629: Anne-Laure Le Cunff - How To Live Freely In a Goal Obsessed World (Tiny Experiments)

27:42They want to contribute to their community and they have all of those different purposes in their life. That is not just that one big purpose. The other one is that your purpose can actually change. We're very fortunate to live in an age where hopefully we're going to live for quite a long time. And so you can change, you can grow, you can evolve, and you can reinvent yourself. You can completely change careers if you want to at some point. And the last one is that it makes a lot of people miserable when they haven't found their purpose. So they look around and they feel like, oh, I'm behind. I got something wrong.

28:18I'm not living a meaningful life because I don't have this one true purpose. When in reality, when you ask around people, how did you find your purpose? A lot of them, if they're honest, will tell you that they stumbled upon it. They tried a lot of different things. They worked on a lot of projects. They met interesting people. And then they got to work on a project, on an idea, and one day they woke up and they realized like, oh, I actually really love this. I'm actually really excited to wake up in the morning and to work on this. Or I go to bed and I can't stop thinking about this thing. And might it be it?

28:55That's my purpose? Oh, I guess that's my purpose for now. That's the one thing that's going to really keep me excited. And again, knowing that that might change in the future. So that's why I tell people we should really try to escape that tyranny of purpose. And if you do find one for now, that's great. If you have several, that's great. If you don't have it yet, that's great also. Do you have one now? I'm actually in this in-between phase, which is very interesting, where the past few years did feel like I had one because I was completing my PhD. I was writing this book. And so it did feel like I had this very clear purpose that I had to follow in that area of my life, at least.

29:39And now the book is launching, I'm done with my PhD. And that's what I mean by escaping the tyranny of purpose is that I want to be okay with the fact that for the next few months, maybe the rest of the year, maybe longer, I might not have a clear purpose. And that's okay. I'm going to experiment. I'm going to keep on talking with people, having interesting conversations, working on different projects without putting that pressure on myself that one of these needs to be my purpose. And I'll trust that at some point, something will emerge. When I read Nest Labs, if you were to ask me to guess what I feel like your purpose is, like an overarching one with this book, with just what you do, I would say to help people become the scientists of their own life.

30:24Would that be accurate? it? That's more of a mission, a company mission. And I think it's very helpful to communicate to other people the kind of value that they can get from my work. And especially in this day and age where we usually have half of a second on the feed and social media for people to understand what you're doing. I do find it very helpful to explain it in this way. But I would not necessarily describe this as my purpose in life. I have several, you know, like I have my family I care a lot about, my friends I care a lot about, and to me these are also very important, and these are things that I want to dedicate a lot of energy, time, and attention to as well.

31:05Gotcha. Okay. You write about uncertainty, and I think it's important to talk about uncertainty, and you want to help people collaborate with uncertainty and create growth loops, and And you go into it a lot, and I think it's important because I think what we're taught, at least, and I've been taught as a leader is good leaders help create certainty. And you're talking about collaborating with uncertainty. So I'm thinking, wow, I really want to dig in here because I've been told, hey, help people get more certain about things. That's what leaders do. They make people feel better because they create more certainty in an uncertain world.

31:44And then I'm reading your stuff. I'm like, wait a second. I'm changing my mind. I'm like really going into it. So what is it about collaborating with uncertainty? How do we do this and how will this make us better? I think it's helpful to go back to why we try to avoid uncertainty in the first place. It makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective because our brains are designed to help us survive. and when you're in the jungle and you might be surrounded by lions who want to make you their next snack having as much certainty as possible is actually going to help with surviving right and so anytime you're in a situation where you feel like i don't have enough information i don't know who the players are i don't understand the rule i don't know you want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

32:35It's almost a self-protection mechanism. And this is all very helpful in an environment where the only objective is to survive. But if you're a leader in today's world, you probably don't want just your team to survive. You want your team to thrive. And so you really need to try and get over that instinctive fear of uncertainty that we all have, which is perfectly normal. And instead, learn to befriend it, to listen to it, to collaborate with it, because there is a lot of interesting data in uncertainty and you can make decisions that are a lot more innovative and creative if you learn how to stay in that space of uncertainty for a little bit longer instead of trying to rush to the other side as quickly as possible.

33:21So this is really what I mean by collaborating with uncertainty. it's instead of clinging to the first obvious solution that is going to give you a sense of certainty which yes is going to be very comforting but is going to close many doors to you instead of doing that being able to sit in that uncertainty and as a leader even more difficult than providing certainty, really helping your team say, that's okay. It's okay if we don't know yet. Let's just stay in here a little bit longer. Let's figure out what makes sense for our business, for our priorities, for the ambitions that we have. And it's okay if it's not the very first clear solution that we go with.

34:08So it feels like you think it's a better idea to slow down a little bit more. Is that right? Yes, but not always. I wouldn't say that slowing down is the key feature of collaborating with uncertainty because sometimes you have to learn to collaborate with uncertainty very quickly depending on the pace of your industry. It is really just about not clinging to the illusion of certainty just to get out of there and making sure that you're basing your decisions on what is good for the business and what makes sense and not on that fear of uncertainty that we all have. Do you have any examples or like a story or something to bring this to life?

34:51Yeah, absolutely. So you will see that a lot in startups where a lot of people are reactive. So you have a competitor that launches a product that is similar to your feature that is similar to you. I've seen a lot of startup founders that I work with that the first response is going to try and create another feature. That's just that, but better. Like just responding in that way where all you want to do is being able to tell your team, don't worry. They did that. We don't know what that means, but we're fast. We're going to launch something that's even better. Learning to collaborate with uncertainty is telling your team, let's wait two weeks and let's conduct a little bit of research.

35:35I want you to sign up to the product and use it and see how they copied this. How does it work? What happened here? I want you to do some user research and figure out if this feature actually makes sense, right? Or is that an important feature for us? I want you to do this. I want you to do that. And you have this little tag team that is actually exploring the uncertainty, not trying yet to come up with a solution or a decision, just trying to understand what's going on. Who are the players? What are the rules? What's happening? Then let's reconvene together and let's make a decision. But let's not rush because we're scared of that new uncertainty that has arised in our business.

36:16Gotcha. Okay. Okay. That is helpful when thinking about uncertainty because I think effective leaders, this is a key point. Instead of just going super fast to eliminate as quickly as possible to get maybe a shorter term answer that may be okay, it might take a bit more time to get an excellent answer that will help you and serve you better in the long term. And I think the type of leader that's a learning leader is one that is working and playing long-term games, not just trying to win short-term transactions. Speaking of that too, you write about procrastination. And I think of my conversation with Tim Urban.

36:55I don't know if you're a Wait But Why reader, but Tim writes all about procrastination too. And so I'm trying to embrace this. Why is procrastination something that could be useful? It's actually kind of a – it is a similar mindset. It is that experimental mindset that I just mentioned with uncertainty, where in our society, we have collectively decided that some emotions are bad. We have labeled them as bad. And so we try to ignore them, to suppress them, to get rid of them. If you go on any search engines and you look up how to manage procrastination, you're going to find a bunch of articles that are all titled something like how to beat procrastination.

37:36and it's quite violent when in reality this is just another signal from your brain and so this is the change that I recommend having here is that instead of whenever you experience procrastination to decide to just get rid of it or power through using willpower or experiencing shame or self-blame because you're not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing it's really all about reframing this and saying, oh, hello, procrastination. You're here again. What are you trying to tell me? And when you start doing this, there's actually so much interesting information in there that you can use to make better decisions around your tasks and what you should be doing next.

38:23Wait, so can you explain how, because I'm thinking I have these moments and then I get done and I do, I get upset. I'm like, I didn't do anything. I mean, sometimes I get an idea or I'm thinking or, but there are other times where I get really upset because I feel like I just wasted hours because I was just doing nothing or reading some random stuff on Twitter. How do we actually use this to our advantage? Yeah. So I share in the book a little tool that I find so helpful. I use it all the time because I do procrastinate too. And, and this is really, again, not about getting rid of procrastination.

38:58It's about rewiring your response whenever you face procrastination. So the tool is called the triple check. And it's about asking, why am I procrastinating? Is it because of the head, the heart or the hand? So let's start with the head. If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, even though it's subconscious, you think that this is not the right task to be working on, or that the task is badly designed, not aligned with the business priorities, or maybe you're not the right person who should be working on this task. So there's a very rational reason for you to not do the thing.

39:39It's just that you haven't really surfaced it. And so it's at a subconscious level and it becomes procrastination. If it's coming from the heart, it means that although at a rational level, you're convinced, it doesn't look like it's going to be fun. It doesn't look like it's going to be enjoyable. And so you're procrastinating. And if it's coming from the hand, it means that although at a rational level, you're convinced, at an emotional level, you're convinced, at a practical level, you feel like you don't have the right resources, the right support, the right skills, the right knowledge in order to do the task.

40:15And the great thing about this little tool is that it's not just telling you where the procrastination is coming from. It's also telling you what to do about it. So if it's coming from the head, you're not convinced at a rational level. You can go back to your team and you can say, well, you know, I've been trying to work on this and actually I don't think this is the right approach. So you can redefine the strategy. You can redefine the task. You can say, you know, based on our priorities, I don't think this is the right thing to do. If you don't feel like you're the right person to do it, you can delegate it to someone else or in today's age, which is amazing, sometimes you can delegate it to AI.

40:49Maybe you're not the one who's supposed to do it. It's quite tedious and AI can do it for you. So that's for the rational aspect. If it's coming from the heart, emotional, then you just need to make it more fun. So maybe you grab a friend and you say, let's go to a coffee shop and work on this together. Let's do a little co-working session. Or you can create a reward for yourself. Like say, I'm actually going to go to this amazing restaurant tonight if I manage to finish this thing. And if it's coming from the hand, so it's a practical issue, then you can raise that hand and you can tell your team or tell someone else, I actually don't have the resources that I need.

41:26Maybe that looks like getting coaching. Maybe that looks like getting mentoring. Maybe that means getting access to a tool that is going to help you do this better, extra training and online course. But instead of being paralyzed by procrastination, now you know where it's coming from and what to do about it. I could go on all day about the ideas in your book. I am curious and a lot about you and your story. You've written about your parents. You've written about your grandmother, Oma, if I'm pronouncing that right. And you said Oma never had the opportunity to learn to read or write, and she would be so proud.

42:03It's the final part of your acknowledgement section of your book. Can you tell me about her and why she would be so proud of the stuff that you're doing? Yeah, my grandma is, so I'm half Algerian, half French. So on my mother's side from Algeria and my dad is from Brittany in France. Yeah, my grandmother could not read nor write nor speak French. And so we had this really beautiful relationship that was a lot with touch and hugs and smiles because we could actually not communicate together. And she has actually taken a lot of risks in her life. She has experimented a lot, even though she wouldn't have called it that, moving from Algeria to France, bringing all of her kids, fleeing the war.

42:47And as a woman also who grew up in Algeria and were the kind of objects you could work on was very, very limited there. It is a very patriarchal society. I think she would have been amazed and really proud to see that her granddaughter actually wrote a book and not in my native language either because French is my native language. So I think she would have been really, really proud. Did you write this in French and then translate it or write it in English? No, I wrote it in English. It's a really fun plot twist for me, but a French publisher actually acquired the rights for the book and someone else is going to translate it back in French.

43:28Really? What was that? I don't speak to languages fluently. What is your brain thinking? in it actually i got i'm at a point now where i actually either think in english and speak in english or i'm speaking and thinking in french and it's really it feels like two completely different parts of me even my intonations and the way i move my body are different in french and in english because it is associated with a lot of culture about how you express yourself and I can tell when I spend a little bit too long in Paris and I go back to London where I live normally that I'm a little bit stiff and it's like harder to just go back to just thinking and speaking in English.

44:13Wait what so wait which one is makes you more stiff? It's more it's not that the French is making me stiff is that it's hard to like when you're in one mode to switch back to the other one. And so I, you know, I struggle to find my words a little bit more in English if I spend a little bit too much time in France. So they're almost two completely different modes of being. Interesting. Okay. Also, when you write about your parents, anytime anybody writes about their parents, I think about my parents. And then I also think about the fact that I am a parent. And you said, they've always made me feel like anything is possible.

44:49And I want to be that I I want to make my children feel like anything is possible. What do they do? And how do they make you feel? Because you've obviously gone on and done it. You're still in the beginning part of your career, and you've done so many amazing things and impacted people in a huge way. How do they make you feel like anything was possible? I think the key kind of mantra that my mom has for me is that it is not for me to decide whether something is going to be successful or not, and I should just give it a try. And she used that so many times in my life where I was saying things like, oh, there's no point in applying to this prestigious university.

45:28There's no point in doing this thing. There's no point in starting this company because I'm not going to succeed. And she always said, that is not your job to decide. Your job is to show up, to give it a try. Anything is possible. And anything is possible if you at least give it a try. Wow. How has that messaging impacted you as you've grown up and now are doing what you do? It really permeates everything that I do. I just think about this book, for example, I got blurbs from Adam Grant and Carl Newport and all of these amazing people I had never talked to before. And as a child, I might not even have reached out to them because I would feel like, Like, why would they even reply?

46:11They don't know me. And they're, you know, so established in their own field. But I always hear this voice in the back of my mind from my mom saying, like, it's not your job. It's not your job to decide whether that's going to succeed or not. And so I send the email. I always send the email. And if people don't reply, they don't reply. I apply to things. I applied for my program in neuroscience, even though I had no knowledge of neuroscience whatsoever before doing this. I sent my first newsletter, although nobody probably was going to read it at the time. And so, yeah, just give it a try. Anything is possible, but you need to give it a try.

46:45I think people get excited to start projects, start a podcast, start a newsletter, start something, start a business even. What happens is then the initial excitement goes away after a certain period of time, six months, a year, two years, whatever. And then they quit. Most people quit. This happens in my world where I get requested and asked, hey, can you help me start a podcast? And I like to help people because people have helped me and I think it's just the right thing to do. And then they kind of peter out most of them, if not almost all of them. How do you get past that initial excitement of trying something?

47:22Because you said, I don't know if anyone's going to read it, your first newsletters, and maybe they didn't. right? How do you get past the initial excitement and keep going once, once that part, once like the honeymoon is gone? Like, what do you do to make sure that you keep at it? I think you do, you can just, um, use that as a signal as well and recreate a new honeymoon in a different part of your business. Uh, so in my case, for example, after launching the community after a year, it became really difficult for me to keep on logging in every day and answer all of the messages. And I could tell it was starting to feel like more like a burden rather than something I was excited about.

48:03And instead of saying, I quit, I'm just going to close the community. I hired someone part time for just a couple of hours a day to log into the community, make sure that everybody had the answers to whatever they needed from me. And then I focused on something else, writing the book, in my case. So I kind of always think about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. That's what he did too. At some point, he got a little bit bored of the ad business. And so they give it to someone else to manage within the team. And he went on to create a lab internally at Google to work on different projects. And you can do that too.

48:45You don't have to quit. I think people quit because they have this assumption that whatever it looked like at the beginning needs to keep on looking in exactly the same way. And so if you're bored of what it looks like now, you need to stop. When in reality, again, that uncomfortable feeling of I'm kind of bored of this. I don't want to keep going. If you look at it, it can be also a source of information for you to start changing some processes and approach things differently in your business. So good. And Laura, let's say you're meeting with somebody who is a recent college graduate and they want to leave a positive dent in the world, but they're not that sure exactly what they want to do, which is very normal.

49:23What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? I would say two things. The first one is always have space for experimentation in some part of your life. And I realized that depending on your circumstances, you might have to just take a job, whatever job, when you finish college. And that's completely okay. If at the beginning, that's what you need to do, take the job, but always make sure that at some point, even if it's a couple of hours on the weekend, whatever that looks like for you, there is a space where you're trying something new, you're experimenting, you're in contact with new people, you're learning new things and you're growing because this is how you're going to discover your next interesting step.

50:07That is not that first linear option that you had to go with when you finished college. So always make space for experimentation. And the second one is always default to curiosity. So whatever challenge that you face, if it's uncertainty, if it's procrastination, if it's stress, if it's anxiety, whatever it is that you're facing, look at it with curiosity. Again, just really practice this saying like, oh, hello, what are you here to tell me? What can I learn from you? Because when you do this, you can learn from any emotion and especially from the ones that have been labeled as negative in our society.

50:48So good. I love the way you say curiosity, by the way, side note. But anyway, the accent's perfect. The book is called Tidy Experiments, How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed world. Really, really well done. And then also at nestlabs.com. Great place to go read, as you mentioned with the newsletter. And Laura, I've been a fan for a while and I'm very grateful that we had a chance to meet and have this conversation. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Thank you so much. I absolutely love your questions and thank you for all of the work you do as well.

51:25it is the end of the podcast club thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club if you are send me a note ryan at learningleader.com let me know what you learn from this great conversation with dr ann lor lecumf a few takeaways from my notes how about the goal setting process what are the traps of linear goals and in lord talks about the fact that we think We know what we want. And we always assume we'll want the same thing as we progress, but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes we need to iterate as we go to figure that out. There's also the arrival fallacy, meaning we think we'll be so happy whenever we get the goal or achieve the thing.

52:09But the arrival fallacy states that that's usually not the case. So instead, we should focus on the process, the daily behaviors, the activities. We should run continual experiments. And through those experiments, maybe we'll actually figure out what we want to accomplish. We might even stumble into them throughout the course of those experiments. And then I think it was really important to talk about uncertainty. And she writes the fact that we should collaborate with uncertainty, understand why are we actually scared of uncertainty and it's most likely because it comes from such a long time ago where we were uncertain if that animal was going to try to come make us its next snack as Ann Lohr said but that's not really a thing anymore but our brains haven't really caught up they were built originally just to survive but now we don't want to just survive we want to thrive so we can't necessarily cling to the first obvious conclusion.

53:10We should sit in it. We should wait. We should do more work before just trying to eliminate uncertainty quickly. And then how about having a vision as a CEO? And I think that's important, but instead of focusing on being number one in the marketplace and crushing all of your competitors, how about we focus on our approach, our values, our mission, focusing on our company's daily behaviors more so than beating somebody else. Be curious, be ambitious, right? But have it be intrinsically focused, not externally focused on others. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Dr.

53:54Anne-Laurent LeComphe. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and you subscribe to the show and you rate it, hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review. By doing all of that, you are giving me the opportunity to chase my curiosities and do what I love on a daily basis, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.