Kate Henry [00:00:00]:

Welcome to Honing In, a podcast for creative thinkers where we’ll hone our skills, explore our passions, and nurture our dream projects into being. Hi, everyone. Welcome back to honing in. I always say this, but I am very excited for today’s interview. I loved reading this book. I got a lot out of it. So I hope that you will get as much out of this conversation. Today, I’m talking to Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is a neuroscience and an entrepreneur.

 

Kate Henry [00:00:40]:

After leaving Google and failing as a startup founder, she returned to university to pursue a PhD in neuroscience. By documenting her journey and learning in public, she has amassed a loyal audience of more than 100,000 newsletter subscribers, becoming the foremost expert in systematic curiosity applied to productivity, creativity, and mental health. She currently runs Nest Labs, an online school for curious minds to learn how to achieve their goals without sacrificing their mental health with more than 2,000 students. Simultaneously, Le Cunff conducts research into the neuroscience of learning and curiosity at King’s College London. She teaches neuroscience in the digital world for the bachelor’s in science in psychology and neuroscience and serves as an advisor to the applied neuroscience association, which is so exciting. You’ve got so many things in your bio, and I know we’re gonna talk about those today. So welcome.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:01:43]:

Thank you so much for having me.

 

Kate Henry [00:01:46]:

My pleasure. I really mean what I say when I loved your book. And I told you this, you know, when we were emailing that I found it really accessible and I found it really actionable. And that’s something I just really appreciate as a productivity researcher that sometimes things can really feel one size fits all, or they can feel inaccessible for folks who are very busy or working parents who have chronic health conditions. And I really found tiny experiments to be very intentionally written in a way to make it accessible. So thank you for doing that.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:02:18]:

I’m so glad this is, yeah, this is literally what I’m trying to achieve. Anytime I write an article for my newsletter or when I worked on the book, I want people to be able to use these tools to apply them in their work and in their lives. So thank you.

 

Kate Henry [00:02:34]:

Thank you. I’m gonna get into asking you a bit more about your journey, but first, I wanna start out with a question I’m really curious about personally, and this really informs the project on creative projects. I would love to hear what your perspective is on the concept of a creative project. So I’m using air quotes for project. Does this label of a project feel helpful to you, or do you have a different terminology or framework that you use? And I’d be curious to hear if maybe that’s informed by the idea of an experiment. So just love to hear how that resonates with you and how you think about projects.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:03:12]:

Yeah. I have a lot of creative projects. I have more creative projects on the the list of projects I’d like to work on at some point than the ones I can actually work on with the limited number of hours I have in the day. So I think using projects as a construct when working on something is useful. It means that it’s a container to create something. I would say that a project is slightly different from an experiment, and an experiment can be a gateway to decide which projects you wanna work on. The main difference in my mind is that for a project, you probably have a pretty clear idea of what you want the outcome to look like. Whereas with an experiment, you’re starting with a hypothesis, a research question.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:04:04]:

You’re wondering if a certain approach, certain tool, a certain collaboration, habit, or routine, whatever it is you wanna test, you’re wondering if that might work for you. And that means that failure is an option. If that does not work out, now you know. You know that your hypothesis was not correct. And this is really what the experimental mindset is all about. It’s about asking those research questions about anything that you might want to work on or that you might want to change in your life and being okay with the fact that the answer might not be what you expected. If you like the answer and you wanna keep going in that direction, it might be worth switching to an actual project that might have an actual deadline, specific milestones, specific collaborators, and an outcome that you have in mind.

 

Kate Henry [00:05:07]:

Thank you for that clarification of thinking of a project versus an experiment and how an experiment could lead us to a project. I think often, myself included, will just set a project and be so thrilled about the potential outcome of having achieved it. And, like, that sometimes then we can just feel really crappy when we don’t achieve it. So I really like what you talk about in tiny experiments with gathering this data and finishing your experiment and then making a decision. It feels like there is intentionally a lack of self judgment or self criticism throughout the process, and I’m sure you would agree, but what are your thoughts on that?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:05:50]:

Yeah. This is really about applying that experimental mindset that scientists use when they design experiments. So when a scientist designs an experiment, they don’t start poking at the data and then decide that they don’t like what they’re seeing, and so they’re just going to stop the experiment in the middle. There’s really a commitment to following the protocol until the end of the experiment, withholding judgment. And when you’re done collecting the data, you can analyze it and you can make decisions. So this is the same with tiny experiments that you might want to conduct in your work or in your life. You choose an action that you wanna test, and then you choose a duration, and then you do the thing. And so it might be a writing experiment for a couple of weeks.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:06:39]:

It might be another kind of creative experiment that you do for a month, and you do the thing. You perform the action for the duration of the trial, just as in a scientific experiment. And only when you’re done, you look back and you can ask yourself, okay. What worked? What didn’t? Do I wanna keep going? Do I wanna tweak it? Maybe. I feel like that was good, but maybe there’s something in the process that could be improved. Or maybe I hated it. Not for me. But now I know, again, this is great.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:07:14]:

I have this new self knowledge that I can use to move forward.

 

Kate Henry [00:07:20]:

Yeah. I wanna I’m like, I feel like there’s so many additional questions that I I could really talk to you for, like, five hours about this, but I won’t. But before I shift and ask you a bit about your journey, I just wanna say, again, something I really appreciated in tiny experiments was how you encourage folks at that stage of ending an experiment to consider if they wanted to, like, pause versus, like, I’ll throw everything out. I’m going to quit. You know? Like, there is like, that felt very self compassionate, this concept of, like, pausing instead of, like, fully, like, having black and white thinking as your approach. So, yes, just another thing I thought was in effort of the accessibility of the framework of the book. We’re gonna talk about tiny experiments, how to live freely in a goal obsessed world. But I wanna hear about your journey, which has led you you know, as I shared in the bio at the beginning, you worked for Google, you left Google, you started a different career path, you have this really wonderful newsletter, which I love reading in my inbox, you work with folks at Nest Labs, and then you went back to your PhD in neuroscience.

 

Kate Henry [00:08:24]:

I’d love if you could tell us a bit about your experience with moving through these different chapters or milestones in your life. And do you feel like there’s a similar interest or curiosity that informs your work in these different spheres of your life, whether that’s entrepreneurship or research or writing or teaching?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:08:45]:

I like that you used the word chapter because I really think about my life in terms of two different chapters. And there might be many more in the future, but so far, two main chapters. In the first chapter, I had a very linear approach to work and to success. So I was very focused on being successful based on the traditional definition. I tried to do well in school. I got a good job at Google. And then once I was there, I tried to climb the corporate ladder. I quit my job at Google, and I decided to start a start up because that’s what everybody around me was doing.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:09:23]:

And it’s only when my start up failed that I allowed myself to ask the question, what is it I’m actually curious about? What is it I want to explore that I might want to work on even if nobody was watching? Even if I forgot about this traditional definition of success, even if I forgot about validation from others? What is something I am intrinsically curious about? In my case, it was the brain. I had always been fascinated with how the brain works. And so I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience, which a lot of people at the time told me, that’s that’s crazy. That makes no sense. Those are such long studies, and I was in my late twenties. But I decided to ignore those voices and to really focus on what I was curious about. And today, this is really the kind of like the thread that runs through everything I do, having this curiosity oriented mindset, this experimental mindset, whether that’s in my work at Nas Labs where I write my weekly newsletter, in my academic research at King’s College London, or even when writing this book. I had which is very meta, but I had to apply all of the tools in the book in order to complete this project.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:10:47]:

So a book is a very big project, and I decided to break it down into tiny experiments so I could actually complete it. So this is really how I approach everything or at least I try to approach everything. And I can tell sometimes, especially when I’m faced with something particularly challenging or new or uncomfortable that there is kind of this automatic response of wanting to cling to more linear approaches that might give me this illusion of certainty. She’s very comforting. And I try to practice going back to this more expensive, more generative experimental mindset.

 

Kate Henry [00:11:34]:

That’s excellent. That sets me up well to think about my next question for you, which is, you mentioned this a bit earlier when we were talking about experiments as a container and projects as a container. I really appreciated in the book how you set out a framework early on around this time bound pact. And this pact is where you will complete your experiment by deciding an action that you will do in completing it or doing it for a certain amount of duration. And this is as compared to something like setting a big goal or I’m gonna develop this habit or, like, I’m going to, you know, completely change my life in this big way, which can be just incredibly daunting. Again, people can fail. They can feel really crappy about themselves. And your work in general is really infused by curiosity.

 

Kate Henry [00:12:22]:

So in this book, you’re talking about curiosity versus just finding this outcome. For folks who haven’t read the book yet, could you tell us a little bit more about why you chose this focus? Like, why were you drawn to the concept of, like, a time bound pact versus something like goal setting, which I think generally folks just, like, automatically go to that when they’re thinking about achieving something new?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:12:46]:

I think there is something that’s fundamentally broken with the way we set goals in today’s world. The the way we have designed most goal setting frameworks was relevant and worked really well in a world that was more stable and more predictable in terms of careers, in terms of technology, in in terms of just the way most industries used to work. And today, everything is changing so fast. Our skills are outdated the moment we acquired them. We need to keep on learning new things all the time, new tools, new terminology. And because of that goal setting, that linear approach to goal setting where you have a very specific outcome in mind and then you have a clear plan, a clear vision, and you work really hard to get there, doesn’t work really well. So this is why I suggest in the book replacing this linear approach, which, again, can feel comforting because it does give you that illusion of certainty. You feel like, I have a plan.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:13:52]:

I know where I’m going. Replacing that illusion with embracing uncertainty instead, Knowing that you actually don’t really know where you’re going, and that’s okay. Knowing that the person you are today is different from the person you will be tomorrow, and that’s okay. Knowing that your areas of curiosity, your ambitions, your relationships, your collaborators, the kind of projects you’re working on might change a lot between now and next year. And that’s okay. This is actually an opportunity to learn and grow. And so instead of having those smart goals or those linear approaches, I recommend using something that I call a PAX, which is a commitment to curiosity, which is a mini protocol for experimentation. And so instead of saying, I will get there by this date, you say, I will do this.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:14:49]:

I will perform this action for a specific duration. And this is really shifting the focus from the outcome, which you actually cannot control, to your output, to just showing up, to doing the thing, collecting data. And if you show up consistently, you might not know where you’re going to end up because this is a more emergent definition of success. But you can trust that you’re going to grow.

 

Kate Henry [00:15:19]:

I love this approach. You talk in the book and you’ve talked before on on other podcasts about your experiment that you did of writing and publishing a hundred articles in your newsletter across a hundred weekdays. And it makes me think too of when I was doing my PhD and having my realization that I didn’t want to stay in academia when I finished. I said an, I guess, an experiment, but it kinda felt more like an ultimatum for me that, like, if I could blog research and blog every week about productivity for a year, that I would, like, be like, okay. I obviously like this and can enjoy it enough that I’ll, like, make it my career. So it was all it was an experiment that benefited me as an individual. It also communicated and shared things with others to help them. But it also was like a reminder to me that, like, it’s okay to leave academia.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:12]:

Like, similar to you to be like, what? Why are you leaving? This is crazy. You’ve worked so hard. You know? But it felt really good to be like, no. I did this, and I feel relief, and I feel, like, confidence in myself. I feel reassured. Like, I’m curious. Was your experience when you did those, like, one hundred days of writing and publishing about that? Did you have a similar experience where you were like, look at me go. I’m like, I love this.

 

Kate Henry [00:16:36]:

I certainly wanna keep doing this. Like, I don’t know. I’m just curious to hear what

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:16:40]:

you thought. In this case, I did. I that’s why I’m still writing, but that’s not always the case when you conduct tiny experiments. And that’s why they were so powerful. So for my newsletter, I completed the experiment of writing a hundred articles in a hundred weekdays, which actually was not such a tiny experiment. It was pretty big. But at the end of the hundred days, it was very clear to me that I loved writing online and that I wanted to keep going. And so this is where really the experiment shifts into more of a project, a long term career that you might want to explore.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:17:17]:

Going to give you another example when that did not happen because I think this is very helpful also to see when that’s not the what the data tells you. The data doesn’t tell you to keep going. So last

 

Kate Henry [00:17:29]:

year,

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:17:29]:

I think it was last year or the year before, somehow, everybody around me started becoming a YouTuber. I had so many friends who were also online writers like me who started YouTube channels, and they seemed to really like it. A good source of inspiration for tiny experiments can actually be what other people around you are doing and enjoying. So not in a copy pasting your success type of way, but more like, oh, these are people I respect. They’re they’re also pretty creative. We’ve been doing similar things so far, and they keep on they they’re all raving about YouTube, so maybe I’ll like it. And so I decided to design a tiny experiment where I said, I’m going to publish a weekly YouTube video until the end of the year. It was towards September that I started this one.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:18:21]:

So I completed the experiment, and if you look at the external metrics of success, it looked pretty good. I had a good number of subscribers, likes, comments, people seemed to like it. But if you look at the internal signals of success, I hated it. I hated recording videos. Every time I knew that it was a day where I was supposed to sit down in front of the camera and record myself, I was dreading it. And it was having a negative impact on a lot of other areas in my work because on those days, I was procrastinating on everything else because I was dreading that moment I would have to sit and record that video. And so at the end of the experiment, I looked back, I analyzed the data, and I decided to not keep going. And if you go on my YouTube channel, I recently published a video to announce my book.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:19:12]:

But outside of that, it’s been very quiet over the past year. I don’t really publish videos anymore. And there is this sense of relief also in knowing. It’s like you’ve scratched the itch, and now you know. Now when people tell me, oh, you know, maybe you should do YouTube. I can say, you know what? I tried it, and I don’t think it’s for me right now, at least. And you mentioned earlier how when you decide to not keep going, that’s really just pausing because that’s what happened here. I might change my mind in the future.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:19:44]:

I might experiment again with YouTube in the future, but I know that in my current context with my current priorities, that’s not what I wanna focus on right now.

 

Kate Henry [00:19:53]:

Yeah. Oh, that’s excellent. That’s an excellent example for folks to hear. And also for folks to hear that even people who are very good at productivity or, you know, doing these things, make those decisions. That reminds me of, like, I bought a violin when I was, like, in my early thirties. I was like, I’m gonna learn to play the violin and tried and was like, this is incredibly hard. I’m just gonna listen to classical music instead. My, like, experiment was, like, one lesson, and I was like, no, I’m good.

 

Kate Henry [00:20:22]:

I’m good. Alright. So something that was really fun for me when I was reading tiny experiments was to hear the frameworks and terminology from neuroscience, and you were describing why and how different approaches to experiments work. I also my PhD is in rhetoric, so I really appreciated how you were using, like, ancient rhetorical frameworks as well. When you developed your plan for tiny experiments, was it important to you to translate these, like, scientific, neuroscientific approaches into this more accessible language for the general reader? And what was that process like for you?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:21:02]:

This is probably one of the aspects of my work that I love the most, translating neuroscience into applicable tools that people can use in their everyday work and life. So, yes, absolutely. It was very important to me. And how did it feel? It was fun, actually, challenging sometimes because especially when this is something that you tend to look at on an everyday basis at work. I I have to read academic papers around neuroscience all the time for my research. It does take a little bit of effort and self awareness to make sure that the language you use when you’re trying to translate the science into a practical tool is language that is actually useful, that people can understand, that people can apply. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of just using jargon that sounds smart but ultimately is not helpful to the readers. So I would say it was challenging, but in a good way.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:22:05]:

It was fun.

 

Kate Henry [00:22:07]:

Yeah. It was fun for to read it. And, like, I love that you have a glossary of all the terms in the back. Like, it was really this book was incredibly well researched. And also, I don’t know, I took maybe, like, two science classes in college, and they were like, the planets. Like, they were not I don’t have any science background at all. But you made it I understood what you were writing. It was really that was really satisfying too, to, like, now have those frameworks in my mind.

 

Kate Henry [00:22:32]:

This leads me to my next question for you, which is about my favorite chapter in the book, which was learning in public. And I also, of course, really love the section on mindful productivity. But with learning in public, specifically, I’m really interested in public scholarship both as a way to make knowledge accessible to folks outside of academia, which I feel like we just talked about, like making these frameworks accessible, but also to recognize our lived experience as a valid form of knowledge making. And reading the learning in public chapter in specific made me think of the work you’re doing with Nest Labs, both with publishing and with the the teaching and coursework that’s there and with this weekly newsletter that you’re writing. So I’d be curious if you could tell us a bit more about this framework of learning in in public and also how you feel that you’re practicing it in the work you do.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:23:28]:

So the reason why I recommend for people to learn in public is because you are going to learn a lot faster when you share what you’re studying and learning before you feel like you’re an expert. And I actually don’t even see myself as an expert. I see myself as a lifelong learner, a student who’s sharing what I’m studying with other people. Very often, when I write my newsletter, this is about a topic I literally just heard about for the very first time, maybe a few days before. And the newsletter is more of a forcing mechanism, a vehicle for me to go and read more research papers and also to make sure I understand what I’m reading. Because, again, when you try to explain something to someone else, it forces you to make sure you’re not hiding behind jargon. It forces you to clarify your own thinking. So in a way, that’s what’s interesting with learning in public is that it’s great for other people.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:24:29]:

It does benefit other people. You’re sharing what you’re learning and so you’re having a positive impact. But at a selfish level, it’s just great for you as well. It’s such a great way to learn better and faster, and it can take any kind of form. There is a misconception that people might have, which is that learning in public means that you have to have a big social media platform, which is not the case. Learning in public is anytime you learn and there’s at least one other human being who’s aware of the experiments that you’re currently running, the things that you’re trying, the things that you’re studying, and who you’re sharing the journey with. And where you’re very honest, very transparent, you’re sharing what you’ve learned, but also what you find challenging, the questions that you might have, the things that you might try, the failures, the mistakes, and everything you learn from them. That can be just one friend, one colleague.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:25:26]:

That can be a very small group chat with two to three friends where you decide to share what you’re learning together. And, yes, absolutely. It can also be a big social media platform. You can do that on social media. You can do that through a newsletter, a podcast, a YouTube channel, but it doesn’t have to be. Learning in public is just making sure that you’re not learning on your own and making sure that what you share is the learning, not the outcome, not the whatever kind of artifact that you produce at the end when you feel like you’ve understood everything already.

 

Kate Henry [00:26:02]:

Yeah. And when I read your newsletters, you know, from Nest Labs, like, I can see your enthusiasm about the things that you’re talking about. Like, it’s that’s very clear and energizing as the reader to read that and see that. Yeah. This when I first started my blog project where I was blogging every week about productivity that I was practicing and learning, which I did for two years, I was like, I started it on a Tumblr. Like, it was not any professional website or anything like that. It really was just, like, DIY, and, you know, I think this is excellent. I’m curious, you know, like, is there a section of the book that’s your favorite, like, right now? It doesn’t have to be your favorite section always.

 

Kate Henry [00:26:45]:

I’m sure that you’re thrilled about all of the sections. But is there something right now you feel like you’re really excited about?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:26:52]:

To me, it’s probably that chapter about the pact and how to design your first tiny experiment because I feel like if there’s one tool in the book that I want people to to use and take away, it’s this one. And the rest of the book, all of the other tools are in support of conducting better experiments. So all of the other tools are about making sure you actually collect the data, how to analyze that data, how to not blame yourself when the result is not what you expected, how to conduct experiments with others. And so all of these are extremely helpful and I’m very proud of these chapters as well, but if there’s really one thing that you need to start doing to benefit from the rest of the book is actually conducting a tiny experiment. And what I really like about the framework that I created for this chapter is that it is deceptively simple, I think. You might feel like, oh, just choosing an action and doing it for a specific duration. It doesn’t sound groundbreaking because it isn’t, actually. It is such a common sense way of trying something before you commit to it for a longer period of time.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:28:10]:

Something that I often think about is how crazy it is when it comes to your habits that we pick something and we commit to it for the rest of our lives. We say, from now on, this is my new habit. And you don’t even know if it’s going to work for you, you don’t know if you’re going to enjoy it. And then, not only you’re surprised when you don’t manage to stick to it, but you blame yourself when that doesn’t work out. And so, I really hope that more people take this this approach, this this framework, and decide to first run a tiny experiment. Just give it a try. And if you like it, if it works for you, then turn it into a habit.

 

Kate Henry [00:28:52]:

Yeah. When I was taking notes as I was reading the book, I wrote down, like, I will blank for blank. Like, it’s like, I will action for duration. It’s really like, I’m right now, like, thinking about this in terms of, like, my yoga and my stretching practice. Like, it it’s just like, do I do this a bit every day for a certain amount of days? So I found that incredibly helpful. I’d love to end our conversation today with a question I like to ask everybody, which is, what are you honing in on in your life right now?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:29:27]:

Currently, making space for not making any decisions. And I’m in a bit of a a liminal space right now and in between a transition in the sense that I finished my PhD, I published a book. And, again, there is a temptation to try and figure out as quickly as possible what’s next, what’s the next project. And so for me, the actual work right now is to not

 

Kate Henry [00:29:57]:

do the

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:29:57]:

work right now, to give myself space to take a little break. I am journaling a lot. I’m spending time with friends and family. I’m I have planned a couple of weekends away in the countryside where I can be away from my screen and kind of recharge my batteries, including my creative batteries. And so this is really what’s top of mind for me right now, not making any decisions and giving myself space for letting whatever will come next emerge.

 

Kate Henry [00:30:32]:

That’s lovely. And you don’t need to have done anything to deserve that, but also how well deserved. Like, what a way to celebrate these humongous milestones. Lovely. Well, I will link to all of the wonderful things around your book and your website in the show notes, but is there anything else that you would like to, you know, invite folks to check out, you know, where they can follow your work?

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:30:56]:

Yeah. I think the two main ways to connect deeper with my work and explore it further is first to read my book, Tiny Experiments, which we discussed today. It’s available anywhere books are sold, and you can even order it from your local book shop if you wanna support them. And I write a weekly newsletter at masslabs.com. So if you enter your email address there, I also write about a lot of the topics we discussed today.

 

Kate Henry [00:31:23]:

It’s one of the newsletters I actually do read that comes into my inbox, so I I encourage folks to check it out. Well, thank you so much today, Anne-Laure. This was such a satisfying conversation, and I really encourage folks to check out your book. I think it’s accessible. I think it’s actionable. I think that it is a wonderful shifting in the way we think about, you know, personal development and productivity development. So thank you for writing it, and thank you for your time today.

 

Anne-Laure Le Cunff [00:31:53]:

Thank you so much for having me.

 

Kate Henry [00:31:57]:

Thanks so much for joining me. You can learn more about honing in and my work as a productivity coach on my website, katehenry.com. Take good care.