experimentation, and then reflection. Yeah, because I could see somebody with my psychological proclivities launching a million tiny experiments, but never reflecting and just launching from one to the next. Yes. So a lot of the people I work with are highly curious and highly ambitious. And so they are all very prone, I am as well, to want to conduct tons of tiny experiments at the same time. There are several reasons why you don't want to do that. The first one is what you just mentioned, which is that if you try to conduct too many experiments at the same time, it's going to be very hard to actually have space for reflection, really integrating what you learned so you can then implement that knowledge and use it for your next experiment.

50:21The second reason why you want to avoid having too many experiments at the same time is because it's going to make it harder to know what is having a positive impact on your life. So a little bit like when a scientist is conducting an experiment and you want to look at a couple of variables at most, you don't want to have too many variables changing at the same time. So it's just simpler to know if you're doing the experiment of not bringing your phone in your bedroom for the next two weeks, for example, if you just do that one thing, it's going to be easier to know that this is what's helping.

50:55And the last reason why you don't want to have too many experiments at the same time is because, again, it's very important that you complete your experiments. So you commit to that action for that specific duration, and only at the end of the experiment, you decide what you're going to do next. And again, if you have a thousand of them running at the same time, it's very likely you're going to abandon quite a few of them because that's unmanageable. Yes. People come to me a lot, given what I do and say, I was just having this conversation the other day with a contractor who was saying, you know, he's at a point of self-examination because of some health stuff.

51:32And he was like being told to meditate and get more sleep and blah, blah, blah. And he was like, I don't know which to do it. I said, just pick one and go really small. But what I should add is do it for a finite period of time and reflect at the end of it. Yes, tiny experiments. That's really the main difference between a habit and an experiment. It's this idea of having a fixed duration and reflection at the end. And then experiments can actually become a gateway to figuring out habits that you want to implement. I told you in my case with meditation, it did not become a habit, which is perfectly fine.

52:12But in some cases, you might discover that something works so well that you want to implement it as a permanent habit in your life. I buy it.

52:23Coming up, Anne-Laurelle Comte talks about how to learn and grow with others and why that matters, collective flow states, tips for community building, and the question of whether legacy is important.

52:44part four of the book the final part of the book is called grow with the world what do you mean by that phrase i mean that you could do everything i describe in the first three parts of the book on your own and that's fine but if you really want to grow you need to do it with the world you need to do it with others you need to learn in public you need to be part of communities of practice. And this is what the last part of the book is about. It's really about opening up your personal laboratory to the world and actually learning and growing with others. When you say learn in public, what does that mean?

53:20Learning in public, people might think that it means that it's all about posting on social media, and it can be, but it doesn't have to be. Learning in public is anytime you're conducting an experiment and there's at least one other human being who's aware of the experiment, that's learning in public. And that can take many forms. That can be having a little WhatsApp group with friends where you say, hey, that's our experiment for the next few weeks. Let's do it together. That can be having an accountability buddy where you say every week we grab coffee on Sunday and we ask each other, OK, how's your experiment going?

54:00What did you learn? What didn't work? what worked, what do you want to do next and doing that together. And so learning in public can have a very limited public. That's okay. And it can be all the way to actually having a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, whatever you want to do. It doesn't have to be that, but it's really about making sure that you're sharing what you learn with others, not at the end when you feel like you have figured it out and you're the expert, but really sharing during the learning journey while you're still figuring it out. I believe there's quite a bit of evidence to show that when you're trying to boot up a habit, what the psychologist calls social support is incredibly important.

54:44It can really strengthen or supercharge the process. I often talk about the importance of living in the HOV lane or the carpool lane. The term you use is social flow or unlocking social flow. Can you say a little bit more about that? A lot of people are probably already familiar with the concept of flow. This is a state in which you are, it is kind of linked, and I talk about it in both parts of the book, about this idea of Kairos time, right? When you're in a state of flow, you are lost in the moment, you're fully focused on a task, and you feel this sense of ease and both effort and effortlessness at the same time.

55:29Anyone who's experienced it will know exactly what I describe here. It's actually really hard to describe. And flow has been studied for decades and decades. There's lots of research around it, but most of it has been conducted in individuals. But there's emerging research looking at what they call social flow, which shows that when you surround yourself with other people who are deeply engrossed into a task, really curious about something. And in that state of flow themselves, it makes it easier for you to access, to unlock that state of flow as well. So there is really something about the sense of collective curiosity where we all are trying to explore something, to understand something, to work on a task.

56:19And it makes it a lot easier when everybody is in that same state of flow around you rather than trying to do it on your own. Yeah, it's really interesting because I've done a million interviews on the show on the subject of flow. Either I've done entire episodes on it or it's come up within episodes. And I always feel a little sheepish in those conversations because it's not frequent that I get into a flow state on my own, maybe when I'm playing the drums or maybe when I'm running, but it's not happening all the time, sometimes in meditation. But it does happen when I'm talking to other people, either when we're working on something collectively, or if it's just a dinner party where the conversation is really flowing and then I do lose track of time.

57:04Yes. And traditionally, you might not see those experiences described in the flow of research literature, because again, we tend to look at it at an individual level, but at a cognitive level, it's actually the exact same experience. It's just a lot easier to unlock with other people. Yeah. This part of the book, Growing With The World, is all about engaging with the world, not being stuck in your own tiny experiment silo, not being stuck in any kind of silo. But one thing I hear from people all the time is, well, you, Dan, and many other so-called experts are talking about the value of community.

57:42I don't know how to build one. And you do have some advice here, this framework of apprentice, artisan, and architect. I'd love to hear more about that. A lot of people struggle to find their community because they try to build one straight away, which is really, really hard. Building a community is really hard. So instead of starting with building a community, start by just joining one. That's what I call a community apprentice. You just join the community and you try to learn as much as you can. You're part of the community. You join all of the events and you ask questions and you're a good contributor.

58:21Then if you want to, and you could just stop here, that's completely fine. But if you feel called to explore that journey a little bit more and go a bit deeper, you can become what I call a community artisan. And this is when you start being a more active contributor in your community. So maybe you start hosting some of the community events. Maybe you start making suggestions in terms of how the community is run. Maybe you start sharing more ideas, getting small groups together. Again, you can stop here. But if this is something you like and you derive a lot of joy from that experience and that connection that you get with people, then only you can start exploring becoming a community architect.

59:04And this is where you really start your own community. This is a lot of work, but it can be incredibly fulfilling for people who actually enjoy that kind of work. The only thing I would recommend is maybe start with the two other levels first to try and figure out if that's something you enjoy enough to go to that other level. And whether you might be happy just being more of an apprentice or an artisan, you don't necessarily have to be one of the community architects to get meaning from those kind of connections. I don't know if what I'm going to say is going to make any sense. I had this experience the other day where my wife and I went to go pick up our son from one of his classmates' homes.

59:47And the house and the property was just beautiful. So tasteful, so beautiful. Just, I love the house we live in. But it just put me in this mind state of like, oh, maybe we should be, you know, should we live in that town, in that house? and it's just not a fun place to be. It's not terrible. It's not as unfun as murderous rage, but being in that kind of acquisitive, comparative mind state is, I don't know, it's not really where I want to live. Whereas when I'm thinking about, I actually have started to experiment with architecting communities, but even if I'm just apprenticing in a community, when I'm in that mindset, I don't have any existential crises.

1:00:32It doesn't feel edgy and cracked out. Does anything I'm saying land for you? It makes sense. And I think a lot of it has to do with the traditional definition of success that we've all kind of internalized. And so, you know, it's the same with big job titles or big salaries or fancy projects, the big house, the car, and all of that, even though at a rational level, you probably know that you don't necessarily care that much. When you grew up in a society where you've been told that this is what success looks like, I think there is still going to be a part at the emotional level that's going to have those instinctive responses.

1:01:15Whereas at least in our Western societies, it would be really interesting to talk to someone from another culture. But in our Western societies, we haven't really put that kind of prestige around this label on community building. You don't admire people as much in our society around community building. And so maybe that's why there is less of that response, because I think I think you're right. I think a lot of people would have experienced those two very different responses in those two different situations. But I wonder if and I'm not sure, but I wonder if that's not cultural. For me, I think it's 100 percent cultural.

1:01:53Well, I mean, I think there's something about the human animal that desire is hardwired, but for sure, where are you channeling that desire can absolutely be cultural, not only the larger culture. I mean, I grew up in the 70s and 80s watching Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous on television, but also the culture of your family of origin. I had great parents who were both physicians and, you know, lived in ways and worked in ways that benefited the world. But, you know, there was a very sort of conventional post-World War II boomer mindset of credentialism and materialism that definitely got into my molecules.

1:02:34Yeah, 100%. And so I feel like there is a lot, again, of scripts to unlearn and to relearn, to ask ourselves, what do I actually care about? What is actually meaningful for me to explore? What are my areas where I'm curious to grow versus copy pasting or having those automatic responses, which we're going to have those responses, but observing them and then knowing that that's not necessarily the script that you want to follow. You have this concept right toward the end of the book of life beyond legacy. What is that about? Something I keep reading about and hearing about, sometimes even more than purpose, is legacy, leaving a legacy behind.

1:03:16And this is also something that I want to encourage people to question. Why is it that we are so obsessed with leaving a legacy that people are going to benefit from once we're not there anymore in a way that is very unpredictable when we could actually decide on our actions in a way that benefits our current communities, the other fellow human beings who are sharing the planet with us today in a way that's very visible and immediate? And I think it might seem less grand and impressive because the kind of generative impact I talk about in the last chapter of the book is really about local impact, community impact, and just thinking about the kind of positive impact that you can have on the people around you.

1:04:06when in general, all of the talk around legacy is about the kind of millions of people are going to remember your name kind of legacy and you're going to change the world kind of legacy, which I think is a distraction. Yeah, I think I was like in my teens when I realized I was not foreordained to be king of the world. Yeah, it's very common desire. You know, I think it's reaction to impermanence and change and uncertainty that we want a legacy because it defies death. Yes. Ultimately, we want to feel like our life matters. We want to feel like it made a difference that we were here versus us not having existed at all.

1:04:49And so it absolutely makes sense. I still have those intrusive thoughts sometimes where I ask myself, does any of what I do actually matter? Nobody's going to remember it. And again, none of the work that I do and none of what I write about is about getting rid of those thoughts or those responses that we have. They're very human. They're very, very human. But it's about noticing them, not blaming yourself for having those thoughts, and then deciding in an intentional way to not act on them and act in a different way that is actually more aligned with what you want to contribute today. That's a crucial point you're making, in my opinion, that mindfulness or self-anthropology or whatever you want to call it is going to backfire if when you see embarrassing parts of your personality, you then lapse into self-judgment, self-laceration, making it bad.

1:05:48In the words of my executive coach, Jerry Colonna, when I talked to him about my less appetizing or attractive motivations, he always says, like, let's not make it bad. It is human. That urge is trying to help you. It's some neurotic script that you, you know, the organism came up with at age five or whatever. It's trying to help you, but we don't need to follow it. I think that's crucial. I do want to come back to where we started, which was we talked about the two chapters of your life and you described the first chapter, Google, startup that didn't go so well, and then entry into the second chapter, which is experimentation.

1:06:31But what does your life look like now? Can you flesh out the second chapter a little? Yes. I ask myself, what is something I'm actually curious about? Even if nobody was watching, even if the traditional success was out of the equation, what is something I would be excited to explore just for the sake of it? And for me, that had always been the brain. I had always been curious about how it works. So I went back to school. I went back to school to study how the brain works. And this is where I rediscovered the concept of the experimental cycle, because that's what we're taught in school when we study neuroscience, how to conduct experiments.

1:07:10starting with observation, formulating a hypothesis, collecting your data, and then based on that data, making decisions. And I had a bit of an aha moment where I figured, huh, what if I started applying this approach to other areas of my life? And so I started conducting tiny experiments as I was conducting my studies in neuroscience. I also started my first public experiment around that time, which was to write a hundred blog posts in a hundred weekdays, which I know doesn't sound like such a tiny experiment, but that's because I don't think everybody would agree with my definition of an article.

1:07:53Some of them were very, very short, but I had to publish something every day. And at the end of that experiment, I realized that I actually loved writing. I loved writing. I wanted to keep going. And so I kept going. And today my life looks like a little bit of neuroscience research. I work at a university in London where I study the brain. A little bit of writing. I still write my weekly newsletter and have published this book. A little bit of traveling and meeting interesting people and listening to their stories and seeing how I can incorporate that in the rest of my work. Well, I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing because I found it personally helpful.

1:08:37At the end of my interviews, I ask two questions. One of them is, is there something you were hoping that we would get to that we haven't gotten to? Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. Based on our conversation, what would be a tiny experiment you'd like to try? Oh, that's a good one. I'm hesitating only because my job is to be a self-improvement guinea pig, so I'm just constantly running experiments. Can I add a tiny one? So it has to have that short duration. Yeah. Well, here's something I've been thinking about. I have a fraught relationship to dessert. I love dessert. It's my favorite thing, especially since I can't do cocaine anymore.

1:09:22I really like dessert. And I've gone through periods of time where I just was cookie monster and would just eat until I got sick. Literally one night I got up in the middle of the night and puked Oreos. And that wasn't good because I would feel like shit the next day. And that was a whole spiral. And then I went through this whole abstemious phase where I wasn't having any sugar at all. And then right here on the show in 2020, I interviewed an amazing woman named Evelyn Triboli, who's one of the co-creators of something called intuitive eating. And her point is that actually making food groups bad is not so helpful, especially when you're a parent.

1:10:04And so now I do allow myself to eat dessert, but I just try to actually taste it while I'm eating. And that can help me not eat as much. And that has been great. And yet, you know, I do notice that if I don't have it, I sleep better and I feel better the next day. And so one of the things I've been thinking about is without making dessert bad, can I cut back on it? Not because it's bad, but because I don't want to feel that way. Yeah. So I don't know. Maybe there's an experiment in there. I love that. But yeah, you could say, I don't know, looking at how much dessert you eat today. And also, by the way, I quit drinking three years ago and I also now eat so much sugar.

1:10:51So I think it's a very common experience. But I would just look at how many desserts you have every week and say, I will only eat X, like have it X number of times over the next X weeks. And what I like about doing it by weeks like that is that it's a bit more flexible. So if you have no dessert, if you say three times a week, for example, if you have no dessert at all the entire week and you actually feel like having a really, really big piece of cake on Sunday, you can do that. That's fine. That's part of the experiment, right? Or you can have three smaller ones throughout the week, but it makes it a bit more playful and a bit more, you know, fun to experiment with and figure out what works for you.

1:11:31But that could be something you could do for a few weeks. Yeah. I will only have dessert twice a week for the next three weeks. and then I will evaluate. Boom, tiny experiment. I like nothing more than a gold star. So thank you for giving me that. In closing, can you just enter what I sometimes semi-jokingly call the plug zone? Can you please remind us of the name of your new book? Tell us about your newsletter, anything else you're doing in the world, your website that we should know about. I love that, the plug zone. My book is called Tiny Experiments. You can find it anywhere books are sold.

1:12:07that includes Amazon, or you can go and support your independent bookseller. And I have a newsletter called Nest Labs. Just go to nestlabs.com. I send it every week and I talk about a lot of the topics that we discussed today. Anne-Laure LeCamp, thank you very much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.

1:12:29Thanks again to Anne-Laure. Great to talk to her. As you may have heard, she did give me a tiny experiment challenge. challenge. And yes, I did try only having dessert twice a week, and it's really been helpful. It's been super helpful and not that hard. And I think it will turn into an abiding habit. So thanks again to Anne-Laure. Thank you for going to check out my new app, 10 % with Dan Harris. If you haven't done so, what are you waiting for? You can check it out via danharris.com. If you go to danharris.com, you can get the app, which again is called 10 % with Dan Harris. New meditations posting there all the time.

1:13:04Plus, we've got weekly live meditation and Q &A sessions that you can join. There's a 14-day free trial if you sign up now, so you can try before you buy. Finally, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard on this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. We're our theme.