March 19, 2025 • 22 mins
Neuroscientist Anne-Laure Le Cunff shares tips for taking little steps to make life better
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
they have for the rest of us. Today, I am
delighted to welcome and Laura Lecomfe to the program. She
is the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments.
(00:34):
So and Laura, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yeah, excited to have you here. So please tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I'm a ner scientist at King's College, London, and I
also write a weekly newsletter called nest Labs, which is
all about how to explore your ambitions without sacrificing your
mental health. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
And the ness part is that maybe you can explain
that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Yeah, absolutely so. Ness is the suffix that you add
at the end of a word to describe the state
of being something. So consciousness, the state of being conscious, mindfulness,
awareness and Labs was because I wanted to create a
little laboratory for myself to explore these ideas.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, and your new book is all about tiny experiments,
So what are these tiny experiments?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Tiny experiments are all about replacing the linear definition of success,
where you have a fixed goal and then you work
really really hard to get there, sometimes at the expense
of your mental health, with tiny experiments where you don't
start from a clear vision of where you need to go,
but you start instead with curiosity, a hypothesis, a little question,
(01:51):
and then you start exploring and in that process you
learn more about yourself and your work and the world.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And go from there. Yeah, we talk a lot about
in this post podcast about how to iterate in life
and try different things, so hoping you can give us
some practical tips for how we might do that better.
And one of the things you talk about doing to
start all this as you're figuring out what little tiny
experiments to do in your life is a bit of
self anthropology. So let's talk about self anthropology and what
(02:21):
it might mean to be doing field notes on yourself.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
So think about what an anthropologist does as their job. Right,
they go and they study a new culture that sometimes
they know nothing about. So they go there and they
take the little notebook their field notes and they try
to capture all of their observations and they ask questions
like why do people care about this? And why do
they do things in this specific way? And why is
(02:47):
this so important in their culture? So you can do
the same thing. And that's what I call self anthropology.
It's being an anthropologist with your own life as the
topic of study, and you look at your life as
if you knew nothing about it. It's your first time,
you're completely new to this culture. And for twenty four
hours you can take little notes. You can do that
on your phone or in a notebook, and you ask
(03:10):
the same kind of questions, why do I care so
much about this? And why do I have this routine?
Why is this a priority for me? Why is this
something that I think a lot all the time? And
you take those little notes. And what's amazing with this
exercise that I've done with hundreds of people is that
all of them say I had not realized how many
(03:31):
decisions I was making on an everyday basis that were
automatic that I never questioned. It just seemed obvious to me.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I'm very curious when you first did this to yourself,
was there anything surprising to you that came out of
this self anthropology.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Oh absolutely. I thought, for example, that I was a
knight ol. I had thought that for a very very
long time. But then when I started paying attention to
my energy levels throughout the day, I realized that actually
I had a lot more energy in the morning. And
so based on that, I started readjusting a little bit
my bedtime so I could make the most of that
energy in the morning.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Awesome, Well, and a podcast called Before Breakfast. We're gonna
be sure to talk about your morning energy later in
this show. But one of the parts, you know, anyone
who's been in science class, even if it's been a
few decades, you know you're supposed to have a hypothesis
as part of an experiment. So what exactly is a hypothesis?
(04:28):
And maybe you can talk a little bit about what
it means to come up with ideas that are actually testable.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Yes, So a hypothesis when it comes to personal experimentation
is really about starting with this magic word that I
really really love, which is maybe maybe if I did this,
I would feel this way. So maybe if I went
to bed a little bit early earlier in the in
the evening, I would feel better in the morning. Maybe
if I woked more, that would give me more energy.
(04:54):
Maybe if I went to more meetups, even though I
feel a little bit introverted, I would meet interesting people
and that would be a good thing for me in
my life. So maybe maybe maybe that's a hypothesis. And
it doesn't necessarily be to be need to be testable
in the scientific lab like kind of way when it's
(05:14):
your personal and professional life we're talking about, But it
just needs to be something you can try for a
specific duration and then you can look back on and
see if that hypothesis was correct or not very cool.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, when we come back from our first ad break,
we'll talk a little bit more about what those, you know,
experiments for a certain length of time might look like.
So I am back with Anne Laura Lacombe, who is
the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments. We've
been talking about what it would mean to do a
(05:48):
tiny experiment and come up with a hypothesis about.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Your own life.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
So one of the things you suggest is making packs
packs with yourself pacts. I guess how you spell that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Everyone's like, what wait, what did she just say?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
And that takes the form generally I will do X
for why amount of time, So maybe you could give
some examples of that and talk about why this is
a wise way to approach your experiments.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
So Tanny experiments are inspired by the scientific method, and
you have two very important components. When you design an experiment,
it's deciding what the test is going to be, what
the action is going to be, and then how many
trials and scientists decide that in advance, right, they don't
stop in the middle or feel like that's not going
where I wanted to go. They say, I'm going to
(06:36):
conduct this experiment for this period of time, and I'm
going to withhold judgment and I'm only going to analyze
the data at the end. And so a pact is
really just a mini protocol to design your own experiments.
And the way it looks like is, as you said,
you decide on an action and a duration. So that
could be like I'm going to go for a twenty
(06:56):
minute work every day for twenty days. That's a pact.
It's a commitment to conduct this experiment. I'm going to
reach out to a new person on LinkedIn every Monday
and tell them that I want to talk about their work,
and I'm going to do that for three weeks. That's
a pact. You have the action and you have the duration,
and you can use that for literally any area of
(07:18):
your life. That's what's amazing is that you can do
that to explore different ways to be productive, to be creative.
You can use that for your relationships. I've seen people
who said, I'm going to make the pact that for
the next four weeks, I'm going to organize a date
for me and my partner on Friday every evening for
the next four weeks, and when we're done, we're going
to see if we liked it or not. So that's
(07:39):
the idea behind the.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Pact, And how can we come up with the right
amount of time for a pack to be useful, like
you could have some actual useful data, but maybe not
feel quite so overwhelming like I'm doing this for the
rest of my life.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I love that you're asking this question because I talk
about the maximalist brain in the book, and it's our
tendency to always want to go for the bigger, most
ambitious version of something. So whenever you design a pact,
try to think small, tiny experiments. That's what you want
to go for. But obviously you need to be long
enough that you have enough data to know if it
(08:15):
worked or not. So first think about the pact itself.
What is it. If it's a daily action like going
to bed at the same time, or going for a
daily walk or stretching every morning, maybe two weeks is enough.
You'll have enough data after you've had those fourteen to
fifteen repetitions. If you say, actually, I'm going to start
a newsletter and I want to write a weekly article
(08:38):
that I'm going to post online, well, obviously one week
is not going to be enough for this, so maybe
you do it for one month or for six weeks.
And in doubt, it is very likely that someone else
has run a similar experiment in the past, so you
can even use that as a way to connect with
other people. You can reach out to people and say, hey,
I see that you've been writing online for a while,
(08:59):
or that you've been going for daily runs for a while.
I'm going to start this experiment and I wanted to
ask you how long do you think I should go
for it? Like when did you know that it worked
or it didn't for you? And then you use that
for your experiment. So when you.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Started ness Labs, I think you had a pact going
to do it for maybe one hundred newsletters.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Is that what that was?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How did you come up with that?
Speaker 3 (09:20):
It was a hundred articles for every day or one
hundred weekdays. And I came up with that at the
time because I actually felt a little bit lost. I
didn't really know where to focus my creativity and my attention.
It just felt like an interesting experiment, and for me,
the inspiration came from the fact that I had always
loved writing in the past, but didn't really have a
(09:43):
lot of space for it. And also when I restarted
my studies and went back to university to study in
your science, I discovered this very neat psychological phenomenon called
the generation effect, which shows that by creating your own
version of something, you're going to both understand it and
remember it better. And I felt like, oh, this is
really great. So I'm going to take something every day
(10:05):
that I study at university and I'm going to write
a newsletter about it, and that's going to be my
pact for the next one hundred weekdays.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Do you have any packs going right now?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
It's really funny because my current pact was to work
for twenty minutes every day for twenty days, and I
actually this morning decided to not go for a walk
because my back hurts a lot. And that's the interesting
thing too about a pact is that because it's not
a goal, it's completely okay. If there are days where
you can't do it. You just make a note. That's data,
(10:37):
and that's interesting for you. So in my case, maybe
it means I've been pushing myself a little bit too
hard the past couple of weeks and I need a
little break, and so I'm making a note of this.
But there's no sense of failure of the fact that
I didn't do my walk today because I'm just experimenting.
I'm just collecting data.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, well with that, I mean, I think you said
earlier we kind of want to both hold judgment the end, right,
we want to see how this pack plays out, how
our experiment goes.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
We'll run the experiment, see what comes of it.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
But it sounds like we.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Are tweaking in the middle too, right that you know,
we are sort of analyzing what's happening, like, oh, yeah, well,
maybe if I walk every day or do all this
other stuff, my back starts to hurt, I can deal
with that or you know, maybe you aim to go
out with your partner every Friday night and you realize
that you're both just so incredibly tired. By the second Friday,
You're just like, it's you're in a bad mood. I mean,
(11:29):
should we analyze and decide to tweak in the middle.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
So ideally what you want to do is just collect
the data. So in the case that the example that
you gave, you make a note you say, actually, that
Friday night, we didn't do it because we were feeling
too tired. But you don't necessarily make a judgment about
the entire pact at this stage. It's at the end
where you look back and you say, okay, So, out
of six dates we had planned for this pact, we
(11:56):
ended up going on four of them and we missed too.
One of them was of external circumstances, something happened, couldn't
do it. Another one was because we were too tired.
How do we feel about the remaining four ones? Actually
we felt really really good. So maybe for the next
iteration we say every two weeks instead of every week,
because every week was maybe a little bit too ambitious here,
(12:17):
And so it's really about waiting until you have collected
all of the data about the pact, so you can
look back and decide what you want to do. If
you want to keep going, if you want to pivot
and redesign it in a way that makes more sense,
or if you hated it, which is completely fine you
just stop. But now you know because it's based on
your own experience.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, well, what are some questions we should be asking
at the end of it? I mean to figure out
did anything come of this? Am I happy with it?
Did it result in what I wanted? I mean, what
should we be asking ourselves?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
What's really important at the end of an experiment is
to consider both external and internal factors, and a lot
of us are more comfortable with one or the other.
Some people they will just want to open a spreace
and look at the data, and other people they will
maybe be more comfortable asking about how they feel. It's very,
very important to look at both. If an experiment is
(13:09):
successful on the outside but make you feel miserable while
you were conducting it, you probably don't want to keep going.
So the questions to ask yourself are externally speaking. If
I just look at metrics of success, So if you
were writing a news that or having you subscribers and
likes and comments, do people open it and read it?
And then internally speaking, how do I feel? Did I
(13:30):
actually enjoy writing this? Did I like it? Did it
bring me joy? And only when you consider both internal
and external signals you can decide whether you want to
keep going or maybe tweak it.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Excellent. Well, we're going to take one more quick ad
break and then we will be back with more on
Tiny Experiments.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Well, I am.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Back with an Laura Leconte, who is the author of
Tiny Experiments. We've been learning about all sorts of different packs.
We can have ourselves at pacts. Try doing this for
one hundred days, see what comes of it, See if
we enjoyed it, how it felt. So one of the
things you talk about in your book is, you know,
creating your community, finding your tribe of people as you're
(14:16):
doing these experiments. So maybe you can talk about what
is the upside of doing that. And then also these
sort of three levels of involvement one might have with
an online with a community, you know, being the apprentice,
the artisan, the architect.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Absolutely, I talk a lot about learning in public in
the book. I think it's extremely important. There may be
the temptation to wait until you feel like you're ready
you're the expert to start sharing your knowledge, But you
will actually learn better and faster if you start sharing
your journey from the very beginning. And if you say
that's what I'm experimenting with, I'm sharing it with the world.
(14:52):
Does anyone want to follow me and also help me? Maybe?
So learning in public is extremely important, and and there
are different levels of engagement. Some people might feel a
little bit scared of learning in public because they feel
like it means I have to start a community and
I have to do all of this, but you can
start quite small, actually, So what I call the apprentice
(15:13):
is really just paying a little bit more attention to
the way you create your network, the people you connect
with and who you want to learn from. And that's
also something we rarely make time for. So just doing
that already is going to allow you to learn from
other people in a better way. The artisan is when
you start creating your experience at a higher level. So
maybe you start actually contributing to those communities and you
(15:37):
start posting sharing saying I'm actually happy to co host
this event with someone, and just being a little bit
more active in those communities. The architect is when you're
finally ready to launch your own community and to actually
decide who's going to join, what the experience is going
to look like, and really being more of a leader
when it comes to learning in public.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, And I think people are often a little bit
wary of this learning in public because I don't know,
I guess they think they might be might do something embarrassing,
which which is entirely possible. Is there a way to
kind of psych ourselves up for that?
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Oh? Absolutely. I have sent newsletters with things and them
that were actually wrong, and I had people reply and
tell me, you know, actually there's new research that came
out and that shows that what you wrote is not correct.
And once you managed to move past the embarrassment, you
realize that it's actually amazing that you got to share
that information in public. Someone corrected you, and now you know,
(16:35):
instead of walking around your entire life thinking that this
information was correct. So it is really not about getting
rid of the embarrassment that you might feel. This is
a very normal human reaction. It's more about rewiring your response.
How do you deal with the embarrassment And once you
manage to look at it as a sign that you're
(16:55):
growing and learning. You almost welcome these moments where go like, oops,
I actually did not know that, but now I know.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, wonderful. Well, I want to pivot more to your
own experience. You mentioned earlier in the show that you
had thought you were a night owl. You analyzed your
energy found you had more energy in the morning than
you were aware of. I'm curious how you spend your
mornings these days.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
I always start with journaling. This is my most important
ritual and I always try to do this before I
open my computer or do anything else. Cup of coffee, journaling,
a little bit of stretching, and then I get into
work and I try to do as much as possible
to kind of work where that's creative, where I can
(17:41):
be focused the research, the writing, and then I keep
my meetings for the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
When you're journaling, is there something specific a format to it,
or it's whatever is in your head.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I have two ways of journaling. My daily morning journaling
is very free flow, writing whatever comes up, and I
often start with today I feel dot dot dot, and
usually starting with this thread, I do end up finding
a lot of interesting things that are on my mind.
And then every week I use plus minus next, which
is a very simple method to review your week that's
(18:14):
a little bit more structured, shorter, and where I have
three columns. The first one plus is for everything that
went well that week, the second column minus for everything
that didn't go so well or when was unexpected, and
the last column with a little arrow next is anything
I want to focus on next or I want to
experiment with during the following week. So those are my
(18:36):
two ways of journaling and reflecting throughout the week.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, and you mentioned that you try to do your
creative work in the morning and you're more focused work,
then move your meetings to the afternoon. I wonder if
you have any other sort of productivity tips that have
been helpful for you as you try to get everything
done in your life.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
So for me, it's really about taking little breaks in
between everything, and not just a break in go and
take your phone and scroll on something, or but really
a conscious break where I pay attention to how I'm
feeling in the moment. And then that might mean that
I will take literally five minutes to walk outside the
(19:14):
house and just be in the sun being outside before
I go into my next meeting. Maybe sometimes it means
having a glass of water, a little stretch, But I
try to avoid looking up from my computer at the
end of the day and having no idea as to
how I'm feeling, so really just staying in touch with
those signals awesome.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Well, that probably answers my next question. I always ask
people if there's something they've done recently to take a
day from great to awesome, But it sounds like being
aware of those signals is a good one.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Are there any things you're looking forward to right now?
So after the book comes out, I'm going to take
a little break for a few weeks. I'm going to
spend a lot of time with my parents, and I'm
also going to try to limit my screen time for
a few week because I won't have to be in
so many meetings or answer so many emails. And as
someone who is a your scientist, I spend a lot
(20:07):
of time in the lab and also a writer, I
spent a lot of time in front of my laptop.
Spending a couple of weeks with not so much screen
time I think is going to be amazing and I'm
very much looking forward to this.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
What do you think you're going to do with your
time that's not going to be spent on screens. I
think that's always people's problems. They're like, well, I've spent
so much time on screens. I don't even know what
I'm going to do when I'm not plugged in.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So one of my experiments in the past year was
around meditation, something that I always thought I was terrible at,
but then through running an experiment, I discovered that I
actually enjoy it and has become part of my practice.
So more meditation, going a little bit deeper. I also
sign up for a course to learn more about plants
and how to make different teas and tinctures. So I'm
(20:53):
kind of looking for different things I can experiment with
and learn about that will be in the way they're designed.
Intrinsically speaking, they don't require a scream Yeah, awesome, awesome.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Well and Laura, thank you so much. Where can people
find you?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
You can go to nesslabs dot com and I have
a newsletter that I send every week or on social media.
I am at at nuran n E U r A
n n.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
E excellent excellent. Well, and Laura, thank you so much
for joining us.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Everyone.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Please check out her book Tiny experiments. Thank you to
everyone for listening. If you have feedback on this or
any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura
at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this
is Laura. Thanks for listening and here's to making the
most of our time cool.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(22:09):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a longer one part of
the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
take their days from great to awesome and any advice
they have for the rest of us. Today, I am
delighted to welcome and Laura Lecomfe to the program. She
is the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments.
(00:34):
So and Laura, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 (00:36):
Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Yeah, excited to have you here. So please tell our
listeners a little bit about yourself.
Speaker 3 (00:44):
I'm a ner scientist at King's College, London, and I
also write a weekly newsletter called nest Labs, which is
all about how to explore your ambitions without sacrificing your
mental health. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
And the ness part is that maybe you can explain
that a little bit.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
Yeah, absolutely so. Ness is the suffix that you add
at the end of a word to describe the state
of being something. So consciousness, the state of being conscious, mindfulness,
awareness and Labs was because I wanted to create a
little laboratory for myself to explore these ideas.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
Yeah, and your new book is all about tiny experiments,
So what are these tiny experiments?
Speaker 3 (01:28):
Tiny experiments are all about replacing the linear definition of success,
where you have a fixed goal and then you work
really really hard to get there, sometimes at the expense
of your mental health, with tiny experiments where you don't
start from a clear vision of where you need to go,
but you start instead with curiosity, a hypothesis, a little question,
(01:51):
and then you start exploring and in that process you
learn more about yourself and your work and the world.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
And go from there. Yeah, we talk a lot about
in this post podcast about how to iterate in life
and try different things, so hoping you can give us
some practical tips for how we might do that better.
And one of the things you talk about doing to
start all this as you're figuring out what little tiny
experiments to do in your life is a bit of
self anthropology. So let's talk about self anthropology and what
(02:21):
it might mean to be doing field notes on yourself.
Speaker 3 (02:25):
So think about what an anthropologist does as their job. Right,
they go and they study a new culture that sometimes
they know nothing about. So they go there and they
take the little notebook their field notes and they try
to capture all of their observations and they ask questions
like why do people care about this? And why do
they do things in this specific way? And why is
(02:47):
this so important in their culture? So you can do
the same thing. And that's what I call self anthropology.
It's being an anthropologist with your own life as the
topic of study, and you look at your life as
if you knew nothing about it. It's your first time,
you're completely new to this culture. And for twenty four
hours you can take little notes. You can do that
on your phone or in a notebook, and you ask
(03:10):
the same kind of questions, why do I care so
much about this? And why do I have this routine?
Why is this a priority for me? Why is this
something that I think a lot all the time? And
you take those little notes. And what's amazing with this
exercise that I've done with hundreds of people is that
all of them say I had not realized how many
(03:31):
decisions I was making on an everyday basis that were
automatic that I never questioned. It just seemed obvious to me.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
I'm very curious when you first did this to yourself,
was there anything surprising to you that came out of
this self anthropology.
Speaker 3 (03:45):
Oh absolutely. I thought, for example, that I was a
knight ol. I had thought that for a very very
long time. But then when I started paying attention to
my energy levels throughout the day, I realized that actually
I had a lot more energy in the morning. And
so based on that, I started readjusting a little bit
my bedtime so I could make the most of that
energy in the morning.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
Awesome, Well, and a podcast called Before Breakfast. We're gonna
be sure to talk about your morning energy later in
this show. But one of the parts, you know, anyone
who's been in science class, even if it's been a
few decades, you know you're supposed to have a hypothesis
as part of an experiment. So what exactly is a hypothesis?
(04:28):
And maybe you can talk a little bit about what
it means to come up with ideas that are actually testable.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Yes, So a hypothesis when it comes to personal experimentation
is really about starting with this magic word that I
really really love, which is maybe maybe if I did this,
I would feel this way. So maybe if I went
to bed a little bit early earlier in the in
the evening, I would feel better in the morning. Maybe
if I woked more, that would give me more energy.
(04:54):
Maybe if I went to more meetups, even though I
feel a little bit introverted, I would meet interesting people
and that would be a good thing for me in
my life. So maybe maybe maybe that's a hypothesis. And
it doesn't necessarily be to be need to be testable
in the scientific lab like kind of way when it's
(05:14):
your personal and professional life we're talking about, But it
just needs to be something you can try for a
specific duration and then you can look back on and
see if that hypothesis was correct or not very cool.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, when we come back from our first ad break,
we'll talk a little bit more about what those, you know,
experiments for a certain length of time might look like.
So I am back with Anne Laura Lacombe, who is
the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments. We've
been talking about what it would mean to do a
(05:48):
tiny experiment and come up with a hypothesis about.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
Your own life.
Speaker 2 (05:52):
So one of the things you suggest is making packs
packs with yourself pacts. I guess how you spell that.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Everyone's like, what wait, what did she just say?
Speaker 2 (06:03):
And that takes the form generally I will do X
for why amount of time, So maybe you could give
some examples of that and talk about why this is
a wise way to approach your experiments.
Speaker 3 (06:15):
So Tanny experiments are inspired by the scientific method, and
you have two very important components. When you design an experiment,
it's deciding what the test is going to be, what
the action is going to be, and then how many
trials and scientists decide that in advance, right, they don't
stop in the middle or feel like that's not going
where I wanted to go. They say, I'm going to
(06:36):
conduct this experiment for this period of time, and I'm
going to withhold judgment and I'm only going to analyze
the data at the end. And so a pact is
really just a mini protocol to design your own experiments.
And the way it looks like is, as you said,
you decide on an action and a duration. So that
could be like I'm going to go for a twenty
(06:56):
minute work every day for twenty days. That's a pact.
It's a commitment to conduct this experiment. I'm going to
reach out to a new person on LinkedIn every Monday
and tell them that I want to talk about their work,
and I'm going to do that for three weeks. That's
a pact. You have the action and you have the duration,
and you can use that for literally any area of
(07:18):
your life. That's what's amazing is that you can do
that to explore different ways to be productive, to be creative.
You can use that for your relationships. I've seen people
who said, I'm going to make the pact that for
the next four weeks, I'm going to organize a date
for me and my partner on Friday every evening for
the next four weeks, and when we're done, we're going
to see if we liked it or not. So that's
(07:39):
the idea behind the.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Pact, And how can we come up with the right
amount of time for a pack to be useful, like
you could have some actual useful data, but maybe not
feel quite so overwhelming like I'm doing this for the
rest of my life.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
I love that you're asking this question because I talk
about the maximalist brain in the book, and it's our
tendency to always want to go for the bigger, most
ambitious version of something. So whenever you design a pact,
try to think small, tiny experiments. That's what you want
to go for. But obviously you need to be long
enough that you have enough data to know if it
(08:15):
worked or not. So first think about the pact itself.
What is it. If it's a daily action like going
to bed at the same time, or going for a
daily walk or stretching every morning, maybe two weeks is enough.
You'll have enough data after you've had those fourteen to
fifteen repetitions. If you say, actually, I'm going to start
a newsletter and I want to write a weekly article
(08:38):
that I'm going to post online, well, obviously one week
is not going to be enough for this, so maybe
you do it for one month or for six weeks.
And in doubt, it is very likely that someone else
has run a similar experiment in the past, so you
can even use that as a way to connect with
other people. You can reach out to people and say, hey,
I see that you've been writing online for a while,
(08:59):
or that you've been going for daily runs for a while.
I'm going to start this experiment and I wanted to
ask you how long do you think I should go
for it? Like when did you know that it worked
or it didn't for you? And then you use that
for your experiment. So when you.
Speaker 2 (09:13):
Started ness Labs, I think you had a pact going
to do it for maybe one hundred newsletters.
Speaker 3 (09:18):
Is that what that was?
Speaker 2 (09:18):
How did you come up with that?
Speaker 3 (09:20):
It was a hundred articles for every day or one
hundred weekdays. And I came up with that at the
time because I actually felt a little bit lost. I
didn't really know where to focus my creativity and my attention.
It just felt like an interesting experiment, and for me,
the inspiration came from the fact that I had always
loved writing in the past, but didn't really have a
(09:43):
lot of space for it. And also when I restarted
my studies and went back to university to study in
your science, I discovered this very neat psychological phenomenon called
the generation effect, which shows that by creating your own
version of something, you're going to both understand it and
remember it better. And I felt like, oh, this is
really great. So I'm going to take something every day
(10:05):
that I study at university and I'm going to write
a newsletter about it, and that's going to be my
pact for the next one hundred weekdays.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Do you have any packs going right now?
Speaker 3 (10:16):
It's really funny because my current pact was to work
for twenty minutes every day for twenty days, and I
actually this morning decided to not go for a walk
because my back hurts a lot. And that's the interesting
thing too about a pact is that because it's not
a goal, it's completely okay. If there are days where
you can't do it. You just make a note. That's data,
(10:37):
and that's interesting for you. So in my case, maybe
it means I've been pushing myself a little bit too
hard the past couple of weeks and I need a
little break, and so I'm making a note of this.
But there's no sense of failure of the fact that
I didn't do my walk today because I'm just experimenting.
I'm just collecting data.
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yeah, well with that, I mean, I think you said
earlier we kind of want to both hold judgment the end, right,
we want to see how this pack plays out, how
our experiment goes.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
We'll run the experiment, see what comes of it.
Speaker 3 (11:05):
But it sounds like we.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Are tweaking in the middle too, right that you know,
we are sort of analyzing what's happening, like, oh, yeah, well,
maybe if I walk every day or do all this
other stuff, my back starts to hurt, I can deal
with that or you know, maybe you aim to go
out with your partner every Friday night and you realize
that you're both just so incredibly tired. By the second Friday,
You're just like, it's you're in a bad mood. I mean,
(11:29):
should we analyze and decide to tweak in the middle.
Speaker 3 (11:34):
So ideally what you want to do is just collect
the data. So in the case that the example that
you gave, you make a note you say, actually, that
Friday night, we didn't do it because we were feeling
too tired. But you don't necessarily make a judgment about
the entire pact at this stage. It's at the end
where you look back and you say, okay, So, out
of six dates we had planned for this pact, we
(11:56):
ended up going on four of them and we missed too.
One of them was of external circumstances, something happened, couldn't
do it. Another one was because we were too tired.
How do we feel about the remaining four ones? Actually
we felt really really good. So maybe for the next
iteration we say every two weeks instead of every week,
because every week was maybe a little bit too ambitious here,
(12:17):
And so it's really about waiting until you have collected
all of the data about the pact, so you can
look back and decide what you want to do. If
you want to keep going, if you want to pivot
and redesign it in a way that makes more sense,
or if you hated it, which is completely fine you
just stop. But now you know because it's based on
your own experience.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
Yeah, well, what are some questions we should be asking
at the end of it? I mean to figure out
did anything come of this? Am I happy with it?
Did it result in what I wanted? I mean, what
should we be asking ourselves?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
What's really important at the end of an experiment is
to consider both external and internal factors, and a lot
of us are more comfortable with one or the other.
Some people they will just want to open a spreace
and look at the data, and other people they will
maybe be more comfortable asking about how they feel. It's very,
very important to look at both. If an experiment is
(13:09):
successful on the outside but make you feel miserable while
you were conducting it, you probably don't want to keep going.
So the questions to ask yourself are externally speaking. If
I just look at metrics of success, So if you
were writing a news that or having you subscribers and
likes and comments, do people open it and read it?
And then internally speaking, how do I feel? Did I
(13:30):
actually enjoy writing this? Did I like it? Did it
bring me joy? And only when you consider both internal
and external signals you can decide whether you want to
keep going or maybe tweak it.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Excellent. Well, we're going to take one more quick ad
break and then we will be back with more on
Tiny Experiments.
Speaker 1 (13:54):
Well, I am.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
Back with an Laura Leconte, who is the author of
Tiny Experiments. We've been learning about all sorts of different packs.
We can have ourselves at pacts. Try doing this for
one hundred days, see what comes of it, See if
we enjoyed it, how it felt. So one of the
things you talk about in your book is, you know,
creating your community, finding your tribe of people as you're
(14:16):
doing these experiments. So maybe you can talk about what
is the upside of doing that. And then also these
sort of three levels of involvement one might have with
an online with a community, you know, being the apprentice,
the artisan, the architect.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
Absolutely, I talk a lot about learning in public in
the book. I think it's extremely important. There may be
the temptation to wait until you feel like you're ready
you're the expert to start sharing your knowledge, But you
will actually learn better and faster if you start sharing
your journey from the very beginning. And if you say
that's what I'm experimenting with, I'm sharing it with the world.
(14:52):
Does anyone want to follow me and also help me? Maybe?
So learning in public is extremely important, and and there
are different levels of engagement. Some people might feel a
little bit scared of learning in public because they feel
like it means I have to start a community and
I have to do all of this, but you can
start quite small, actually, So what I call the apprentice
(15:13):
is really just paying a little bit more attention to
the way you create your network, the people you connect
with and who you want to learn from. And that's
also something we rarely make time for. So just doing
that already is going to allow you to learn from
other people in a better way. The artisan is when
you start creating your experience at a higher level. So
maybe you start actually contributing to those communities and you
(15:37):
start posting sharing saying I'm actually happy to co host
this event with someone, and just being a little bit
more active in those communities. The architect is when you're
finally ready to launch your own community and to actually
decide who's going to join, what the experience is going
to look like, and really being more of a leader
when it comes to learning in public.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
Yeah, And I think people are often a little bit
wary of this learning in public because I don't know,
I guess they think they might be might do something embarrassing,
which which is entirely possible. Is there a way to
kind of psych ourselves up for that?
Speaker 3 (16:13):
Oh? Absolutely. I have sent newsletters with things and them
that were actually wrong, and I had people reply and
tell me, you know, actually there's new research that came
out and that shows that what you wrote is not correct.
And once you managed to move past the embarrassment, you
realize that it's actually amazing that you got to share
that information in public. Someone corrected you, and now you know,
(16:35):
instead of walking around your entire life thinking that this
information was correct. So it is really not about getting
rid of the embarrassment that you might feel. This is
a very normal human reaction. It's more about rewiring your response.
How do you deal with the embarrassment And once you
manage to look at it as a sign that you're
(16:55):
growing and learning. You almost welcome these moments where go like, oops,
I actually did not know that, but now I know.
Speaker 2 (17:04):
Yeah, wonderful. Well, I want to pivot more to your
own experience. You mentioned earlier in the show that you
had thought you were a night owl. You analyzed your
energy found you had more energy in the morning than
you were aware of. I'm curious how you spend your
mornings these days.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
I always start with journaling. This is my most important
ritual and I always try to do this before I
open my computer or do anything else. Cup of coffee, journaling,
a little bit of stretching, and then I get into
work and I try to do as much as possible
to kind of work where that's creative, where I can
(17:41):
be focused the research, the writing, and then I keep
my meetings for the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
When you're journaling, is there something specific a format to it,
or it's whatever is in your head.
Speaker 3 (17:51):
I have two ways of journaling. My daily morning journaling
is very free flow, writing whatever comes up, and I
often start with today I feel dot dot dot, and
usually starting with this thread, I do end up finding
a lot of interesting things that are on my mind.
And then every week I use plus minus next, which
is a very simple method to review your week that's
(18:14):
a little bit more structured, shorter, and where I have
three columns. The first one plus is for everything that
went well that week, the second column minus for everything
that didn't go so well or when was unexpected, and
the last column with a little arrow next is anything
I want to focus on next or I want to
experiment with during the following week. So those are my
(18:36):
two ways of journaling and reflecting throughout the week.
Speaker 2 (18:39):
Yeah, and you mentioned that you try to do your
creative work in the morning and you're more focused work,
then move your meetings to the afternoon. I wonder if
you have any other sort of productivity tips that have
been helpful for you as you try to get everything
done in your life.
Speaker 3 (18:54):
So for me, it's really about taking little breaks in
between everything, and not just a break in go and
take your phone and scroll on something, or but really
a conscious break where I pay attention to how I'm
feeling in the moment. And then that might mean that
I will take literally five minutes to walk outside the
(19:14):
house and just be in the sun being outside before
I go into my next meeting. Maybe sometimes it means
having a glass of water, a little stretch, But I
try to avoid looking up from my computer at the
end of the day and having no idea as to
how I'm feeling, so really just staying in touch with
those signals awesome.
Speaker 2 (19:35):
Well, that probably answers my next question. I always ask
people if there's something they've done recently to take a
day from great to awesome, But it sounds like being
aware of those signals is a good one.
Speaker 3 (19:45):
Are there any things you're looking forward to right now?
So after the book comes out, I'm going to take
a little break for a few weeks. I'm going to
spend a lot of time with my parents, and I'm
also going to try to limit my screen time for
a few week because I won't have to be in
so many meetings or answer so many emails. And as
someone who is a your scientist, I spend a lot
(20:07):
of time in the lab and also a writer, I
spent a lot of time in front of my laptop.
Spending a couple of weeks with not so much screen
time I think is going to be amazing and I'm
very much looking forward to this.
Speaker 2 (20:19):
What do you think you're going to do with your
time that's not going to be spent on screens. I
think that's always people's problems. They're like, well, I've spent
so much time on screens. I don't even know what
I'm going to do when I'm not plugged in.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
So one of my experiments in the past year was
around meditation, something that I always thought I was terrible at,
but then through running an experiment, I discovered that I
actually enjoy it and has become part of my practice.
So more meditation, going a little bit deeper. I also
sign up for a course to learn more about plants
and how to make different teas and tinctures. So I'm
(20:53):
kind of looking for different things I can experiment with
and learn about that will be in the way they're designed.
Intrinsically speaking, they don't require a scream Yeah, awesome, awesome.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
Well and Laura, thank you so much. Where can people
find you?
Speaker 3 (21:10):
You can go to nesslabs dot com and I have
a newsletter that I send every week or on social media.
I am at at nuran n E U r A
n n.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
E excellent excellent. Well, and Laura, thank you so much
for joining us.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Everyone.
Speaker 2 (21:23):
Please check out her book Tiny experiments. Thank you to
everyone for listening. If you have feedback on this or
any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura
at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this
is Laura. Thanks for listening and here's to making the
most of our time cool.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,
(22:09):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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