What if we reframed failure as a step toward clarity rather than away from success?

In this episode, Laurence and Carlos sit down with Anne-Laure le Cunff, neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author of the book Tiny Experiments, to explore why failure isn’t failure – it’s feedback.

Anne-Laure’s work is all about curiosity-driven learning; turning doubt into discovery through small, low-risk experiments. Her approach aligns deeply with how we support entrepreneurs, coaches, and creatives inside our Vision 20/20 group coaching program:

• Curiosity leads to clarity. What fascinates you is often pointing you toward the work you’re meant to do.
• Small experiments create momentum. You don’t need a master plan—just a first step.
• Failure is data, not a dead end. When you stop seeing failure as personal, you start seeing opportunity.
• Exploration before exploitation ensures alignment. Before you "scale" an idea, make sure it truly fits you.
• Structure + flexibility = a sustainable, fulfilling business. The key is having just enough structure to guide you, but enough freedom to adapt.

If you’re navigating a career transition, designing a business that truly fits, or just wrestling with the fear of getting it wrong, this conversation is for you.

Links

• Join the conversation live
• Become a member of the Happy Startup School
• Join the next Vision 20/20 cohort

Welcome everyone.

Welcome Anne-Laure.

You're someone we followed for a long time actually.

So it feels great to have you on here and to celebrate your work.

And obviously the book that's coming out next week, isn't it?

I'm waiting for the physical copy, so I'm a bit behind on the, on the book front.

Carlos is more of a listener, so yeah, I can't wait to get that in my hands.

I'm excited.

Thank you so much for having me.

I'm not gonna assume that anyone listening to this knows you inside out.

I know you through Lawrence primarily, initially because of Nest Labs and

the work that you were doing there.

Uh, and then listening more, basically stalking you, uh, cyber stalking you

and listening to all of the podcasts and reading all the blogs and all that

stuff, and just got a much better feel for who you are and your journey and your

passions as I understand it, particularly around the mind and, and productivity

in a mindful way, and what you're doing with your community, which is amazing

and there's so much, uh, alignment there.

But I would love for you to, Give you an opportunity to share a bit more

about yourself, maybe a bit more about where you find yourself right now in

terms of the work that's occupying you, uh, and however you wanna describe

in a, you know, short summary, how you got to this point right now.

Yeah, I, um.

I kind of think about my life in two chapters, which I think are kind of

helpful to know about, to understand who I am and how I got here today.

The first one was very linear in the sense that I had a very clear vision

of what success looked like, and I tried really hard to get there.

So got good grades in school, got a job at Google.

I started a startup and I did that for really at the time.

I didn't know it, but for all of the wrong reasons, I did that because that,

that was expected for me and um, for a bunch of reasons that would be too

long to explain here, I then entered a second chapter, and hopefully there

will be many more chapters in my life.

But that's the chapter I'm currently in, which is a lot more experimental,

where I don't really know where I'm going, but I'm fully embracing it and

I'm really following my curiosity in terms of deciding what to work on.

And so in the past few years, I started a newsletter called Nest

Labs, which has about a hundred thousand people reading it every week.

I also did a PhD in neuroscience, which I completed last year.

And, uh, I have this book coming out, which, uh, I'm very, very excited about

Tiny Experiments coming out next week.

And, um, what I love about all of these projects that I've worked on in the

past few years is that I had no plan.

I had no idea that that's what.

I would end up working on.

But uh, I just paid attention to the different opportunities that

were in front of me and try to pay attention to the signals and to what

I was actually curious and excited about as a compass to make decisions.

I, I can imagine Lawrence, you, a lot of what Anna was sharing just

seems to ring all the bells for us.

Exactly.

Well, uh, I dunno if you've read the book Second Mountain or heard of that

book, but it talks to that idea of a lot of us are on this path to the,

the summit of the first mountain.

So we chase success for the wrong reasons, like you say.

And then at some point it doesn't happen to everyone.

Um, and it doesn't always happen in midlife, but typically can where we.

I think David Brooks, you wrote it talks about this valley between the first and

second mountain in life when we're kind of exploring and in this liminal space.

And then at some point we want to commit to something that's bigger than us.

Uh, whether it's a community like you or a cause that we care about.

Um, or even just go on that journey of exploration and maybe

there's no mountain to climb.

It's just that meandering around.

So yeah, maybe this is the second and many more mountains

for you to, to sort of go on.

Um, no, it's just funny because, um, the title of the book was

supposed to be Liminal Minds.

And, uh, it was really about, and it is still about, that's

still what the book is about.

It is about being comfortable in those liminal spaces, being

comfortable in uncertainty and seeing these transitions, these moments

when we're lost as opportunities for growth and self-discovery.

But, uh, it turned out when we conducted some surveys, a lot of

people don't know what liminal means.

The once you explain it to them, a lot of them have the same reaction.

They say, where has this word been that that describes exactly my experience?

It's such a useful word, but it's not really an everyday word that

a lot of people have come across.

And so people would look at the title and not really understand what it meant.

So I changed the title to what it is right now, tightening experiments.

But I just find it funny that you mentioned the word liminal, which is not a

common word, and it was supposed to be the book of the title, the title of the book.

And I love how you use tiny experiments to test out the title for tiny.

It's quite meta, isn't it?

Yes.

And I find this is all part, like these, these words, these terminologies, the

way we approach change it, these are words that we discover on that journey

of change where we think, all right, we're trying to look for the way forward.

Uh, and I'd love to, because I wanna put tiny experiments into a kind of

a, for us, a context for our, for our audience, uh, and then explore various

ideas that you share within the book.

Uh, hopefully to, well, primarily to get people engaged with, with

this idea of what tiny experience could mean, particularly with

respect to someone's life, but then also where they may come into play.

And, and I love what you said in terms of your own journey of like

this chapter, transition from one chapter to another, a one way of

thinking, to another way of thinking.

And, and to just help with that, I wanted to just share, you

know, the Satya change model.

This is something that a friend of ours who's a fellow coach just shared

with us in terms of like, trying to describe this kind of process of change.

there's this idea of the, the current status quo, and then there's a future,

and then there's this idea of chaos in the middle, which is all messy and you're

not sure how to, to navigate, part of that journey is the inciting incident.

And I think it is really, I believe, believe is really helpful for,

to share stories of this kind of what tips us over and to change.

Then it's like, okay, when I'm there, what do I do next?

Which I think is a lot to what you're talking about.

Well, there were two moments.

The, the first one was when I was at Google and I was still very

much in that linear mindset of trying to get the next promotion

and work on the next big projects.

And, I had a health scare while I was there.

So I woke up one morning and my arm had turned black and uh, I

went to the Google Infirmary.

They told me.

You need to go to the hospital.

So I went to the Stanford Hospital.

I was based in San Francisco at the time and working in Mountain View,

and they, they told me that I had a blood clot in my arm that was

threatening to travel to my lung.

And in that moment, so when they told me we need to do surgery as quickly

as possible and take care of this, my first reaction was to open my Google

calendar to see when I could schedule this at a time that would not disrupt

any product launches I was working on.

And so I, yeah, this, this like almost this out of body experience

where you see yourself do something completely ridiculous.

Um, and I had that where I noticed I was doing that and as.

I felt like my priorities are completely wrong, obviously.

the surgery went well.

I still have both my arms, and everything is fine.

But that was definitely a moment of realization.

And so I quit my job at Google.

But what I didn't realize at the time is that that it's really,

again, the liminal space, right?

It's that liminal space, that space of transition between one chapter and

another, a way of being and thinking and another that's very uncomfortable.

And I found that for me at the time, it was so uncomfortable

to not have an identity anymore.

To not be able to answer the question, what do you do when, especially coming

from Google that had made, made it so easy for me to say what I was doing,

that I rushed onto the next script.

And the, the script in Silicon Valley that everybody knows the script, right,

is that you stay at a big tech company for a while, you save money, you

build your network, and then you raise more money and you start a startup.

So I did that, and it's only a few years later when that startup failed.

And when I found myself again in that liminal space, not knowing

what I wanted to do next, that I finally, finally allowed myself to

finally ask, what is it I actually wanna do if nobody was watching?

If traditional success was out of the equation, if I could just decide that

I would do something that I'm curious about and wake up in the morning and

work on something I'm interested in, and that's it, what would that be?

And for me, that had always been the brain.

I had always been curious about how the brain works.

And so I decided to go back to university at the, in my late

twenties to study neuroscience, which.

Funnily enough, I actually, I didn't put that in the, in the book.

I, I'm just realizing while telling you this story, I had more people

telling me it was crazy to do that than, than when I did the startup.

The startup was such a normal thing to do in Silicon Valley after

working at a company like Google or Meta that everybody said, yay.

Like, congrats.

People tell you, congrats for quitting your job and good luck on the

startup for the neuroscience studies.

I had so many people tell me, what do you mean these are very long studies?

You're not going to go back to university in your late

twenties to study neuroscience.

and that was the beginning of that second chapter for me when I stopped

listening to those scripts and I started making decisions that were more aligned

with what I was actually curious about.

So One of, I think a few inciting incidents I hear

is like, okay, the arm okay.

And need to think.

And then it's like, okay, quick Google, do a startup 'cause that is

where I'm what I'm supposed to do.

That didn't work out quite well.

Oh my God, I need to do something different here.

There's this idea that we, we learn about this, this transformational

idea that starts getting us on a different par trajectory.

and I'm, I'm wondering in your case, was that part of the journey of doing the

risky research or was there, was there something else, uh, a a moment or an

incident that think, okay, actually I need to rethink how I look at life and work

and this is a way that's gonna help me.

It was really just realizing that I was completely lost and for the first

time in my life, not resisting it.

I think that was the big change for me after my startup failed, is that instead

of trying to cross that the middle space as quickly as possible and find something

to clink to, that would make me feel like I knew what I was doing and I knew where

I was going for the very first time in my life, I told myself, I have no idea.

I'm completely lost.

And somehow that felt liberating.

That felt really good.

I didn't have a plan, didn't have a vision, but that also meant that anything,

literally, any decision I could make in that moment was something that was

possible, something I could explore.

And so I really.

Went back to the drawing board.

It was really through a lot of journaling, a lot of reading, a lot

of introspection and self-reflection.

Just asking myself, trying to really untangle the, those, those

external scripts from what it was that I was really curious about.

And sometimes even thinking back on my childhood and things that

I used to like at that time.

So.

Well, it sounds like to, from what I'm hearing is, is

you, you shifted the script.

There was a script that was running and you somehow was able to shift that script.

And in the book you talk about cognitive scripts.

Yeah, absolutely.

And this is really how I went about writing this book.

A lot of it was inspired by my personal experience, but, um, I don't actually talk

a lot about my personal life in the book.

Most of it is in the introduction, but those, those were seeds for, for me

to read papers and look at research and interview other people and do

case studies to see if that was a more common experience than not just me.

Right.

Turns out absolutely, yes.

Not just me.

So many people struggle with exactly the same challenges that I went through.

And, um, I discovered this fascinating study from 1979 where scientists,

so it's a very simple study.

Scientists just ask people, if you're in this situation, how do you behave?

That's it.

And what they realized is that when you put people in similar

situations, most of it, most of them behave in exactly the same way.

And in a, in those, those first studies, so they looked at things like going to

the doctor or going to the restaurant.

Just think about it for, for yourself.

Imagine what you do when you go to the doctor or when you go to the restaurant.

If I ask everyone who's listening right now to answer this question, we will

probably have very similar scripts.

You go to the waiting room, you wait there, that's why

it's called the waiting room.

And then you, you wait for someone to call your name and you go and

you go in the doctor's office and maybe they ask you to get undressed

and check what's wrong, right?

If the doctor walked out of their office and asked you to get undressed in the

waiting room in front of everybody, you would feel like something is really wrong.

And that's because the doctor went off script.

We're all following these scripts as to how we're supposed to behave.

And a lot of situations, it's actually fine for going to, to the doctor.

That's very useful, that I don't have to think every time about how

I'm supposed to behave right for going to the restaurant as well.

So these scripts can be great in situations where there's actually

a routine that you want to follow.

The problem is that researchers found that we follow these scripts and also

in lots of other areas of our life that are more important and where

maybe we don't want to follow a script.

We follow scripts in our career decisions, in our relationships.

Uh, we follow scripts in the way we dress, in deciding what we eat.

We have cognitive scripts everywhere in our lives, and they're unconscious.

We, they're subconscious.

We don't know we're following them.

And so in the book, I talk about the three.

Big scripts.

The the three biggest ones, that a lot of us follow.

So the first one is, I call it the sequel script.

And it's this script where you feel like whatever you do today, whatever decision

you make today has to make sense based on the decisions you made in the past.

And so this is why, for example, someone who built a startup in one

area will do their second startup in a similar one, or someone who studied

something will only look at jobs that are aligned with whatever they studied.

This is also why we rewrite our resumes, uh, when we apply for jobs

because it needs to make sense, it needs to have a nice narrative.

The second script is the crowd pleaser script.

It's when we make decisions based on making people around us happy.

Rather than asking ourselves what, what makes us happy?

Um, this is why a lot of people find themselves in careers like being a

lawyer or nothing against lawyers, but like, you know, where they

probably did not wake up one morning feeling like that's my calling.

It probably results from a lot of pleasing people around them, maybe

their parents, that who supported them for a very long time and now they wanna

give back by doing the right thing.

And then the last one, which I think is the most insidious one, because that's

one we celebrate as a society, is the, the one I call the epic script and it's

descriptive follow when we feel like whatever we do, it needs to be big, it

needs to be impressive, it needs to be our passion, we need to be obsessed with it.

And anything less than that is not meaningful, is not worth us

our time or, or even is failure.

Because of that, we either don't explore things that might be interesting, but

that don't look really big at first.

Or we put all of our eggs in the same basket.

We say, this is me, this is my identity, this is my life.

And when that thing doesn't work out, and obviously you

know the consequences, right?

So those are the three big scripts that a lot of us follow.

And just by being aware of them, you can start noticing them,

questioning them, and maybe try to write your own script instead.

You just talked about going off script and when you were talking

about being in Silicon Valley, my sense is you're surrounded by lots of

people who, there's a, there's a path there, there's an expectation there.

There's a script there in some ways of what is, what is the norm.

So yeah.

What allowed you to go off script and have that courage other than doing the sort of

in inward reflection, did you have people around you who were thinking differently?

'cause it feels like there's almost like a values misalignment there.

You are thinking of a different path, more about learning and growth and

then this other path, which is more about external measures of success.

to be completely honest, I was very lucky because I was back in

the UK when my startup failed.

And I think having started the, the company when I was kind of like following

all of these scripts of Silicon Valley, but being back in the uk, being back

in Europe, when that happened, it did give me a little bit more space.

To be able to actually explore and ask myself these questions.

Whereas maybe if I had still been in Silicon Valley when that

happened, I would've had so many people around me telling me, because

that's the script there, it's okay.

Startups fail all the time.

You just, it's the first one.

You almost need to get a failed startups under your belt and then

you can go and raise more money.

And investors actually like this.

They know that it means you're resilient and you know how it works.

and that's certainly what people would've, told me if I was in Silicon Valley, but

I was in Europe, I was closer to a bunch of friends who are not doing startups.

And it just slowed down that transition a little bit and gave

me that time to, to do this.

So in my case, this really is pure luck and it's so, it's very

easy for me to look back on this.

And so this is also why in the book, I never give advice based

on that period in my life.

I just pointed out as a way to say that.

My story is not a story of, I just figured it like I figured it out.

I, I kind of like, you know, this, I think we like beautiful stories

of transformation that are, again, the nice narrative that goes from

A to B that's very satisfying.

And that was not my case.

I actually kept on following scripts for quite a long time,

and it's completely normal.

That's our natural pull.

We want to belong, right?

And, and when we see other people following a certain

script, it kind of makes sense when we're right in the middle.

So that's the first thing I want to say, is that the, the only reason at

the time I did not follow the script was because I had the space to do so.

And the second one is that I'm not saying that you should not ever

follow any scripts in your life.

It's really about being intentional about the ones that you follow.

So it's actually completely okay to say that in some parts of your,

of your life, you know, that people expect you to behave in a certain way.

And that could be either cultural, that could be what you agreed with your

partner, that could be whatever it is in your industry that you're expected to do.

And you can look at your cognitive scripts and say, you know what,

actually this is fine with me.

Like I'm, I, I'm not interested enough or curious enough about this, that I

actually want to do something else.

And you see quite a few people who actually decide to say, for my like,

day job, I'm going to do this thing.

And it's actually nice, I like it.

I work on something interesting.

My team is nice, but I'm going to be more experimental in other areas of my life.

Whether that's a side project, whether that's experimenting with my creativity

was that, whether that's, you know, food, diet, health, relationship,

running, whatever it is that you wanna be a bit more experimental with,

you don't have to turn everything in your life into an experiment.

What I'm hearing with that is, uh, and I, the idea of discernment, like a

conscious, mindful choice as to where to follow a script and not follow a script.

Uh, and what comes up for me is the, what's the cost?

The real actual inner cost of not flipping the script, which I'm hearing

with you, was part of that inner journey, really trying to define, okay, what

do I want to choose to follow and what do I need to rewrite the script for?

Which for some people is really, really scary.

Like you said, I think we scripts are, Cognitive shortcuts so we

don't have to spend so much energy trying to work out what's next.

But then if there is no way to work out what's next from an existing script,

we have to step into the unknown.

And that's for me, which is a lot of your work in this book, is like, how do we

navigate this space called the unknown?

And I'm gonna say, well, you know, one way that people do that particularly

that we, that we encounter in terms of starting a new business

is like, I need to have the plan.

I need to know where it's gonna go and I just need to execute.

That is a script.

I would love for you to just share your alternative view on this, particularly

when you're not sure whether the destin, what the destination is.

Yeah, it's, it's really about changing your mental model of success.

So what you just described here is basically a ladder.

So that's the mental model of a ladder, which implies that you need to.

Climate and in a certain way and, and go through things in a certain order.

So first you make the plan and maybe you, you raise money or you don't, you decide

you're going to be bootstrapped, and then you go onto the next one and you get your

first customer and you do this right.

And you almost need to go through all of these steps in order a little bit

like, um, a platform video game where you're only allowed to, to go to the next

level once you've collected all of the points and the artifacts at one level.

So this is the linear model, this is the mental model of a ladder

that you're supposed to climb.

And there's, there are a lot of issues with that.

Uh, it's very rigid, so not very adaptable.

It also kind of, it's based on the assumption that you know where you're

going, and it's also based on the assumption that you're not going to

change and the world is not going to change, which we all know is not true.

So the alternative is replacing this.

Ladder with a loop.

And that's the experimental cycle that you find in the scientific method.

When I, I talk about tiny experiments, all I'm doing really is taking the scientific

method and unpacking it so people can use it in their daily lives and work.

And so the way a scientist designs an experiment is that they're

not starting from an outcome.

When we have a linear mindset, we start from the outcome, this is what

I want and I'm going to get there.

For a scientist, if they knew what the outcome would be, there would be

no point in running the experiment.

So they start instead from a hypothesis, from a research question.

And it's more something like, maybe if I do this, this will happen.

That's my hypothesis.

And it could be correct, but also it could be wrong.

And the only way to find out is to actually do the thing to collect the data.

So this is really the experimental mindset, and this is the idea of going

through a cycle of experimentation and just designing everything like that.

So first admitting that, no, you don't know where you're going.

And so instead, based on your current knowledge, current information context,

who you are today, what the business looks like today, what your current constraints.

Ask questions and say, okay, let's design an experiment here.

So it always starts with observation.

You observe the current situation, then you ask what could be different.

So again, maybe, maybe this, maybe this could be the case.

That's the hypothesis.

Then you design an experiment around it, and I have a very simple tool in the book.

I'm happy to share if you want, but to, to design that experiment.

And then once you're done collecting data, you reflect on it.

The beautiful thing about conducting experiments to you is that just like

a scientist, you withhold judgment until you're done collecting the data.

Scientists don't start looking at the data and analyzing it, or maybe

stopping the experiment in the middle because they're like, I'm not quite sure

what I, I like what I'm seeing here.

Right?

They collect all of the data and they decide at the end what

they're going to do and how they're going to implement those lessons.

And that's also a completely different definition of success.

And, and failure with the linear mindset, you have a very binary definition.

Either you get there and that's success or you don't, and that's failure.

When you start from a hypothesis, as long as you learn

something new, that's success.

And if you say, that's what, that was my hypothesis, and it turns out

to be incorrect, that's fantastic.

Now, you know, instead of making decisions based on something that's wrong now, you

know, and you can make better decisions.

So that's the, that's the shift in mindset from a linear mindset

to an experimental mindset.

And there's a number of aspects of that I'm curious about for, for people

making that transition, particularly when they're thinking of a new idea.

And the hypothesis that I, I generally hear that people formulate when

they're thunking a new business is the hypothesis is, is this a good idea?

And it is like they're still clinging onto the fact that, oh, I need to

validate that this is a good idea.

But if it's a bad idea

mm-hmm.

Do you like my idea?

Do you like, do you like my idea?

That's the other aspect of it.

So there's a whole, I think I can well read the book if you wanna learn more

about how to construct better questions as opposed to just, is this a good idea?

But tied to that, um, there's an element, uh, and I love what you said

is like, when we, when we start on a linear journey, we assume nothing

changes other than our progress.

There, there's this thing about how we potentially change along the way,

and one of the things that we talk about with our community and the

people who who do our programs is this.

Um, as you work, as you do the work, your clarity becomes,

you know, the clarity emerges.

It isn't necessarily the beginnings, like through the exploration, you kind

of realize, ah, that's what I want, or that's where we need to get to.

But there's a fear around that going into that space because

they're clinging so much onto the initial idea or what I wanna do.

Where am I getting with this?

I think I'm just curious about for you is like, was there anything that

allowed you to let go of that still that need to be right or need to know

exactly where you're gonna get to?

I think it really helps to have this structure.

Um, a lot of people who just hear about develop an experimental mindset,

live a more experimental life.

They think it's this very floaty kind of approach to life when

it's not actually, it's again, inspired by the scientific method.

So it is quite rigorous actually, when you think about it, you define

your question and that question could actually be like, do do I enjoy this?

Or will people resonate with this?

Um, is that something that people find useful rather than just is it a good idea?

So that could be the, the question that you have and

then you design an experiment.

I mentioned I have a little tool in the book.

I'm just going to share it now because I think it's actually helpful

to frame it and really understand what I mean by tiny experiments.

So if you look at an experiment.

Any kind of experiment.

It has two main building blocks.

The, the first building block is what you're going to test, what's the

action, the thing you're going to do.

And the second building block is the number of trials.

How many times you're going to repeat that action for you to know

if something is actually happening.

If there's actually a, an interesting pattern here.

And so when you design your own tiny experiments, that's all you need

design on an action and on a duration.

And so you say, I will do this thing for this specific duration.

And then you do the thing.

And again, no judgment while you do the thing.

You're just doing the thing at the end.

When you're done conducting the experiment, you can look back and it's

very important to look back both on the internal and external signals of success.

We're all very good at looking at the external signals of success.

We have our spreadsheets, our dashboards.

We have like a little notion like thing that's connected to our Zapier

that's pulling all of that data.

We look at it and we feel like, okay, this is trending up, up and to the right.

This is looking good, but if you're successful on the outside, but feeling

miserable every morning when you wake up and you work on your business, that

is actually not success, and so it's very important when you analyze that

data from your experiment, you ask yourself, how does it look on the outside?

Cool, but also how does it feel on the inside?

Based on that, you can decide what your next cycle of experimentation

is going to look like, and so that's why there's no failure or success

because there's no end point.

There's no end goal.

All you're trying to do is with each cycle to learn something new that you can use

to iterate and grow and evolve even though you don't know where you're going, and so.

You might have results where actually the, the external signals are very good.

Growing fast is great, but you're completely burned out.

But that's not failure.

That just means that for the next cycle of experimentation, maybe

you need to tweak some things.

Do you need to hire some help?

Do you need to maybe scale down a little bit for now and try while you

figure out what the business structure is, do you need to maybe build some

systems, automate some things, uh, maybe work with AI a little bit more

so you don't have to do everything?

What does that look like?

And again, it's not about having the answer to these questions, it's actually

just about formulating a hypothesis.

And so you could say, I have the hypothesis that maybe, maybe if I

worked with AI more, then this would be a lot more manageable to do.

And so you design your next experiment and you say that for the next 15 days, I will

spend, every morning I will spend an hour.

Just talking to Jack g PT about my current challenges and figuring

out if there are any ways to make things a little bit easier.

And in two weeks at the end of the experiment, same, I'm going

to, was that correct or not?

That's really the idea of experimenting.

And so to answer your question, you can completely let go of the idea of

failure or, or trying to have a plan or this illusion of certainty because you

have this very simple structure that you can follow that is giving you a sense

of growth without giving you this full sense of having a clear destination.

what does it mean for something to feel right?

How do you.

RT or come to terms with that for yourself.

This actually does require a little bit of work to define for yourself and is

going to look different for everyone.

So I would actually highly recommend sitting down and asking yourself that

question because for some people, something that feels right might be to

be a, a good partner or a good parent.

And that might be actually an important factor in their lives that yes, they

have a successful business, but for the internal factors, they feel like they're

still able to show up in ways in their life that actually make them feel good.

That's what feels, feels good for some people, it's very physical.

Um, so for example, in my case, it's very important that I feel

rested and um, and also I pay a lot of attention to signs of anxiety.

' cause sometimes I feel the anxiety without knowing where it's coming from.

For me, it's a sign to you start paying attention that something might be wrong

somewhere, and my brain is already picking up those signals, but I'm, I'm

not yet seeing them at a conscious level.

And so you can be a bit more proactive.

And really it's, uh, so I do talk about this in the book.

It's, uh, it's really a beautiful human capability ability that we have.

That as far as we know, we're the only mammals that are able to do

this, which is called meta cognition.

And it's the ability to observe your own thoughts.

Obviously, you know, anyone who has a dog or a cat, they think, right.

People who think otherwise have never had a pet, but they think, but they're

not able to observe their own thoughts.

Only human beings are able to do this.

And so I would highly encourage anyone to try and do this a little bit more

proactively, where you observe the way you feel, you observe how you think.

You ask yourself, why is it that I'm feeling this way?

Why is it that I'm thinking this thought?

And sometimes the answer is just like, oh, yeah, okay.

I'm a little bit tired right now and that's fine.

I'll take a little nap and, and all is good, right?

But if you start noticing these patterns over and over again, then it might be

a sign that something needs to change, whether in the, the, the personal or the,

the professional, the kind of parts of your life, but something needs to change.

So I would say that the answer to this is just really paying attention to

how you feel and also being radically honest with yourself in terms of

what matters to you and in terms of how aligned the way you feel right

now is with what matters to you.

And what that says to me, because in order to really, well, from my perspective,

at least in my own experience, in order to listen to that or feel that.

I need to slow down.

I can't be acting and moving all the time which kind of touches on this

idea of our, our relationship to time.

Because as entrepreneurs, and particularly in the startup world,

time we need to, it's ticking down.

It's ticking down, it's ticking down, which means that sometimes some of us can

be very, we can get very, very quickly to somewhere where we don't need to be.

we've all seen this, um.

For people who are familiar with Tim Urban from Wait, but y this square that's

filled with hundreds of tiny squares that represent your life in weeks.

And, uh, this is how we think about time.

Most, you know, most of us in our societies, a series of tiny boxes that

need to be filled with as much stuff as possible in order to be productive

and make the most of that very limited time that we have on Earth, right?

This is how we think about it.

And this is also why whenever we procrastinate, whenever we're not being

productive, we feel really bad about it, we're literally wasting that time.

Um, and so what's really interesting is that the ancient Greeks were also

already very aware of this, and they actually had two words for time.

The first one is Kronos, and that's the one we still use a lot.

We live in a time.

Kronos in our society, and that's the time of the, the all of the

little squares, the little boxes that you need to fill with stuff.

The other word that they had was kairos.

So Kronos is the quantitative definition of time.

Kairos is the qualitative definition of time, and the idea of kairos

is that each moment is different.

It's not just a series of identical boxes that you can fill with whatever,

and you just need to manage it in the most efficient way possible.

It is more about being able to connect deeply in each moment, to

allow for this moment to expand.

And I'm going to give you two examples of this because I think we've all

experienced kairos, but we just don't have a word for it in our English language.

So whenever you're in a, you lost in a very interesting conversation with

a friend and you look at the time.

You, you feel like what happened?

Like, you know, I thought that was, we started chatting 10 minutes

ago and it's been two hours.

That's Ros.

You lose track of time.

This is the, this deep sense of being lost in the moment and of having this

beautiful experience that where time you, you really lose the idea of time itself.

And another one is whenever you get in the flow, when you're working on something so

interesting that you also forget the time.

You might even forget for some people to get up and have lunch.

You're just so focused and last in whatever creative

project you're working on.

And those are kairos moments.

And so when you have a linear mindset, you're trying to optimize your time in a

Kronos way, you have your little calendar and you add as many meetings as possible.

It needs to feel productive.

And whenever you catch yourself not doing something, this is wasted time when you

have a kairos approach to time management.

You realize that time, expense and contracts, that there will be

moments where you do absolutely nothing and that's fine.

And there will be moments that are so rich that they feel like

it was 10 years in one hour.

And what you ideally want to do is allowing yourself to live both types of

moments and maybe try and optimize more for seeking kairos moments in your life.

Those kind of moments where so they, they're so rich and deep that they

almost dwarf any other moments that you had during that day, during

more like krono types of tasks.

So you will still have kno time.

We live in a society of kno time, but try to seek those kairos moments in your life.

I've got a question before you dive in, is that right?

Um, I think on what Julia highlighted, because I think Julia said, I think

the trick is tiny experiments.

Um, we talked a lot about experiments, but one thing we see a lot of as

people, I think we are all guilty of this, is like making the first

thing they do the, a big thing.

Like they find it really hard to break it down into a tiny step.

So any words of wisdom for someone?

I'm sure there's lots in the book about how to, yeah.

How to, how to start small ultimately, even if you've got a big vision.

Yeah, I, um, I call it the Maximalist brain.

And it's really this tendency that it needs to be, it needs to be big if,

if, for it to be worthy of our time.

And so that's actually why I ended up calling the book Tiny Experiments

because it was such a fundamental part of this mindset and this approach.

So what I would recommend is, uh, first, whenever you're hesitating in between

two durations for your experiment to just go with the smaller version, because

that's the great thing about experiments.

It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to do that thing only once, right?

You wanna do it once, complete that cycle, and then based on what you learn,

you can go for another cycle that might be longer, but also where you might

tweak a little bit of your approach.

So, for example, let's say that.

You decide to start a daily newsletter for your startup.

And so it might be tempting to say, I'm going to like, send a day

newsletter for the next three month and, uh, I'm going to interview all

of these people and I don't know what's the big version of this, right?

But instead, you could say, let's start a day newsletter and let's do

that just for the next two weeks.

Uh, and at the end of the two weeks, let's see what works.

Let's see what doesn't, and let's see what we wanna do next.

And in terms of what you, you can do next, you can just go for

another two weeks if you're like, I'm actually not quite sure yet.

Like, I'm not gonna, I don't know if it's working or not working.

Let's just go for another two weeks and see.

I, I'm, I'm enjoying this, but I'm not quite sure if customers

are actually resonating with it.

So let's go for another two weeks.

Or you could say, actually, you know, similar example to earlier,

people seem to be resonating with it, but it's taking a lot of my time.

So for the next iteration, is there someone on the team that can help?

Should we work with a freelancer?

Is there another approach?

And then you can go for the next cycle of experimentation.

Or sometimes it is so clear after even one tiny experiment that this was a

horrible idea and you can just stop you.

You know?

Now you can say, okay, this is actually taking way too much

time, way too much energy.

Nobody cares.

Let's just stop.

Let's park it.

What's nice to you is that when you do that, I highly recommend taking

a few notes as to why you made the decision to either persist with the

exact same experiment or pivot a little bit, or completely pause it.

Because in the future, if you or someone else on the team has a similar

idea, you can just go back and say.

Those are the results of the experiment we run last time.

And so if you feel like you're going to do something differently, and

so you can use that and tweak it, but now, you know, I tried, it went

horribly wrong, but feel free to, to run another tiny experiment if you feel

like you would do things differently.

So I would really start with the, the smallest version possible.

The only case where I tell people it's okay to go for a bigger one, it's when

it's something you're actually already quite familiar with, you know how to do.

You're, you're almost a hundred percent sure that this is going to work and

you just need a commitment device.

And in that case, the, the experiment can be more of a way to commit to doing it.

And so that's how I, for my newsletter, for example, like I had this experiment

where I said, I'm going to write a hundred articles in a hundred weekdays.

Yeah, that's a really big experiment, actually.

But I already was writing a lot.

I had already started newsletters in the past.

I had all of that background where the, the challenge for me was more

about that daily consistency, and in that case, it's okay to have a bigger

experiment if it's new and uncomfortable.

Start tiny and then you can scale it up later.

That is wonderful.

Thank you.

Brilliant.

And Laura and I, I've been enjoying this tiny experiment as well.

I hope we can continue these conversations.

But if you wanna learn more, and book is, and Laura's book is coming out next week.

Order it, get it.

I highly recommend it.

There's stuff that you talk about.

I'd love to talk about pacts and curiosity circles and just ways to

continue with these experiments.

Keep you going.

I think if you are in that space of just, uh, navigating a liminal

time in your life, you can't go wrong with getting Laura's book.

And I look forward to seeing you actually in a couple of weeks at your book launch.

Take care.

Bye everyone.

Thank you so much.

Take

care.

Having me care.

Thank you for your time.