In this episode, I unpack the lessons from “Tiny Experiments” by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
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Full Transcript:
So in the following four parts of this book, you will learn how to get started by committing to curiosity, keep going by practicing mindful productivity, stay flexible by collaborating with uncertainty, and dream bigger by growing with the world. That’s how she lined things up. And this book is, again, Tiny Experiments by Ann-Laure LeCom. So.
She kind of starts by talking about how goal setting is broken. She said she calls it the trap of linear goals. So she talks about how linear goals is a typical goal, has three main problems. They can stimulate fear, they can encourage toxic productivity, and they can breed competition and isolation. She talked about how French philosopher Rene Girard called this phenomenon mimetic desire. We desire something because we see others desiring it. In other words, our goals mimic the goals of others. So we can mimic things, it can cause fear, it can cause some issues. So she talks about
When you’re in a situation, there are two responses you can have to any given situation. How the stimulus hits you and how you respond to it. Response one can be discomfort, fear, and helplessness. Response two can be delight, calm, and curiosity. She gives the example of being on an airplane and just being scared of flying. So how do you handle that response? Do you live in that helplessness and fear or do you look at the curiosity and try to make yourself calm? And it’s easier said than done, but it can certainly help.
She says, uncertainty becomes fuel for anxiety. So just the fact you have uncertainty is problematic. This next part was super interesting. She said, quote, in fact, uncertainty has been found to cause more stress than inevitable pain. When we don’t know what’s coming, we overthink every possibility and we conjure worst case scenarios. So if you know something bad’s coming, that’s bad. But if you’re uncertain what’s coming, that can sometimes be worse, which is crazy to me. But yeah, she cites some studies for that. So when this happens, we fall back on up to three defense mechanisms where we abandon
our curiosity or ambition or maybe both, which are cynicism, escapism and perfectionism. And think we’ve all fallen prey to some of those before. So the mental shifts she talks about to kind of go from trying to get back into the right shape for experimentation is to go from response one to response two. So go from this comfort and fear to the delight and calm, which again, easier said than done. Go from fixed ladders to growth loops. And we’ll talk about that in a little bit, but fixed ladders being a traditional goal where you go up in a growth loop where you just kind of experiment and try things and kind of just keep making yourself better.
and going from outcome to process, focusing more on the process of what you’re doing than worrying a little bit less about the outcome to make sure you’re doing the right things and growing the right way. Next she digs into the tyranny of purpose. She talks about how purpose can be problematic. So one thing she says here, she says quote, when we fixate on finding one singular purpose, we rule out the side quests that help us grow the most. Your life doesn’t need to follow predictable acts and arcs. The best stories are full of surprises, with colorful characters and unexpected plot twists.
So in her case, she actually worked for Google for a while. She wanted to work for Google, that was her goal. She got her dream job there, it was fantastic. And then she left to start her own company, doing things with a company called Nest Labs, which is how I discovered, I found that some years ago. But yeah, she didn’t follow that path. She kind of let the side quests kind of go where they went and it worked out well. She talks about the shackles of cognitive scripts, kind of following just these scripts that seem to be laid out for us, they don’t always have to follow that way. She says, let’s see.
Research has expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions, and decision making from work to relationships and education, giving rise to a branch of cognitive science and cognitive script theory. So these scripts that were kind of built into our life and to explain that further, she talks about three scripts that kind of keep us locked in to artificial boundaries. She has one, the three are the SQL script, the crowd pleaser script, and the epic script. So the SQL script,
I’ll kind of read her words here. She said, call this phenomenon the self-consistency fallacy, the assumption that I’ve always acted in a certain way, therefore I must continue to act in this way. So this is how I’ve always done it, this is I always have to do it. We kind get stuck in that script. The crowd pleaser script is when we get stuck following the crowd. And the epic script is when we follow our passion. We hear a lot about you should follow your passion. And she kind of goes against that a little bit. Not say you shouldn’t follow your passion, but just be careful how you follow your passion.
I’m gonna read, she wrote a good bit about this. I’ll read just one chunk of what she had to say about following your passion. She said, the popularity of the epic script is largely due to survivorship bias. When we mistake a successful subgroup as the entire group overlooking those who failed. This phenomenon is particularly common in entrepreneurship. We try to emulate the success of a few successful founders without realizing that the purpose driven narrative they promote doesn’t take into all the other factors involved. Luck, money, support network, those sorts of things. So.
Survivorship bias is super interesting to look at because you see where these four people did this and it worked out great But you don’t see the other 400 people that did the exact same thing and it didn’t work out great because of luck and money and other things that happen It can be a dangerous thing to not pay attention to So she does about unlearning your scripts trying to break out of those a little bit She mentions Alvin Tauflert of the futures who coined the term in front of information overload in the 70s Wrote that the illiterate our times will not be those who cannot read and write those who cannot learn
unlearn and relearn. So kind of breaking those scripts can be important. So she gets into experiments. Again, the book is called Tiny Experiments, the experiments you can run like with your life. So she talks about three questions you can ask yourself to help avoid the trap of the sequel and the crowd pleaser in the epic. So she asked these three questions. Are you following your past or discovering your path? Are you following the crowd or discovering your tribe? Of course, know, Seth Godin talks a lot about building your tribe, the people that believe what you believe and kind of go there versus just following the crowd.
And then are you following your passion or discovering your curiosity? And that’s her big difference there is she’s worried less about your passion. Just discover curiosity and kind of go that way. One way to start doing this. She talks about a idea called field notes and I’ve done a little bit of this. I probably could do it better. but she’s just says, take, take these notes, have a notepad. could be a paper notepad. could be your Apple notes. It could be wherever you want to save notes and just write about different things that happen throughout the day. Your insights, your energy, your mood, your encounters.
So like your insights, your moments of curiosity or random thoughts, new ideas, just jot things down for that. Your energy, it’s wise to write down your energy levels throughout the day so you understand what gives you energy and when you have more energy. Talk about your mood, your emotions during or after an experience, whether it’s a meeting or a workout or podcast or whatever, track that kind of stuff. And your encounters, talk about your social interactions and new connections and how your feelings and thoughts and insights arose from that.
So big part of what she’ll talk about as she gets into this is having a pact, setting a pact with yourself. Kind of instead of a goal, you set a pact. It’s similar, but the idea of a pact is a simple sentence that she says, I will action for duration. I will do this for this long. And so how does that really work? So she talks about a pact being purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable, P-A-C-T, purposeful, actionable, continuous and trackable. So again, not unlike a SMART goal in a lot of ways, the difference is,
I will action for duration. You want to try this new thing for a while and then see how it goes and we’ll talk more about it. What happens at the end. So she says a pact is not a habit. It’s not a new year’s resolution. Those don’t ever work. A pact is not a performance metric and it’s not a resource intensive project. And so she talks about ways to start the pack, but just think about, I will action for duration. We’ll talk about some examples there, but she gets into things like I will publish a new video on Tik TOK every day for 30 days.
or I will exercise three times a week for six months. So just kind of have some set duration and try things out and see how it goes. Then you can reevaluate later. ⁓ She gets then into act where you talk about, you know, trying to be mindful about how you do things and finding the magic windows of time where things work well. She says, whatever the trigger, this form of this toxic form of productivity becomes a hidden motive that influences our choices and actions, pushing us toward constant output while downplaying the value of arrest, reflection and meaningful engagement.
So she’ll get big into having rest and doing things. And again, if you have a hard specific goal, you can sometimes get out of that mindful productivity into just the toxic productivity, which can be problematic. Something I certainly have fallen prey to quite a lot and still do from time to time and I’m working not to. She then talks about the two types of time. And I’ve heard this before, but never heard it broken now like this. So I thought this was interesting. So we’ll talk about two ways to manage time here and I’ll read just what she said. She said, quote, the ancient Greeks had not one, but two words to speak of time.
The first one, chronos, refers to quantity. This is largely how most of us in the modern world relate to time. It’s a time of clocks and calendars or productivity tools and linear goals. The Greeks valued this qualitative view deeply so much that they had a second word for time, kairos. Kairos expresses the quality, not the quantity of time. It recognizes each moment is unique with a unique purpose rather than a fixed unit to be mechanically allocated. And I like this line she said here. She said, kairos is when you feel like this moment
right now is perfect. And so you’ve all had those times where you’re with your family or on vacation, you’re doing something, you’re like, wow, just looking at this is perfect. And that’s what Kairos is, is I’m saying this moment is perfect. You’re not worried about this last 37 minutes is perfect or July 28th is perfect. You’re not worried about the specific Kronos of it. It’s the Kairos of it. This moment is perfect. And this is recognizing that feeling. So she talks about your magic windows, trying to manage your physical resources to manage your energy and your cognitive resources to manage your executive function and
We’re just kind of keeping track of that stuff and keeping track of it’s kind of the key with those field notes to understand where you have the most energy during the day when you can think most clearly during the day. Getting into the cognitive stuff, she talks about multitasking in good bit, which as a lot of books have said, and I tend to believe is kind of a myth. We can’t really multitask. She says, quote, we fancy ourselves adept multitaskers, but studies show that our performance dropped dramatically when we attempt to focus on more than one thing at a time. That’s because the human brain has an attentional bottleneck impacting both perception and action.
In short, our efforts to get more done actually slow us down. And so she has a solution for this called sequential focus. The key is to use sequential focus, doing one thing at a time by accepting that you can’t maintain equal effort across all the essential aspects of your life, deciding moment to moment what your priority is, and giving that your undivided attention. There will always be competing priorities. But instead of trying to maintain an artificial balance to keep all the balls in the air simultaneously,
You can use sequential focus to choose one priority at a time and devote all your energy to it. And so that can be your family, your work, things for yourself, but just pick the thing you’re gonna do and just go all in on it and then do the next thing rather than trying to juggle a few things at once. mean, certainly with kids and families, you have to try to juggle things from time to time and we can’t escape it, but the more you can kind of focus things individually can be fantastic. Managing your emotions, you talked about emotional resources. You know, again, manage your energy, your executive function and your emotions. Just kind of looking for the time there.
gets a lot into designing a kairos ritual. She gives a lot of examples in the book. I won’t get into all those. But like one example she has here is talks about a nurse here who says, quote, I go to another room, close the door and take a few deep breaths. Closing the door creates the sense of a separate space. And so she’s found she’s kind of getting trapped in the Kronos and wants to get back to more kairos and kind of being in the moment. She goes to another room, closes the door to make it a separate space, takes a few deep breaths and then kind of gets back to work. It’s not a big drawn out thing. And it’s a nurse. I’m sure she’s a lot going on, but just taking that.
20 seconds or whatever it takes can make a big difference. Next she gets into procrastination. Her title of this chapter is, procrastination is not the enemy. So we hear about procrastination as bad thing and it certainly can be. ⁓ But yeah, she talks about there’s advantages to procrastination or at least advantage to understanding why you’re procrastinating and trying to solve that problem. So first she talks about the death by two arrows. There’s a longer quote but I think this is fantastic here. She says, as in the teachings of the Buddha, there are two arrows.
The first arrow that strikes is procrastination itself in the form of myriad activities we can turn to while avoiding our tasks, scrolling instead of studying, watching TV instead of working, browsing shopping sites instead of writing. That’s problematic. The first arrow you could survive. It’s the second arrow that’s the real killer. That arrow is not the procrastination itself. It’s your emotional reaction to it. Studies have found that adverse psychological reactions such as anxiety and shame often accompany procrastination. She quotes here Dr. Tim Seichel. She says quote, or he said,
quote, there’s nothing like the downward spiral of procrastination to make you feel like an abject failure. That’s why the strongest emotion associated with procrastination is guilt. so procrastinating is bad in and of itself, but then the way you feel about procrastinating is even worse. And I think we’ve all done that. If you choose to skip a workout or eat poorly or skip a task or whatever, doing that’s bad, but then you feel so bad about yourself and about what you’ve done. And so just being careful not to do that. Don’t feel bad about it. Try to figure out what actually happened there. So she talks about
If you’re procrastinating, ask yourself whether it’s coming from the head, the heart, or the hand. And so the head is saying, is this task appropriate? Is this something I should be doing, seeing what’s going on there? The heart, is the task exciting? You know, that might be the problem. And then the hand is, is the task doable? And so between those three, you may find out like, you know, this task is not exciting and maybe you need to suck up and do it, or maybe the task isn’t doable and you’re kind of delaying because you know you can’t get it done. There’s just trying to look at why did you procrastinate? And it’s funny, she wrote,
She said in this chapter, this is the chapter she procrastinated the most about. And so she worked through her emotions there, tried to figure out why she was procrastinating about it and made it better than it was. The other thing she talks about here is looking outside yourself with procrastination. She says it may not be a personal failure, but it may be a system one. So she gave an example of another nurse in the book that had issues with procrastinating at work, but it wasn’t really her fault. The way the system was set up, the way their processes were.
It wasn’t something she did, so she had to work to fix the system rather than try to fix herself. And that’s a lot of, I think, where procrastination is, is not us just being lazy and flipping on the TV. It’s certainly part of it. But it’s just the system doesn’t allow you to do things on time. And so solving that can be, can be helpful. Next, she gets into the power of intentional imperfection, which I love. We talk about this quite a bit. She, she shared the story of a woman named Shonda Rhimes. said, Shonda has achieved remarkable success, not by striving for unattainable perfection, but by embracing the perpetual
juggle of life, where we must stay in the moment, never quite achieving balance, but constantly directing our attention to what is most important in the here and now. Of course, at our company, we talk about things like issues versus tensions. know, some things you can solve, but some things you just have to fight with the tension and be okay with that, that perpetual juggle of life that Ryan’s talked about there. Just be okay with that and know that it’s not gonna be perfect, but it can be good. More interestingly, she quoted Stephen Hawking, you know, the famous theoretical physicist, who said, quote,
One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn’t exist. Without imperfection, neither you or I would exist either. so imperfection is kind of what makes the universe and the world actually function. Imperfections are what leads to things changing and getting better and worse, but that’s what happens. So without imperfection, we wouldn’t exist, which is okay. And then ultimately she talks about better done than perfect. We’ve talked about this a good bit in different books and stuff, but.
Getting things completed versus trying to make it perfect can often be good. And there’s a balance there. I think I tend to drift too far to the get it done and make it wildly imperfect. So I think you certainly want to do things with quality. But what does that look like? And so she gives a few things to help with that. To identify perfectionist patterns. If you feel stretched, write down everything you’re committed to and describe what success would look like for each. You may realize you’re trying to be a perfectionist across too many things that can’t happen.
Challenge your unrealistic targets. You how much effort would it take to complete all those things? You may just may not have enough time. And then choose progress over perfection. You know, again, some things you need to get completed and out the door that are imperfect, but a lot of things in life are just progress you need to keep working on. You know, it could be your health or your wealth or other things. There’s never an end goal, just always getting better. Choose that progress over perfection. Next, she gets into collaboration. We talked about growth loops. I mentioned earlier the latter versus the growth loops. So again, growth loops are just kind of, you know, always kind of
being trying to improve yourself. She got into a tool of hers I’d heard of before, I heard her mention before, but never really unpacked, and I really like, I’m trying this, I’ve done it for the first week now, we’ll see how it goes. But she has a tool called plus minus next. ⁓ It does what it says in the tin with three columns. Positive observations go in the first column, plus, negative observations in the second column, minus, and plans for what’s next in the last column, next. And so you can do this after a project, I’m doing it as part of my weekly review, what went well in the week, know, plus minus next.
She talks about doing it in an annual review. There’s different times you can do this, but just pull out this tool, this plus minus next, and see what happens. So to break them down a little bit, for plus, she says, write down any accomplishment that made you proud. These could be largely work-related, but don’t neglect other areas of life, such as relationships, hobbies, and home life. Anything that’s positive goes in the plus column. In the minus, identify any challenges or obstacles you faced, whether it was a difficult task at work, an unexpected setback, or an opportunity you missed.
And so there’s things you could do, acknowledging the mistakes you made, biases you noticed, decisions you regretted. And then that next column, use insights from both the plus and the minus to shape your actions for the coming period. Consider strategies to foster more of the positive stuff and plus, figure out how to resolve some of the stuff in negative and the minus, and just kind of keep things moving forward. So she talks about that a good bit. ⁓ Yeah, again, I do it weekly. Here’s how she describes her annual. She says, plus minus next is a great tool for conducting an annual review.
Each year at the end of December, I sit down, go through all my weekly reviews, which I guess she has the plus minus and next in there too, and write a retrospective, which I publish in my newsletter. I get to see all that I’ve accomplished, all that didn’t come to fruition, and all the questions that remain to be explored for the next year. And then this, the idea of metacognition, kind of thinking about thinking, she said, it might feel uncomfortable at times. It’s easy to write about what went well, regardless of the specifics that led to the success. And that can be challenging too. say, this went great, and you gotta realize whether you actually impacted that or not.
but she says, it’s more difficult to write about what went wrong and even harder when it’s sometimes the case, we ourselves must take sole responsibility for why things go so well. So, you know, this plus minus next is an internal tool. So you should be very, very honest with yourself about what you did to impact the plus or what you maybe didn’t do and how you impacted the minus and all the pieces that go in there. She then gets into decision-making. So really kind of how you handle when your pact ends. So you have the pact, you know, the I will action for duration.
you know, completing it, she says, doesn’t mean you must now strive for more. Cause that’s kind of the, again, the toxic stuff we get into like, all right, I did that much. Now I gotta do more. I gotta do more. Always more. Not necessarily. Maybe that might be the right answer, but she says you’re at a crossroads where different paths are available. All things considered, there are three viable alternative routes for this transition. So when you finish a pack, you, you publish on TikTok every day for a month or whatever. Like after that month, you should stop and look at it and choose one of these three paths going forward, which are to persist, to pause, or to pivot.
And so persists, she says, the wind is in your sails, like do it. If posting once a day and TikTok’s worked well for you, then keep on going. That can be a certainly a valid option. Next could be to pause. If it’s draining too much energy, you may just want to put it on pause or perhaps reduce things. Or you could pivot, you know, the experiment could benefit from some tweaks, whether that is increasing or decreasing in scope or changing your tools and tactics. You may say, wow, this posting once a day and TikTok has been fantastic. I should ramp it up and post twice a day or three times a day because it’s doing so well for me or whatever the case may be.
Or again, it did okay, but once a day was too much, maybe I’ll do it, you know, once a week. Or you can change things, or can pivot. Again, get to that point where you can actually stop and evaluate things and see what’s happening. ⁓ Let’s see, in part of the pausing, the taking a break, I never knew this story. I don’t quite see the relationship here, but I thought it was super interesting. She said, according to Buddhist legend, the night Guatmabuddha was conceived, his mother dreamed of a white elephant. And so for many centuries, white elephants were sacred in many Southeast Asian countries.
Receiving a white elephant as a gift from a monarch was a great honor, but it was also a curse, as the animal is extremely expensive to maintain, protected from labor by local laws, and impossible to give away. People were stuck with this beautiful but useless possession with ruinous maintenance costs.” So again, she’s talking about taking a break. I thought it was interesting we hear about white elephant gifts, and I never really knew what that meant, but that’s what it was, is this white elephant that you get that’s a great gift to get, but really is not that great of a gift to get. So thought that was super interesting there. ⁓
As you’re trying to decide what you’re going to be doing, she says, you can ask yourself stuff along along the lines of external signals and internal signals. So as you’re looking at your pact and what happened, you can look at external signals like just facts and contextual information and practical limitations. How does that pact still fit with your current circumstances? Is it manageable? Does it conflict with other commitments? Are there things in your life that need more of your energy? Is it anything the world changed since you started? Look at those signals. Look at the internal signals as well. Your emotions, your motivations, your mental states. How do you feel about it now? Is it?
Fulfilling or is it a source of tension is that posting every day and tick-tock you feel great about it and seeing the reactions You’re like, oh I got to do it again Like that should factor into how you decide to go forward with it, you know It’s good to have done the test and now you can run with it either faster or slower or quit or whatever you need to do there Next she gets into dancing with disruption. You know what happens when things break apart She talks a little bit there really about the two-step reset. So
If you’re having trouble with things, you know, not going so smoothly, you can process the subjective experience or the objective experience. So again, kind of see what happened in real life and also see how you feel about it. And he gets a lot of that where you should look at the data, look at the numbers to what happened, but also see how it affected your emotional state. See how you’re, you’re going with that. And she says, ⁓ ride the wave of chaos instead of vainly trying to contain it. You know, things are going to go, go bad and contain when you can for sure, but just kind of ride the cast a little bit too.
The point is not to create a master plan that gives the illusion of power over the situation. Rather it is to deescalate the consequences of any setbacks and move forward rather than give up. So yeah, again, things will go sideways. want to, yeah, I like the idea of deescalating the consequences, making sure if it goes sideways, it doesn’t hurt too bad. And then just kind of figure out where it goes from there. Next, she talks about growing with the world and unlocking social flow. I thought it was kind of cool here. She talks about flow states. You know, we’ve seen the book flow and things like that, but we just kind of get just into that groove.
⁓ She says here research has found that flow states happen more easily in group activities than solitary ones Which I would have guessed the opposite I was a group stuff potentially would have been more distracting But I think we’ve kind of been in those situations We’re all just kind of humming and brainstorming and the whiteboards going and kind of getting that flow together can be great And so she talks about how group states can be great through three different effects She has he has the pooling effect the ripple effect and the safety effect. So the pooling effect is something Psychologists called transactive memory
which I love this idea. I’ve talked about this before with various folks, but it’s a system where individuals develop an understanding of who knows what, enabling them to leverage the group’s knowledge and make progress more effectively. And so this applies, I mean, applies in your job, you know, with Ali and I, we know different parts of the business and we’re okay with that. I don’t need to know everything because I know she does and vice versa. And with your spouse as well, I know with my wife, my wife keeps track of certain things in our life and I keep track of certain things in our life. We don’t both have to know everything that transacted memory can be great. That pooling effect can be super powerful. The ripple effect.
She says such interactions are especially likely in what researchers call communities of practice a group of people who genuinely care about the same issues and Frequently engaged to learn from one another so just being around those folks can make you all better And then the safety effect if you have a legal issue or lose a job or whatever having that group can help you You resolve those things and so tapping into collective things There’s kind of like three steps and kind of ramp up your commitment as you go the apprentice the artisan and the architect so the apprentice
Just invest in a few relationships, some deep conversations, be your authentic self, ask good questions, see what’s going on. The artisan, you can start looking to help other people on their journey, giving advice or collaborating with peers, volunteering to speak at events, of building up a little bit more. And then the architect, she says, eventually you may feel called to scale up your impact by shaping the vision and structure of the community or maybe even building your own community. And so the architect is kind of where you often want to get to build that community around you.
So she gives a few tips on that. She says, start scrappy, don’t overthink it there. Be upfront, don’t act like you know everything. Don’t overthink it. ⁓ Make it cozy. She quotes Adam Grant, who we all love. ⁓ He said, quote, the clearest sign of intellectual chemistry isn’t agreeing with someone, it’s enjoying your disagreements with them. So make it cozy where people can disagree respectfully and don’t hold the reins too tight. Let other people help lead and grow and do that sort of thing.
As she gets toward the end here, she talks a lot about learning in public and sharing, sharing your learning as you go. And that’s kind of what her company Nestlabs has done. She shares so much what she does in public as she’s learning and succeeding and failing and all the things there. She says, you know, stepping into the arena, you should make a pledge, choose a platform and practice and iterate. And it’s interesting. She says under make a pledge, she says, quote, studies have shown that announcing a goal has the unfortunate effect of making you less likely to complete it. Making a pledge to conduct your experiment in public helps ensure that you don’t drop your pact after
after the dopamine hit from announcing it. you have this pact, you get excited about it, and then that’s gonna fade off after a couple days. Having it in public will help. And so, again, choose a platform, iterate on there and stuff. She gives an example with podcast host, Steph Smith, who has a page on her website where she shares the number of days she has exercised throughout the year, the book she is reading, the online courses she’s taking, the side projects she’s working on, even the revenue those projects are generating. So she has a lot of stuff in public that kind of holds her accountable to keep working on those things, which can be great.
The advantages to learning in public, she gives five different advantages to learning in public that can really help with things. So one, you get early feedback, you get early answers when you have new ideas or thoughts, people give their thoughts back and help you make it a more iterative approach. It’ll increase your productivity, you others, that you’ll connect dots between your ideas and other people ideas and you can kind of get things together. It’ll clarify your thinking, you know, you kind of be nudged to think about your strategy a bit more.
This is kind of why I blog in public. I’ve talked about blogging versus journaling. I like to blog in public because it makes me clarify my thinking and really think about it bit more versus just writing a journal off to the side, which journaling off to the side can be great, but putting it in public sort of forces me to do that. You can build your network. Learning in public is a great way to connect with people who are interested in similar space. In the book, she gives examples of that, but you can start as small of niche as you want, but if you have it in public, there’s other people that have that same interest and could help you there.
And then you learn faster, you by documenting your process openly, including your challenges and questions, you can connect with others who have experienced and can suggest resources to build your skills more efficiently. And then she gets into the downside of this course, you okay, cool, I’m gonna publish all this stuff, but there’s a lot of concerns, which she calls quieting the voice. You know, there’s voices that say, I don’t know enough, people might judge me, it might be a distraction, might negatively impact my professional reputation, I might become too focused on external validation and.
I won’t get into these too much. The book unpacks ways to address all those quite a bit. But she says, remember that expertise is a mirage. The closer you get, the more illusory it seems. And so I’ve seen things from like Einstein before talking about, you know, the circle of, you know, incompetence as you, as your circle of knowledge grows, the stuff you don’t know also grows. You get more and more stuff you don’t know. Like expertise is a mirage and just okay. Knowing that going in, just continue to get better. You know, keep building those loops and making yourself better. And then she gets into legacy and she says,
You shouldn’t worry about legacy as much as generativity. And so I’ll talk about that here. She says, well, I’ll quote her here more specifically. She says, quote, this is how you discover your life’s meaning by focusing on your daily actions rather than the content of your future eulogy. When generativity becomes your focus, the immediate impact of your actions is all the motivation you need. Every pact you make, every shift, every what if becomes not just a step in your own journey, but a chance to inspire and elevate others. Your career is no longer a linear ladder you climb alone, but a nonlinear path of shared discovery.
And so, you know, to kind of do this, she talks about a few ways to make sure you focus on that is to do the work first and just be out there and get it done. Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI and ChatGBT, he says, luck isn’t an independent variable, but increases super linearly with more surface area. You meet more people, make more connections between new ideas, learn some patterns, and your luck’s going to increase. know, luck is certainly a factor, but you can encourage luck by meeting more people and making more connections and stuff.
⁓ She talks about growing lateral roots. This can really help. So think about a tree or a plant where they have roots that kind of expand out further. So she says, just as lateral roots are essential for a plant’s growth and resilience, branching out beyond your primary area of expertise can help you thrive in today’s rapidly evolving world. While others remain siloed in their field of expertise by stacking their skills vertically, your interdisciplinary experience will enable you to stand out and contribute to diverse fields in unique ways. So yeah.
Yeah, look at things outside of what you do. And there’s been many, many, many studies that show that people that have other skills outside of their core competency tend to be better at the core thing that they’re trying to do. Her third key to this is to prioritize impact over image. I think that one’s kind of clear enough. ⁓ for us, close the loop to open doors. know, again, use that plus minus next template at the end of the loop to kind of see what you want to do next and figure out what could have been handled better. And it’ll help you figure out what to focus on next. And then play along the way. You she says,
Quote, a generative approach to work recognizes the importance of playfulness alongside professionalism. Playfulness fosters creativity, exploration, and innovation. Finding joy in the present act of doing work can lead to discoveries that positively impact our career, others, and the world around us in ways we may not have initially imagined. Let’s see. Unpredictability of life is not a bug, but a feature.
You know, by embracing the unknown, staying open to serendipity, create space for unexpected opportunities to emerge, opportunities to learn, grow and create value in ways you may not have initially imagined. Again, her path of Google was where it was going to be. She wanted a job at Google. She got it. It was the perfect job. It paid her a ton. It was awesome, but she kept her mind open and has taken things even further by getting off that path she thought she had. And then she kind of ends the book with a summary just of she says, hello, experimental life. And, know, a summary of everything in there. So I’ll kind of end with the same summary that that she dropped at the end here. She said,
Forget the finish line, unlearn your scripts, turn doubts into experiments, let go of the chronometer, make friends with procrastination, embrace imperfection, design growth loops, broaden the decision frame, dance with disruption, seek fellow explorers, learn in public, and let go of your legacy. So yeah, Tiny Experiments by Ann-Laure LeComf, it’s a fantastic book. Again, I think I covered quite a bit of it here, but there’s so much more nuance in the details. It’s an easy read. She’s a great writer, so I encourage you to check it out for yourself.
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