How to Build a Growth Mindset through Tiny Experiments | Anne-Laure Le Cunff | Glasp Talk #45
This is the forty-fifth session of Glasp Talk!
Glasp Talk delves deep into intimate interviews with luminaries from various fields, unraveling their genuine emotions, experiences, and the stories behind them.
Today's guest is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and founder of Ness Labs. With a background at Google and a marketing leadership role in tech, Anne-Laure is also a PhD researcher at King’s College London who investigates how neurodiversity, especially ADHD, interacts with AI, curiosity, and learning. She’s the author of Tiny Experiments, a book that encourages people to adopt an experimental mindset in their personal and professional lives.
In this interview, Anne-Laure shares how she transitioned from a linear, goal-oriented career path to one fueled by curiosity and continuous experimentation. She discusses her concept of a “growth loop” over a “ladder of success,” offering practical methods such as Plus Minus Next for self-reflection, Head-Heart-Hand for beating procrastination, and tangible strategies to prevent burnout. She also delves into how AI can serve as a powerful thinking partner—especially useful for exploring complex topics where we might not even know the right questions to ask. Throughout, Anne-Laure emphasizes enjoying the journey, seeing your life as a laboratory for discovery, and building community-driven learning experiences that focus on collaboration and experimentation over linear achievement.
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Transcripts
Glasp: Hi, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Glasp Talk. Today, we are very excited to have Anne-Laure Le Cunff with us. Anne-Laure is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and author, deeply passionate about the intersection of neurodiversity, curiosity, and learning. She is the founder of Ness Labs, a thriving learning community that helps knowledge workers achieve more without sacrificing their mental health. Through the Ness Labs newsletter, she shares neuroscience-based insights with over 100,000 curious minds worldwide. As a researcher at King's College London, she explores how neurodiversity, especially ADHD, interacts with AI, curiosity, and learning. She's also the author of Tiny Experiments, a book that empowers people to embrace a more experimental mindset in their personal and professional lives. With a background in tech, including a marketing leadership role at Google, and advisory roles in entrepreneurship networks, she brings a unique perspective on innovation, mental well-being, and lifelong learning. Today, we will dive into her fascinating journey, research on curiosity and neurodiversity, and how we can all experiment our way to a better life. Thank you for joining today.
Anne-Laure: Thank you for having me. I can tell that you're building a tool for connecting ideas and knowledge management because this is one of the best introductions that I've had in a conversation like this. So thank you for having me.
Glasp: Thank you so much. So first of all, congratulations on launching your book, Tiny Experiments. I really enjoyed reading it.
Anne-Laure: Thank you. Thanks so much.
Glasp: Yeah, then the first question is like, you know, we are curious, you know, what inspired you to write Tiny Experiments? And was there any personal or research-based realization that sparked the idea?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, Tiny Experiments is based on a combination of personal experience and science. So on the personal side of things, I kind of think about my career in terms of two different chapters. And there's the first chapter that was very focused, very linear, where I had a very clear idea of success. And that was the time when I was at Google and I worked on my startup. So I was very clear in my mind in terms of what success looked like. I thought that in order to be successful in life, you need to have a clear vision and then work hard to get there. And that did not work out well for me in the sense that, yes, I was successful on the outside, but on the inside, I was completely burned out and a little bit bored also because I had this entire plan, this entire map in front of me where I knew exactly where I was going. So it's a little bit like when you're going to watch a movie and a friend has spoiled the movie for you, it felt like that. My career felt like that. And it's only when my startup failed that I allowed myself to ask, what am I curious about? What do I want to explore? What is something interesting to me, even if I remove traditional success from the equation? And so I went back to university to study neuroscience, and this is when I conducted my first experiment in my personal life. I said, OK, I'm going to sit down every week and I'm going to write five articles every week. So that's going to be 100 articles over 100 weekdays. And that was the first experiment that I ran. I hadn't codified it in the same way that I did in the book. But the more experiments I ran, the more I noticed that this worked so much better for me. Rather than having this linear goal and this is a success you need to work hard. Whenever I started from a place of curiosity, whenever I asked myself, what is something interesting? And whenever I designed an experiment around it, not only I was more successful, but I was having a lot more fun also in the process. And I then discovered a bunch of research, which I talked about in the book, that supports this. So it's not just me. It's the case for everyone. As human beings, we are designed to use our curiosity to explore, to learn, and to grow. And so that was the inspiration for the book. My personal experience and then the science supporting that personal experience.
Glasp: It's amazing and I love it. And yeah, turning yourself and your life, you know, into like an experimental and learning kind of machine so that you can understand what's happening and what you're curious about. And so I love that. And if, you know, readers take away just one lesson from your book what do you hope it is? What's the number one takeaway from it or your favorite section or ideas?
Anne-Laure: This is a really good question. I think the main takeaway for me would be a change in mindset in general, really going from a linear mindset to an experimental mindset. And the way I see it is really when you think about the mental model of success that you have, the linear mindset has a mental model of a ladder of success that you're supposed to climb in a specific order, which comes with a lot of problems because we're all climbing our ladders and looking at each other and comparing our success to the success of others. And so if there's one change or takeaway for readers that I want to take from the book is replacing this mental model of this ladder that you're supposed to climb with the mental model of a growth loop instead, where instead of starting from this fixed goal, you start from a research question, a hypothesis. You just wonder what might happen if I try this and you design cycles of experimentation where you can't compare yourself to others because you're designing your laboratory of experimentation. So that would be the main change I would love to see for people reading this book is changing their mindset from a linear mindset with the ladder, the mental model of the ladder of success to an experimental mindset with the mental model of a growth loop instead.
Glasp: I love that. And also I love the concept of a Plus Minus Next method. And since I read your book I started using that method and that works well. And every week I was reviewing that week and what worked and what didn't work and so on. But you articulated the better way in a simplified way. I read it of that. Could you tell us what the Plus Minus Next method is with us?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. And it's connected to what I just mentioned. The idea of a growth loop is that if you keep on doing the same thing over and over again without reflecting, then you're not growing. You're just going in circles. Right. So you need to practice what psychologists call metacognition and metacognition just means thinking about thinking. It means observing your thoughts, observing your emotions, and how they connect to your behaviors. And so instead of just mindlessly acting, you observe why you're acting in a certain way, what's working and what's not working, and what you might want to change. And minus next is a very simple metacognitive tool. It's a tool that allows you to reflect on your thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors. And it has just three columns. It's very simple. I am not very good at naming, or describing the tool plus minus next. So in the first column, you write everything that went well, plus. In the second column, you write everything that didn't go so well or that was unexpected in a not-so-good way, minus. And then in the last column, next, in which I use a little arrow, you write anything you want to try next, what you want to tweak. So what do you want to focus more on or maybe what do you want to let go of? And this way you can iterate each cycle of experimentation. You can learn from what happened, the plus and the minus. And you can use that data to decide what the next cycle is going to look like. And this is how you create those growth loops.
Glasp: I love it. But I'm curious, how do you evaluate plus, minus, and next? If people have a goal, so people can understand, oh, this is working for the goal. But so it's an entire experiment mindset. So you can evaluate, so this is working, but maybe not. So how do you evaluate plus, minus, next?
Anne-Laure: Yes, this is such a good question. So as you said, when you run experiments, you don't have this fixed goal. You don't have this binary definition of success of saying either I get here, this is success. I don't get here. This is not a success. This is a failure. This is the traditional definition of success. When you run an experiment, success is learning something new. And if you think about the way a scientist approaches an experiment, if they already know the answer, if they already know how to get there, there's no point in running the experiment. When you run an experiment, it's because there is a chance that it's not going to work out. You don't know. You start from this hypothesis or this research question. So you just want to learn as much as possible. And instead of focusing on this end goal, you focus on the different signals of success. In particular, you want to make sure that you include both external and internal signals. And for this, I think an example can be helpful. So I ran an experiment, I think it was last year, maybe the year before, around last year. It was an experiment around YouTube. So I don't know why around that time in my life, all of my friends decided to become YouTubers. And so I was wondering, maybe I would like it also. My friends, they're quite creative. They seem to be having a lot of fun with YouTube. I'm also quite creative. I like writing. Maybe I will also like producing YouTube videos. But I wasn't sure. So I decided to design a tiny experiment. And I said I'm going to publish one video every week on YouTube until the end of the year. It was towards September, I think, that I started that experiment. So I experimented. I published the videos. And at the end, I did the Plus Minus Next to try and see what was working or not working. In the book, I also describe this tool that works well with plus minus next which I call the steering sheet. And it encourages you to look at both internal and external signals. So in my case for YouTube, external signals looked good. I had quite a few subscribers, quite a few comments, and quite a few likes. So if you look at the external metrics of success, successful, right? But if I looked at the internal signals, every time I had to sit in front of the camera, I hated it. I hated recording videos of myself. I was so uncomfortable. And because I was so uncomfortable, it was also hurting so many other areas of my work and my life. Because every day that I was supposed to record, I was procrastinating on everything else because of the anxiety around the YouTube videos. So it was impacting everything else also. And so this is an example of considering not just the goal, oh, I want to grow a YouTube channel, but the external and internal signals. Because if you're successful on the outside, but it feels miserable on the inside, then that's not success. So this is what you want to consider when you're running tiny experiments.
Glasp: Yeah. And then you mentioned the big topic, procrastination. It's a big topic for many people. And sometimes we rationally understand, oh, we should do this, but emotionally, we don't want to do it. And you mentioned like head, heart and hand, 3H method. Could you explain that to our audience?
Anne-Laure: Yes. The reason why I wanted to include that in the book is because, first, this is something we all experience. Procrastination is, I think, universal. Whenever I do a workshop and I ask people to raise their hands, if they're currently procrastinating on something, everybody raises their hands. We're all procrastinating on something. But if you go online and search for how to deal with procrastination, most of the articles that come back are about how to beat procrastination. It's a very violent approach. It's all about willpower, pushing through. And because of that, there is a lot of self-blame and self-judgment that is linked to procrastination. Whenever we procrastinate, we feel bad about ourselves because we think, why am I not doing the thing that I know I should be doing? And so in the book, I want to help people reframe this relationship with procrastination. It starts by understanding what procrastination is. Procrastination is just a signal from your brain. It's just a signal from your brain that something is currently not quite working, that something is stuck. And it's stuck at an unconscious level. So you don't know what's wrong, but something is wrong. And your brain is trying to communicate that information to you. But you're trying to beat procrastination. You're trying to get rid of it. You're trying to push through. You're not listening. So first, you need to listen to your procrastination. And it's almost as if, I know it's going to sound silly, but you kind of want to imagine that the procrastination is coming to you like a friend. And you're like, oh, hi. Welcome back. You're back. What do you want to tell me? I'm listening. And in the book, I share a simple tool that you just mentioned. I call it the triple-check. And it's just a way to structure that conversation with your procrastination. If you have this friendly conversation and you ask about your procrastination, are you coming from the head, from the heart, or the hand? If your procrastination is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not convinced that you should be working on this task. So maybe the task makes no sense. Maybe it's badly designed. Maybe you should not be the one doing it. And when I say you should not be the one doing it, 10 years ago, it would mean someone else needs to do it. But today, it means maybe AI should do it. Maybe you should not be doing it. And at a rational level, you know that subconsciously that you're wasting your time working on this. And so you're procrastinating. So that's the head telling you, we don't want to spend time on this. This task makes no sense at a rational level. If it's coming from the heart, it means that although at a rational level, you're convinced, okay, we should be doing this. At an emotional level, it doesn't feel like it's going to be fun or fun or exciting to work on this task. And so you're procrastinating. And so again, when you know this, you can start addressing it. That means that maybe you want to grab a friend and do a little co-working session to make it more fun. Or maybe you want to go to your favorite coffee shop. Or maybe you want to give yourself a little reward. Say, okay, I can go and get my favorite snack from the local bakery when I'm done with this task. Just making it more fun for you. And if the problem is coming from the hand, that means that the head is saying yes at a rational level. The heart is saying yes at an emotional level. But at a practical level, you don't believe you have the right skills, the right tools, the right resources, or the right support to complete the task. And again, that's what's amazing is that when you start having this conversation with your procrastination, it also gives you solutions. So if you know that the problem is coming from the hand, you can raise that hand and say, hey, I need help. So you can ask someone to coach you, or maybe you can get an online course, watch a video tutorial, read some blog posts, or ask in a community that you're a part of, but now you're not stuck anymore. You know there's a practical issue and you can get it fixed by addressing it. And so that's the triple check. Head, heart, hand.
Glasp: Yeah, I did it a bit. And I'm familiar with the concept called the Fog Behavior Model. It's like BMAT like behavior equals motivation, ability, and trigger. And have you heard of that?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, go ahead.
Glasp: Yeah, and I think one thing I was, I thought I was missing was like a trigger in this, you know, head, heart, and hand. But I realized, you know, you mentioned that, you know, procrastination itself is a trigger for our, you know if that decides if we should behave, you know, make a decision, you know, do it or not. And since procrastination is our best friend, and so we got to deal with that. But yeah, that's one thing I realized. But yeah.
Anne-Laure: Yeah. That's the, I think that's the challenge with procrastination, or at least the way we relate to it normally is that we associate it with being stuck. And so it becomes a self-perpetuating problem where we think that procrastinating is being stuck. And so we stay stuck. Whereas if you see procrastination as an interesting signal that is pointing to the problem, and that is also giving you a solution, then all of a sudden, when you're procrastinating, you can see it as a way forward, to reconnect with your productivity and your creativity on the task. So it's reframing your relationship to it.
Glasp: And so also regarding another, you know, big topic, like burnout. Sometimes we work on something so hard and if we're curious about something, and enjoying the process, sometimes burnout happens. And how should we balance like, I would say, productivity or mental health and so on? Do you have some thoughts or tips on what to avoid burnout? Sorry, it's a big topic, sorry.
Anne-Laure: It is a big topic, but it is an important topic. First, again, I think we could save ourselves a lot of trouble and avoid a lot of misery if we practiced listening to the signals from our brains. Very often they are early warnings, but we ignore them and we just think that we'll push through. And what's very interesting is that the more resilient you are, the more you have experience going through big challenges, the more you're going to think that you can deal with it and you're going to keep on pushing through and your burnout is going to be even worse because you ignored the signals. So really practice listening to the signals. And this is why I love Plus Minus Next as a tool because it encourages you to have a little check-in at least every week where you ask yourself, how are things going right now? And because there's the minus column, it also encourages you to, everything can't be perfect, right? So you can start writing about the little signals. Sometimes it can be being a little bit impatient with your friend or your partner. You go home, they ask you to do something and you go like, why are you asking me this? Right. Oh, interesting. I noticed that I'm getting a little bit snappy here. Sometimes it can be having a really hard time getting up in the morning. You're just feeling so tired and it's been, you know, three, four, or five days in a row that you're dragging yourself out of the bed or you're ignoring your alarm. Sometimes it can also just notice negative thoughts. And so we have these sometimes, maybe you're on your way to work or on your way to meet with a friend and you notice that you have a thought in your mind that's like, oh, I wish I could just be in bed right now. I don't even want to do this. That can happen if it's just something that happens rarely, that's OK. But if those are recurring negative thoughts, those are early signs that you might be on your way to burning out. So I would say first, very important, to have a metacognitive practice in your life. You can use Plus Minus Next, but that can be also journaling. That can be any other type of practice that allows you to create space for self-reflection and looking at your inner world. That's number one. Number two, if you do burn out, there is no trick. There's no hack. You need to take a break. You need to take a break. Everybody is asking what's the tip? How can I get back to work as quickly as possible? No, you take a break. There's no other way to heal from burnout than taking an actual break. And sometimes the break can be just 24 hours. It doesn't have to be a very long break. But it needs to be a proper full break. No checking your emails, no being in your calendars, no, you know, full break. You relax, you sleep for as much as you need that day. You go, you take a little walk, you make yourself your favorite food, you call a friend, and you treat that as a full holiday, full holiday. And then, you know, later on, when you feel better, you can catch up on work. That's okay. But you need a full break. And so I'm sorry for anyone who's hoping for a quick hack. There's no quick hack to recover from burnout.
Glasp: Yeah. Thank you for sharing the insight. And yeah, I recently realized that having a long-term view helped me, in my case, helped me focus on the current work. Meaning, let's say, in my case, I want to work on my project for the next 10 years, let's say. In that case, if we have a one-month break, it doesn't matter, right? Because if we run long-term, and so that one-month takeoff, you know, if you take off and that, but in total, if you can produce more, then that's, that's good. And so that, yeah, that's how I, how to say, deal with like, I've never felt burnout, frankly, yet, but I, you know, to avoid it, and I'm having, try to keep telling myself, have a long-term vision and then thinking all the time.
Anne-Laure: Yeah. And that's because you're focusing on the experience and the process and the journey itself. A lot of people also burn out because they focus again, on a linear mindset. You're so focused on the end goal. You want to get there as quickly as possible, so you push yourself hard. And also there's this social comparison where you look at other people, you're like, oh, this person I was in school with, I'm still here, they're over there. Again, that's that ladder. And we compare ourselves to each other. When you're not in that mindset, when you're in an experimental mindset, then you're enjoying this phase of experimentation, you don't know where you're going. In your case, you know, you don't know what the product is going to look like in five years, but that's a good thing. It's going to evolve. And there are so many opportunities to try new things, to make spectacular mistakes, to learn from them, to then grow in a different direction, to connect with people, to make new friends. And when you're optimizing for that quality of the experience, rather than getting there as quickly as possible, as you said, it makes sense to take breaks. It makes sense to take your time because you're, I'm using the metaphor of the movie again, you're enjoying the movie so much. You don't want to finish it as quickly as possible. You don't want to put it at two times the speed and just get to the end. You're enjoying each moment of the movie.
Glasp: And this is just a casual, random question, but what is your ideal holiday? What do you do when you, what is your ideal holiday? So what do you do? Like, yeah, before, yeah. The ideal holiday. Yeah. How do you spend the holidays?
Anne-Laure: Oh, actually, you know, this is something that I've been struggling with in the past few years where I haven't taken a proper, proper holiday in a long time, because I was working on my PhD and the book and running Ness Labs, I'm very fortunate that I love my work. So it's been something that's been okay for me to check on my work and my emails. But what I, what I've done though, I did travel quite a lot over the past few years. It was never a full disconnection. This is something I do want to do this year. I like going to places that are in nature or with quick access to nature. And I think the reason why is because I live in London, which is very urban and London has beautiful parks, which is great. And this is also part of why I love it, but still, it's a city. It's quite noisy. It can be a little bit stressful to be in that environment. And so when I want to recharge and calm my nervous system and really rest, I always try to find places either abroad or in the UK that are more like in the countryside where it's a bit quieter and, also where time feels slower. I talk about that in the book as well. The two different words that the ancient Greeks had for time, are Kairos and Kronos, and where Kronos is the time that we use in our societies, which is the quantitative time. And this is the time of productivity. It's the time in your calendar, trying to do time boxing and be as productive as possible. And Kairos is the quality of time. It's the moment when you lose yourself in a conversation and you check the time and you feel like, oh, what happened? I need to run because I just completely lost track. It's those moments where you realize that time is elastic, that it can expand and it can contract. And so to answer your question about the ideal holiday, for me, the ideal holiday is the kind of holiday where I lose track of time, where time becomes more elastic, where it has this kind of quality to it that is so different from the quantitative approach that I have when I'm focused on my work.
Glasp: Yeah, I love your focus on focusing on the quality of time, being in the present, and engaging with the moment and that advice, I love it. And by the way, I don't know if someone asks you this question, but, you know, do you have any section or concept or ideas that you wanted to put into the book, but you edited out during the editing process?
Anne-Laure: Yes, it's linked at the end of the book, so I link to it as a bonus chapter. We decided to cut with my editor an entire chapter, which is called Mind Gardening, which you know, I know you know about, right? We connected over that concept many years ago, the first time we talked to each other. So Mind Gardening is the idea of treating your mind like a garden, where certain aspects of it can be created in your mind. So you are creating your mind sometimes by thinking and you are right Instead of trying to structure everything in advance, like an architect, you're letting ideas emerge from seeds that you plant. So you plant seeds of ideas that you find in books and podcasts, online, on blogs, and then you grow branches. You connect the ideas and you create new ideas based on connecting those ideas, and you harvest the fruit of your mind garden. So it's a metaphor that I find helpful because it encourages people to not just collect information but also become creators, to create new content from what they curate. So you go from, and I used to have a course call like that, but going from collector to creator. And that's the idea of mind gardening. I wrote this entire chapter about how to create your mind garden, how to collect ideas and plant the seeds in your garden, how to connect them to grow the branches, and then how to create those fruits that you can then harvest and share with the world. This chapter turned into a monster of a chapter that became bigger and bigger and bigger, almost as if it wanted to be its book. And so we ended up just cutting it, putting it online, and there's a link at the end of the book that says that this is a bonus chapter. So it's a chapter I love, but it was indeed becoming too big for being part of the Tiny Experiments book.
Glasp: Would that be the next book for you?
Anne-Laure: I don't know because I feel like I've written so much about it already. And to me, part of what I love about the creative process is when I start from something where I don't feel like I know everything about it already, and creating is a way for me to learn. So I usually like, and this is how I write my newsletter as well, I take something I'm curious about. And the creation process is part of my learning process. And so for me, because I started writing about mind gardening years ago, I have written newsletters about it, I have created courses, and I have given so many interviews about the topic. I don't know if I would have it in me to work on a book over two, three, or four years on this topic. I think I would need something a little bit newer, a little bit different, and a little bit more outside of my comfort zone for the next book.
Glasp: Yeah, I'm so excited about that. And yeah, and also you mentioned Ness Labs and how you write articles and come up with ideas. And we want to move on to Ness Labs. So before that, I have random thoughts and wanted to ask, or I wanted to share them with you. And so I did it up the outline, like in your book, like pact and act, the act and impact. It all contains acts, right? But since you, I remember you're from like France, Paris, and I saw it's an acronym for Paris, but it was missing S. So I saw you put like subtract or something in the end, but you know, just wanted to let you know, just a random thought.
Anne-Laure: You know, it's funny because another word, so pact, act, react, impact, also spells Paris, which is also a French word, which means making a bet. So there's no need for the S, it means making a bet. And when you think about it, when you design an experiment, it's a bit like making a bet. You have a hypothesis, you think it might go a certain way, but you're not quite sure. And sometimes you're wrong. You know, it's like the null hypothesis. Sometimes you find out that actually, that's not what you expected that happen. And so, yeah, Paris, bet in French.
Glasp: Wow. Sorry, I didn't know that, but I loved that. Yeah. Glad you clarified that part today. Thank you. So yeah, let's move on to the Ness Labs and newsletter and community. I love the community because you mentioned social focus, social flow matters and learning community helps, right? So Ness Labs is a thriving learning community. I love that. And could you briefly tell us, you know, why did you start Ness Labs and how it's growing, how it's going?
Anne-Laure: Yes. Ness Labs, the community also kind of started like an experiment. I wasn't sure if that was going to work or be useful to people. So I used to have in the newsletter, a little post scriptum at the end of each newsletter that just say, like, how are you doing? Hit reply. Tell me how you're doing. I don't have this anymore because the newsletter has grown quite a bit. And so if everybody replied and told me how they were doing, it would be really hard for me to manage. But in the early days, I had that. And so every week I had a few people reply and just tell me what they were working on. And it was always a nice way to connect with readers of the newsletter. And in March 2020, we all know what happened. I started receiving replies from everyone saying, I'm stuck at home. I'm feeling anxious, disconnected, a bit depressed. My creativity and my productivity are completely gone. I'm just at home, really struggling to get any work done. And I'm frankly feeling a little bit lost. And so that was the beginning of the pandemic. And people didn't know what to do with the lockdowns being in front of their computer the entire day and not knowing what to do. So I thought maybe instead of just broadcasting information one way where every week I send a newsletter, I could create a platform where there would be a multi-way connection between people where they can learn from each other. So not just learn from me, but support each other in their learning journey. And around the same time, I discovered this new community platform called Circle. And I thought, oh, you know, I like trying new tools. So let's try it. I created the Nest Labs community using the Circle platform. And then I went into my newsletter in the dashboard. And I took the 300 most engaged people who had been opening every single newsletter for the past few months. And I sent them personalized emails saying, hey, I'm trying this thing. Do you want to join? And let's see what happens. I think most of them, I think almost all of them said yes and joined the community. And so that was the little seed of the first 300 people who joined the Ness Labs community. That first year was crazy because we were all stuck at home. So there were maybe six or seven events happening every day in the Ness Labs community. And the reason why was because I was encouraging people to learn in public. So I told them, if there's something you're curious about right now, don't wait until you feel like you're an expert. Host a session. Do a little workshop. Let's learn together. And we had a bunch of virtual online meetups where we would take a topic that we knew nothing about. In the meeting, we would actually go and look up stuff, ask questions, and learn together. And we had like shared boards where everybody was creating a mind map together. It was amazing. And completely unsustainable. The only reason why it was so active was because we were all stuck in front of our computers. As soon as the lockdowns were over, the activity started going down. We had a transition phase where I had to figure out what is the future of the Nest Labs community in a world where, fortunately, people have a life outside of being stuck at home in front of their laptops. And it took me a little while to figure out. But now in the new iteration of the Ness Labs community, it's very focused on experimentation. So, we have a section where people can share their tiny experiments and their results. Everybody's supporting each other. And every month, we have sessions where we start experiments together. We have co-working sessions. We have writing and reflection. So, it's very centered on personal experimentation now with tools and events that are supporting this. Supporting people in becoming the scientists of their own lives. And that has become a lot more sustainable.
Glasp: Yeah. I love that. And I wasn't in the community. And I love the energy and passion of the community. Thank you for building and creating a community. Such great people and great, curious minds. And regarding newsletters, Kei and I are always curious about how you come up with ideas. And when you write an article, do you have some format or structure you care about? I remember we did your article about how you usually focus on showing facts or one statement and showing examples and showing actionable advice at the end of something like that kind of format. And, and yeah, how, yeah, how to come up with ideas and how to structure idea into like that's the article. And could you share the process with us a little bit?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. So I always start from my curiosity inbox. So I have, and I use Roam for my notes, and throughout the week I read things, or even after this conversation, I might have some ideas, things that we discussed that were interesting. And so I take little notes on my phone when I go about my life. And all of that goes into my inbox where I have ideas in there. And so when it's time to write an article, I go to my inbox. And again, I use my curiosity to pick something that I find interesting. So again, it's never based on my current level of expertise. It's based on something I find interesting. I want to learn more about it, and I'm hoping that other, readers of the newsletter are also going to think that it's interesting. And in terms of the structure, you're right. I do tend to follow, even though it's loose and sometimes I will break that structure when the topic lends itself to it, but usually I will go with something like in the introduction, why, why is this interesting? Why do we care about this topic or this question in the first place? And to me, that's why I was interested in also telling the reader why they should pay attention and read the rest of the article. Then the second section, usually I go into science. This is the part where I go and read all of the research papers and I try to condense this and distill it into the key insights from scientific research about this topic. And then in the last section, it's kind of the so what section where I try to make it actionable. You know why this is important. You know about the science, but what do you do with that? And I think this is what makes Ness Labs, I hope, so helpful to a lot of readers that I just don't write about the science. I also try to translate that into practical tools that people can use. And that section is very different, but it could be three simple tips that people can apply. It could be a tool, it could be a little change that they can implement or a little experiment that they can run. This is the practical aspect, the takeaway of how they can use science in their life and work.
Glasp: Yeah, that's insightful. And thanks, yeah, tips. So, by the way, our community highlighted the most, the forgetting cup, that article at the Glasp community, and people like the content. But do you have your favorite, like your favorite articles? Let's say your favorite content, but fewer views or something like that, it is kind of a hidden gem.
Anne-Laure: Yes. OK, my favorite article, which not many people have read, is called Thinking in Maps. And so Thinking in Maps, yeah. I wrote that article during the pandemic, so I was at home and I spent so many days where I was just not talking to anyone, deep in research. I read so many obscure blogs that were written 20 years ago, still like old-school HTML that had never been updated. And it was amazing. And it's really about how human beings have always been thinking in maps in terms of connecting ideas. And you can see that even from the Lascaux caves in France, from very early human beings up to today, the way we have created knowledge graphs. And so I went through a bunch of old manuscripts from the Middle Ages and all through new tools from today. It's a very nerdy article, and I think that's why it doesn't have a lot of views. It's one of those articles that gave me so much joy to write, but that is not driving a lot of traffic to Ness Labs.
Glasp: Do you repost, re-write, or repurpose the article?
Anne-Laure: Yeah. Oh, you do? I did that last year a few times because I was working on the book and it was around the time I had to submit my PhD thesis. So I went back to older articles and I refreshed them. So instead of taking hours and hours to write an article from scratch, I would take an article from 2020 and I would go and read the latest research on the topic and update the article and sometimes even update the how-to actionable section. If there was new research that provided more information. And so instead of taking a very long time, it would only take me a couple of hours. That saved me so much time in that very busy period when I had to finish writing the book and finish my PhD thesis at the same time. And I didn't have the time or energy to write anything new from scratch for the newsletter.
Glasp: Looking back at the article, that's one of my favorite articles, and I found a great quote in the article, one of the characteristics you will find of polymers is that they see links where we see separations. For Leonardo, everything is linked up. It's yeah, I love that.
Anne-Laure: Yeah. That's a beautiful quote. And I'm so glad that this is also one of your favorite articles. This is also the reason why I don't care that much about how popular the articles are because sometimes I've made friends based on very obscure articles on Ness Labs. And sometimes the nerdiest articles attract a certain type of curious mind where I know I'm going to have amazing conversations with them. And so instead of reaching 20,000 people who maybe would have read it in a very superficial way and don't care that much, sometimes you just need one person to really care about what you wrote and then you connect with them and they can become either a friend or a creative partner, creative collaborator in the future. And then to me, it was worth it. Not only do you get the joy of writing the article yourself, but you also get to connect with another human being who's interested in similar topics. So that's why I know it's hard on the Internet to not care about the number of subscribers, the number of likes, the number of views. I think it's important to remind ourselves that ultimately the two objectives of creating content should be learning your personal growth and connection with others. And the number of likes or views doesn't necessarily translate to actual human connection.
Glasp: Yeah, I agree with that. Yes, thank you. And so I want to touch on this AI. So since, you know, many people are using AI nowadays and it replaces the intelligence and helping us, you know, the intelligence part in our society. So how do you what or how do you see the impact of AI on learning or our curiosity from the founder perspective or neuroscientist perspective?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, from the curiosity aspect, I think it helps a lot because in a very similar way that when we started having search engines, we started asking more questions and looking up the answers. This is doing a very similar thing here. So imagine, you know, 50 years ago, if you had a question about something random and you didn't have immediate access to it, you would just forget about the question and move on with your life. Right. And you would never know the answer. When we started having Google, you would just look it up and you would you would satisfy your curiosity by looking up the answer. But also with search engines, we developed a kind of a knowing that some answers you could not get. You know, it's it's there's there are questions that are too complex for Google to answer. And so we would not search for this. Now, there's no question almost that you can get an answer for. So to me, access to AI tools is expanding the realm of our curiosity, because now we can allow ourselves to be curious about so many more things. You can even ask questions about things where you're not even sure what the question is. You can tell an AI, hey, I've been thinking about this thing, but I don't even know if I have the right words to express this question, because this is very nebulous for me and I haven't read any books about it, I don't even know the right vocabulary, I don't even know if my question is crazy. You can type all of that in ChatGPT and they will still reply to you and they will still tell you okay are you thinking about this or that? Let me refine your question with you. So if you think about it, we're going to have the playground that we'll have for our human curiosity. It's going to be much, much, much, much, much larger now that we have AI tools.
Glasp: And do you use AI too in your research process and all?
Anne-Laure: Yes, of course. Yeah, I use AI a lot. I see AI as a thinking partner. So obviously it has replaced Google for me in a lot of different ways similar to I think most people who use AI. I just get a quicker, better, more in-depth answer and then I usually check on Google afterward to see the actual sources. But I often start from either ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity to ask my questions now. So there's just this research aspect that is facilitated by using AI. But also sometimes I use it just to clarify my thinking, the process I just described where I'm thinking about something I've been fascinated for a while with different theories of consciousness. And this is a very complex area that would overlap between philosophy, biology, neuroscience, physics, and all of that. And a lot of areas where I don't have deep expertise. I know enough about neuroscience, but even in neuroscience, you have so many different areas and whether you're looking at it at a cognitive level or molecular level, it's so complex, right? So that's what I describe where sometimes I don't even know how to formulate the question because I don't know enough. I've been having amazing research conversations with AI about theories of consciousness because I can ask my questions like a child when I don't know the right words. And it can point me to an author, a different book, a different perspective. And it can also help me make authors have conversations together. So if I say, Oh, okay, tell me more about this. And can you tell me about some authors that disagree with this statement? Cool. It sends me here. Now, what if I wanted to read about someone who connects those two ideas? Yes, AI will reply and recommend another book.
Glasp: This is amazing. And yeah, I think I was already a little bit addicted to Wikipedia before. Now I'm developing a problem with Claude. This is another issue.
Anne-Laure: Yeah, I now have the same actual process. I use I prefer to use ChatGPT and I less Google nowadays. But yeah, I have the same opinion.
Glasp: Yeah. So do you have a few more minutes? And we have two more questions. But, okay. The one last question. So about legacy, you mentioned in the book about legacy and generativity. But since Glasp is a platform where people share what they're learning, reading as additional legacy, that's what we see how we see. But, we want to ask you this question, what impact or legacy do you want to leave behind for future generations?
Anne-Laure: Yeah, I love that. This is your question. Because as you know, I have an entire chapter in the book that is about letting go of legacy and replacing it with generativity. Legacy is about focusing on the impact that you will have on future generations, whereas generativity is focusing on the impact that you can have right now, in the present moment, on your community, and on fellow human beings who are sharing planet Earth with you at this moment. So I'm trying to focus on generativity, in the sense that I'm trying to have a positive impact right now trusting that it will have ripple effects in the future. And so to answer your question, I don't know what legacy I'm going to have. But in terms of the change that I want to see right now in the present, I would just love to see more people run experiments in their lives, really treating their lives as if they were scientists seeing it as a giant laboratory. And instead of feeling like they have to follow a fixed path, instead of following the scripts of success that they've been taught, that our society is telling us to follow, feel more comfortable with injecting some experimentation, trying new things, failing, learning from this, and, if possible, learning in public, learning with others.
Glasp: Very beautiful. Thank you. So if you know, the audience wants to learn about the Tiny Experiments, where should they go?
Anne-Laure: Yes, you can go to tinyexperiments.org. This is the website that has all of the links to buy the book. But you can also just look up the title of the book, Tiny Experiments, on any website where books are sold. Or you can go to your local bookstore as well. If you want to subscribe to my newsletter, you can go to nesslabs.com, and enter your email address. I send it every Thursday.
Glasp: Thank you. And thank you so much for joining us today. We learned a lot from you.
Anne-Laure: Thanks for having me. I loved your questions. Thank you.
