JOSH: Hello, and welcome to Clearer Thinking with Spencer Greenberg, the podcast about ideas that matter. I'm Josh Castle, the producer of the podcast, and I'm so glad you've joined us today. In this episode, Spencer speaks with Anne-Laure Le Cunff about mindful productivity and simplifying habit forming behaviors through self-reflection.

SPENCER: Anne-Laure, welcome.

ANNE-LAURE: Thank you so much for having me, Spencer.

SPENCER: A lot of people who listen to this podcast care about being productive. They want to work hard and achieve their goals. But there can also be a toxic side to productivity. I know you've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and you have this idea of mindful productivity. What is mindful productivity?

ANNE-LAURE: Mindful productivity is basically the idea that you can achieve your goals without sacrificing your mental health. It's something I started exploring after I burned out several times just trying to do too many things at the same time, being a little bit too ambitious. And I realized that I wasn't the only one facing that problem, which is why I started looking at different ways of approaching things, strategies for working smarter, those kinds of things, which I'm now putting under the umbrella of mindful productivity.

SPENCER: What happened when you yourself experienced burnout?

ANNE-LAURE: I used to work at Google, and I remember when I joined, I felt so lucky. I almost felt like it was a mistake, that someone would realize at some point that I didn't really belong there with all of these smart people. So I tried to do everything that I could to earn my spot there at the company. I was saying yes to every single project. I was trying to do even more than what was expected of me and, as a result, not very surprisingly, I burned out. I didn't have the term for it at the time but, just to give you an example of something that happened, at some point, I had to work on a research project, and I was offered the opportunity to go to San Francisco — I was based in London — to do an additional training. I said, "Yes, sure, I'll do this." And I kept on working both time zones, so I was working, doing all of my training in San Francisco, but also attending meetings London time. And I was barely sleeping. Yeah, that was absolutely silly when I think about it now but, at the time, it just felt like I didn't want to let anyone down, and I wanted to make sure that I was hitting all of my deadlines. One day, I was on a meeting with someone back in London while it was the middle of the night for me in San Francisco, and they mentioned that maybe something was wrong with some of the data, the way I had analyzed it. And I started crying on the call, which had never happened before, and I had to pretend that I had connection problems — that the signal was too bad — so I could disconnect from the call to avoid them realizing what was going on. And that was my first real encounter with burnout. Since then, I experienced similar things several times when I worked on my startup, but even when I worked at my current company, Nest Labs, which I have started. And what's really interesting to me is that, when you look at the way people used to talk about burnout at the time when I was looking for resources to try and navigate this, a lot of the content and a lot of the strategies were about dealing with an overbearing manager, micromanager, with leadership that was giving you too much work. But in my case, it really wasn't that at all. I had amazing colleagues. I had an amazing manager. As an entrepreneur, I have a lot of freedom in terms of the kind of work I do. So it was a different flavor of burnout, the kind of burnout you experience when you actually really like your job. There weren't many resources at the time around this, which is why I started doing my own research and creating my own resources.

SPENCER: What were the kinds of thoughts that were going through your head that you think were driving this burnout?

ANNE-LAURE: The main thought was probably, "Am I good enough?" And a lot of my behaviors were driven by this desire to prove to myself and to others that I deserve to be here.

SPENCER: Would you describe it as imposter syndrome, or do you think it's something else?

ANNE-LAURE: I think imposter syndrome is definitely a part of it. And I think the reason why I experienced such intense burnout was that imposter syndrome was combined with a bit of — I would call it — type A personality, highly ambitious, wanting to contribute and having an impact. And I think if you combine those two traits together, that's the perfect recipe for burnout.

SPENCER: If you were to advise your past self who was experiencing this — who was working in both time zones at the same time and was feeling so stressed out that you started crying during a call — what would you say to your past self?

ANNE-LAURE: "You're enough. You're good enough. You were hired by very smart people who thought you would be a great contributor to this team, and they knew that there would still be things that you would need to learn on the job, so trust their intelligence." And this is something I repeat to myself now every time I have this kind of self-doubt — which I know can be an early symptom of burnout for me — is to trust the intelligence of people I'm working with. I'm currently doing a PhD, writing a book, working on a bunch of projects, where there are many opportunities for me to feel that kind of imposter syndrome and to want to do more than is required, because I want to prove myself to others. And I keep on telling myself, "Trust the intelligence of those people you're working with. They trust that you'll be able to get the job done, so you don't need to go overboard and push yourself like crazy. You will get it done."

SPENCER: That's interesting to me because it's using a kind of external standard. It's switching from your internal standard to an external one, saying, "Well, these people want to work with you. These people hired you. So if you trust them, you know that you're good enough to do the job." What do you think your internal standard was that you were holding yourself to?

ANNE-LAURE: I think ultimately it's impossible to really separate those external standards from those internal standards. It's a skewed perception of how people perceive you that leads to your own internal standards. So this is why now I'm starting from those external standards, trusting that people know what they're doing when they want to work with me, instead of trying to start from my own internal standards, which are always going to be a bit more of a skewed version of maybe more objective standards that other people are applying to me.

SPENCER: This is a funny topic for me because, if anything, I think I have the opposite of imposter syndrome. I've always believed that I'm capable of things I'm probably not even capable of. [laughs] Just for fun, I do bouldering, and just as a form of exercise. And I was talking to a friend about this recently. She's like, "Oh, yeah, totally. You constantly believe you can climb things you can't climb." I'm like, "Yeah, I do. I'll throw myself at them." And it's actually really served me well, I think, because it pushes me to try things that other people won't try. And even if I fail at them, there's something good and positive about that a lot of the time. Obviously, it can have its own cost, too; it's not perfect. And it can be a problem. So to me, it's very hard to imagine having imposter syndrome because it's so different from how my mind works. But I work with some people — and I've worked with many people over my life — who have very severe imposter syndrome, and one thing that I notice about them is that sometimes they view mistakes as totally unacceptable. And I'm curious, was that part of your imposter syndrome?

ANNE-LAURE: At the time, it definitely was, and it's something that has really changed for me now. I actually really embrace mistakes now; I almost seek them out as opportunities to learn. But at the time, I was so afraid of judgment from others, so afraid that someone would find out that I wasn't as good as they thought I was, that any mistake just felt like a catastrophe.

SPENCER: And do you think it would feel that way, too, even if you knew no one would find out about the mistake, like somehow making that mistake proves that you're not good enough, even to yourself?

ANNE-LAURE: That's actually interesting, because I think I never had any issue growing up with making mistakes in private. It was really always about that perception, that external perception from others. So I would be really happy with trying different things, making mistakes and all of that, as long as I was working with the garage door closed. As soon as I felt like someone was watching, I wanted everything to be perfect. So again, it's really all about this skewed perception of how people are going to react when they find out that you've made a mistake. Because, in reality, most people won't have such a negative reaction. They will maybe try to understand what happened. They might even provide some solutions. They may share similar experiences that they had in the past where they tried something similar and they also struggled. It's not really the case that people are going to point fingers at you and say, "Ha! I knew it. I knew you would fail." So it's interesting how people actually react, objectively speaking, when they find out that you've made a mistake, and how people who have the same kind of mental makeup as me, or maybe experiences growing up, end up perceiving those reactions, those future reactions, and modeling their behaviors to avoid having those reactions they're imagining people will have.

SPENCER: What would happen in your imagination? When you would think about making a mistake, what would the scenario you imagine be?

ANNE-LAURE: Well, you have the scenarios you have when you're a little bit more rational, where I just thought, "Oh, my manager is going to be disappointed. I'm probably not going to have a great performance review." And then you have the scenarios when you are about to fall asleep and looking at the ceiling and you're really stressed about your work. Those could be quite dramatic, like getting fired or something like this.

SPENCER: So surely, during these jobs, you must have seen your colleagues make mistakes. When you're doing difficult work, everyone's going to make mistakes sometimes. I'm curious, how did you react to the colleagues around you making mistakes, and how did that differ from how you would react to your own mistakes?

ANNE-LAURE: That's what's so illogical with the way we react in those situations. Obviously, whenever a colleague of mine was making a mistake, as I mentioned earlier, I would just have this very normal reaction, I think, which is the one most people would have of trying to understand what happened, trying to provide solutions, and maybe sharing some of my own past experiences with similar mistakes. I would never really judge their intelligence or their abilities in general. I just understood that mistakes can happen, especially when you're in a fast-paced environment and you're trying to innovate, and a lot of the projects you're working on are things that you haven't done before.

SPENCER: So do you think, fundamentally, you were just, on some level, overestimating how harshly other people would judge you for mistakes?

ANNE-LAURE: Absolutely. That's absolutely what was happening. And I think I'm really not the only one doing this. We tend to do that a lot, especially people who suffer from imposter syndrome; they will overestimate how harshly other people are going to judge them for any mistake they potentially are going to make.

SPENCER: There was this hilarious study done many years ago where they, if I recall correctly — I might get some of the details wrong — but they asked students like, "What would be the most embarrassing band to be really into?" And I think it was like Barry Manilow or something at this time when they ran the study. So then they bought Barry Manilow T-shirts, and they had students wear them around other students. And then they asked them, "What percentage of the other students do you think noticed what t-shirt you were wearing?" It was Barry Manilow. And people thought it would be really high. And then they surveyed the actual students in the room, and barely any of them remembered what the person was wearing. I just think it's a really interesting idea of how we're so attuned to how people are judging us, but the reality is that most people are not so focused on us. They're focused on their own stuff.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, absolutely. I think this is this main character-slash-self spotlight kind of experience. We feel like we're the main character in the movie of our lives, and so we feel like other people are also watching us, but everybody is really busy watching their own movie; nobody's paying that much attention to what you're doing or any mistake that you could be making.

SPENCER: I suspect that one reason people have the tendency that you described is that they view it as functional on some level. Imagine that you just had no anxiety about your work. Well, maybe you wouldn't feel so motivated to get it done. Maybe you wouldn't be as high-achieving, and then people develop anxiety as a strategy to get stuff done. It's like whipping yourself in order to create action. Now, unfortunately, whipping yourself to create action, while it does create action, it actually gets extremely unpleasant. And then if you do it too much, it's debilitating; at some point you just burn out. But you could see why it could actually be a functional strategy that was developed to get yourself to do things. It just turns out to be not a great functional strategy. But people might be resistant to swapping it for something else, because they might, on some level, think, "Well, if I stop doing this, maybe I'll just be a slacker, maybe I won't achieve my goals."

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, and it's the case for so many of our behaviors. You can explain them from an evolutionary perspective. For example, the fact that we have this fear of rejection, or that we have a deep need for belonging, those are the kinds of things that give you the fear of public speaking, but those are also the things that allow you to pay attention to other people's reactions when you're saying something, and trying to adapt your language to your audience. So a lot of the deeply ingrained, almost automatic reactions that we have — especially as being part of a group, which is really important for us in terms of just what makes us human — can be functional but also become dysfunctional when we have zero control over them and we let them dictate our behaviors.

SPENCER: I think that some people view productivity as effectively a trade-off. It's like, well, you can overwork yourself and drive yourself into the ground and be more productive, or you can do less of that and be less productive but be happier. Do you think that that is a true trade-off?

ANNE-LAURE: A lot of it has to do with how meaningful you find your work. If you find your work meaningful, you can actually get energy from it, rather than your work draining your energy, which you then have to recharge by doing something else. So that's one thing. But then again, even if you find it meaningful, and especially actually if you find it meaningful, you do have to pay attention to not going overboard on the other side of that spectrum and overworking yourself because you are trying to do everything right, and you're almost attaching your identity to your work in a way that is unhealthy. So it is a little bit about a sense of balance, and not balance in the sense that you need to have this now pretty old idea of work-life balance, where you try to spend as much time and energy on your personal and on your professional life. Not really that, but more the idea that things are going to ebb and flow, and there are going to be moments where work is going to be quite intense, moments where it's a little bit less intense, and just detaching this — the amount of work that you're putting into your projects — from the output and from your self-worth, is going to make your life a lot easier and is going to make your work a lot more fulfilling.

SPENCER: I think that some people view there being a fundamental trade-off, where you can push yourself really hard and work really hard and put yourself under a lot of stress and work a lot of hours and be very productive and achieve a lot, or you can just do less of those things, but you're going to be less productive and you're going to achieve less. Do you think that this is really a fundamental trade-off, or do you think that that's really misconstruing the relationship between those things?

ANNE-LAURE: This is really interesting because I think it stems from this idea of work-life balance that we've been talking a lot about in the past couple of decades. And I think this idea of work-life balance doesn't really make sense in today's world. We don't really have clear boundaries between work and life, and trying to seek that balance conveys the idea that one of them is going to drain your energy — the work side of things — and the other one is going to help you recharge your energy levels, recharge your batteries, which is your personal life, your hobbies, your relationships, etc. But for a lot of people nowadays, and especially knowledge workers who use their mind at work and who can't just turn it off when they stop working, the boundaries between work and life — between professional and personal lives — are very porous. I think instead of thinking about how you can balance these and seeing those two as a trade-off where, if you work more, then you have less time and energy for your personal life and vice versa, I think it's more helpful to think about, how can your personal life nourish and fuel your professional development, and how can your work also expand your mind and your creativity and your knowledge in a way that can then benefit your personal life.

SPENCER: What would that look like, to have your personal life enhancing your work life?

ANNE-LAURE: There are so many ways that you can do this. For example, if you learn something from a friend or partner or spouse — whether it's maybe a better way to manage conflict or a little tidbit of information or an experience that they had that you can use to illustrate a point — you can use that at work. You can use those things to become a better leader, a better communicator, a better team member. Other ways where your personal life can benefit your professional life is just by taking care of your mind, taking care of yourself — consuming interesting content, reading interesting stories, listening to good podcasts — any of those kinds of things that you do in your personal time are also going to make you someone who's probably going to perform better at work. But you're not doing these things for work. Again, the boundaries are so porous nowadays that just by taking care of your mind, just by making sure that you consume interesting, nourishing content, you are going to become better at your work.

SPENCER: What are some of the biggest mistakes you see when people are trying to become more productive?

ANNE-LAURE: Probably spending way too much time trying to build the perfect productivity system. I see so many people following productivity influencers, downloading notion templates and copy-pasting these, trying to connect these to different parts of their tool set, automating some parts of their emails and having those big spreadsheets. And people spend so much time trying to improve their productivity in this way that they don't spend as much time actually doing the thing. And I feel like many times, in many situations, a very simple to-do list with the two or three things that you want to achieve today and just getting that work done, is the best thing that you can do instead of trying to tweak and improve your system.

SPENCER: Yeah, I suspect that working on improving your system can almost be a form of procrastination [laughs] where people get obsessed with finding just the right thing.

ANNE-LAURE: Absolutely. Yes, it's a way to feel like you're making progress and you're working on something useful when, really, exactly as you said, you are procrastinating because you're not making progress on any of the tasks that actually matter when you're doing this.

SPENCER: A lot of times, I've found that the minimum process tends to be best, the minimally complex system that achieves the goal. And mainly I've found it useful to deviate from that when I notice there's a problem. I'm like, "Oh, there's something slow here," where there's some issue with how things are working, and then I'll try to introduce more processes to solve that problem. But you want to always be adding the minimal amount of stuff to solve the problem, rather than having a really complex system. I'm curious if you agree with that.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, it reminds me of just-in-time learning. So I guess just-in-time building?

SPENCER: Yeah, that's a nice way to put it. Right now, one problem I noticed in my to-do list is that there'll be important stuff that ends up falling to the bottom of the to-do list and I don't see it for a while. And so I'm like, "Oh, okay, there's definitely a problem there, and I want to create a solution for that problem. What can I add to my current to-do list system that barely changes it but then solves that problem where now the to-do's, the important things are not falling by the wayside?" That's a practical example for me. But I'm wondering, how do you handle your to-do's? I imagine as an entrepreneur and someone writing a book, and someone doing a PhD, you must have a million things you need to be doing all the time. How do you keep track of all of that?

ANNE-LAURE: I have all of my to-do lists in one place. I use a tool called Roam Research, which allows me to very easily move my tasks. But every day, I have all of my tasks in one place, and I just decide to keep maybe two, three things that I'm going to do that day, and the rest, I move to the following day, which doesn't mean everything else, I need to do the day after but, because I do this process every day, that just means I only have two to three tasks every day. And then I try and do this; I just get to work. At the end of every week, I do a little weekly review. I use a very simple system that I call Plus Minus Next. It's basically just three columns. In the first column, plus, I write everything that went well. In the second column, minus, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, with a little arrow for next, I write everything I want to focus on next. And by doing this every week, that allows me to notice any more systemic issues. For example, if it's been two or three weeks in a row that I realized that, in my minus column, there's a problem that keeps on coming back, or if in the next column, I keep on saying, " I'm going to do this. This week is the week I'm going to do this thing," and I keep on not doing it, then, exactly as you were saying, that's when I'm going to sit down and start thinking, "Okay, there's something going on here. What can I change? What can I improve? Or whom can I ask help from that can maybe help me navigate this in a more efficient way?" And that's it. That's really my entire productivity system.

SPENCER: For this idea of Plus Minus Next, is the idea that, by noting what went well and what didn't go so well, and then what you want to do next, that you're essentially debugging your own system at a periodic rate where it's built into your system that you're doing a debugging process?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, absolutely. These are basically the two key pillars of mindful productivity. You have action and reflection; and you can't have one without the other. For the action part, this is your to-do list; those are your tasks. This is when you're in execution mode and you're just getting things done, hopefully. And then the reflection part is very important because this is when you look back on what you've managed to do or what you struggled to get done, and when you — exactly as you were saying, I really like this term — debug your system, where you notice if anything is not really going as planned, and when you decide what you're going to try and change or tweak the following week. What I really like about this process as well is that, instead of waiting for too long before you start noticing issues, because you check every week, there's no problem that becomes big enough that it's too overwhelming and you don't know how to tackle it. Every week, you can iterate. You can try and see if something works a little bit better, and again, if after a few weeks of trying to fix it, still, nothing is working, you can reach out to someone, to a colleague or to a friend to ask for more help. But you have data that you can bring to that conversation and say, "Look, I've been facing this issue and in the past two to three weeks, those are the different things that I've tried and it's not quite working yet. What do you think?" which makes the conversation itself with someone who is going to try to help you also more productive.

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SPENCER: I developed a formula for productivity, and I'm curious to run it by you and get your reaction to it.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, tell me.

SPENCER: The basic idea, it's actually a mathematical truth, the way it's described. I'll break it down. The idea is, I define productivity as the total amount you produce of value according to whatever is valuable to you. So it could be money, but it doesn't have to be money. It could be any kind of thing you find valuable that you produce per week; that's your productivity. And then productivity is simply the product of three factors. Productivity equals time times efficiency times objective. Time is just the total number of hours you work on the goal each week; that one's obvious. Efficiency is the fraction of the goal you complete with each hour of your time you spend on it. And then finally, objective is the total value according to what you care about, that you get by completing the goal. So the amount of total value you produce each week (which is your productivity) is time (which is number of hours you work on it) times efficiency (which is basically how much you're moving towards completing the goal with each hour you work) times objective (which is basically how much value you actually produce by achieving your goal). And so that's how I break it down. And then when you think about productivity techniques, I like to think about where they fit in it. Some techniques are around time; they're around just working more hours, basically. Some are around efficiency, which is around getting more out of each hour that you work. So that would be hacks for using key commands to do your work faster, or using deep work so you're more focused when you work, etc. And then the last one, objective, is really around planning. It's like deciding what you're going to work on, prioritizing to do the things that are most valuable now rather than less valuable.

ANNE-LAURE: I really like this because it reminds me of — and you have those three factors — how, in ancient Greece, they had two definitions of time: chronos and kairos. And one of them, chronos, was just the number of units, so seconds and minutes, but kairos was the quality of time, how either efficient or meaningful one of those units was in the way we either used it or experienced it. You have a little bit of that in your formula and I really like that. I think breaking it down in this way is also a really nice way to be a little bit more intentional with the tools and the systems that you use for your productivity because, instead of just telling yourself, I'm going to do this to be more productive — which actually is quite vague when you put it this way — you can decide, "Okay, I'm actually going to use this to be able to work more or I'm going to use this tool in order to work more efficiently," etc. So yeah, I really like your formula.

SPENCER: One thing I suspect, if you think about productivity this way, is that a lot of people will just try to use time as a blunt instrument. They're just like, "Work more hours." And I'm someone who tends to work too many hours, so I'm certainly guilty of this. But I think it's often not the best way to be more productive. I think it's the kind of way that tends to be very self-sacrificial, tends to lead to burnout and things like this. Would you agree with that?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, I actually wrote an article in my newsletter that was titled, "Time is Not a Measure of Productivity." So I completely agree with you.

SPENCER: From my point of view, I think one of the healthiest ways to use time to improve productivity is more about being good at saying no, either to people or opportunities or projects that are just things you don't actually want to do, according to your values, because I do think that that is something that a lot of people struggle with, where they end up getting sucked into things that, from the point of view of their own values, are just not that good. But I think a lot of that really goes more into the objective factor about prioritization, of picking the things that are really deeply valuable to you based on your values — which is not necessarily selfish; it could be very altruistic, like it could be helping a friend — could be a great use of your time because it's really deeply meaningful to you and fits well into your values. But I think usually, when time is just used as a blunt instrument — just like push more hours on — that's usually when it's not that helpful.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, and unfortunately, it's very hard to say no to things that don't make sense for us or are not meaningful, and it ties back to what we were discussing earlier, this idea that, as humans, we really struggle with being rejected, not being part of the group, not being loved. And for a lot of us, saying yes to everything is a way to create that sense of connection, that sense of belonging, that sense of being useful to the group and to other people. And so being able to decouple those two things to actually say, "I can be a useful contributor by being more focused on working on things that are more meaningful and that are more generative," instead of saying yes to everything, is a bit of a process. It does require some effort to be able to do this when our automatic response very often is just to say yes to everything.

SPENCER: Yeah. I think some of that can be driven by altruism, like we want to be a helpful team member, want to help people around us and so on, which can be a great thing. But also some of it can be very fear-driven, like, "Oh, if I say no, maybe they won't like me," or "If I say no, they'll think I'm not good at my job," or what have you. And one technique that I think is really interesting in terms of this, when it comes to when you work at a company, is making it clear to whoever is trying to ask you to do things, what the trade-offs are. In other words, you're externalizing the trade-offs rather than just internalizing them. So if you work at a company and your boss says, "Oh, can you also get this thing done next week?" and let's say you already have too many things to do. A lot of people are going to want to say yes because they want to be a good employee. They don't want to disappoint their boss. They want to get a promotion, and so on. But then now you've just agreed to one more thing on top of maybe already too much work. The way they externalize instead of internalizing it is to say to your boss, "Awesome. I'm happy to do this. But just to let you know, here are the other five things in my to-do list. Which of these would you like me to prioritize this over?" So then the boss is forced to actually make a trade-off, like, "Oh yeah. Well, okay, why don't you do this instead of this other thing?" rather than just viewing it as, you can do an unlimited amount of stuff in a week.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes. And this is a much smarter way to work as well, because you're focusing on the quality of your output rather than just the quantity of it. And long term, what's really interesting is that all of these things that you were worried about in the first place — getting that promotion, being a good team member, contributing, etc — you are probably going to achieve in a much more efficient way by focusing on what really matters, both to you and to your boss, and to the company in general, and doing really great work on those tasks instead of spreading yourself too thin, trying to do everything and maybe doing mediocre work in the process.

SPENCER: Right. In the short term, it may seem like you're going to be more liked, you're going to be more respected, etc, if you say yes to everything, but then you might produce mediocre work because you've overstretched yourself and actually make less of a good impression than if you were better at saying no, but able to show really high-quality output.

ANNE-LAURE: Yeah, and I feel like people do appreciate it as well when you tell them in a very transparent way, "Look, we're trying to do too much here. What are the things that you think are actually going to move the needle, and where should we focus our efforts and our resources as well?" because resources are not unlimited. So having those conversations... Maybe you're working on a product launch or a marketing campaign, and you can tell your team members or your boss, "Hey, we're trying to do those ten things. Do we really think those ten things are going to have the kind of impact where it is worth it for the entire team to work on? Or maybe do we want to remove a few things and put all of our focus, time, energy, and financial resources behind the parts of this campaign that we think are going to have an impact?"

SPENCER: When it comes to techniques for improving efficiency — basically how much you get done per hour — what kind of advice do you give on that? Because there's so many tips and tricks and using software more effectively, or using key commands, or using automation and so on.

ANNE-LAURE: All of those techniques are great, but I think the most important thing is to take a couple of minutes before you start any task to just ask yourself a few basic questions. The first one is: does this thing actually need to happen? Very often, you will realize that there are things that are on your to-do list that are no longer relevant and that you can safely remove from your to-do list. The second question would be: am I the right person to do this? Because, again, sometimes something ended up on your to-do list a little bit by default, maybe because you were the one who thought of it, who thought, "Oh, that would be a good idea. Maybe we should do this." But maybe you're not the right person to do it, or maybe you're not the person who can do it in the most efficient manner. So just ask yourself that question, and if not, maybe talk to your team or delegate it, or figure out who else can do it, and nowadays, the 'who else can do it' includes AI. So maybe that's not a colleague who does it. Maybe it's some form of automated software that allows you to get that thing done quicker, more efficiently, and where you don't have to spend so much time and energy on it. And then the final question, if you have determined that, yes, this thing needs to happen, and you are the right person to do it, is: how am I going to go about it? Because sometimes we just jump straight into doing things, into execution, and we don't necessarily think about the best way to do this. You shouldn't go overboard when you do this. We talked about spending too much time tweaking our system, so this should not be an opportunity for procrastination of trying to figure out the very, very best way to go about it, but just again, a couple of minutes total, asking yourself these questions is going to save you so much time that then it doesn't really matter if you're using that shortcut or that different little trick, because you got the fundamentals right.

SPENCER: I totally agree. I think a little bit of planning right at the beginning of jumping into something can save tremendous time. I've seen cases where someone wastes the entire week basically working on something and, because they didn't spend that planning at the beginning to actually notice that there was a much simpler way to achieve 95% of the task, they tried to get it perfect in a way overly complicated way. I think this happens quite a bit.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, this is so common when we try to save time by getting started very quickly, and we end up wasting a lot of time in the process

SPENCER: Changing topics a little bit, tell me about, what is the experimental mindset?

ANNE-LAURE: I discovered what an experimental mindset was when I went back to school to study for my Master's in neuroscience, and I got trained as a scientist. I thought it was really fascinating the way scientists approach their work and how different it was from the way I was approaching my work when I used to work in tech. The way scientists approach their work is that there is no real failure, in the sense that any experiment is just designed to collect some data. So you ask yourself a question, you formulate a hypothesis, you design an experiment, you collect that data, and then you look at it, and you see if you have an interesting answer. If the results are unexpected, you're not going to feel like, "Oh, wow, that's a complete failure." You're just going to be like, "Okay, that's interesting. What can I learn from this, and how can I design my next experiment based on this?" And having an experimental mindset means for anyone — you don't need to be a scientist to apply those principles in your daily life and work — approaching everything as an experiment, considering that there really is no such thing as failure when the goal of any action, any project, is just to expand your knowledge, your understanding of the world, your understanding of maybe your customers, maybe your team, or your understanding of yourself, and that any question, any doubt, any challenge, can be turned into an experiment.

SPENCER: I like that a lot. But is it fair to say that that's sort of an idealization of science, where there are lots of great scientists who act that way, but there's also a lot of scientists that maybe are not internalizing that and it's more like, "Let's churn this out so we can write a paper from it," rather than, "Well, we're just collecting data and we're gonna see what the data says."

ANNE-LAURE: Oh, yes, absolutely. This is inspired by science with a big 'S,' not necessarily how science works nowadays. The scientific landscape has changed a lot, and there are lots of issues in academia nowadays. When I talk about having an experimental mindset, I really talk about it as this ideal, this North Star. I also realize that, in your day-to-day life, it is not necessarily possible to act like this all the time, so it should really be more of a set of principles that you try to apply as much as possible. And anytime you're faced with a challenge, or doubt again, or something you don't understand, or there's a new project, just asking yourself, "How can I have more of an experimental mindset when approaching this?" So more like a North Star.

SPENCER: Could you give us one or two specific examples of how you use this in your life?

ANNE-LAURE: I think my biggest experiment was how I started Nest Labs, my current business. I decided to start a little experiment where my hypothesis was, "I think I really like learning, and maybe this could become my main occupation." So I designed an experiment where I said I'm going to write 100 newsletters in 100 workdays. What's really important about designing experiments is that you want to have enough trials where you can actually trust the data to be able to make decisions. It's a little bit like throwing darts. If you just throw it once and you get it into the bullseye, you are not going to be able to claim that you are the best darts player in the world. You need to be able to do that several times to have enough data and be able to make any claims. That's very similar when designing experiments in your daily life and work; you just need to do it enough times. In this case, I decided to do it 100 times to see if I liked it or not, and I managed to complete that experiment. I shared my progress online as I was doing it, I collected feedback and, at the end of the experiment — after 100 newsletters — I asked myself, "Okay, did I like that? Was that something that I enjoyed enough that I would want to keep going?" And the answer was yes.

SPENCER: That's a great approach. I really like it. When I started my podcast, after I recorded (I think it was) three episodes, I got 40 people to listen to them and fill out feedback surveys critiquing them. And I found that incredibly useful. I think it accelerated my ability to be a podcast host much faster than if I hadn't done that experimental approach of like, "Let me try it. Let me get feedback on it," and I think actually, after 10 episodes, I did a bit of that again, getting more survey responses.

ANNE-LAURE: I really like that. Collecting feedback is so important. This is really this part of collecting data, and you can think about that data in terms of both external data — that kind of feedback that you're collecting from people — but also internal data: how do you feel about it? Is this enjoyable? Because if everybody's telling you that they love your podcast and you hate recording it every week, that's also important data, and you should not ignore it. For me, you want to keep going with that experiment and maybe do another cycle and record more episodes, etc, if both the external and the internal data are telling you that this is something that is still worth pursuing.

SPENCER: Yeah, how you feel about the thing can make a huge difference. Even if your only goal is to be successful, if you're doing something that just feels difficult and unpleasant, it may greatly reduce your chance of success, and I definitely take that into account with the podcast. For example, I generally don't do video, and part of it is, I just enjoy it substantially more if I'm not on video for an hour and a half, having to think about, how am I looking right now, etc. If I can just focus on the audio. I actually often pace around during the podcast taping, and I just return to the microphone whenever I speak, and I just find it so much more pleasant. That being said, it would be nice to have videos over a conversation, so it's a little bit of a sacrifice. But I do totally agree with you that taking into account how you feel about the thing is part of the data we need to collect.

ANNE-LAURE: Thank you so much for saying this because, actually, this was one of my experiments, or something kind of related, when I decided for six months to record one YouTube video every week. I had a lot of friends who had a lot of success on YouTube, and quite a few people who told me, "Hey, you've been writing your newsletter for a while. What about YouTube videos? Why don't you start a YouTube channel?" And I did pretty well, nothing extraordinary, but the channel grew pretty quickly to a few thousand subscribers, and I did manage to record the video every week. But I really did not enjoy it. It was a drag for me to have to sit down in front of the camera every week. I was also worried about how I looked, how I sounded. It didn't feel as natural as writing for me. So at the end of the experiment, again, I looked at the data. The external data was pretty good. People seemed to like it. I got lots of comments on the videos. People were obviously waiting for the next one. But the internal data was telling me that this was not something I enjoyed and this is not something I wanted to keep working on.

SPENCER: When you look at people who are really successful at a thing, it seems like a lot of times, they have almost an obsession with it. And it's just very, very hard to compete if you don't have that mindset. And it's also very hard to be obsessed with something that you just find really unpleasant. [laughs] So I think that's actually a really important factor, that without that kind of real internal drive to do a thing, it's often very hard to reach high levels of achievement with it.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, and this is also why I think it's really important when you run those kinds of experiments, to have enough trials, because there's this myth that we just discover our passions as if it was love at first sight. You just discover something and you're like, "Oh, that's my passion. I love it. I want to keep going." But sometimes you fall in love very slowly with a hobby or a project or a type of work, and I think it's important to give yourself that time to see, once you've become good enough at it, whether you like it or not. At the beginning, it can be very easy to mistake not liking something for what really is a lack of skills. So I would really recommend doing it for long enough and, then again, it's a bit similar to what we discussed before, the action and reflection aspect, making sure that you have space for self-reflection and asking yourself, "Do I like this or not? Could I become obsessed with it? Could I keep going? Is that something where I would be able to keep on showing up and be quite consistent with it without forcing myself too much?"

SPENCER: It also raised the question of willpower where, imagine you're trying to get yourself to succeed in a domain. One thing you could do is, you could just constantly be exerting willpower to push and push and push. But it seems like a lot of the most effective people — they do often, I think, tend to be pretty self-disciplined — but the thing that they're doing is not so much exerting willpower. Like if you take the greatest chess players of all time, I don't think there are a lot of them where they're having to exert willpower to make themselves play chess that much. You know what I mean? Or the great runners. Yes, it's very difficult and tiring and they're pushing through pain. But I don't think most of them are like, "Oh man, I really don't want to run today, but I better get out there."

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, willpower is only a temporary band-aid which you can use sometimes. There were definitely times where I was a little bit tired and didn't really feel in the mood to write the newsletter, and I had to use a little bit of willpower to be able to get it done that week. But that's the exception, not the norm. If it is the norm for you — working on a project that you have to use willpower all the time — several things are probably going to happen. The first one is that you're probably not going to be that successful because, as you said, you're probably not going to be as good as someone who really enjoys it and who's going above and beyond to maybe educate themselves, acquire new skills that are necessary to be really good at this project. The second one is that people are going to feel it, whether this is something you're doing as part of working at a company, your colleagues, your managers, your boss, etc., are going to notice that you're not really in it and that you're forcing yourself. And if you're doing work that is a little bit more public — maybe as a creator, podcaster, online writer — same; your audience is going to notice that you're forcing yourself. And then the last thing is you're probably going to burn out, because you can't really sustain that level of effort where willpower is the only thing driving you every time you have to show up and do the work.

SPENCER: It's also interesting to think about how habits can reduce willpower where, let's say you want to be a good runner. If every day you get up, immediately, your first thing is like, "Okay, I'm gonna get my running shoes and go for a run," it becomes this thing over time where you don't need willpower because you're just doing it without even thinking about it. It's just the first thing you do where there's such a strong expectation and such a natural inclination in that direction. And so I think, often, habits can reduce the need for willpower in a way that's really positive.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, that's why I like to make the distinction between routines and habits, where routines are things that you know are good for you and you're still forcing yourself a little bit to do; whereas, habits are things that you do with your eyes closed, without really thinking about them. For most people, for example, brushing your teeth is not something you even think about. Hopefully, you just wake up and it would feel so weird not to do it. For other people — you mentioned running, for example — for some people, it is still a routine. It is something where they still have to think about it at a mental level, not in an embodied way, where they have to decide, "Okay, I'm going to put my shoes on, I'm going to go and do this thing because I know it's good for me." And for other people, it has turned into a habit. Another example is making your bed. For some people, it is more of a routine. They know that the days, the mornings, where they do it are usually going to be a bit better because they start their day with something that they know is nice for themselves; not necessary, but just nice. And for other people, especially people who have been in the military, for example, it has become a habit. It would be so weird for them to get up and not make their bed. So thinking about it in terms of routines and habits is helpful, because then you can look at your routines and decide, "Okay, what are the ones where I wanted to do it often enough that it becomes so automatic that now it's a habit?"

SPENCER: I think this is an example where language can get confusing because, as far as I understand it in the psychology literature, habit is often used in a technical sense to mean something that's done automatically, where you don't even need to resort to your system two analytical thinking at all. So brushing teeth, I think, for a lot of people, technically does meet that definition; whereas, there might be people that have a really, really strong habit, in the colloquial sense, but it still does involve thought. It's not fully automatic, and so maybe that wouldn't meet the technical definition.

ANNE-LAURE: Yeah, That's what I would call a routine. Whenever you still have this analytical thinking, it is still a routine. Again, it doesn't mean that... Sometimes you may have to use a little bit of willpower because maybe you're tired or something like that. But most of the time you just do it in such an automatic way that it would feel really strange for you not to do it. Then it has become a habit.

SPENCER: Yeah. And if you think about building an actual habit — going from routine to habit — I think one of the really important aspects is having predictable stimuli that precedes the habit. So if every day you wake up and you take a different amount of time before you get out of bed, and then you do something different before you go brush your teeth, it might actually make it difficult to turn brushing your teeth into a true habit; whereas, if every time, you wake up at 8 am, the first thing you do, you stand up, you go to the bathroom, you brush your teeth, then it will probably become automatic quite quickly.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, this is also why a lot of people struggle to maintain their habits when they're on holiday, for example, or when they move to a different place, or when maybe they have a new partner, or someone moving in — a new roommate — anything that disrupts the cues that you have that normally trigger your habit is going to have an impact, and it may require, again, a bit more willpower and effort to rebuild the habit around those cues. So it will have to be a routine for a little while, just forcing yourself to do this until you make it automatic again.

SPENCER: We talked about the experimental mindset, but we haven't really talked so much about applying it in your own life. Are there ways that you use it just in your personal life?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, I've used it for many areas in my personal life. I use it sometimes to experiment with my diet where I will, for example, decide for a month to only cook all of my lunches instead of buying something outside. I will experiment sometimes with the type of ingredients or the nutrition that I'm going to apply in terms of what I eat and, same, every time I make sure that there is a self-reflection aspect so I can see what works and what doesn't work for me. I also did an experiment at the beginning of this year that was around meditation, because this is something that I had always struggled with. And by struggling I mean that... You know those apps like Calm and Headspace that have a ten-day onboarding meditation program? I had never managed to complete any of these. I would never manage to get to more than five days of meditation in a row. So I designed an experiment where I committed to do it in public, and I said I was going to meditate for 15 minutes a day for 15 days and, this time, because I had committed to it in public, I did manage to stick to it, and I learned a lot about myself in the process — what worked and didn't work for me in terms of meditation — and I managed to create a routine. It's definitely not a habit yet. I still have to make that conscious effort and remind myself that this is good for me, but this is a massive improvement compared to before where I had never managed to do more than five days of meditation in a row.

SPENCER: I'm also someone who likes to run a lot of self-experiments. I try to pretty much always have at least one going. I'm curious; because feedback and data is so important for this — not necessarily quantitative data, but data of some form — how do you advise people to actually set up their self-experiments, and do you recommend that they formally track things, or more just informally track them?

ANNE-LAURE: I think it's very important to track all of that data around your experiment, but that's also why you need to keep it as easy and frictionless as possible. You do run the risk, again, of making things too complicated, and then you end up not tracking anything because you're adding too much work to the experiment itself. For example, for my meditation experiment, I just created a Google Doc that I called 'meditation experiment.' And every day after meditating, I would write a couple of bullet points in there about how I felt, what I tried that day, for example, if I would try eyes closed or eyes open that day, sitting in different positions, maybe doing a bit of breath work, and just seeing what I liked and what I didn't like. And that's it, very simple, just a Google Doc. It could be a note on your phone, or for people who don't really like writing or taking notes, you could also do the experiment with a friend and say, 'Every week, we're going to catch up over coffee and just tell each other how things went, what worked, what didn't, and what we want to focus on next." It really doesn't matter what the format is. What really is important is that there is space for self-reflection so you can collect that data, analyze it, and then draw conclusions and decide if you want to keep going or not.

SPENCER: What about quantification, assigning numbers to things? Do you think that's an important aspect of this?

ANNE-LAURE: It really depends on what you're experimenting with. For some things, it does matter. If you're experimenting with your diet and what you're trying to experiment with and look at and impact is your blood sugar, for example, then it may make sense to collect that quantitative data. But in lots of cases, you don't necessarily need to do that, especially if it's just about feeling better, about being more creative, more excited about something, a little bit of journaling. And by journaling, I mean again, just a few bullet points is often enough; I would try again not to overcomplicate it. So if the experiment, really intrinsically speaking, makes sense in terms of data — quantitative data that you want to collect, you're really trying to affect numbers — then collect that for sure. But if not, just writing whatever you want to write or having a conversation with a friend around it maybe every week, that's enough.

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SPENCER: I think it's easy to overestimate how much we remember. Let's say you do an experiment for two weeks. You might think, "Oh, I'll be able to tell if I'm feeling better." But without those daily notes, I think it can actually be really, really hard to get back into the mindset you were two weeks ago and really see the effect of this on you.

ANNE-LAURE: Absolutely. That's why it's important to collect some form of data. If you don't have time, one sentence a day is good. You even have apps where you can just click a little emoji that is a green smiley face or an orange meh kind of face, or a red and happy face, and you can just collect your emotions, your mood, in that way. If that's all you have time and energy for, that's okay. But there should be some form of data you can look back on without the recency bias that you would have if you were just relying on your memory.

SPENCER: How should people decide what to do experiments on? Because there are thousands of different things we could try to change about our life.

ANNE-LAURE: It really all starts with a question, a hypothesis, very often something around 'what if?' What if I change the time I go to bed? What if I ate in a different way? What if I arrived at work half an hour earlier? What if I worked on this little project for two weeks with this friend whom I admire and think is really creative? And then you design your experiment around that. If you don't have any idea for a potential experiment, what I highly recommend doing — which is also a very fun exercise — is to collect some field notes for a couple of days. And by collecting field notes, I really mean treating your life as if you were an anthropologist, so the same way anthropologists go to a different country or go and explore a different culture and try to understand their language, what they care about, how they eat, how they work, and all of that stuff. And they take a lot of notes which, at this stage, they're not necessarily analyzing. They're really just observing and taking notes. You can do the same thing with your own life. Go to work, and anytime you have a little break, take some little notes on your phone. That could be things like, "I felt really energized after I had that conversation with this colleague," or, "I really liked discussing this idea," or, "I got a lot of praise when I presented this concept to my team," or, "I felt really tired in the afternoon after lunch, and I don't feel like doing any work," those kinds of little things. You can take notes about your emotions, your moods, the ideas you're excited about, and all of that. Based on this, very often, if you do that for 24 to 48 hours, you are going to start noticing patterns. If there's an idea you're excited about, for example, maybe you can design an experiment around this. If there is a type of work that gives you a lot of energy, maybe you can design an experiment to see if you can get to do more of that. Or if there's someone that you love talking to, maybe you design an experiment with them.

SPENCER: For me, a lot of times, I focus my self-experiments around what I would describe as my biggest challenges in life. And so I start with, okay, what are my three biggest challenges in life? And then I think, for each of them, what are the different experiments I could try. Let's say, you come up with five potential experiments for each of your biggest challenges in life, and then you pick among those. What do you think of that approach?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, that also works great. And when you collect field notes, you will also notice some challenges very often, and you can also design your experiments around those challenges. So I think this is a great approach as well.

SPENCER: How often should we expect these experiments to yield something valuable, versus just totally failing?

ANNE-LAURE: It really depends on how often you conduct them and how small or big they are. If you conduct a lot of small experiments, you're more likely to fail faster. Again, by 'failing,' I just mean finishing the experiment and feeling like, "Okay, that was not helpful, and that's not something I want to keep going with." And then you can start your next experiment, or your next iteration of that experiment, where you tweak something. This is why I highly recommend keeping your experiments quite small. Instead of doing an experiment like I did in the past — and which I think now was completely unnecessary — experiments that were six months or eight months or nine months long, I would recommend keeping them in between two weeks and one month at first, quite short, so you can fail very quickly, if necessary, or succeed very quickly, and you can keep on iterating in terms of what the experimental setup looks like.

SPENCER: In your own experiments, what percent would you say end up producing something valuable, versus end up with you really just learning, "Okay, that thing doesn't work for me, or that doesn't help me"?

ANNE-LAURE: All of them are valuable because, even if the outcome is that I really didn't like that thing, and I don't want to keep going, that was something I wasn't sure about before starting the experiment, and now I have this certainty; that's very helpful. I'm not going to waste any more time thinking about it in the future, and I can focus on other stuff. That's what I mean by 'there's no real failure when you experiment.' Even when you get an unexpected outcome, or when maybe you feel a little bit disappointed because that's not really what you wanted to happen, it is still valuable.

SPENCER: I definitely agree that there's some value there. You're eliminating things; you're narrowing the field of possible things that could help you. But it still does seem to me way more valuable to find something that's actively positive than merely to eliminate something that could have worked but didn't.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, yeah, absolutely. So you could say some experiments are more valuable than others. I still think they're all valuable. In terms of percentage, I would say that probably in between 70 and 80% of my experiments are highly valuable. And again, it's because I tend to conduct quite a lot of them that are fairly small. So usually there's always going to be at least a tiny little thing out of that experiment that I can keep, or I can implement, or I can tell a colleague about — "I learned that, I tried that" — and so it ends up being helpful very often.

SPENCER: It's funny, I feel like it's almost the inverse with me. I'm constantly running experiments. I don't mind a lot of them failing. I expect most of them to fail. Fail in the sense that I don't keep doing the thing; I don't find the thing valuable enough to continue with. Obviously, there's still learning there, but I would say probably 80 to 90% of mine fail in the sense that I decide not to continue with the thing once the experiment's done.

ANNE-LAURE: Oh, yes, by that definition, definitely not 70 to 80%. [laughs] Yeah, probably the same as you, I would reverse that in that case; probably 20% are things that I want to keep on doing afterwards.

SPENCER: Right. But you still feel like you're glad you did it most of the time, even if you don't end up keeping with that particular strategy you tried.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, exactly, and as you said, I expect most of them to 'fail' (quote, unquote), based on the definition that you just gave. I do expect that a lot of these things, I might not want to keep on doing, at least in that format, especially the first time I try something; I'll do everything wrong very often the first time I do something. So it's very rare that I'll just keep on going with the first iteration of an experiment.

SPENCER: So it's often iterative experiments that are building on prior ones, building a better and better version of that experiment.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, it's really all about seeing these as cycles of experimentation. You go through a first cycle, you learn from it, and then you decide to tweak the next iteration. And then there are the very rare ones where, really at the end of the first cycle, I'm like, "No, I'm done with this. I don't need to spend more time on this." But very often, I will just iterate on the first version until I get it right.

SPENCER: You mentioned your experiments with meditation. What are one or two other experiments that you found fruitful?

ANNE-LAURE: Another one that I did at the beginning of the year was around camera confidence. It's funny because we talked about it a little bit earlier, but it's something I've always struggled with, especially in English, because that's not my first language. If I have to focus on what I'm going to say, plus how I look, it can get really confusing for me and a bit stressful. So I designed a little experiment where I said that I would post a short video on social media about literally anything I wanted every day for ten days. It was nerve-wracking but it was something that I found extremely helpful because I found that I could build my confidence very quickly if I kept on doing it every day. And since then, I haven't really kept that routine, but a lot of my anxiety is gone now. Whenever I have to turn on the camera and film a quick little something, I'm way less anxious than I used to be as a result of this very tiny experiment that I ran where I showed up every day on social media with one short video recording myself.

SPENCER: It's essentially a form of exposure therapy, right?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, actually. I hadn't thought about it in this way but, yes, it is.

SPENCER: Yeah, I've had really good success with essentially exposure therapy, where you take something that you find stressful, and you just systematically make yourself do it for a while and make yourself push through it so you don't quit in the middle; you don't run away. You just ride it out. And I've found it very, very helpful in my own life.

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, a lot of our fears are really just a lack of familiarity.

SPENCER: It's almost like there's this rat part of our brain that's like, "Is this dangerous? Is this dangerous?" And it can predict that something's really dangerous and then, if you do the thing a bunch of times, and nothing bad happens — or nothing too bad happens — eventually, that rat part of your brain just eventually settles down. It's like, "Oh, I guess this is okay. Nothing horrible happened."

ANNE-LAURE: Exactly. And that's also why I was talking earlier about the importance of repeated trials because, again, at the very beginning, when you don't really know how to do the thing, you might be scared and, because of that, you might think that you don't like it. But when you do it enough times and that fear is gone, you can judge a little bit more objectively whether this thing is for you or not.

SPENCER: Before we wrap up, how about we do a quick rapid-fire round where I ask you difficult questions and just get your quick takes on them.

ANNE-LAURE: Let's do it.

SPENCER: First question: what is systematic curiosity?

ANNE-LAURE: Systematic curiosity is the idea of applying curiosity in a systematic way in all areas of your life. It can be used to be more performant at work. It can be used for self-exploration and self-knowledge. And really the idea is that, instead of trying to judge whether something is good or bad, what you do is that you ask questions and you explore it in a very non-judgmental way. So asking yourself, "Why do I feel anxious? Why do I feel lonely? Why do I struggle with my creativity?" etc., kind of debugging your challenges in a non-judgmental way.

SPENCER: Do you think that people have an unhelpful view of the way that careers proceed? And if so, what do you think a better way to look at careers is?

ANNE-LAURE: A lot of people still think about their careers in a very linear way, with fixed milestones that correspond to a traditional definition of success. I think it's a lot more helpful to try and design your career in a non-linear way, just seeing it as a map — a network with a lot of interconnected opportunities that you can explore without planning them in advance — and I think approaching it in this way without trying to have this beautiful, linear narrative, is going to help you have a lot more professional and personal growth, sometimes in very surprising ways.

SPENCER: You're someone who's built a pretty big following on Twitter — aka X — and Twitter's obviously come under a lot of fire in the last year or so. What's your feeling about how it's changed?

ANNE-LAURE: Weirdly, I'm still having really good conversations on Twitter, and I think this is because the kind of people I'm connected with — that either I follow or follow my account — are the kind of people who are curious about the same kinds of topics that I'm curious about. So we end up talking about science, about different types of mindsets, productivity tools, curiosity, how to learn better. Because of that, it is still a joy for me to log into Twitter and see what people are talking about. I feel like I'm very fortunate that I'm in this little positive bubble of Twitter that hasn't been affected too much by the change in leadership.

SPENCER: You've been very successful with your newsletter building an audience. I think it's (what) 100,000 people now? How would you describe what it was you did in order to build that audience?

ANNE-LAURE: I can attribute a lot of the success of the newsletter to the fact that I have been learning in public as I was building it. I was posting ideas on Twitter for articles before starting writing them. Then I would share early drafts, then I would get feedback from people, edit the articles in public. I would also share all of my numbers, all of the different milestones, both in terms of number of subscribers, but also financial successes, getting sponsors, and everything that was happening behind the scenes. And I think because of that — because I was so transparent with the ups and downs and the challenges and the joys and the doubts of building this company and the newsletter — a lot of people joined also just to follow the ride and see what would happen.

SPENCER: So do you think that made them more invested in what you were doing? Because it wasn't just a newsletter they enjoyed; it was actually following your progress?

ANNE-LAURE: Yes, I think people like to connect with other people, and so having so much information about me as an online writer, about where my head was at and what I was thinking about in terms of growing this little newsletter into something that had a way bigger impact, made it a lot more relatable for people, and made them want to know what was going to happen next, and maybe even want to support me in this journey.

SPENCER: One thing that I think a lot of people have found difficult in the last few years is orienting themselves politically where a lot of the most extreme positions get the most air time. And if you say something that seems even somewhat political, you could end up being attacked either by the Left or the Right, [laughs] depending on what exactly you say. How do you navigate the political polarization we're seeing when you do things like post on Twitter?

ANNE-LAURE: I never really had any issues with this because my politics are fairly simple. I'm just thinking about treating other human beings the way you would want to be treated. It also helps that I'm based in Europe and not in the US. Because of that, I also genuinely have no idea sometimes of some of the smaller conversations that are going on there that have not gone global yet, and so I'm unable to comment on them. Being part of Europe, where each country has their own politics and their own issues being discussed means that it's a little bit more fractured, and we don't necessarily have the same big global online discourse around politics that you have in the US. So it hasn't really been a problem in my case.

SPENCER: Last question for you: some people listening might think, "Okay, well, sure, Anne-Laure is actually talented, and she had imposter syndrome. But my problem is, I just suck, and I've just convinced everyone in my company somehow that I'm actually talented. But once they find out, then everyone's gonna think I'm not good enough." What would you say to a person like that?

ANNE-LAURE: The exact same thing I'm telling myself. "Just trust the intelligence of the people you're working with. If you're struggling to stop calling yourself stupid, just stop calling them stupid. They hired you. They know what they're doing."

SPENCER: Thanks so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

ANNE-LAURE: Thanks so much for having me. This was great.

[outro]

JOSH: A listener asks, "Are there discussions about particular topics or discussions of particular natures that you consistently avoid? And why?"

SPENCER: Well, I generally don't like to talk about cultural topics that much because I think that they make it difficult to have a conversation that's really about the thing itself. It ends up becoming about signaling around the thing, showing what side you're on. And it's very easy to get people in a mode where they're just kind of angry at the other side rather than really considering the things that are under discussion. I sometimes try to take on these topics, but I try to do it in a more orthogonal way where I'm bringing up the topic in a way that is trying not to trigger "Oh, this is this is on the left, this is on the right," but more approaching from a different view. For example, a topic that I like is: Suppose that we've decided to have a certain amount of immigration in society — we're going to let in x people per year — how do we decide who those people are? That, to me, is an interesting discussion. And it approaches the topic a different way than either the left or right would approach it, which I think makes it much more interesting and much more likely people won't turn off their brains and just get angry.