The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 629: Anne-Laure Le Cunff - How To Live Freely In a Goal Obsessed World (Tiny Experiments)

Episode Date: April 6, 2025

The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Go to www.LearningLeader.com for full show notes. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire 1 person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Go to www.InsightGlobal.com/LearningLeader At 27, Anne-Laure had her dream job at Google. She quit. "Are you sure?" "No." She was focusing on a narrow vision of success. Anne-Laure was most curious about the brain, neuroscience, and why we think the way we do. She went back to school to learn more. Writing - First, to clarify thinking. Works as a forcing function for that. You need to create your own version of it. You do that by writing. The generation effect. You remember it better that way. Next, it created a magnet of people to her. The meaning behind the name "Ness" is "The state of being." Goal setting - What are the traps of linear goals? We think we know what we want. We assume we'll always want the same thing. The arrival fallacy. Think we'll be so happy when we get it, but usually we aren't. Instead focus on the process, the daily behaviors. And run continual experiments. Through those experiments, you'll probably figure out what you want to accomplish. Or you might even stumble into it. Practical goals - Was it useful? Focus on the process. There is nuance. How do you hold others accountable? It's more than just the number. Do the work to understand the nuance, the details behind the number. Too many managers are lazy. Collaborate with uncertainty. Understand why you're scared of it. Comes from a long time ago. That's no longer a thing. You don't just want your team to survive. You want them to thrive. Don't cling to the first obvious conclusion. Do more work. What about vision for a CEO? Instead of focusing on being #1 in the marketplace, focus on your approach. Your values, your mission. Focus on your company's daily behaviors more than beating someone else. Be curious and ambitious.  Escape the tyranny of purpose. People are obsessed with finding theirs. People have more than one purpose. It changes over time. You can reinvent yourself. It can make people miserable if they haven't found it. I suggested that hers is what she has on Ness Labs website: "To help people become the scientist of their own lives." She said that it is for her work. Procrastination - Instead of getting rid of it, reframe it. Say hello, you're here again; what are you telling me? A tool for it: Triple check - Head, Heart, Hand. Her grandmother Oma was the final person she thanked in her acknowledgement. Moved from Algeria to France. Didn't speak the language. Her parents always encouraged her that she could do anything. Show up. Do it. Try. How do you keep going after the honeymoon of a new project or idea? Keep iterating and trying new things. Have others help you. Sergey Brin got tired of the ad business at Google, so he had someone else run it and he created a lab inside of Google for new ideas. Don't let anyone rob you of your imagination, your creativity, or your curiosity. It's your place in the world; it's your life. Go on and do all you can with it, and make it the life you want to live.—Mae Jemison, American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut

This episode is brought to you by my friends at Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to providing amazing people to their clients and taking great care of them. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global can get you the people you need and help you develop them to reach their full place. potential. Developing your people can be tough, but having productive employees can be magic. Visit Insightglobal.com slash learning leader. That's Insightglobal.com slash learning leader to learn more. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Text, Hawk to 6-6-866 to become part of Mindful Monday. You, along with tens of thousands of other learning leaders from all over the world,

will receive a carefully curated email for me each Monday morning to help you start your week off right. You'll also receive details about how our book, The Score That Matters, will help you become a more effective leader. Text, Hawk to 66866. Now on to tonight's featured leader. Dr. Anluir Lecomf is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. As the founder of Ness Labs, Anluar writes to over 100,000 subscribers about evidence-based ways to achieve more without sacrificing your mental health. Her book, Tiny Experiments, is a transformative guide for living a more experimental life, turning uncertainty into curiosity, and carving a path of self.

discovery during our conversation we discuss how to fix our goal setting process why uncertainty is a good thing the benefits of procrastination and escaping the tyranny of purpose we talk about that and so much more ladies and gentlemen please enjoy my conversation with dr. Anlor Lecombe okay I want to start with a specific story in life. It is a few years ago. You're 27 years old. You're living in San Francisco at the time. And you had just turned in your resignation to what seemed like your dream job at Google. And your manager, she's unsure and says, are you sure? Do you really want to do this? Could you take the story from there? What happened next?

Yeah, absolutely. I actually wasn't sure. I wasn't sure at all because as you, as you, you said, this was the dream job. I was working at one of the best tech companies in the world. I had an amazing team. I was working on exciting projects. But I had started realizing that something was wrong. I had been really focused on a very narrow definition of success. I was trying to be as productive as possible, trying to get the next promotion, trying to really get as many accolades as possible from my peers. But I had lost my sense of of curiosity, of exploration that I used to have as a kid. And so even though I wasn't sure, I said, yes, yeah, I'm going to do this.

I'm ready to try something else. What was the next thing you were ready to try? So that's what's interesting is that I would love to tell you that I went from working at Google to then living my best free creative life, but I didn't. I didn't realize at the time that I stopped following one script of success, which was the one that says you need to work at this big tech company and get your next promotion to following another script of success, which especially in Silicon Valley is a very common one that says that you need to raise money and start a startup and save the world and anything less than that is failure. So after leaving Google, I started working on my own business, my startup. And it's only when that failed, only when that didn't work out, that I finally allowed myself to ask, what is it? I'm actually curious about.

What is something I would like to explore, even if external metrics of success were out of the equation? What was the next thing you were actually curious about? for me, it had always been the brain. I've always been fascinated with why we think the way we think and feel the way we feel. So in my late 20s, I went back to university to study neuroscience. And a lot of people around me told me, are you crazy? You don't become a neuroscientist at that age. Those are very long studies. But what was interesting is that I didn't do that to become a neuroscientist. I, for the first time in my life, I was, trying to achieve a specific goal or to be successful, I went back to university because I was curious about the brain and I wanted to learn how it works and I had no idea where that would lead. Interesting. So I think some would say, well, that's cool. I'm glad you could do that. But others would say, well, you also need to have a job to make money, right? You've got to live. You've got to support at least yourself. How did you make money? How were you able to do that

financially? Yeah, absolutely. I am not a big fan of people who tell you, just quit your job and do that thing, right? It's very risky and it rarely works out. In my case, I kept on freelancing what I was doing that. So I was spending my time in between consulting for people based on things that I had learned in my previous job at Google, so consulting mostly for tech startups. And I was in the rest of my time doing my neuroscientific studies. And that's also around that time I started writing online, which, again, was not in that case something I had a goal around. I didn't think really that I could make money out of this, but it did end up becoming another source of income for me.

The writing online is fascinating to me because it does a few things. One, writing is the ultimate tool for clarity, right? You don't fully know what you think or believe about something until you get those thoughts out of your head onto the page. So I think that's a useful activity. for all leaders who care about sustaining excellence and getting clear and influencing and inspiring. So I think that's good. But also, in addition to that, if you choose to publish them like you've done, you become a magnet to attract people to you, especially those who maybe think

like you do or at least are entertained and interested in what you're writing about. I mean, a podcast can do similar things. It can open up so many doors. and create lots of opportunities. What did publishing your writing online do for you? How did it work as a magnet? How did it work as a clarifying tool for you? I love that you're mentioning this because for me, it really started initially as just a clarifying tool.

That was the only objective I had for it. I discovered something during my studies in neuroscience called the Generation Effect, which shows that when you create your own version of something, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And so that's why, you know, teachers tell you just write it in your own words, right? You're not just going to copy-paste it. But the generation effect works across any kind of medium.

You mentioned writing, but as you said, podcasting, creating a video, even having a conversation with a friend where you're trying to explain the thing that you're trying to understand is going to help. So I initially started the NASLabs Newsletter as a way to apply the generation effect. And I said, every week I will pick a concept, something that I just discovered and learn about in my studies, and I'm going to write about. But I need to write about it in a way that is clear enough that someone who is not with me in my class, in my cohort in university, can actually understand it. So no jargon, no hiding behind complicated words. It has to be something anyone can understand. And then only I'll be sure that I understood it myself.

So that was the beginning of the newsletter, just committing to translating something scientific into a practical tool that other people could use. And then in terms of the magnet effect that you described, that's the part that at the time I hadn't expected. But it was amazing. It immediately attracted fellow curious minds that shared more resources, that asked me more questions, that showed me some blind spots, things that I hadn't thought about. I had moments where I wrote about a specific tool and someone replied and said, you know what, actually, there's new research showing that what you wrote is wrong. How amazing is that that I could find out that this idea was wrong in one week just by writing the news editor rather than going around and making a bunch of decisions based on that idea that was wrong, right? So it really creates this tight feedback loop where if you're willing to learn in public, if you're willing to learn in public, if you're willing, willing to put your thoughts out there. And if you're willing to listen when people show their

feedback, you're going to learn and grow a lot faster. So good. You named it Ness Labs. The Ness Labs newsletter. Why do you name it that? So Ness is the suffix that you added at the end of a word to describe the state of being something. So consciousness, the state of being conscious, mindfulness, awareness. And labs means just laboratory. And I really wanted to create a little laboratory for the mind, a playground where I could explore any idea I was curious about. So how did the Nest Labs go from a newsletter and you publishing your work online to an actual business that could be sustaining and create income for you? Well, at first, it was very inbound in the sense that I had people who started replying and saying,

hey, do you accept sponsors? Can I sponsor your newsletter? And at that time, if it was something I was okay to promote not worth supplements or things like that and things that I could try myself, I would say, yes, let's do it. But I realized very quickly that this was a lot of back and forth and negotiating with sponsors was actually taking away from what I actually enjoyed doing, which was writing the news editor. And I was still kind of stuck in that middle kind of like trying to figure out what is the business model. If there is a business model here, when something happened in March 2020, we all know what. And I always finished my news editor signing off with a post scriptum telling people, hit reply,

tell me how you're feeling this week, how things are going, what are you working on? In March 2020, all of the replies I got were I'm feeling anxious, I'm feeling overwhelmed, I'm feeling lonely, I'm stuck, my creativity is completely gone. I can't get any work done. And I thought, what about instead of just having this one, way broadcasting relationship where it's just me writing something and sending it out to sending it out to all of these people. I create a space where people can actually talk to each other where I'm not in the middle anymore and where everybody can support each other. So I created the Neslabs community

and to make it sustainable and made it paid. And to me, this is the moment NessLabs actually turned into a business that had a clear business model and where I said, I'm going to write this newsletter for free. This is what I love doing. And anyone who wants to go deeper and who wants to connect with other people who are interested in these ideas can sign up and join the community. So what does the community look like? How do you actually do that day to day? I now have people to help me run it on a day-to-day basis, which has been immensely helpful. But in terms of how it works, it's very simple. We have recurring events where people can co-work together and support each other. And we have a section where anyone can post their current experiments.

So they can say, I'm currently working on this. This is the experiment that I'm running. And you have a lot of other people jumping in and saying, oh, that's interesting. I run a similar experiment in the past. Here are resources that might be helpful for you. Or just sometimes sharing words of encouragement. I call it a peer learning community,

because I think that the more you put into it and the more you learn in public, the more you're going to get out of it. So good. It makes so much sense to build a community around it. Okay, and I like that you're using the word experiments a lot. It would make sense that now as you've written this book that I'm really grateful for your team for sending it over an early copy, tiny experiments, how to live freely in a goal-obsessed world. And I got to jump on that first one, and you do too, to start your book, let's talk about goals.

Okay. And the very first part of your book is why goal setting is broken. And you talk about the traps of linear goals. So we'll start high and then drill down. But why is a goal setting process broken? The main thing is that it makes a lot of assumptions. And a lot of these are not conscious at all. So the first assumption it makes is that you know where you.

you want to go, which is actually a big assumption. We think we know where we want to go, but in reality, we sometimes lack that clarity. And we cling to the first goal that gives us that illusion of certainty as to what the future might look like. The second assumption that we make is that whatever we want today is what we will want in the future. But we change. The world changes. Our circumstances keep on changing. And so our ambitions should also evolve with us. and with the world. When we cling to a rigid, predefined goal, which is what is encouraged in traditional goal-selling frameworks, we might be so focused on getting there, on that specific destination that we miss other opportunities that might arise on the way there. And the other one,

which is more at a personal slash psychological level, is that a lot of people assume that once they get there, they'll be happy. That's what psychologists call the arrival fallacy. And very often we're disappointed when we do that. We get there or we don't. But in any case, we realize that happiness was not hiding just on the other side of that milestone, right? We're still the same person. And a lot of the challenges that we're facing on the day-to-day basis are still here. And so that leads to disappointment. What we tend to do, if we stick again to the traditional goal setting, approach is that we think the problem is not from the goal setting approach. We think the problem was with the goals or it came from us. And so what we do is that we just pick another linear goal

to try and get to because we feel like once I get there, then it will be fine. Then I'll be happy. What's a better way? Because like we're all strivers. We're growing. We are ambitious to do big things and make an impact and help people and be leaders. So if that process is not a good one, what is a better one? Well, you mentioned that I say the word experiment a lot. And that's because I do think that that is a better approach. And the main difference between trying to get to a specific milestone, a linear goal, and having an experimental approach is that in one case, you start with an outcome,

a very clear outcome, a clear vision and a clear plan to get there. Whereas with an experiment, you start with a hypothesis. you ask yourself, you say, huh, maybe this could work. My intuition is telling me, or the data that I have at the moment at my disposal is telling me that this could work. I'm going to run an experiment. I'm going to test it. I'm going to collect data.

I'm going to pay attention to the signals, both external in terms of success metrics, but also internal in terms of how I feel. And then based on that, I'm going to decide what to do next, what my next experiment is going to look like. And so in one case, you have the mental model of a ladder that you're supposed to climb in a very specific order. Whereas in the other case, when you have this experimental mindset, you have the mental model of a loop. You just go through each loop, you complete it. And failure is not this binary thing of like whether you got there or not.

Success is just learning something new. If your hypothesis was not correct, that's success because now you know. So let's get practical for a minute and talk about real life examples. For example, it is natural for every team in the NFL to say our goal is to win the Super Bowl. Or it would be natural for a company to say our goal is to do $1 billion in revenue this year. And then each team within that company would have their own goal that would add up to a billion dollars. And then each person within there would have a set of daily behaviors that they believe would help them lead to getting. the ultimate billion dollars, right?

Whatever that may be, just like a football team, everybody has their job to do on every play in order to hopefully make that play what would be deemed a success, which if you string enough of those plays together, you could win a Super Bowl. What is it about those goals that maybe aren't useful? And if you're in those situations

where it's either a billion dollars in revenue or winning a Super Bowl, what would be a better way to set goals for those organizations? Yeah, absolutely. So the big problem for me, and I've worked in a big organization before, several actually. And what I've seen is that we set those goals quite in tech. It's quarterly. Actually, we have OKRs and KPIs.

And then some of these succeed, some of these fail, right? What I've seen every single time is that when it fell, we kind of like budget a little bit and we make up excuses and we say that something happened and whatever. And then we go and we create just another different goal for the next quarter, right? There's not much learning going on when you do this. And so in the first place, I want to question, was it useful to have this goal? I don't know enough about sports. So forgive me for not using the NBA example, but I'll use the business example.

And a difference would be, for example, my goal is to make, I don't know, 100,000 in sales this quarter. to my goal is to book or to reach out to X number of clients of prospects for this quarter. And so in that case, you're focused on the process of showing up, on the process of learning and collecting data. At the end of the quarter, what's very interesting, and this is the big mindset shift here, is that a few things might happen. Well, first, either you manage to actually talk to all of the, these people to all of these clients, right? And so you could say that's success, but there are still

probably lessons to be learned here. Could it have been better? Did you actually burn out in the process? Because if you burned out in the process, that is not complete success either, right? That might mean that for your next cycle of experimentation, there might be other processes or more support that you need from the team in order to make that happen, right? But the other thing that's interesting is that let's say that actually at the end of the quarter, you did not manage to reach that number of meetings. Instead of saying, oh, I felt, you look at what happened and you say, okay, so this experiment got that unexpected results. I really thought I could do this and I couldn't. So what didn't work here? What can we learn? And again, what am I going to change for the next cycle of

experimentation? So this works. Is it going for like a number of clients that's smaller? Because that's just what's possible here? Or is it bringing in another team member to divide and conquer? Is it having shorter meetings? Because maybe I don't need to talk to them for an hour. After half an hour have become so good at this that they're convinced. What does that look like? Right? And so that's the experimental mindset where every time you start from a hypothesis, you complete the cycle, you analyze the data, and then you adapt your next cycle based on this without this binary definition of success. Gotcha. Okay. Let's say from a leadership perspective, you have people working for you

and you need to objectively measure are they doing a good job? Should I continue to have them on the team? Should I fire them? This is a very real thing that leaders go through every day. You've been in these environments. What are good ways to be able to ensure people are progressing and proving that they're helping the company hit,

I'm going to say goals that are helping the company do what they want to do and you as a leader are in charge of building and maintaining and growing a strong team, but you also have to hold your people accountable to ensure that that's happening. How do you manage all of that, which is kind of the messy middle, as you've written about in your book? I think not much changes if you're a good leader. I think we just need a little bit more honesty when you let go of someone. It's never because they didn't hit their sales targets. A good member of the team, it might happen that you don't hit their sales targets, but they will have a very clear explanation as to what.

what happened exactly. Maybe something happened on the client's side and things are delayed. Maybe they're not convinced that the positioning and the messaging that the marketing team created for them is working. But you're not going to fire them just because they didn't hit the numbers, right? You know they're working hard. You know they're paying attention to what's working and what is not working. And you know that they have a good explanation for missing that target. It's never just based on numbers that we let go of people. It's also never just based on numbers that we promote them. know that already, right? So to me, it's just about having a little bit more of an honest framework around this and being honest with the fact that actually we rarely know if we're going to hit

that artificial goal that we created for the team and instead say, okay, this is the experiment we want to run as a team. I want everybody to pay attention to what's working and what's not working. I want everybody to be transparent. I want everybody to learn in public. If you try something and it did not work, let's celebrate that. In the next team meeting, come and tell us, I experimented with this. It was a catastrophe. Do not do this. I tried it. It does not work. And that's the culture that you want to have. Gotcha. It's just like a lot of things. It's contextual. It's messy when you're dealing with people. There's a lot going on. If you try to make it black and white, that's just not how it works. You have to really dig deeper and understand the process.

daily behaviors, the actions that the people are taking to see to be able to measure, are you doing a good job or not? It's not just like, well, did you hit the number or not? And I know some lazy managers, that's how they manage, right? It's because it's easier. You don't have to do as much work. You just simply look at a spreadsheet and say, they're doing a good job and they're not, when it's always way, way more contextual than that.

Yeah, exactly. And that's why this shift that I'm suggesting is not going to work for anyone who wants a quick shortcut. It is really for managers and leaders who really care a lot and who feel like deep down, something is not working with the traditional approach and who want a different way of approaching it. But really what I'm offering is just a framework to do a lot of the things that they're probably already doing if they have a team that's performing pretty well. Got you. How about when people say, hey, when you're the CEO, okay, you have to cast a vision.

You have to tell the story. You need to be inspirational when it comes to where our company is headed and where we're going. And I know the majority of places I worked and for CEOs I work with, they're thinking about their messaging and their next speech at their quarterly town hall and setting this big, ambitious goal or this number to hit or We're going to be number one in the market and we're going to surpass our competitor by doing this. And here's what it's going to take to do that. What about that part of the CEO role of casting vision, of being ambitious, of telling that story, of setting ambitious goals? Like, what about that element?

What do you think about that? Yeah, same. Just looking around me and just talking with a lot of people in my community, it's rarely being the number one in the market. That's the most inspiring thing for people to decide to work at a company and stay there. So I think you can still be very inspiring. You can still be ambitious. I do talk about the work I do is for people who are both curious and ambitious. I am not anti-ambition.

I am very ambitious myself. And it's really more about casting a vision that is about the approach, about the values, about the principles, about the kind of world that you want to create versus we're going to crush the competition and we're going to be number one in the market. The interesting thing to you is that a lot of companies that base their vision more on that vision for the world and the impact they want to have in general,

which was the case when I worked at Google. We were never really motivated at a CEO level by we're going to be number one in the market, right? Especially for a search engine at the time when it was quite early when I worked there. It was already the case that Google was number one. people were Googlers, as they call themselves, were excited to be there because they felt like they could have a positive impact in general on the world and create products that would potentially change lives. So, yes, you can still be inspirational.

And I actually think that it can help you focus on the messaging that is actually going to resonate with people instead of focusing just on the numbers. What does it mean to escape the tyranny of purpose or the tyranny of purpose? Yeah, it's one of my favorite chapters in the book. So thank you for asking about it. So I discovered this really crazy stat when I was doing research for the book that the number of mentions of finding your purpose has searched 700% in books in the past two decades. So people have become obsessed with finding their purpose. And I think that's very dangerous. for a host of reasons. The first one is that it's assuming that you just have one purpose. And for a lot of people and many of the most talented people that I know, they don't have one purpose. They want to be an effective leader, but they also want to be maybe a good dad,

a good friend. They want to contribute to their community and they have all of those different purposes in their life. That is not just that one big purpose. The other one is that your purpose can actually change. We're very fortunate to live in an age where hopefully we're going to live for quite a long time. And so you can change, you can grow, you can evolve, and you can reinvent yourself. You can completely change careers if you want to at some point. And the last one is that it makes a lot of people miserable when they haven't found their purpose. So they look around and they feel like, oh, I'm behind. I got something wrong. I'm not living a meaningful life because I don't have this one true purpose when in reality when you ask around people how did you find your purpose a

lot of them if they're honest will tell you that they stumbled upon it they tried a lot of different things they worked on a lot of projects they met interesting people and then they got to work on a project on an idea and one day they woke up and they realized like I actually really love this I'm actually really excited to wake up in the morning and to work on this. Or I go to bed and I can't stop thinking about this thing. And might it be it? That's my purpose. Oh, I guess that's my purpose for now. That's the one thing that's going to really keep me excited. And again, knowing that that might change in the future. So that's why I tell people we should really try to escape that tyranny of purpose. And if you do find one for now, that's great. If you have

several, that's great. If you don't have it yet, that's great also. Do you have one now? I'm actually in this in-between phase, which is very interesting, where the past few years did feel like I had one because I was completing my PhD. I was writing this book. And so it did feel like I had this very clear purpose that I had to follow in that area of my life, at least. And now the book is launching.

I'm done with my PhD. And that's what I mean by escaping the tyranny of purpose is that I want to be okay with the fact that for the next few months, maybe the rest of the year, maybe longer, I might not have a clear purpose. And that's okay. I'm going to experiment. I'm going to keep on talking with people, having interesting conversations, working on different projects, without putting that pressure on myself that one of these needs to be my purpose. And I'll trust that at some point, something will emerge. When I read Ness Labs, if you were to ask me to guess what I feel like your purpose is like an overarching one with this book, with just what you do.

I would say to help people become the scientists of their own life. Would that be accurate? That's more of a mission, a company mission. And I think it's very helpful to communicate to other people, the kind of value that they can get from my work. And especially in this day and age where we usually have half of a second on the feed in social media for people to understand. what you're doing, I do find it very helpful to explain it in this way. But I would not necessarily describe this as my purpose in life. I have several, you know, like I have my family. I care a lot about, my friends I care a lot about. And to me, these are also very important. And these are

things that I want to dedicate to a lot of energy, time, and attention to as well. Gotcha. Okay. You write about uncertainty. And I think it's important to talk about uncertainty and you want to help people collaborate with uncertainty and create growth loops. And you go into it a lot. And I think it's important because I think what we're taught at least, and I've been taught as a leader is good leaders help create certainty. And you're talking about collaborating with uncertainty. So I'm thinking, wow, I really want to dig in here because I've been told,

hey, help people get more certain about things. That's what leaders do. They make people feel better because. they create more certainty in an uncertain world. And then I'm reading your stuff. I'm like, wait a second. I'm changing my mind. I'm like really going into it.

So what is it about collaborating with uncertainty? How do we do this and how will this make us better? I think it's helpful to go back to why we try to avoid uncertainty in the first place. It makes a lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective because our brains are designed to help us survive. And when you're in the jungle and you might be surrounded by lions, you want to make you their next snack, having as much certainty as possible is actually going to help with surviving, right? And so anytime you're in a situation where you feel like,

I don't have enough information, I don't know who the players are, I don't understand the rule, I don't know, you want to get out of there as quickly as possible. It's almost a self-protection mechanism. And this is all very helpful in an environment where the only objective is to survive. But if you're a leader in today's world, you probably don't want just your team to survive. You want your team to thrive. And so you really need to try and get over that instinctive fear of uncertainty that we all have,

which is perfectly normal. And instead, learn to befriend it, to listen to it, to collaborate with it. Because there is a lot of interesting data in understanding. uncertainty and you can make decisions there are a lot more innovative and creative if you learn how to stay in that space of uncertainty for a little bit longer instead of trying to rush to the other side as quickly as possible. So this is really what I mean by collaborating with uncertainty. It's instead of clinging to the first obvious solution that is going to give you a sense of certainty, which, yes, is going to be very comforting,

but is going to close many doors to you. Instead of doing that, being able to sit in that uncertainty and as a leader, even more difficult than providing certainty, really helping your team say, it's okay if we don't know yet. Let's just stay in here a little bit longer. Let's figure out what makes sense for our business, for our priorities, for the ambitions that we have.

and it's okay if it's not the very first clear solution that we go with. So it feels like you think it's a better idea to slow down a little bit more. Is that right? Yes, but not always. I wouldn't say that slowing down is the key feature of collaborating with uncertainty because sometimes you have to learn to collaborate with uncertainty very quickly depending on the pace of your industry. It is really just about.

not clinging to the illusion of certainty just to get out of there. And making sure that you're basing your decisions on what is good for the business and what makes sense and not on that fear of uncertainty that we all have. Do you have any examples or like a story or something to bring this to life? Yeah, absolutely. So you will see that a lot in startups where a lot of people are reactive. So you have a competitor that launches a product that is similar to you. you're a feature that is similar to you.

I've seen a lot of startup founders that I work with, that the first response is going to try and create another feature. That's just that but better. Like just responding in that way where all you want to do is being able to tell your team, don't worry. They did that. We don't know what that means, but we're fast.

We're going to launch something that's even better. Learning to collaborate with uncertainty is telling your team, let's wait two weeks and let's conduct a little bit of research. I want you to sign up to the product and use it and see how they copied this. How does it work? What happened here? I want you to do some user research and figure out if this feature actually makes sense, right? Or is that an important feature for us?

I want you to do this. I want you to do that. And you have this little tag team that is actually exploring the uncertainty, not trying yet to come up with a solution or a decision. just trying to understand what's going on. Who are the players? What are the rules? What's happening? Then let's reconvene together and let's make a decision.

But let's not rush because we're scared of that new uncertainty that has arisen in our business. Gotcha. Okay. That is helpful when thinking about uncertainty because I think effective leaders, this is a key point. Instead of just going super fast to eliminate as quickly as possible, to get maybe a shorter term answer that may be okay, it might take a bit more time to get an excellent answer that will help you and serve you better in the long term. And I think the type of

leader that's a learning leader is one that is working and playing long-term games, not just trying to win short-term transactions. Speaking of that, too, you write about procrastination. And I think of my conversation with Tim Urban. I don't know if you're a wait-but-why reader, but Tim writes all about procrastination too. And so I'm trying to embrace this. Why is procrastination something that could be useful? It's actually kind of a, it is a similar mindset. It is that experimental mindset that I just mentioned with uncertainty,

where in our society, we have collectively decided that some emotions are bad. We have labeled them as bad. And so we try to ignore them, to suppress them, to get rid of them. If you go on any search engines and you look, up how to manage procrastination, you're going to find a bunch of articles or all titled something like how to beat procrastination. And it's quite violent when in reality, this is just another signal from your brain. And so this is the change that I recommend having here is that instead of whenever you experience procrastination, to decide to just get rid of it or power through

using willpower or experiencing shame or self-blame, because, you're not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing. It's really all about reframing this and saying, oh, hello, procrastination, you're here again. What are you trying to tell me? And when you start doing this, there's actually so much interesting information in there that you can use to make better decisions around your tasks

and what you should be doing next. Wait. So can you explain? Because I have these moments And then I get done and I do. I get upset. I'm like, I didn't do anything. I mean, sometimes I get an idea or I'm thinking or, but there are other times where I get really upset because I feel like I just wasted hours because I was just doing nothing or reading some random stuff on Twitter.

How do we actually use this to our advantage? Yeah. So I share in the book a little tool that I find so helpful. I use it all the time because I do procrastinate too. And this is really, again, not about getting rid of procrastination. It's about rewiring your response whenever you face procrastination. So the tool is called the triple check. And it's about asking, why am I procrastinating?

Is it because of the head, the heart or the hand? So let's start with the head. If it's coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, even though it's subconscious, you think that this is not the right task to be working on or that the task is badly designed, not aligned with the business priorities, or maybe you're not the right person who should be working on this task. So there's a very rational reason for you to not do the thing. It's just that you haven't really surfaced it. And so it's at a subconscious level and it becomes procrastination. If it's coming from the heart, it means that although at a rational level,

you're convinced, it doesn't look like it's going to be fun. It doesn't look like it's going to be enjoyable. And so you're procrastinating. And if it's coming from the hand, it means that although at a rational level, you're convinced, at an emotional level, you're convinced, at a practical level, you feel like you don't have the right resources, the right support, the right skills, the right knowledge in order to do the task. And the great thing about this little tool is that it's not just telling you where the procrastination is coming from, it's also telling you what to do about it. So if it's coming from the head, you're not convinced. at a rational level. You can go back to your team and you can say, well, you know, I've been trying to work on this and actually I don't think this is the right approach. So you can redefine the strategy. You can redefine the task. You can say, you know, based on our priorities,

I don't think this is the right thing to do. If you don't feel like you're, you're the right person to do it, you can delegate it to someone else or in today's age, which is amazing, sometimes you can delegate it to AI. Maybe you're not the one who's supposed to do it. It's quite tedious and AI can do it for you. So that's for the rational aspect. if it's coming from the heart emotional, then you just need to make it more fun. So maybe you grab a friend and you say, let's go to a coffee shop and work on this together.

Let's do a little co-working session. Or you can create a reward for yourself. Like say, I'm actually going to go to this amazing restaurant tonight if I managed to finish this thing. And if it's coming from the hand, so it's a practical issue, then you can raise that hand. And you can tell your team or tell someone else,

I actually don't have the resources that I need. Maybe that looks like getting coaching. Maybe that looks like getting mentoring. Maybe that means getting access to a tool that is going to help you do this better. Extra training and online course. But instead of being paralyzed by procrastination, now you know where it's coming from and what to do about it. I could go on all day about the ideas in your book. I am curious and Laura, a lot about you and your story. You've written about your parents. You've written about your grandmother, Oma, I'm pronouncing that right. And you said Oma never had the opportunity to learn to read or write, and she would be so proud.

It's the final part of your acknowledgement section of your book. Can you tell me about her and why she would be so proud of the stuff that you're doing? Yeah, my grandma is, so I'm half Algerian, half French. So on my mother's side from Algeria and my dad is from Brittany and France. Yeah, my grandmother could not read nor write nor speak French. And so we had this really beautiful relationship that was a lot with touch and hugs and smiles because we could actually not communicate together. And she has actually taken a lot of risks in her life.

She has experimented a lot, even though she wouldn't have called it that, moving from Algeria to France, bringing all of her kids, fleeing the war. And as a woman also who grew up in Algeria and were the kind of projects you could work on was very, very limited there. It is a very patriarchal society. I think she would have been amazed and really proud to see that her granddaughter actually wrote a book and not in my native language either, because French is my native language. So I think she would have been really, really proud. Did you write this in French and then translator or write it in English? No, I wrote it in English. It's a really fun plot twist for me, but a French publisher actually acquired the rights

for the book and someone else is going to translate it back in French. Really? Yes. What was that? I don't speak to languages fluently. What is that like what is your brain thinking? Actually I got, I'm at a point now where I actually either think in English and speak in English or I'm speaking and thinking in French. And it's really, it feels like two completely different part of me.

Even my intonations and the way I move my body. are different in French and in English because it is associated with a lot of culture about how you express yourself. And I can tell when I spend a little bit too long in Paris and I go back to London where I live normally that I'm a little bit stiff and it's like harder to just go back

to just thinking and speaking in English. Wait, so wait, which one makes you more stiff? It's more, it's not that the French is making me stiff is that it's hard to, like when you're in one mode to switch back to the other one. And so I, you know, I struggle to find my words a little bit more in English if I spend a little bit too much time in France. So they're almost two completely different modes of being. Interesting. Okay. Also, when you write about your parents, anytime anybody writes about their parents, I think about my parents.

And then I also think about the fact that I am a parent. And you said, they've always made me feel like anything is possible. and I want to be that. I want to make my children feel like anything is possible. What do they do? And how do they make you feel? Because you've obviously gone on and done it. You're still in like the beginning part of your career and you've done so many amazing things

and impacted people in a huge way. How do they make you feel like anything was possible? I think the key kind of like mantra that my mom has for me is that it is not for me to decide whether something is going to be successful or not, and I should just give it a try. And she used that so many times in my life where I was saying things like, oh, there's no point in applying to this prestigious university.

There's no point in doing this thing. There's no point in starting this company because I'm not going to succeed. And she always said, that is not your job to decide. Your job is to show up to give it a try. Anything is possible. And anything is possible if you at least give it a try. Wow. How has that messaging impacted you as you've grown up and now are doing what you do?

It really permits everything that I do. I just think about this book, for example, I got blurbs from Adam Grant and Call Newport and all of these amazing people I had never talked to before. And as a child, I might not even have reached out to them because I would feel like, why would they even reply? They don't know me and they're, you know, so established in their own field. but I always hear this voice in the back of my mind from my mom saying, like, it's not your job. It's not your job to decide whether that's going to succeed or not.

And so I send the email. I always send the email. And if people don't reply, they don't reply. I apply to things. I applied for my program in neuroscience, even though I had no knowledge of neuroscience whatsoever before doing this. I sent my first newsletter, although nobody probably was going to read it at the time. And so, yeah, just give it a try. Anything is possible, but you need to give it a try.

try. I think people get excited to start projects, start a podcast, start a newsletter, start something, start a business even. What happens is then the initial excitement goes away after a certain period of time, six months, a year, two years, whatever. And then they quit. Most people quit. This is, this happens in my world where I get requested and asked, hey, can you help me start a podcast? And, you know, I like to help people because people have helped me and I think it's just the right thing to do. And then they kind of peter out most, most of them, if not almost all of them. How do you get past that initial excitement of trying something? And like, because you said, I don't know if anyone's going to read it, your first newsletters. And maybe they didn't, right?

How do you get past the initial excitement and keep going once, once that part, once like the honeymoon is gone? Like, what do you do to make sure that you keep at it? I think you do, you can just, um, use that as a signal as well and recreate a new honeymoon in a different part of your business. So in my case, for example, after launching the community after a year, it became really difficult for me to keep on logging in every day and answer all of the messages. And I could tell it was starting to feel like more like a burden rather than something I was excited about. And instead of saying I quit, I'm just going to close the community, I hired someone part time for just a couple of hours a day to log into the community, make sure that everybody had the answers to whatever they needed from me.

And then I focused on something else writing the book in my case. So I kind of always think about Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. That's what he did to. At some point, he got a little bit bored of the ad business. And so they gave it to someone else to manage within the team. And he went on to create a lab internally at Google to, work on different projects. And you can do that too.

You don't have to quit. I think people quit because they have this assumption that whatever it looked like at the beginning needs to keep on looking in exactly the same way. And so if you're bored of what it looks like now, you need to stop. When in reality, again, that uncomfortable feeling of, I'm kind of bored of this, I don't want to keep going. If you look at it, it can be also a source of information for you to start changing some processes and approach things differently in your business.

So good. And Lord, let's say you're meeting with somebody who is a recent college graduate and they want to leave a positive dent in the world, but they're not that sure exactly what they want to do, which is very normal. What are some general pieces of life slash career advice you'd give to them? I would say two things. The first one is always have space for experimentation in some part of your life. And I realize that depending on your circumstances, you might. have to just take a job, whatever job, when you finish college. And that's completely, okay, if at the beginning that's what you need to do, take the job, but always make sure that at

some point, even if it's a couple of hours on the weekend, whatever that looks like for you, there is a space where you're trying something new, you're experimenting, you're in contact with new people, you're learning new things and you're growing because this is how you're going to discover your next interesting step that is not that first linear option. that you had to go with when you finished college. So always make space for experimentation. And the second one is always default to curiosity. So whatever challenge that you face,

what is if it's uncertainty, if it's procrastination, if it's stress, if it's anxiety, whatever it is that you're facing, look at it with curiosity. Again, you just really practice this saying like, oh, hello, what are you here to tell me? What can I learn from you? Because when you do this, you can learn from any emotion and especially from the ones that have been labeled as negative in our society.

So good. I love the way you say curiosity, by the way, side note. Anyway, the accent's perfect. The book is called Tidy Experiments, How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed world. Really, really well done. And then also at nestlabs.com, great place to go read, as you mentioned with the newsletter. And Lord, I've been a fan for a while, and I'm very grateful that we had a chance to meet and have this conversation. And I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Thank you so much.

I absolutely love your questions. And thank you for all of the work you do as well. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan, at learningleader.com. Let me know where you learn from this great conversation with Dr. and Lord Lecomf. A few takeaways from my notes.

How about the goal setting process? What are the traps of linear goals? And in-Lawr talks about the fact that we think we know what we want. And we always assume we'll want the same thing as we progress, but that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes we need to iterate

as we go to figure that out. There's also the arrival fallacy, meaning we think we'll be so happy whenever we get the goal or achieve the thing. But the arrival fallacy states that that's usually not the case. So instead, we should focus on the process, the daily behaviors, the activities. We should run continual experiments.

And through those experiments, maybe we'll actually figure out what we want to accomplish. We might even stumble into them throughout the course of those experiments. And then I think it was really important to talk about uncertainty. and she writes the fact that we should collaborate with uncertainty, understand why are we actually scared of uncertainty? And it's most likely because it comes from such a long time ago where we were uncertain if that animal was going to try to come make us its next snack, as Anwar said. But that's not really a thing anymore, but our brains haven't really caught up. They were built originally just to survive. But now we don't want to just survive.

We want to thrive. So we can't necessarily cling to the first obvious conclusion. We should sit in it. We should wait. We should do more work before just trying to eliminate uncertainty quickly. And then how about having a vision as a CEO? And I think that's important. But instead of focusing on being number one in the marketplace and crushing all of your

competitors, how about we focus on our approach, our research? values, our mission, focusing on our company's daily behaviors more so than beating somebody else. Be curious, be ambitious, right? But have it be intrinsically focused, not externally focused on others. Once again, I would say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leadership with Dr. Anne-Lor-Lacomph. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And you should, subscribe to the show and you're ready to 0.5 stars and you write a thoughtful review by doing all that you are giving me the opportunity to chase my curiosities and do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to soon. Can we?