SPI 860: Quick Experiments to Quit Your 9-To-5 Job with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

SPI 860: Quick Experiments to Quit Your 9-To-5 Job with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I was both a little bit bored, but also burned out at the same time. And as you know, a job at Google comes with what they call the golden handcuffs. Even my mom, when I mentioned that I wanted to leave my job there, she was terrified for me. She thought that I was headed for the homeless shelter.

I really had to go back to the drawing board and really ask myself, okay, enough with the copy pasting, enough with the playbooks, enough with those linear goals. What is something I’m actually deeply curious about? Even if nobody was watching, even if money was not immediately part of the equation, what is something I would be really happy to just wake up in the morning and explore just for the sake of it. Developing this, sense of taste as to what you like and what you don’t like in life and in work is one of the best investments you can make.

Pat Flynn: More recently here on the show, we’ve been going deep into certain platforms and certain choices that you can make with where you want to put your time. And that is great. Hopefully you’ve made some decisions and have already started to move forward. Or if this is the first time you’re listening to this podcast, first of all, thank you.

But also second of all, you’re going to come across the biggest wall that you could ever come across when it comes to making progress. And that wall is not a technological wall. It’s not a competitor wall. That wall is a mental wall. And it’s you. And the hardest thing to do is to get over those things we’ve been conditioned to learn in order to get the results we want today and tomorrow and next week and next month and next year.

Now, as you know, I’ve been trying to do my part with writing a new book. That book comes out in June. It’s called Lean Learning and it’s how to navigate this world of overload and information and overwhelm in order to find the right mentors, to find the right strategies, to find the right resources to help you get the results that you want.

And I do touch a little bit on this inside of the book. And I wanted to bring on an expert today. Somebody who is a neuroscientist. To talk about the right kind of mindset you need. To approach the jobs that you are going to do to become an entrepreneur. So today we’re talking with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who is a neuroscientist.

She is the founder of Ness Labs. She formerly worked at Google. And interestingly enough her story very much follows my same story, which is you thought you were supposed to go down this path, but you discover something and you want to go down this path instead because it’s more exciting because it’s more interesting but it’s not easy. And I know that many of you are on the same path as well So Anne and I talk quite a bit about the mindset of getting started and how to make those mental shifts and how to find tiny experiments to help you make progress because that’s really what her book Tiny Experiments it’s about, how to live freely in a goal obsessed world. And in this world where we know we have heard about the importance of quote unquote hustle culture and sacrificing things.

That’s not the way we should be doing it. We need to take a more compartmentalized petri dish approach to these things that will help us get to where we want to go. And that’s why I absolutely love Anne’s book, Tiny Experiments, and we’re going to talk about that. This very much is in alignment with Lean Learning.

We all know about Atomic Habits. I love this trend toward smaller. hyper focus and this idea of finding little pockets of time has been something we’ve talked about here on the podcast before and Anne-Laure Le Cunff, again our neuroscientist today who’s going to help us through this, really breaks it down for us.

So let’s not wait any longer. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, again founder of Ness Labs and author of Tiny Experiments, here she is.

Welcome and thank you so much for coming on to SPI. I appreciate your time today.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited.

Pat Flynn: I’m super excited for a few reasons. Number one, you have a book coming out, if not out already by the time people listen to this.

It’s called Tiny Experiments. I love the concept of it. I think it’s going to be incredibly useful. It actually aligns with a lot of stuff that I’m going to be teaching in my upcoming book related to learning and not being overwhelmed along the way. There’s a lot of mindset things that our audience can relate to and understand, and we’re going to dive into that.

I want to dive a little bit into your story because I know that, similar to me, you went down a path that you thought you were supposed to, and then you realized you weren’t in the right place. Can you tell me about that journey?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, absolutely. I started in a very linear career. I had a kind of like predetermined version of what success was supposed to look like.

I worked pretty hard in school. I got good grades. Then I started working at Google, got a job, got promoted, made sure to work on the most interesting projects possible. So I would get visibility basically like check, check, check, doing all of the right things. And after a while, I realized that I was in this weird situation when it came to just mentally and creatively where I was both a little bit bored, but also burned out at the same time. Bored out and burned out at the same time where I had a lot of things to do, always endless tasks, a to do list that was never ending. So that’s the burnout, but also not enough space to really be creative, to come up with new ideas and to explore so also a little bit bored. And that’s when the idea of maybe leaving that path and doing something a little bit different started to emerge.

Pat Flynn: How hard was it for you to make that leap and jump? A lot of our audience is in that situation where they’re just not happy, they’re bored, they’re burnt out, like you said.

What was going through your head in terms of that decision and how hard was that for you?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I’m not going to lie, but money was part of the equation. I come from a background where my parents didn’t necessarily have a lot of money. I didn’t grow up with a lot of money. And as you know, a job at Google comes with what they call the golden handcuffs.

So I had stock options. I had a pretty good salary. Even my mom, when I mentioned that I wanted to leave my job there, she was terrified for me. She thought that I was headed for the homeless shelter. Basically. So that was a big part of the equation. I kind of like made sure that I had enough money to go for in between six months and a year, depending on how much I would be spending before I left.

That was one criteria. And then the other part that was hard was the status that comes with working for a company like Google for years while I was working there was very easy when I was introducing myself to just say, I work at Google and people would just assume, Oh, she must be smart and she’s accomplished because I had the name of that company that I could name drop in any conversation and there was something that was a bit hard to let go off here, let go of that identity that I had attached to my work, and take that leap and try to recreate something from scratch, something that was a little bit less legible and more difficult to explain to others.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, I find the same thing to be true as far as societal pressures and parental pressures.

When I got laid off, it was very quick for my dad to say, okay, well now you should go back to school to get your master’s degree because that’s the next logical step since you can’t get a job right now. And I was just like, no. Like, I went down this path and it turned its back on me. I had expected things to be rosy because I went down that path and then it wasn’t.

And I had a sort of mini existential crisis. I thought I was not as talented as maybe I thought I was. I thought I had made the wrong decisions. Did you have any self reflection in that moment of like, who am I? What am I doing? Because you expect things to be successful when you do the things that everybody says makes you successful, but here you were wanting to go the other way.

Like I’m trying to get a little deeper into the emotions that you were feeling and how you eventually said, okay, I’m going to do this.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, it’s hard because even getting to the point where I admitted to myself that something was wrong, that took a little bit of time also, because on paper, honestly, what did I have to complain about?

I had a good job, I had a good salary, my team was actually great. The people I worked with were really smart. I was working on interesting projects. Google had sponsored me to move from the UK to the US. So, on paper, even just telling my friends or family that actually I was not that happy and that I felt like I needed something more.

That I, I didn’t feel like this was the path for me. Even that getting to this point was a little bit difficult. And you obviously ask yourself, shouldn’t I maybe work on myself a little bit more isn’t maybe I’m the problem. If I have all of these things that are supposed to make you happy and somehow I’m not happy, maybe something’s wrong with me.

So it did take a little bit of a soul searching for me to be able to make that leap and something that helped a lot, which I know not everybody has access to, but the fact that I was in San Francisco during that time in my life, I was very, very fortunate to have a lot of examples of entrepreneurs around me.

And to me, just seeing that other people were doing this, other people have, made that leap and not all of them had succeeded. So it was not even about emulating this 30 other people’s success story because some of them had failed, but they were still okay. Just seeing those examples. I think that’s what helped.

And I know I’m half French half Algerian. I grew up in Paris that there are lots of places in the world and even in the U. S. where you don’t necessarily have that access, those models around you that can inspire you. So I felt like I was very fortunate in that sense.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, absolutely. I feel the same way.

When I started, there was internet communities that I was a part of, and this is why at SPI, we’re so honed in on creating communities for people who are in this part of their life and journey with entrepreneurship to connect with one another. So when you were at that point in San Francisco and you saw these other examples, what did you do next?

I know that you we’re at Google. You were like, Okay, I’m done. But what does one do after that? How do you even begin to plan your next move?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: That’s the thing is that I thought I was leaving the linear path and that I was going to get on that path of freedom of creativity. But what I didn’t realize is that when I left Google, I started immediately applying another playbook instead of just thinking about what I wanted to do. And at the time, so that’s the kind of other side of the coin of being in San Francisco is that a lot of the companies that were started there were started following the exact same model. There were most of them startups where you raise money and you find a co founder, you maybe build an MVP or you have an idea, your pre product, you pitch to different partners and investors.

So it’s a very specific model, which can work obviously, but that is made for a very small kind of subset of business ideas. It’s not necessarily for everyone. And my startup ended up failing for a variety of reasons. The main one being that I actually didn’t really know my co founder before I started working with him, but everybody told me you need a co founder.

So I found a co founder and we didn’t know each other. And it has really nothing to do with who we are separately as human beings, but the dynamic was just not working. We had different values, different working styles. So that was the main reason why the startup didn’t work out. And it’s only after going through this process of failing, properly failing, that I found myself completely lost and I didn’t have a next step. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I really had to go back to the drawing board and really ask myself, okay, enough with the copy pasting, enough with the playbooks, enough with those linear goals. What is something I’m actually deeply curious about?

Even if nobody was watching, even if money was not immediately part of the equation, what, what is something I would be really happy to just wake up in the morning and, and explore just for the sake of it. And for me, it’s always been the brain, how we think, how we feel, why we connect the way we connect as human beings.

And so in my late twenties, I decided to go back to school to study neuroscience.

Pat Flynn: Wow. And you went to King’s College in London. I know. When you were in your studies, were you thinking, were you thinking about, okay, once I graduate, I’m going to do this thing and follow that linear path again? Or what was your life like in college?

And what were you doing to sort of maximize that time?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: It was completely different. If you take my time as a startup founder and at Google, that was very linear. And the time as a student, when I started studying neuroscience, it was night and day. One of them was very linear. And I really switched to a much more experimental way of doing things, which I just, I learned in school.

Like that’s how scientists are being trained, where you don’t really know where you’re going. You just have questions and then you test them. And I started kind of applying this to everything. My life as a student was I was just doing a bunch of things that I was curious about. I was studying, I was consulting a little bit.

I launched a bunch of side projects on product hunt at the time, just testing things. I learned how to code. I knew to code a little bit from my time at Google, but I learned to code like actual products end to end during that time. And I really just tried to figure out what are things that I like doing.

And if I designed something, if I started designing a day that just feels good, regardless of the outcome, what would that look like? And what’s interesting is that a lot of the things that I started doing then, I’m still doing today. So that’s when I started writing. That’s when I started the Ness Labs newsletter, and I’m still writing.

But coding, for example, is something that is super helpful to me. I can go and fix little things when I need to. But I realized that that’s not something I want to spend my entire day doing. So this time of exploration has been so helpful in just figuring out what it is I want to do.

Pat Flynn: I love this. This resonates with me so much and it’s where I want to spend the rest of the conversation on what is a tiny experiment?

How does one do that and begin to start to go back to how things were when we were kids, right? When we were kids, the way we’d learn is we’d try a whole bunch of different things and we’re just like, Oh, I don’t like that. I’m going to not do that anymore. I don’t like this person. I don’t want to spend time with them.

Versus like when we’re an adult, we’re like, here’s the plan. Here’s how it is. It’s all structured, but we don’t give ourselves the time to learn anything new, which is why when you’re stuck at a nine to five and you come home and you’re with the family and you literally have zero time to figure things out that might excite you or bring you that joy or fill in those gaps for you.

How does one embrace that curiosity in a more adulthood life style so that they can explore and find these other parts of life that may be exciting?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I think first I want to acknowledge that it’s hard because when you think about life and work as an adult, you’re being paid based on the answers you can provide.

People want to work with other people who know their stuff, right? So creating space for yourself or creating a sandbox where you can be a newbie again, where you can be comfortable saying, I actually have no idea what I’m doing. right now that takes a little bit of courage when we’re an adult to, to do this.

And it’s, yeah, it’s not easy. So that’s the first thing I would say. And the second thing is that there is a way to do this that is structured enough that you don’t necessarily have to just do a bunch of random stuff, right? And that starts with observation. I know for people who are problem solvers and who love to get things done, you might be super excited and you just want to run your first experiment straight away.

But the first thing you should do is just observe the current situation. And this is something I talk about in the book. I call it self anthropology because it’s a little bit like becoming an anthropologist of your own life in the same way that an anthropologist goes and studies another culture and asks, Why are they doing things this way?

Why do they care about this? Why is this thing more important than this other thing for them? You can do the same thing with your life and with your work. You can just observe the conversations you have, the projects you work on, the things that give you energy and the ones that drain your energy. And you can take little notes, just like an anthropologist and just be like, Oh, cool. I had this conversation about this product with a friend. And I was so energized when I talked about that with him, or I had to go and give a presentation about that other topic. And I hated it. I was so anxious about the entire process the entire experience before going and on stage. I don’t want to do that ever again. So I would start with observation and then when you observe something interesting, that’s when you can start experimenting and by experimenting, I mean, really committing to trying to think for a certain period of time.

That’s how I started Ness Labs where I said, I’m going to write a hundred articles for a hundred days. And when I’m done, when I’m done with this experiment, then I’ll decide if I want to keep going or not. You can do that for a bunch of stuff in your business, in your life. You can say, I’m going to do that thing I’m curious about for this period of time, and then I’ll decide if it’s for me or not.

Pat Flynn: This speaks to me very highly because that’s how I choose what I want to do too. I don’t know if the thing is going to work, but I have to give it a chance. So I’m going to dedicate some time to it, to get to that point, maybe a hundred days, maybe six months, whatever it might be.

I did this recently. I have a Pokemon YouTube channel and I started a Shorts experiment. So Shorts, TikTok and Reels. And I said, I’m going to go for three months straight of video every day and see what happens. And after 21 days, it just started to explode. It was like nothing in the beginning. And I was a little worried because I was like, I’m not seeing results, like what’s going to happen.

I said, no, the goal isn’t to get a bunch of views. The goal is to get to 90 days straight. And just that, if I do that, I’ve won regardless of the results or not because now I can decide if I want to try a different thing or continue with it and it’s worked so well that I’ve, I’ve continued with it, but if it didn’t, I’d have a closing point where I can then move on and try something else.

So I really love this and I love the word tiny because it allows for it to be inserted into our lives in some way versus like feeling very big and very grandiose or like I have to quit my job in order for this to happen. You could run these tiny things. Do you have any other examples? I think Ness Labs is a great example with your writing and I would highly recommend everybody go to NestLabs.com to subscribe to your newsletter. We’ll talk about where to get the book in a second. But what other examples that you have had or other people that you know have had that have been sort of tiny experiments that they’ve run?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I have tons because I sometimes run little cohorts in the Ness Labs community where we do that together and everybody has their experimental logbook in the community.

So I have lots of examples. I’m going to give you two of mine. that just come up right now in my mind and then a few others, but just to show you the diversity. So YouTube, for example, I also did a YouTube experiment where I said, I’m going to post one video every week for six months. And the reason why I’m sharing this one is because I completed it just like you did with your Pokemon one, except that my conclusion was that I did not want to keep going at the end of it.

And I just want to highlight that as an example where I love how you said the idea here is really just to complete the experiment. And the same way that a scientist, they complete all of the trials before they analyze the data and they decide what the result of the experiment is. So you’re doing the same, right?

So same, I finished the experiment, look back on it. In terms of views and engagement, it was okay, but I actually did not enjoy so much the process of scripting the video, sitting in front of the camera and all of that. It’s just not the creative medium that I like the most. And so at the end of the sixth month, I said, you know what?

Keep on posting YouTube videos whenever I have an idea where it feels like kind of nice to do this, but I’m not going to force myself to grow a YouTube channel. That’s not my thing. So it’s just an example of one where technically some people would say, Oh, it failed. I don’t think it failed. I learned something new.

So it didn’t fail. It’s great. Now I know YouTube is not the medium I want to grow.

Pat Flynn: Before we move on, I want to go deeper with that because I feel like a lot of people, I mean, I’m on that channel now, you have 10,000 subscribers, that is pretty successful for, you know, in the grand scheme of things in terms of YouTube for a lot of people, they would love that, but I love how you sort of felt internally, okay, this is not for me, I didn’t enjoy this process and not tie the results, which are good to whether or not it was successful for you, or not.

I feel a lot of people would do an experiment like this, put six months into it, see some results, maybe still feel like it really wasn’t for them, but then feel like if they walked away from it, it would be a waste. It would be that sunk cost feel. And I think a lot of people feel this. I felt this when I was transitioning into entrepreneurship.

Why put five years of school into architecture? That would be a waste if I didn’t do architecture now in my future. Neuropsychologically, how is one able to understand that sunk costs, especially with, if you’re especially doing these many experiments, like having it quote unquote fail, how do we not make it feel like it’s a waste of time?

Really? I know you said you could learn some lessons, but that’s such a big thing. I think that’s on a lot of people’s minds when they’re trying to make a transition into something new.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, absolutely. I think two things. First, you need to be aware of these thoughts and feelings that you have. And as you said, we tend sometimes to focus so much on the external metrics of success that we don’t actually pay attention to those internal signals.

So there are two skills that are very helpful here, which are called in psychology, metacognition and interoception. Metacognition just means thinking about thinking. So it’s paying attention to your own thoughts, really paying attention to so for me, for example, the fact that every time I had to go and sit down and script a video, I was thinking about like, Oh, this is going to be so much work and I’ll have to write in this word tone.

So it sounds natural when I’m going to sit on the teleprompter. And I had all of these thoughts in my mind. So paying attention to this internal discourse that you have, that’s metacognition. Interoception is the same, but for your bodily sensations and your feelings and your emotions. So same for me, every time I had to sit in front of the camera to film, I had this little like knot in my stomach that was, for me, that means anxiety.

And I had that every single time. So you pay attention to this. That’s the first thing. The second is to actually then act based on this. And I think this is where it’s helpful where, when you were saying, how do you still feel like It wasn’t for nothing to spend all of that energy. It’s that for anyone who thinks that knowing yourself is something that has value in and of itself, then knowing what you enjoy, knowing what you’re both good at, that Venn diagram of what you’re good at, but also what you enjoy and what can have a positive impact on the world.

I’m not a big fan of saying Ikigai because that’s actually not what Ikigai is, but this Venn diagram, this is what is going to make you successful in the long term. If you talk to successful entrepreneurs, a lot of them, they have this strong sense, not necessarily of what they want to do in the future.

They don’t know. Actually, a lot of them will tell you, actually, I don’t know. I’m open to opportunities. We’ll see what happens, but they have a very strong grounded sense of what they enjoy working on and the kind of opportunities they will tend to say yes to and the ones they’re going to just say no, because they know it’s not for them.

Developing this, almost this sense of taste as to what you like and what you don’t like in life and in work is one of the best investments you can make.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, it’s almost like dating, right? Like, you don’t know if you’re gonna, you know, really enjoy being around this person for so long, but you take a chance and, you know, hopefully you don’t just stay together because you’re, you’ve been together for so long.

That’s unhealthy on both sides. So you’d hopefully come to an agreement, break it off, and then you’ve learned from that. You’ve learned about yourself. I could publicly thank my exes for showing me what I don’t want. And I’m very happy where I am now, you know, so it’s in a similar way. You’re kind of doing that.

And I love that example. If you are learning about yourself and your tastes, it is not a waste of time. Absolutely. I had cut you off earlier, but you were going to go into another example.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah. So very briefly, another one I did was with meditation. And for this one. The reason why I’m sharing this one is that I also sometimes like to run my experiments in public.

So with this one, what I did is that I created a Google Doc and I put my notes as I was running this experiment in the Google Doc and I shared the link in my newsletter, and I had a bunch of people, breathwork experts and meditators, et cetera, who would add comments in the Google Doc and tell me about different ways I could practice meditation, different ways to work with my breath, or who would just comment on things where I would put in my notes.

Why do I feel itchy all the time? And then someone would explain why that was happening. So I was also learning faster by learning in public. And this is something that can be very fun to do for me. It was a Google Doc because I’m a writer, but you can learn in public with your experiments by doing YouTube Shorts, but on Instagram, on Tik TOK, on Twitter, X threads, it doesn’t matter, but that’s also an ingredient you may want to play with.

Is just being a bit more public and sharing what you learn, not at the end of the experiment, but while you run the experiment.

Pat Flynn: Yes, I can vouch for that. I have many times before built businesses publicly on SPI, and that is actually what put me on the map in 2010. I had built a website for security guards.

I didn’t know anything about security guards, but I found the answers and built this website and did it publicly. And it really did a couple things. Number one, it showed my authority in the space that I knew what I was doing, and I could figure it out. It also showed that I was not perfect because I made a lot of mistakes along the way, which people really gravitate to, especially today.

And thirdly, it just gave people a step by step process who wanted to follow along, which was great. So, I love that. Working in public is fantastic. I’m curious because I know that your primary mode of content creation is writing. Where are you writing mostly these days? I know that there’s sort of a movement away from writing like blogs aren’t as powerful as they were before video and audio podcasts are quote unquote where it’s at these days. But you’ve decided to kind of stick with writing. Tell me about your decision there I understand you’ve tried YouTube you did that experiment you already have answers for that as you hear more and more about people saying like You got to be on video or audio podcasts.

You’re still a very strong writer who’s building this audience with your writing. So this is possible, but I’d love to know a little bit more your thought process there and how you’re feeling as a writer in this multimedia world right now.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I actually am. That’s why I love that we’re having this conversation right now because I feel like in a few years, I’ll probably have a little bit more clarity as to whether this is the right move or not. And right now I really don’t know. I’m basing my decisions on how I feel right now. And I know I love writing and I want to keep on doing this. So I’m really optimizing for this. I have noticed a few things at the moment. First, it’s getting harder and harder to get traffic to my website. For sure. There are lots of different parameters that things that have been changing, obviously with Google that is summarizing all of the blog posts now, and people are not clicking anymore. People are reading less, they watch videos, et cetera. So definitely things are changing and it’s not looking too good for that written format.

At the same time, I’m seeing still like very high engagement from the people who do read my newsletter, and I feel like it’s a bit less crowded also at the moment. So there is maybe a deeper appreciation for the kind of writing that I do that is really deeply researched. I spend a lot of time writing my articles.

I link to all of the research papers and there are fewer of us doing this now. So the quality of the, the, the connection with my community and my audience, I feel like has become stronger and deeper in the past year, even though my growth is not necessarily as fast. Or it doesn’t feel as easy to maintain as it used to.

And another thing is, this is also part of why I wanted to explore writing a book, which for someone who grew up on the internet, who I started her career in tech who manages an online community, writing an actual physical book might seem a little bit strange, but I loved the idea of creating this more permanent kind of artifact of all of the thinking and all of the work and all of the intellectual efforts that have poured into writing my newsletter over the years.

So I felt like whatever happens with the newsletter in 10 years, at least I’ll have this book that will kind of capture all of my thinking at that point in time. So again, we’ll see. This is my longest running experiment, really. It’s still kind of an experiment, Ness Labs, and I hope it will keep on going for a very long time.

But to be completely honest, I don’t know if I’m making the right decision right now in being so focused on writing and not necessarily exploring video as much as other creators are doing.

Pat Flynn: I appreciate your vulnerability there. The fact that you are investing more time into writing with something like a book, I think that is a smart move.

And I have to say that also to make myself feel better because I’ve spent the last couple years writing a book as well. So congratulations. This is your first book, I believe. Is that true?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah.

Pat Flynn: How was that experience like for you to put this together?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: It was hard in a good way. It felt really good. I’ve worked on a lot of complex projects, but I don’t think I’ve ever worked on something that was so deeply connected to who I am as a person where I cared so much about the outcome that I did with this book, which is interesting because it kind of like is so different from everything else I’m doing in other areas of my life and work.

I love the, the model of a newsletter because every week is almost a new tiny experiment. I can just go and write a newsletter and see what resonates, right? A book is so different. If people don’t like it or if I change my mind, I can’t go and run and grab the copies back and say, Hey, can I just change what I wrote on page 100?

Pat Flynn: It was very permanent. Yes.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, it feels very permanent. And there’s something a little bit anxiety inducing around that again, coming from a background that’s very digital, where everything can be edited, changed or reposted. This feels very, very different. And at the same time, I’ve grown so much. I’ve really pushed myself in terms of my writing. I obviously you can hear my accent. English is not my first language. So writing a book in English in and of itself was a massive challenge. And I feel proud. I think now I feel proud of the result of the products that I’ve created. I’m also excited and a bit nervous to see how people are going to react to it.

And it also, it just, it feels really nice that this is, this feels like the culmination of a lot of work that I have put into building Ness Labs over the years. It’s almost like a little bit of recognition around that work. So a lot of different emotions. What about you? How did that feel to write this book?

Pat Flynn: Well, this Book that I have coming out in June is has been the hardest one and it’s hard because it’s my first traditionally published book. So I am not the person in total control anymore And I’ve had to give up some things here and there and some creative licenses have had to be shared and such. But with any of my books that I’ve created has always felt the same way that you’ve had.

It’s it’s felt permanent, it’s felt like it’s a part of me now being shared with the world and that’s that’s scary but it’s also something that is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done. I’m sure you’re going to collect a number of amazing pieces of feedback and people’s lives who’ve been changed from it.

And I’m so excited for you to experience that on your end as well. And I will say as hard as writing a book is after your first one, something happens and you’re like, okay, when’s the next one for a lot of people? It’s just like getting a tattoo. So just, just warning you. But I think this is going to be an excellent book, especially at this time where we’re all overwhelmed.

We all have so much coming at us. My book is for that audience who’s also experiencing overwhelm and burnout as well. But I love the analogy of or the metaphor of a tiny experiment. Where can people go pick up the book? And how do we get more access to your work? I know Ness Labs is where the newsletter is.

Feel free to drop any other resources here at this time.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, so yeah,   NestLabs.com for my newsletter, TinyExperiments.org for everything about the book. But really, you can just look it up anywhere books are sold. And then I’m at @neuranne on any social media platform.

Pat Flynn: Amazing. I have one final question to finish off here.

And again, thank you for spending the time with me and chatting about the brain and about, you know, our work here today. It’s It’s going to be a question that I know is on a lot of people’s mind about these experiments and it’s about how long should we run them and how do we know when it’s time to pivot or time to, quote unquote, just stop.

I think this is a big question that I often get because we teach a very similar way. We don’t call them tiny experiments, but it’s like dedicate some time, carve out some time to get to a point where you can make a decision. But there’s always that question, how long do I give myself? How long is too long?

There’s that cartoon where there’s a person who’s kind of using a pickaxe in a mine and they’re walking the other way, they’re giving up. And if they just struck that axe one more time, they would have hit, hit that gold, you know, that, that illustration. How do we know that it’s not like, this is such a, like a hard thing to wrap my head around and others too.

Can you speak to, to this idea of like, keeping going or moving on and pivoting.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah. I think this is why it’s so powerful to make that decision in advance before you get started. And you decide that based on your level of curiosity and confidence. So if it’s something, for example, where, you know, you’re already kind of good at it, you have experience with it, but maybe you’ve been procrastinating.

So maybe you’re actually good at filming YouTube videos, you’ve done it, but you haven’t really managed so far to stick to it for long enough, then you can commit to like a longer experiment. You can say, let’s do this for three months, five months, six months, and you finish it and then you decide if you want to keep going or not.

If it’s something you’ve never done before, you’ve never sat in front of a camera, maybe just go for a one month experiment where you say, I’m going to do one video a week for one month. Then let’s stop here. Let’s assess how we’re feeling. Are you still a little bit curious? And at this stage, I would not even look at external metrics.

We’re really just looking at the internal signals. Does this feel fun? Do I want to keep on exploring? Cool. Let’s do another experiment where, again, you decide in advance. This time, I’m going to go for three months. And at the end of the three months, I’m going to decide. So I would remove all of that overthinking that we have while we’re in the middle of the experiment of saying, should I keep going or not by deciding beforehand, because then it’s more of a rational decision based on your current level of expertise and curiosity.

Pat Flynn: I love that a lot. I think that’s a very clear way to go about it. This is perfect. And thank you so much for today and the conversation. I’m sure we could have talked for more hours about this, but everybody should just go get your book and then you don’t get the audio. Is it available on audio as well?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yes. Yes, it is.

Pat Flynn: Wonderful. Thank you so much again.   TinyExperiments.org for the book. NestLabs.com for the newsletter. Go there and thank you. And this has been a pleasure and best of luck to you and the book launch. Look forward to seeing more of it.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thanks so much for having me. This was great.

Pat Flynn: Super great.

Thank you. Alright, I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, again, author of Tiny Experiments. Check her out at NestLabs.com. As you can see, she and I are very much in alignment with a lot of things, especially compartmentalized moments to really hyperfocus on things. This is what we need in today’s world, unfortunately, with so much noise and so much drive toward just goal after goal after goal.

Again, how to live freely in a goal obsessed world. Thank you, Anne-Laure, for breaking it down for us and for spending time with me and congrats on the book. Everybody can go check it out wherever books are available, Amazon, and again, just go to NestLabs.com, you’ll see it there as well. Thank you, Anne.

And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you. And head on over to the show notes page at smartpassiveincome.com/session860 for all those links directly again smartpassiveincome.com/session860 and this is just super inspiring and motivating for me with a book coming out in a couple months again that can be found at LeanLearningBook.com and I love this movement toward tiny, hyper focused, atomic, lean, all those keywords and hopefully you follow through with that. So thank you so much. Take care and I look forward to serving you in the next episode where we’re going to deep dive. As you can see, we still are doing interviews here, which is great.

I know a lot of people have been asking if I was just doing solo episodes from now on. No, that’s not true. I’m doing more solo episodes, going deeper with my own experience and knowledge to help you and serve you through those things. However, I don’t know everything, and I also love to get some reinforcements like Anne Laure today on certain topics that are of utmost importance for you, so I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Let me know what you think, and I’ll see you in the next one. Bye.