Stop Planning, Start Experimenting: A Science-Backed Approach to a Better Life with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Most of us plan our lives around a destination, where we want to be in five years, what milestones we need to hit, what successes we're supposed to look like, but what if the best version of your life is one you never could have predicted? In this episode I sit down with neuroscientist, Anne-Lorla Kump, who's built a whole framework around replacing big plans with small time-bound experiments, and the results are counterintuitive and fascinating. We cover why our brains resist uncertainty even when it's where all the growth is. A 15-minute weekly review that helps you course correct in real time, and how to actually design experiments in your life that will teach you something. As she puts it, "You want to be able to look back in five years or in ten years, and tell yourself, 'Wow, there was absolutely no way I could have predicted that this is where I would have ended up.'" I'm really excited for this one. I'm Chris Hutchins. If you enjoy this episode, please leave a comment or share it with a friend, and if you want to keep upgrading your money points in life, click follow or subscribe. Anne-Lorla, I feel like everyone myself included have been told that the key to a better life is setting really clear goals, but I think you disagree, right? I completely disagree. I know goals give us a sense of certainty, a sense of comfort. It feels good, right? When you feel like you have a clear goal and a clear plan, and then you just need to execute on it. But there is quite a bit of research showing that a lot of those big goals are actually sending us for failure. Why? Well, several reasons. The first one is that goals are based on the idea that you have a very clear idea of what you want in the first place, which in a lot of cases, we don't, and especially in uncertain environments, when things keep on changing, which is the case nowadays, and whether that's because of technological shifts or because of the political environment or the economy or whatever that is, when things keep on changing, trying to stick to a fixed goal in the future is only giving you the illusion of control. So that's one problem. You cling to that goal, feeling like, I know what I'm doing when really you don't. Another problem with goals is that we tend to set goals based on the goals of others. That's what's called mimetic desire. And so even if you end up achieving your goal, very often, some people end up looking back and feeling like, was that even what I wanted in the first place? So there's a lot of social comparison, a lot of mimetic desire around the goals. The last reason why big goals don't tend to work is that quite often, they're so big that they feel overwhelming. And we end up procrastinating and not even making any progress in the first place. And is this true just to set context for personal, professional, all kinds of different financial goals? It's true for really any kind of goal. I would say, though, that any kind of goal that can be broken down or turned into a project works better. So I just want to clarify what I mean by a goal. A goal is really this idea that you have an endpoint, a destination. And very often, we associate that destination with when, if kind of statement, when I get there, I will be happy. If I get there, I'll consider myself successful. And so that goal is defined in this way. Those are the kind of problematic goals that I talk about in my work. If you have more of a project, so if you say, I don't know, I'm going to save extra amount of money every week or you have more of a health project where you say, I'm going to run every week or anything like that, then that's fine. But that's not what I would call a goal with that fixed milestone in the future. Okay. And so what is the alternative? The alternative is something I cannot shut up about, which is experiments. So instead of having those big fixed linear goals where you're deciding on an outcome and then you make a plan and you work really hard to get there, you start from a place of curiosity. You start from a hypothesis. You say, what would happen if I tried this? My hypothesis is that this might work, but it might not, and that's completely okay. And so instead of having this big milestone in the future, you say, I'm going to try this action. I'm going to test this action for a specific duration. And that's an experiment. And so let's take someone who's like currently sitting here thinking, gosh, I had a goal to lose 30 pounds. Would a experiment be what if I ran three days a week for a month? Is that kind of like an example? And it might not result in anything. You might not do it. You might do it and not feel good. How do you bridge the gap between, okay, I defined this experiment to run, but like at the end of the day, my doctor said I need to lose weight and like, it didn't happen. So the hypothesis can be even, you can even start from a higher level. So, you know, your doctor told you that you need to move your body. Okay, great. We're not necessarily going to argue with this, but there are so many different ways to move your body. So you could have the hypothesis that running might be good for you, might help you in terms of getting in shape. So that's the hypothesis. Maybe running, it will be helpful for me. Then the experiment is more of a the protocol. And for a protocol to work, you need to know what you're going to test and the trial period. So you need an action and a duration. And so you could say, I will run three times a week for three weeks. That's your experiment. And the difference between a goal where there's a very binary definition of success and failure because either you get to the end destination and that success or you don't, and that's not with an experiment. As long as you finish the experiment, as long as you collect your data and you learn from it, then that success. So if at the end of that experiment, you look back and you feel like, you know what? That was horrible. I hate running. That's not for me. Then that is success because you've generated new knowledge. You have more information about yourself. And now you can decide on a new experiment. You can iterate. How important are those aspects? Because I think about myself, I would say I like to experiment a lot. I took a part of last year as someone who loves points and I was like, I'm going to try cash back or I'm going to try a year where I don't care about airline status or I'm going to try all these things. But I feel like I'm not living the kind of optimized version of experimentation that I should be. Is the difference just not setting those frameworks or is there more I can be doing to make these experiments kind of work? Because as I'm sure lots of people listening might think, sometimes I run them and then I'm like, well, I didn't really learn what I set out to learn. I did the experiment in that I tried the thing, but I'm not sure what to do next. I think the two ingredients that are quite often missing or reflection and iteration. So a lot of people run experiments and then they're done with the experiment and they move on. They just go and do something else. You really need to extract the knowledge, the lessons from the experiment in order for that to be useful. So having space for reflection is really, really important. Scientists call this meta cognition, which is just thinking about your own thinking, observing your own thoughts, observing your own responses, looking at your results and really questioning what worked, what didn't, why did it happen this way? So whether that's a financial experiment or a health experiment, just really going deep into what you learn from the experiment. So that's one ingredient. The second one is iteration. Once you've extracted all of that juicy knowledge from the experiment that you run, you can use that to iterate. And so what do you want to tweak in your next iteration? Do you want to keep going the exact same way because sometimes the experiment was fine and you just want to go for another cycle of experimentation? Do you want to tweak the frequency? Do you want to tweak the action? Do you want to tweak the way you approach it? Maybe the first time you did it on your own and you found out that it was kind of hard to stick to it. So maybe you want to do another iteration where you ask a friend to do it with you. So those are the kind of tweaks that you can make. And the idea really is that if you keep on learning, reflecting and iterating every time you finish an experiment, then you're going to grow. You're going to learn. You're going to improve even if you don't have this clear goal in the future. And it's something different happening in our brains when we approach it as an experiment versus we're just kind of like relentlessly optimizing something. Yeah, absolutely. It really completely rewires our relationship to uncertainty. I think it's really important to understand why in the first place we tend to resist uncertainty so much. If you think about our ancestors from just our evolutionary past, trying to reduce uncertainty as much as possible makes sense from a survival perspective. The more information you had, the more likely you were to survive. And so that's what our brains evolved to do to try and reduce uncertainty as quickly as possible. That's not really a bug. That's not a problem. Your brain is doing its job. And if all you want in life is to just survive, then great, it's working as intended. It's perfect, right? But if you want to grow, if you want to really fulfill your potential, figure out what works for you, then those survival mechanisms can get in the way. And when you experiment, you develop what I call an experimental mindset. It can be really helpful to picture the way a scientist relates to uncertainty when a scientist is in the lab and they don't understand what's going on or they don't get the results they expected. They don't experience fear or anxiety. There's almost a sense of excitement because they feel like if there's uncertainty, there is an opportunity to learn. And so it's really important about changing your relationship to uncertainty, letting go of those automatic survival mechanisms and deciding to engage sometimes even playfully with uncertainty. - And is this just your default mindset? Is this how you've always thought? How did you cultivate this? - That was not my default mindset. I don't think it's anyone's default mindset. Our default mindset again is the mindset of trying to survive, to try and do what feels safest and most comfortable. I tend to think about my life in two chapters and the first chapter was very, very linear. I had a very conventional definition of success, which was based on having a good job, a good set of recliving the latter, good education and all of that. And it's only in the second chapter of my life when I quit my first job and I decided to go back to university to study neuroscience that I discovered that there was a different way of approaching life. Because I feel like this very often a false dichotomy where people say either you're ambitious and you're hustling and you're only thinking about that very conventional definition of success or it's all about letting go and mindfulness and chilling and just enjoying life. And I personally think that they're not incompatible and that you can be very ambitious in life, but also have a lot of space for exploration being curious, trying new things. And this is kind of what I'm trying to cultivate now in my life, although my automatic responses sometimes come back. - This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Starting something new is exciting, but it's also full of what ifs. When I went full time on this podcast, I had plenty of them. What if this doesn't work? What if no one listens? Having the right tools and the right partner makes that leap a lot easier. That's where Shopify comes in. 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So I want to know how you can find that balance but what brought you from chapter one to chapter two? Was there a defining moment that made you go, oh, I need to do something different. The path I'm going down right now isn't right because I have to assume there's people listening that heard you and said, oh, I'm in chapter one. I'm in chapter one. Yeah, I wish I could tell you that I realized on my own that something was wrong when I was in chapter one but unfortunately for me, and it's the case for a lot of people, it took a bit of a, I discovered this word in English, which I love a lifequake, which I think really captures this idea. But for a lot of people, it takes one of those lifequakes to realize that something is fundamentally wrong with the way you're living your life. And in my case, chapter one, I was working at Google, great job, great team, really loved what I was working on there. But also working really, really hard being the yes girl because I felt like I didn't want anyone to feel like I didn't belong in that company. Because of that, I completely ignored my health. I was very often canceling social plans with friends to work late and I was generally a bit of a work ethic. The reason why I've, and finally questioned all of that in that chapter one was because one day, I was getting ready to go to work. And I noticed that my entire arm had turned purple. So I went to the Google infirmary because we had that on campus. The nurse had one look and said, you need to go to the hospital. So I went to the hospital and Stanford. And the doctors told me that I needed to get surgery as soon as possible because I had a blood clot that was starting to travel to my lungs from my arm. And in that moment, so I'm sitting in front of the doctors and telling me we need to operate as quickly as possible. My response was, once again, I need to check my calendar. And I don't know if you've ever had an experience like this where you do something so absurd. It's almost like an out of body experience observing yourself, doing the thing. And you want to shake yourself and say, what are you doing? Who are you doing this? So it's not long after that that I decided to quit my job. And I ended up finding myself completely lost not knowing what I wanted to do next. So I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, what is something I've always been curious about? If nobody was watching, if traditional success was out of the equation, how would I want to spend my time? And I had always been curious about the brain and fascinated with why we think the way we think and fill the way we feel. So I decided to go back to university and study neuroscience. And that's where I discovered that scientists had a completely different way of relating to uncertainty. That was completely different from what I had been taught in my career up to this point. Obviously, I hope no one has to go through that experience to come to this realization. We've known each other well enough to know, I know you're doing well. So I'm glad that you ended up in such a happy place. Is this something where you think there is any way for a person living in chapter one without this lifequake experience or without having to quit their job can start to figure this out so that maybe they have a slower progression that ends up in a place similar to where you are without that journey? Oh, yeah. I don't recommend a lifequake version of that transition. It's completely unnecessary. And I actually do have a little bit of a pet peeve against people who just say, quit your job. Good you the thing and follow your passion, which can be completely irresponsible depending on your circumstances. This is why my book is called tiny experiments because I truly believe that you can start changing your life and your career, whether that's personal or professional, by experimenting with small changes. It doesn't have to be big. You don't have to quit your job. You don't have to do the scariest things straight away. It's really about trying to experiment with different aspects of your life, things that you're curious about, keeping it small and low risk, and it's a rating until you figure out something that you feel works for you. And the reason why it can feel a little bit slower as a process to make that transition is because you're not taking any of the usual shortcuts we take when we try and copy and paste the success of others. So instead of trying to apply a blueprint that you've seen from other people, it's really about figuring out what works for you. And again, that requires actually trying the thing and then reflecting on the result and then learning from that reflection and then iterating. And if you keep on doing that, you will figure out a path that actually works for you. - Can you give some examples of kind of tiny experiments that people might not necessarily copy because I want them to do ones that are kind of unique to them, but did you kind of give an explanation or an idea of what tiny could mean? - Yeah, absolutely. So I've seen people who were curious about, considering a carrier shift, for example, and so a very simple tiny experiment and the format again is always an action that you're going to try for a duration. And so one of the people I worked with said, "I will reach out to one person in my target industry on LinkedIn every Monday for six weeks." So that's six people, six messages on LinkedIn that they would actually spend time researching and writing themselves. And then their job again, there's no goal in terms of how many people reply, right? It's really just you showing up and conducting the experiment. I've seen people who wanted to develop their skills in terms of thought leadership and communication. So personally I'm biased, but I love writing experiments and in kind of writing experiments. So that could be, I will write and publish a newsletter on Substack or whatever every week for two months. You could experiment with any kind of creative project. I've seen people experiment, I've done that experimenting with public speaking, where you start with a very, very tiny version where you just record yourself and you post it online. And then maybe you start trying to experiment hosting online workshops and then maybe at some point you go on stage and you give an actual talk live in front of people. So really any area, of your life or work where you feel like there might be a little bit of space for growth, a little bit of space for discovery. Any of those spaces can be turned into an experiment. And so if someone's thinking about these experiments, is the framework they need an action and a duration? Is there anything else to be thinking about as you kind of try to document this? And by document, I don't think either one of us are suggesting you go create a notion table and like do all of this, like you could do it in a note, right? Oh yeah, absolutely. And I actually kind of tell people to be careful about that because the kind of people who tend to resonate with this experimental approach are tend to be a little bit nerdy in the best way possible. I'm a nerd myself. So yeah. And I know that we can get excited and we're going to build all the dashboards and have all the tracking and think about all of the metrics for our experiments. But I really encourage anyone listening to this or watching this to think about keeping it very, very simple, very simple. The idea is that you actually do the thing, keep it small. If you're hesitating and between running the experiment for two months or two weeks, go for two weeks. If you're hesitating between five weeks and five days, just do it for five days because you can run it once and then you can iterate and iterating can mean going for a longer duration. Another little like tip, something I recommend trying not to do is to not run a thousand experiments at the same time because again, we can get excited and then we start all of these experiments. And there are several reasons why you don't want to do this. The very obvious one is that if you start a thousand experiments at the same time, it's going to be really hard to actually stick to them. And they're probably all going to fail in the sense of not the traditional definition of failure, but in the sense that you're not going to finish any of them. You're not going to collect your data, so you're not going to learn anything. And the other reason why you don't want to have too many experiments at the same time is more again inspired by the scientific method. If you're changing every single variable in your life at the same time, it's going to be really hard to know what works and what doesn't. So really try to pick one, maybe two maximum experiments at the same time. Keep them small, finish them, collect your data, reflect it to rate, and then you can go on and start the next experiment. Now, let's take this to the extreme of someone that I'm very familiar with myself. And I enjoy these experiments. And sometimes I probably don't define them at all, which I think can be a challenge because you never know when they end. But what happens when they start to consume you? You know, like I would say I spent the last month experimenting with all of these AI agents and tools and software. And like you said, building random dashboards for things that I probably will never need. And what's going on in someone's brain who kind of operates like that. And how can we kind of reign this in to make it more productive and maybe less negatively impactful on other aspects of our life? It's so funny because I actually recently wrote about what I called the omnipotence dilemma, the fact that with AI, we can do literally anything we want. But it's become harder and harder to finish anything because we have the kind of like super stimulus version of the shiny toy syndrome. And there are all of these things that we can try. It's really exciting. But at the same time, I've talked to a lot of my friends and a lot of them feel really scattered right now creatively. It's really hard to just pick one thing and actually commit to it. And I think this is where this format can actually be really helpful just sitting down for 10 minutes, looking at all of the open projects and picking one and saying, that's my experiment for the next two weeks. And everything else can wait for now. That's my experiment. I'm going to actually run this experiment, perform this action, collect my data. And then I'm going to decide what I want to do next once I've actually done this. When I talk about experimentation, I very often talk about committing to curiosity. And I think it's really important because when you talk about experimentation, people might think, oh, it's all about having fun and just doing random things and not really. And obviously, it's fun to experiment. But you do need a little bit of structure. You do need a protocol. And you need to make sure that you have enough focus, enough time and energy dedicated to the experiments. You can see whether it's working or not. So one very practical tip is that I personally have in my notes what I call a curiosity inbox. And I save all of my ideas in there for projects. I just save them if I have them. But I try and not work on more than one or two things at the same time. And if I keep on coming back to something in my curiosity inbox, then it can be promoted to an experiment or to a project. This isn't something that needs to be take work off for a week and run this experiment. It could be something you run for an hour every morning, like writing or running. What are you tracking? Because I think if I remember correctly, it's about tracking, not measuring. And I think we've always been trained to like measure progress. So kind of what does that look like as you're checking in along the way? So the two kinds of signals that I recommend tracking are internal and external signals. I'm going to start with external signals because those are the ones that most of us are really comfortable with tracking. And those can be any kind of signs of external success. And so that can be money, subscribers, promotions, whatever it is. Or if you're trying to be healthy, the numbers on the scale or anything like that. So those are all of the external signals of success. And I'm not saying they're not important, but they don't form a complete picture. You also need to look at internal signals when you're experimenting. Because if you run an experiment and all of the external signals look good, but you feel miserable while running the experiment, is that really success? And I would argue it's not. For example, I did a YouTube experiment a few years ago where I said, I'm going to publish one video every week until the end of the year. And that was about a couple of months. I did the experiment. All of the external signals look good, subscribers, comments, likes. People seem to like the videos. But every single time I had to sit in front of the camera and record myself, I was dreading it, absolutely dreading it. And because I was dreading it, it was having all of this kind of like negative downstream effect on everything else I was doing. I was sometimes procrastinating for an entire day when I knew that I was supposed to record a video for YouTube that day. And so at the end of the experiment, I looked at the external and internal signals and decided that actually YouTube was not for me. And so that's what I mean by tracking and paying attention to all of the signals rather than measuring and having those dashboards that usually only give you part of the story. This episode is brought to you by Gelt. When it comes to building wealth, taxes are such a big part of the strategy. And as tax time gets closer, getting prepared now is so important. 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I hope you enjoyed it. and then they realize days, weeks, months, years later that they don't enjoy it. And so, yeah, that sucks. (laughs) - Yes. - Fortunately, I think it's not that hard to check in with yourself, but is there any rituals or are there any things that along the way you like to do that might help people kind of realize these things sooner? - Yeah, I'm a huge, huge fan of conducting a weekly review and there are so many different formats, but I'll just share my format with you 'cause I know a lot of people I've shared it with find it helpful, it's very, very simple. I call it plus minus next and it has three columns. The first one plus you write everything that went well this week and the second column minus everything that didn't go so well and in the last column next, which I write a little arrow at the top of that column, you write everything you wanna try next, anything you wanna experiment next, anything you wanna tweak or try or do differently next week. And the reason why it works so well is because you're not just doing a snapshot of what worked and what didn't with the last column, you're always making sure to extract any kind of knowledge or lessons from what worked and what didn't and then use that the following week. So it's really a way to kind of bake an iteration into your way of reviewing your week. So yeah, do a weekly review highly recommended and you can use that format or any other format, but just make sure that you have at least 15 minutes every week where you sit down and you just check in with yourself. - I'm thinking about applying a lot of what we've talked about and I worry that at different stages of my life, what would have happened and maybe is happening is I'm learning a ton, I'm curious, I'm running experiments, I'm finding things that I'm more excited about, I'm making progress if that's what you wanna call it, but I might be losing track of the actual big goal, right? You know, the big goal for me might be, let's say find a sustainable way to spend more time with my family and save more. I'm thinking of kind of some big aspirational goals, I know we don't like goals, but goals. And now I've run a bunch of experiments and I've learned a lot and I'm happy and excited, but am I actually moving towards like the life I ultimately want? How do you think of aligning, you know, earlier you talked about there's not just ambition and chill, I feel like if I just ran a life of experiments I would end up not making much progress towards where I'd wanna go, but learning a lot along the way, which would be fun, and how do we kind of find that balance? - I do wanna question that assumption though, I think that if you're the kind of person who runs a lot of experiments, you're probably suffering from a little bit too much ambition and perfectionism and not necessarily not action and momentum. It's a little bit like when people ask James Clear, like, oh, but what if I apply your method so well that then I turn everything into habits? That is absolutely not going to happen. And what I found is that the kind of people who want to run experiments, they do tend to progress. What it really allows them to do is to free them from that predetermined definition of success and let their success emerge in a much more organic way and surprising way. And really what you want, if you apply this method, and I'm not saying it's for everyone, but you wanna be able to look back in five years or in 10 years and tell yourself, wow, there was absolutely no way I could have predicted that this is where I would have ended up. And to me, this is what success is like not getting to a goal that me 10 years ago would have been able to imagine. And maybe that's true. Maybe I'm imagining a problem that won't actually exist. I think I'm kind of locked in this old version of, here's where I wanna be, but I imagine in some sort of weekly or maybe monthly review or in the process of picking an experiment that might be the time to think about what do I want my life to look like. It's not that there's no room for where do I wanna be in one or five years. I assume that that's still something worth considering and thinking about. - Yeah, so this is where I think the kind of tension is and where I think it's quite nuanced and important to consider is that, so that's what I don't call these goals, but for example, you would maybe call that a goal, but I'm optimizing for waking up in the morning and feeling excited to wake up. That's something I'm optimizing for. I don't call that a goal in my definition of a goal, right? And when you're talking about I'm optimizing for spending time with my family, filling energized, filling creative, filling like I'm contributing something meaningful to my community, those to me in my framework, I don't really think about as goals because there are things that you can actually do and track in the present. You can actually check in with yourself and the present and you can every week ask yourself, did I spend time with the people I love? Did I wake up happy and excited in most mornings? I don't think anyone wakes up happy every single morning, but most mornings, was I excited? Did I enjoy most of the work that I have to do this week? And if not plus minus next, how can I in the next column try it next week and have a little bit more of the work I enjoyed and a little bit less of the work that I didn't enjoy? And so that's what I mean by experimenting and iterating, but to me, it feels very different from having this future version of yourself that you wanna get to at some point. - It almost seems like how do you wanna be and feel in the future than like what's the metric you want to hit in the future? Now, I'm sure in some areas like let's say savings, right? If you're like, oh, one day I wanna stop working, I need to have a certain amount of money. It's helpful to say in the future, I wanna feel financially secure, but at some point you need to like put some metrics down and say I need to be saving this much by this point. How does that fit into this? - Yeah, and it's the same. And again, so I am definitely not a financial advisor. So please take that just as more as my personal philosophy rather than advice, but I don't even think that trying to optimize for being able to retire is necessarily something that someone would even want to do optimizing for again, waking up every day and feeling excited and feeling happy and wanting to do whatever you do during the day is I think something that is a much better way to live your life. And if you do that and if you keep on showing up and on learning and on figuring out what it is you wanna do that again, makes you feel excited and is contributing meaningful to your community, you'll probably end up at some point making enough money that not necessarily that you're going to be able to retire but where money is not an issue anymore and where you wake up in the morning and you go to work not because you need to, you know, you're thinking about your next paycheck but because you actually want to do this work. So it's really about shifting almost the focus from far in the future to today and having a much more emergent approach, which I know is quite uncomfortable. Fills uncertain, doesn't make you feel like you have this clear plan and this clear goal, but this is exactly why I'm doing the work that I'm doing and writing what I'm writing about because I think a lot of us would do a lot better if we let go of those big goals. And this is also why earlier I was talking about the fact that I think it's really irresponsible when we tell people just quit your job and do the thing and follow your passion because it takes time to figure out what works for you. It takes time to figure out the kind of work that doesn't make you want to retire. And that's why I also think it's great to experiment and figure out what you wanna do while freelancing or doing something else or doing a job that is not necessarily your big passion or mission in life but that allows you to pay your rent while you're figuring it out. - Yeah, this is kind of one of my criticisms of the fire financial independence movement is that the premise is save so much money that you can stop working and do nothing because then you'll have enough money to cover your life for the rest of your life. And I'd say 90% of the people I've seen do that get really bored when they stop working, find something they're excited about, start doing it with no aspiration to make money because they've saved enough. And inevitably end up making money and realizing that they could have left the job they were miserable in earlier. And so I do think that there is a age in life where your ability to work for some people kind of diminishes enough that you should save. So I will push back a little on like, you might not need to optimize for retirement but you probably should be saving. But you probably shouldn't save so much that you can retire at 40 on the assumption you'll never make money again because most curious people end up finding things they're excited about and smart, curious, productive people end up often, not always, but often generating some sort of financial incentive in their life by doing that. And so I think optimizing for that is important. But I just said optimize again, you've said optimize a bunch. I think that one of the biggest things I struggle with is on the over optimization of everything. I wanna spend a few minutes since I know you've thought about the brain more than anyone. You're welcome to turn me into this subject or the patient. But like what's going on in someone who's kind of really enjoys optimizing's mind and how could either experiments or anything kind of help break out of that mindset or at least apply it to areas where it has more impact. So for me, not optimizing to save $1 on something, but channeling it somewhere else. Yeah. Do you mind if I go a little bit dark and phylasophical here, but it's really, really about our fear of death. This is what wanting to optimize everything is all about. It is really about wanting to feel like we're making the most of our limited time on earth. Do we think the only animal that is aware that we're going to die at some point? And who's aware that there is a limited amount of time we're going to be on this earth and we're going to be conscious. And so we want to make the most of this time. And two things. First, we want to feel like every single minute, every single moment of attention is spent in the best way possible. And second, we want to feel like it mattered that we were here. We want to feel like it changed something and that when we're gone, people will remember us. That's the entire idea of legacy. A lot of people from thinking about their legacy, what they're going to leave behind. And that at the macro level translates back at the micro level into this obsession with optimizing everything, saving one dollar, saving one minute, building a better system, a better notion dashboard. And so they're all connected. It doesn't look like that. But this big idea of not wanting to die connects back to trying to be as productive and effective as possible. And so really, if you want to get to the root of it and you really want to change your relationship to optimization, again, and this is why I use the word optimization a lot. To me, it's a little bit like I want to reclaim it almost because I don't think optimizing is bad. But it's really about asking yourself, what are you actually optimizing for? What are you actually optimizing for? I liked how earlier, again, you mentioned optimizing for spending time with your family or in my case, optimizing for feeling good in the morning. These are things I think are worth optimizing for. And then you can ask yourself when you're you're spending half an hour trying to save one dollar, are you really optimizing for the right things? What about when the optimizing is fun? I think one thing I struggle with is for some people the idea of spending, I don't know, 30 hours building something is like a chore. It's a task. It's something their boss might ask them to do. And for whatever reason, when it comes to things like building a spreadsheet or researching a project or picking a hotel, I just really enjoy it. And so to come back to what are you optimizing for? Like I want to feel excited and energized every day. I've spent a long time the last week building out a entire production system. Let's call it. Using different AI agents, doing all this stuff. And I go to bed way later than I want. And I wake up way earlier than I should for what time I went to bed. And I'm not getting that much sleep. But wow, I feel so energized when I wake up when I get like sitting in front of my computer. Like, I'm doing stuff and I'm just excited. So on one hand, it's not that impactful. And in a way, it's a form of procrastination because I've somehow convinced myself that instead of just sitting down to do task A, I should spend 40 hours building a system to make task A 10% more efficient. But it is so much fun. And I'm enjoying it. Is that a bad thing? No, you're optimizing for the right thing. You're having fun. This is why I keep on saying that experimenting is so important because you're no longer copy-pasting from others what you're supposed to do. Just doing what feels good for you, what feels right for you, what feels aligned. But in your case, sounds like it's making you feel alive, right? Going to bed late. Like when we were little kids and you couldn't go to bed because you were too excited about something, waking up early and waking up on those projects. I think it's great. And that, to me, is, yeah, it's really spending time in a way that feels alive and exciting. So it's great. And you mentioned procrastination. I actually think that it can be really revealing to pay attention to how you spend your time when you're procrastinating on the so-called main task. What are you doing when you're procrastinating? If for a long period of time, you keep on procrastinating on task A by working instead on task B, it might be worth asking yourself whether task B should be promoted to one of your main projects if you enjoy it so much. This episode is brought to you by Superhuman Mail. I've been using Superhuman Mail for years. And the thing I keep coming back to is that it's the only email app that just feels like a system, not just for faster email, but a structured way of working through it that becomes second nature over time. That's the whole idea behind Superhuman Mail. It's part of the Superhuman Productivity platform and it's built to give you clarity and control, not just one week when you happen to get ahead, but all year long. Split Inbox is probably my favorite feature. It lets you separate your email whether it's priorities, follow-ups, or team threads into their own lanes. So when you open your inbox, you're not triaging and what you need to act on is front end center. Then auto drafts, flags emails that need a reply and drafts the response for you. So follow-ups happen fast instead of getting buried. And auto archive moves newsletters, sales emails, and anything that doesn't need your attention out of the way automatically. So your inbox stays focused on what actually matters. And it works with your existing Gmailer outlook. And I swear it is the fastest email out there with the best keyboard shortcuts. Set it up once and stay in control all year. Sign up for Superhuman Mail today at allthehacks.com/superhuman. Thank you so much for being here today. You can find all the links, promo codes, and discounts from our partners at allthehacks.com/deals. These are brands I love and use, so please consider supporting those who support us. Now what happens when there are things that are important to us? So I want to live a long life. I want to be around for my kids. Like I want to be healthy. I know that there are physical movements and exercise that would improve that. But my current experiment is around kind of this boom of coding things and AI agents all stuff. And I'm realizing it's so exciting that I'm not doing these other things that actually are important. And so yes, I should evaluate whether there's some way to make the thing that I'm excited about more important in my life and a bigger part of what I do for a professional work. But I should probably still exercise. I should probably still take time to go eat lunch, which I sometimes skip because I'm just so excited. How do we balance things we're excited about with the things that we know are important. And we actually care about. It's not like, you know, I have a job that I don't want to do and I just don't procrastinate because I hate it. Like, no, I should exercise. It just doesn't happen because there's this other thing I'm excited about. Like something's going on in my brain. If you can unpack it, that would be awesome. It's important to think about not just consistency but flexible consistency for things that you care about that you want to be doing for the rest of your life. It's okay if there are weeks where you get so excited about something else that these are not your priority. This is how most human experiences and projects and anything you do in life actually works when you actually look at it. If you look at an Olympic athletes, for example, in the weeks leading up to the actual competition, they're probably going to spend very, very little time with their friends and family, right? They're going to be really focused on the competition. And that would not be sustainable if that was like that. All your around is just this burst of intensity around the competition. And then they go back to your different routine when they're not competing. And so same here, if there's this new technology, you get really, really excited about and you feel like you want to build all of those systems and you want to test and work with all of those agents. And this is happening for a period of two, three weeks. This is very intense burst of work where you really focused on that. And that means maybe you're sleeping a little bit less. Maybe you're taking a little bit less good care of your health, but this is short term. I think that's fine. I think sometimes we can make ourselves more miserable by blaming ourselves for not managing to do everything perfectly all the time. This is where it's very important to have those regular check-ins with yourself. Because if it's for two, three weeks, that's fine. This is okay. In the grand scheme of things, it's not going to have a huge impact on your health that you had two, three weeks where you got really excited about this thing. If after four, five, six weeks in your weekly review, you notice that you're still actually neglecting other things that you care about, then it might be time to re-calibrate. And this is where you can go back to the experimental mode of figuring out, how do I make this work? Clearly, there's a new variable. There's this new tool or this new technology that I want to play with. And it's taking it out of my time. How do I make sure that I have space for all of the things that I care about? Do I sandbox my time working with these things? Do I hire a coach that shows up at my place twice a week to make me exercise? And I know I will pay them in advance. And that, because I don't like disappointing people, I will show up and I will be there. Whatever it is that works for you, you can experiment with and figure out. So, yeah, cut yourself some slack if you're not doing everything perfectly for a short period of time. And if it's something that keeps on happening, experiment to figure out a better system. You said earlier, run one or max two. I feel like my next iterative will be one experiment of something I'm excited about and another experiment about how to make it not take over my life. Like, those are my two experiments. It's like, how do I force myself to do the things that I also want to do while exploring something I'm very excited about? - This is great, yeah. - We talked a lot about experiments and I feel like a lot of people think about it as it relates to productivity. And I know you've talked about productivity having two types of time, so can we unpack that? - Yeah, I don't think we can think about productivity without talking about time. And what I thought was really interesting when I was doing research from a book is that in ancient Greece, they didn't have one word for time. They had two words. So the first one is the one we still use is cronos and this is what you're going to find in cronometer or chronology. And this is a quantitative definition of time. So it's the time of seconds and minutes and hours. It's the time in our calendars and it's the time we use to kind of plan our tasks and our work in general and any kind of meetings and appointments. Cronos, quantitative definition of time. But the ancient Greeks had another word for time, caros, which is a quantitative definition of time. And caros is more linked to the opportune moment, the depth of the experience. It's the time of not of minutes and hours, but the time of watching a beautiful sunset with a friend or getting so lost in a project or an essay you're writing that you completely lose track of cronostime or having an amazing conversation with someone and then you look at the time you're like, "Oh, what happened?" So this is caros time. And what I argue is that we spend most of our days in cronost mode. So we keep on tracking minutes and hours and those tasks in this very quantitative way. But we need to also optimize for the quality, the depth of our experience. And that means making sure that you have space for those more caros moments, moments when you're not trying to be productive, when you're not trying to make the most of your time in the quantitative way. Moments when you're just here, you're present, just living life. Are there tips to switch into that mode? Yeah, I call these caros rituals. It's basically about designing a very, very, very simple ritual that allows you to switch back into being the mode of presence. I've interviewed a lot of people to ask them what were their rituals. And it was really interesting how different they were. So some people, a very simple one, is just making yourself a cup of tea very slowly and sipping it and just really enjoying this moment, almost in like a mini meditation. Another person told me they would just get up from their desk and walk around in circles and silence in the room and then get back to work. For some people, it might be just listening to your favorite playlist, stretching, whatever that is for you. And again, this is something you can experiment with, but trying to find something that is simple enough that you can do it anytime, anywhere, and that automatically makes you feel more present. One of the things I think I'm fortunate to do, I've reinforced that feeling after reading some of your writing is because I have this podcast, I get to share what I'm doing. And a lot of it is experiments or projects in public. And then you've written about how there's a lot of benefit to doing that. And I'm curious, why is that so valuable? And how might people without starting a podcast reap some of those benefits? - There's a temptation when you experiment to wait until you figured it out to share it with others. There's a bit of maybe fear of being judged, of not being perfect, of maybe looking a little bit silly when you're trying something that you're not quite sure how to do, but there are a lot of benefits to learning in public, which means actually sharing the experiment and the process in what you're learning while you're still learning it, while you're still figuring it out. And the reason why is that first, just by articulating what you're going through, the challenges that you're facing, you're going to understand your challenges better. So that's number one, it's just a really good exercise to explain to someone else what you're working on, what you're struggling with, and the kind of progress that you're making. Second, very often when you share what you're learning and struggling with, a lot of people will actually maybe have faced similar challenges in the past and will be able to share advice or resources and just say, hey, actually, I faced the exact something a year ago. Here's how I went about it. Do you want to give it a try? And last, it helps with motivation. It does help when you're sharing your progress with other people. They turn into cheerleaders and where they ask you for little updates. And it just makes it a lot more fun to experiment. Even if sometimes it's hard and you make mistakes, knowing that you have all of these other people supporting you can make the journey a lot more enjoyable. - I love this when I talked recently with Nick Gray, who for some reason I feel like you know, but if you don't, you would enjoy a conversation with him. We talked about this friend's newsletter concept. And this is not go start a sub-stack and try to grow your audience. It's add people that you know to an email and it could be 20 or 30 and send an email. And I think sharing things in that, like this is an experiment I'm running, is a perfect example. And I can't tell you how many people have emailed me after that episode and said, "Oh, I started this." And a handful of them even just copied me on it. And it was so cool to see some of the experiments or other things, you know, I watched these new shows or I went on this new adventure. And so that's one easy way is to just similar to how, I don't know, my grandparents sent like a Christmas card letter, like just share things with people, make it easy for them to unsubscribe if they don't care. But it's surprising how many people are fascinated by interesting things that we're doing and we so often don't share. - To your point, because I didn't answer the other part of your question, which was, how can people get started with this if they don't have a podcast? This is such a good example. I love the idea of having this just friends newsletter. It can also be a simple chat group with a couple of friends where you say, "Hey, you know, we're experimenting together or this is what I'm doing." I've seen people create very small broadcast channels where they send little updates on the projects that they're working on. And what I always tell people is that as long as there's at least one other human being on Earth who's aware of your experiment, that counts as learning in public. So even if it's just one friend or one colleague and that could be a little weekly coffee chats that you have or a little Zoom call that you have together where you share updates, that's learning in public. - I also think there might be some channel, but with social media channel that you care less about. And for me, sorry to some people who care about it, but for me that's LinkedIn. So it's like, if I were nervous and I wasn't ready to post something on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter where my community is, for whatever reason, I don't care about LinkedIn as a channel. So like, I could go post anything. So if you're listening and you have one of those channels, like that could be a good place where you feel like it's low stakes. That might not be LinkedIn for everyone. But we're talking about how to share things you're learning as you experiment. If someone listening right now wants to start kind of, their first one experiment right now, where would you suggest they start? So the very first part of any good experiment is observation. So don't run and just design your first experiment. You need to spend a little bit of time observing first what's working and not working for you. So you can formulate a hypothesis and then you can design your experiment. That doesn't need to take a long time. What I recommend doing is really spending just the next 24 hours, ideally pick a day that's just a regular day. If you're supposed to go to your wedding tomorrow, don't do it on that day, wait until you have a regular weekday that is just normal and observe that day. Pretend that you are an anthropologist that you know nothing about your life or your work and that you're discovering this life of yours. And you can take little notes again, like an anthropologist. So that could be on your phone and your notebook. It really doesn't matter. And just write down things like when you're feeling energized, when you're feeling drained, conversations you're excited about. We all have these moments during the day when you have a chat with someone and then you can't stop thinking about it. Or the opposite, you're in a meeting and the entire time you just wish it would be over. Just write those down. Those are all really interesting signals that you can then use. I guarantee you that if you do that for 24 hours, you will notice parts of your life and work where you've been doing things in an automatic way. Just because that's the way you've been doing them. And those are parts of your life and work that are right for experimentation. You can start asking yourself, what would it look like to do this differently? Okay, let me give it a try. Let's pick a duration. Let's do that for the next two weeks and let's see what happens. Reflect on the results, iterate and voila, that's your first tiny experiment. - I love it. For people who want to read more about what you're writing, tell people where to go. Obviously there's the book, Tiny Experiments. Everyone should check it out, but give the rundown of where they can find you. - Yeah, so there's the book. There's my newsletter, which is at nestlabs.com and I send it every week and I read about a lot of things that we talked about today. And I'm on Instagram at Neuron. Neu, R-A-N-N-E. - Awesome. All of those things will be linked in the show notes and Laura, thank you so much for joining me. - Thanks for having me. [BLANK_AUDIO]