#115 Creativity as a Compass - Anne-Laure Le Cunff on Leaving Google, Freelancing, and Combining Creativity & Neuroscience,

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Greetings everyone. Today I am in Lisbon, uh, where I actually had brunch with our guest a couple days ago, but we are doing this virtually today. Today I am talking with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She is an indie creator and has been on her own Pathless Path for about 1 month longer than me, leaving her job at Google in 2017.

And she runs a site and community called Nest Labs, where she writes about how we can have a better relationship to work and productivity. She's also impressively a PhD student on the side. So we'll talk a lot about that. Welcome to the podcast, Anne-Laure.

[01:57] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thanks so much for having me. It's great. We get to chat twice in one week.

[02:02] Paul: Lovely. Yeah, I'm so pumped to dive into your story today. Just so many parallels. And I'd love to just hear more about Anne-Laure growing up. What were the mindsets and scripts you had Maybe you didn't think of these in the way, but looking back, what were the stories you grew up with about, okay, when I grow up, when I go to school, when I become a worker, this is what I'm supposed to be doing to be seen as like a successful adult.

[02:33] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I grew up in a, what you'd call multicultural family. My mom is Algerian, my dad is French. On my mom's side, the script was very much that safety was what you had to optimize for. She had a very difficult upbringing. She worked in factories. She's worked as a house cleaner.

She worked as a bartender. She could never really finish the studies that she wanted to do because she had to earn money. So for her, the most important thing was for all of her children to have a roof on their head and food on the table. So every single decision that they made when raising us was what is the safest path? And that's what drove the decisions in terms of what to study, where to study, and what kind of jobs were considered good jobs. So they were really happy when I ended up going to prep school and then studying marketing and working at Google.

They felt like they did a really good job and I was on that very safe path and that they wouldn't have to worry about me anymore. Little did they know that I would just quit a few years after that. So that was not, that was not great. That was a difficult conversation. But yeah, safety was at the core of that script. And my dad is an engineer, so for him, things have to be very obviously useful.

You need to basically hone in on a craft and then have a very clear job where you're contributing something that is related to what you've studied before. So that was the same for him. He was really thinking about this safe, logical path that I would have and always thinking one step ahead as to what was the right thing to study now so I could then study the next thing and then I could get the right kind of job, etc., etc. So yeah, the first part of my career was pretty much aligned with what they were expecting from me. The second part, not so much.

[04:46] Paul: Now, you in school, what was your mindset going through this, getting into the prep school, starting to think about careers and such? Were you also bought into this sort of approach, like maximize your options and things like this?

[05:02] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I would—

[05:02] Paul: Or not even maximize options, minimize downside.

[05:06] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yes, sir. I know I was very unhappy at the time. I wanted to go and study literature. I really liked writing. I liked history. I liked poetry.

I liked philosophy. And they basically made me go and study science, which I liked too, as something that I found to be really interesting and fun. The fact that it happened in such a structured environment kind of sucked the fun out of it. So I always thought that as soon as I would turn 18 and could make my own decisions, I would then go on my own path. But the reality is that after a while, there's a bit of inertia that starts building in. And when I went to business school and then I was offered a really good job at Google, but the salary that goes with it, you realize that in between your grand vision for freedom and, and those, I mean, there's a reason why they call them the golden handcuffs, right?

It's actually a little bit harder than what you imagined to leave that behind and to go onto your own path. So as much as I disagreed with their vision and was seeing something different for myself, there was a little bit of a lag between the time I actually had the ability to make those choices for myself and the time I actually made those choices for myself.

[06:35] Paul: Yeah, so what was it like walking in on the first day of your internship at Google? Were you excited to be there or were you like reluctantly there? Which is, I mean, it's impressive either way, but it might be more impressive if you were reluctantly there.

[06:51] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I wouldn't say I was reluctantly there because I generally didn't understand how I got the job at the time. I felt like everyone was so much smarter than me, that a lot of people had gone to way better schools than I went to. And so I also think that that was part of the reason why I stayed there. It's because it did feel stimulating and I felt like I was learning new things and that it was a challenge. And the switch that I had later was realizing that yes, it was a challenge, but that wasn't the challenge that I wanted to take on. But when I was younger, the simple fact of seeing that thing in front of me that felt a little bit difficult, something where I was out of my comfort zone, was enough for me to feel excited for a little while.

[07:40] Paul: Yeah. And did you, even despite like maybe deep down you had some hesitancy towards this, were there parts of you that started to imagine, okay, maybe I can be the next Sheryl Sandberg or like the next Mark Zuckerberg founding a company? Like, did you get pulled into that tech? Because I know you went to San Fran too, like—

[08:04] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Absolutely. And that's, that's what's really interesting is that especially in tech companies, they, they design your career path in a way that almost feels like a game that you want to win. You kind of forget that you're not that interested in that game, but it's in front of you. It has very clear goals and milestones that you have to go through. You can see other people that have taken very specific steps and that are in very specific positions, and you know that if you do the right things, you'll end up there too. And there is something that pulls you in, in, in that the idea that everyone around you is playing that game, so you wanna be a part of it.

We're social animals. So the simple fact that people you appreciate working with, people you admire, people you think are smart, are on that path makes it look like an exciting path for yourself as well. So absolutely, I took it very seriously. You know, I was optimizing my work for getting the promotions, for getting the roles that I wanted to get, for being able to move countries. I moved to San Francisco and I did very, I did very well and I could have stayed there and I think I could have been pretty successful there by that definition of success that we had inside of Google. And even when I left, the next logical step for anyone working in tech and leaving one of those big companies is to start a startup.

And I also didn't question it at the time. I started a company, I found a co-founder, and I was also on that path for a little while before realizing that it wasn't for me. So, yes, absolutely. I was pulled in and I did play that game very seriously.

[09:52] Paul: So was quitting your job an extension of your path or did you see quitting your job as starting a new chapter?

[10:00] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: At the time, I thought it was starting a new chapter and I didn't realize that I was actually still on that same pre-scripted, pre-written path where, as I said, it's work at a big company like Google or Apple or Facebook or something like that. Then use the connections, the network, and the know-how that you've gained from that role to start your own startup, tackling similar problems probably that you were already tackling in a different way at a big tech company. I did think it was, it was very different. I think I was completely switching directions, and it's only when I stopped pursuing the whole startup path that I realized that actually I was, I was, it was not such a big difference in terms of mindset and in terms of goals.

[10:46] Paul: Yeah, one, one thing you've talked about is that leaving your job was hard, especially on your parents. I said your mom had a really hard time understanding, which makes sense given her background. What, like, what was that like? Like, I think I went through a similar thing. Like, I grew up in a world where, like, full-time employment for a big company is the only thing you do. And then my, whatever I was doing was not that.

And it was hard.

[11:18] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I think nobody likes to disappoint other people. And it's even harder when it's your parents that you're disappointing. So that was difficult, especially because I felt like they had invested so much into my success. To basically tell them that that's not the success that I wanted and that basically scratch that, I'm going to do something completely different. So it, it was the, basically the conversations were very difficult at the beginning, but it became a little bit easier once I managed to communicate to them that it wasn't that everything I learned so far was useless and it was just that I was going to use those skills and this knowledge and all of this experience in a different way. To pursue a different path and that I was still very grateful for all of the support that I had received from them, but that now I was going to pursue a different direction.

But as easy as it sounds to say like this, it was really hard for them to hear and to really understand and internalize. And it's only once it's been, it'd been a little while. I wish I could say that just by talking about it, we resolved it, but really what helped was when after a while they saw that I was actually still stable in a different way, that I still had a roof on, I still had a roof on my head, I, I still had food on the table, but that I was just approaching these things in a different way and that they were not a goal in and of themselves anymore.

[12:55] Paul: At the beginning, did you feel the sense that you had to sort of like defend your path or like make the case for it?

[13:03] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Absolutely. Yes. I was a little bit defensive almost, which is interesting because nowadays I don't feel this way anymore. I even tend to, when people ask me what I do, I don't even tend to say everything I do anymore. I just pick one thing, whatever is the most relevant for the conversation I'm having with that person. And if other things come up, they do.

And if not, it's fine, whereas at the time, you could, I think, feel the insecurity in my answers. If someone asked me, what do you do? I was like, I'm doing this and that, and it matters because of this, and I'm trying to solve this problem, and I know I haven't done much yet, but you'll see in a few years when I get there and I raise that money, this is what's going to happen. So I was, yeah, I was definitely very defensive and insecure at the time.

[13:53] Paul: Yeah, similar for me early on in the journey, the defensiveness was purely a downstream result of my own insecurity and feeling I didn't know what was going to happen. So I'd say, okay, just imagine the internet's growing, like people do, people like me doing these weird things, like it makes sense. And it's like, I didn't know, and I was scared, and I was just afraid to admit that I was scared. And I think once I leaned into that and started just showing like, I don't fully know what I'm doing, that's when I was able to have deeper conversations with people.

[14:30] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I, yeah, I agree. This is, this is one of the hardest things to do, but also one of the most powerful ones, just to admit that you don't know what you're doing and that you're learning about the thing that you're doing by doing it. And it feels uncomfortable, but this is also where growth comes from compared to having that pre-written path in front of you that someone has created for you with those predefined milestones, which feels a lot safer, but where arguably there's less room for that kind of unexpected growth that you'd have on what you called in your book, The Pathless Path.

[15:10] Paul: So how long, so talk me through the timeline of like leaving Google. Did you immediately jump into trying to build a startup and when did you know that wasn't the actual path you were on, meant to be on?

[15:23] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: It's actually something that I've been thinking about recently because for another work project, I had to go back and kind of look at the timeline of the things that I've done in the past few years. And it's interesting to see how I didn't have any gap between Google and the startup because I think now when I look back, I was so uncomfortable again, not being able to answer that question. What do you do? So as soon as I finished working at Google, instead of taking that time, and I could, I could have at the time because I had a bit of savings. It wasn't a money issue. I didn't need to jump into the next project so quickly, but I was very uncomfortable with the fact that I didn't have a work identity anymore.

And so I just, very quickly found a project to work on, started a startup, found a co-founder, and just jumped in straight away without any gap. And in terms of how long it took me to realize that that was not going to work, if I had been honest with myself, probably very, very quickly, but I did keep on pushing forward, trying to make it happen. I also think that sometimes having a bit of a problem solver type of personality can be disserving because instead of admitting that the thing itself is not the right goal to pursue, I was just trying to fix the ways I was approaching the goal. So it took me about, it took me about a, uh, about a year to finally realize that that was not the way I wanted to do things, that that was not the, the life I wanted to design for myself.

And that it was not a problem with the way specifically I was approaching the goal, but the goal itself was wrong for me.

[17:12] Paul: Yeah. And that, that's such a hard thing to realize. But it's funny, about a year into people's self-employed path seems to be a turning point for many people. And I believe that's when you sort of pivoted to freelancing. Is that what you started doing? And I'd love to touch on this a little bit because I think with the emergence of like the creator economy and other things like that, people don't really give freelancing the credit it deserves for basically being a form of work, but it's just a little more breathing room, basically just to buy time to figure out what's next.

So maybe talk about how you thought about shifting to freelancing and how, what that felt like.

[17:58] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I, I love that you're talking about that breathing room that you're creating for yourself with freelancing because it was exactly that for me. And it was the first time in my entire life that I figured that there was a way for me to make money, not have to worry about the financial side of things without linking my whole identity to work. And that could be two different things. I had work on the side where I was freelancing. Basically selling the skills that I had already in terms of marketing, strategy, branding, all of these kind of things that I was doing at Google. And that it was okay if that was not my big goal in life to do that, that it was paying the bills and that was great.

And because it was something that came very easy to me because of all of the experience I had with it, it had a very low cognitive load and I felt like I had a lot of mental space, a lot of mental energy left at the end of the day to think about other things and to think slowly, to really take my time, to not feel the pressure that I had to find an answer straight away, and that I could really explore and play and experiment, make mistakes without worrying about the financial consequences. So that's really what freelancing gave me at the time, and I did it for about 6 months or something like that, but that was really enough for, for me to really take the time to think about what I wanted to do next.

[19:23] Paul: That's for me at the beginning of my path, I started freelancing and it was about 7 months and I think about halfway into those 7 months I started like getting spurts of like imagination and creativity for my life, like flowing into my life and like, oh, I could do this, I could do this, I did, I could do this. Did you start experiencing similar?

[19:45] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I, uh, maybe not as intensely as you describe in your case, but I started reading again books that had nothing to do with work, that were, that didn't have a learning goal, that were just for pleasure. And I started getting a lot more ideas from different areas of, of knowledge and of research, um, that only had one thing in common, is that I found them interesting, which I had kind of stopped doing without realizing it over the previous years because I was so focused on being successful and being productive. And obviously you only have a certain number of hours during the day. So I was always trying to think, you know, in between two books, which one is the most useful? Whereas when I was freelancing, I didn't need to read any books for that. I just knew how to do the job already.

So anything I would read was for pleasure only. And what I found is that it actually made me a lot more creative. I had a lot more ideas. When I was following my curiosity as a compass to decide what content to consume, what to learn, what questions to ask versus trying to always optimize my learning for an end goal or in order to be successful at work.

[21:00] Paul: What do you think that is? The, I mean, I know you're sort of studying this now too, but what is that? Is that our brain just shifting more into like, I think it's called like the, default mode network. Like, is it our brain just shifting into a different mode, working less? Like, what explains this?

[21:22] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Well, you do need— it is kind of linked to the default mode network, but you need two types of thinking in terms of if you want to be creative, and that's the focused mode and the diffuse mode of thinking. And the problem is that when you're always trying to be hyperproductive, when you're always pursuing a goal, you're not leaving any room for your brain to practice that more diffuse kind of thinking. The diffuse kind of thinking is when you have those little aha moments that just seem to come out of nowhere. Some people call them shower thoughts because they happen very often in the shower. The reason why for lots of people they often happen in the shower is because unfortunately the shower is the only time during the day where they let their brain just do nothing.

They're not reading something, they're not scrolling social media, they're not having a conversation, they're not working on a presentation. They're just in the shower. And so those ideas start bubbling up. And in order to be creative, you do need to have that time where you're focused, you're learning, you're absorbing information, but then your brain does amazing work if you just let it be in the background. Just let it connect the dots, let it like see different patterns, imagine things that may seem a little bit weird or it may not be the most obvious solution. So yeah, I think, I think the reason why it happened for, for you when you were freelancing and for me as well is that it creates a lot of space for that diffuse thinking to happen outside of the focused mode.

[22:54] Paul: Yeah. And it seems this is so important because on your own, suddenly the problem of how to structure your life, does require more attention, which requires creativity, right? And you've written a bit about how by not paying attention to these things, we sort of undermine moving towards things or working on things that actually align with our own psychology and wiring of what we'd actually be good at. It'd be interesting to hear like how that— how you came to those realizations in your own work and how that maps to like how our minds work.

[23:31] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I was very much, it's very, it's interesting to think about how at the time of my life when I was at Google, when I was working on a startup and where I felt like I had the most control over the direction I was heading towards, I actually was very much on autopilot because I was just following whatever path, kind of, you know, my environment, society, the people around me, the expectations that other people had for me were defining for myself rather than actually proactively thinking about all of these different things. And the same way with the way I was learning and applying that knowledge for the startup, for example, I would read a blog post on Y Combinator telling you this is how you should build your startup. and I would just take that template and apply it to what I was doing without taking the time to really understand it and create my own version of it.

And something I discovered while I started my neuroscience studies was something called the generation effect. The idea that by taking something that you learn and recreating your own version of it, you could be rewriting it in your own words or Even doing a podcast like you're, you're doing, doing YouTube videos, it doesn't really matter what the medium is, but it's really about taking something that you're learning and creating your own version of it. You're, you're going to remember it better, but you're also going to understand it better. And I started applying that to many areas of my life, and I would start taking notes on conversations and rephrase things that I had learned in my studies, in books, et cetera, and trying to figure out What in there applies to my own goals? What can I learn from this that I can apply to myself?

And how can I design a life and work that is something that I, that, that I truly want to happen versus what other people are expecting from me?

[25:33] Paul: Yeah. I, you have this quote I wanted to read.

[25:36] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Excuse me.

[25:36] Paul: Which I really like is, we are scared of idleness because stopping would mean having to really consider what we want out of life and what we currently have. So it sounds like at Google, you, I don't know if you were scared of idleness, but you didn't have that idleness, sort of like non-doing leisure time to really figure out what you wanted to do. Do you think the question of like, what kind of life I want, you wanted to live was something you were afraid of when younger?

[26:05] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: That's a really good question. I actually never thought about it, but I think it, must have been the case for me to cling onto any kind of external scaffolding that I was given at the time. Must have felt really reassuring because I kind of could see my next steps. I didn't have to worry about what choice do I have to make? What's the right decision? What is it that I truly want?

Because it was all laid out very clearly in front of me and I just had to follow the steps. A little bit like IKEA furniture. You have that manual and if you follow it, it doesn't always work perfectly. You may be missing some pieces in the box, but you get to something that roughly looks like what you were expecting to get when you bought the kit of furniture. So that, that there was something really reassuring in this. And there's also something scary again, as we were talking about earlier, about admitting that you don't know.

And admitting that not only you don't know, but you don't know what you don't know. So you really have no idea what you're doing. And it's only by taking little steps, by experimenting, by trying new things, by keeping on asking yourself questions and those big questions about what is it that you want, how, what do you want your life to, to look like that you can end up designing a life that is truly the life you want versus that the, the life that's been designed for you by external people or factors.

[27:34] Paul: And when did you start to write about this stuff?

[27:38] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Very much as, I did write about these things when I was younger in my journals, but publicly I started writing about it about 3 years ago now when I started NessLabs. And that was for me a bit of an outlet and a way to build accountability for myself to make sure that I was practicing this generation effect. That I mentioned earlier. I would take everything I was learning this week and try and turn it into something that would be applicable for myself and hopefully for other people. So instead of just taking the raw data, the raw research, or whatever information that I learned, I kept on asking myself, so what? How is that helpful?

How can you apply this? How can you design a better life for yourself using that information? So yeah, it's been about 3 years now that I've been writing regularly about these topics.

[28:32] Paul: Yeah. And did you see a path when you, like you said, you freelanced for about 7 months? When did you start to see, okay, maybe this sort of creator path, it didn't even really have that name a few years ago, but when did you see this other sort of direction pulling you forward?

[28:51] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: There were several steps. The first one was after the 6 months of freelancing and having a lot more time for self-reflection, for asking myself what I wanted. A big question that helped me was asking myself, what is something that you'd love on, you'd love to learn about and to keep on reading about and exploring, even if there was no money involved, even if nobody was paying you for it, what would that be? And for me, it was the mind and the brain. I've always been fascinated about how the mind works, how the brain works. So I decided at the ripe age of 28 to go back to university.

To start my studies again. And, uh, and it's only after a few months that I learned about the generation effect. And I used to, as a kid, when I was a teenager, I had a blog. I had an online community. I was, it's so funny to think about right now, but I was already doing all of these things when I was around 13, 14, uh, with the online forums. I didn't have a newsletter at the time, but had the blog with the, the weekly articles.

I was doing all of this already and it's, it brought me so much joy at the time. I remember loving doing that and that I was not being paid by anyone. So I just figured that if I could combine this curiosity that I had for the brain and for the mind with that very tangible outlet for creativity that I knew already I loved from when I was a teenager, this could be a fun thing to explore.

[30:25] Paul: You know, this is such a common thing. I was somebody that basically played around on the internet too and but I just never made the connection that, oh, you could actually like do these things. And part of it was they weren't realistic things you could do when I graduated for sure. But yes, so many of us like in the communities we hang out with now are basically just people that were doing all these things when they were young. And part of what I write about in my book is like remembering those things you used to get joy. I used to create all these random websites and do these fun things online and learn to code websites.

But for some reason, I went to work in like the business world. I can't, I can't do computer stuff. But now it's like, what was I doing? Oh my God, I loved that. Like, why didn't I try to actually keep doing that? What was the name of your blog when you were younger?

[31:22] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: It's the— it was— I'm going to pronounce it the French way because that's why it was pronounced, but Antilles Moon, which was— it's still my Twitter handle. And I remember when I was a kid, like that was the name of the, the blog. And I was thinking one day a lot of people are going to know my blog. And so now this blog doesn't exist, but at least I have quite a few people who know my Twitter handle. So I think 13-year-old, 14-year-old me would be really happy.

[31:47] Paul: That's so, and what do you think it, so you decided at some point to do a 100-day challenge, um, where you'd write 100 posts, um, around a lot of like mindful productivity. And that seemed to really be an inflection point for you. But what do you think connected people to your writing? There was definitely something different about it, but what do you think drew people to it?

[32:12] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I think the first, the honest answer is that I don't know for sure. So this is just my intuition, but I think it's because it is a mix of, there's research for sure in my articles. Everything I say is backed by science. Scientific articles. And so I think that's one bit, but I don't think that's the bigger part of it. People do like that I'm not making up things and that they can go and click on the papers and read the research themselves if they, for themselves if they want to.

But there's a lot of my personal experience in them as well. And I'm always trying to link back whatever the research is to real life experiences, to how can you apply this for yourself? And, and I'm also trying to be as realistic as possible. And the advice that I give to people, I really don't like toxic productivity, those crazy frameworks where I'm just like, even remembering how it works, uh, is, makes me tired basically that, you know, those, those frameworks that have 10 different moving parts and that require 3 different tools, uh, or Even if you don't need tools, the ones that tell you that you're not being productive if you don't wake up at 5:00 AM, have a smoothie, meditate for 30 minutes, and then stretch, and then go for a run and journal. So, um, all of the advice that I'm giving people, I'm really trying to, to be cognizant of the fact that life is complicated.

Uh, a lot of things can change. Not everything is in your control, and that's completely okay. But if you really focus on your daily processes, on also being kind to yourself when those processes fall apart for a reason or another, and on following your curiosity and trying to stay as much as possible connected with your inner self, what you want, your values, your goals, accepting that these can completely change and that tomorrow you can be a completely different person than you are today. As long as you do these things, which arguably are a little bit more fuzzy and not as sexy as some frameworks, I do truly, truly believe that you'll be all right in the long run.

[34:25] Paul: I love that. I sense that a lot of this productivity stuff is generated from my country, and we have this sort of like hustle mentality, which you can actually trace the roots back to some of the gold rush in the US and like going out west to the frontier. But is there something about you creating in a second language, English, that gives you a unique lens on these? Maybe it's easier for you to call bullshit on this stuff.

[34:56] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I think, I don't necessarily think that it helps me, like, yeah, call them bullshit in an easier way because I do think that it's very visible already, whatever the language in most cases. Uh, what it does help me with a lot though, is that in my own, own content, I can't really hide behind big words because I don't know them. So I, uh, I have my, my writing is, is simple on purpose. I do make an effort to keep it simple, but I think that I, I don't have to make as much of an effort as a native English speaker because I am lacking a lot of the flowery vocabulary, the jargon that you find sometimes in other content where really the author is very often, sometimes unconsciously, is hiding that they actually don't really know what they're talking about. And I don't think it's always done in a way where they're trying to manipulate people.

I think it's just uncomfortable to admit that you don't really understand the thing as deeply as you would want to. So you just hide behind complicated words. And then that, so there's, that's one thing. And then another thing is that some people use that as a way to appeal to authority because big words make you sound smarter. And, and a lot of people are looking for guidance and they, they're looking to experts to give them, uh, that information to tell them what to do. And if someone is using those big words, they just do sound like they know what they're talking about.

But because English is not my first language, uh, I, confused. It's not that I would want to in any case, but it makes it even easier because I genuinely can't. It would be very complicated for me to hide behind words that I don't know.

[36:43] Paul: Yeah. And I'd love to hear more about like what that experience is like communicating in English. I think English is sort of the language of the digital world now. And I mean, I grew up with this. I think so many people take it for granted. That they have this.

Like, what do you see in terms of like seeing English as this digital language and how it relates to opportunities people have?

[37:12] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, I don't think I would be where I am today and working on the projects I'm working on and living the life that I'm living today if I didn't speak English. It's not that I don't— I'm 100% sure that that would not be the case. It's very interesting to see that a lot of words that I use in English today that are connected to either mindfulness or the digital world, they don't even exist in French. And I'm really struggling sometimes when I'm talking with friends back in France because I just sound like this arrogant person who's like, oh, what's the word in French? But really the word doesn't exist in French and they will probably be created or be borrowed straight from English, like brainstorming, for example. You also say brainstorming in French.

There's never been a word that's been invented for that. Mindfulness, if you translate it in French, is a very long sentence. There's no one word for it in French. So it means that there's a whole, like, it's actually like a proper blind spot that a lot of people who don't speak English, it's just they don't even know that those discussions are happening because they can't happen in their language. The vocabulary is not there. And then obviously just in terms of collaborations, in terms of money, in terms of network, et cetera, if you look on Twitter, a lot of these conversations are happening in English.

If you join Twitter and you don't speak English, you're only going to have access to a tiny, tiny, tiny subset of local conversations, which I'm sure are very interesting too, but are going to be very limited compared to if you were able to speak English. So I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that English is dominating the discourse in the way it is, but it is the reality today. And I know that if one day I have children, that's probably going to be the only thing where I'll insist that they have to do it, is learning English. If English is still the, the kind of lingua franca, which is funny because lingua franca means French language, but if If English is still the language that we use in the digital world in the next decades, I think anyone who can should learn it.

[39:22] Paul: I'd love to shift back to Nest Lab. So you did like a 100-day challenge. You started growing this following. When did you decide, okay, I want to turn this into a community? Maybe it was just remembering your aspirations as a 13-year-old, but I'd love to hear about the thought process that went into that.

[39:44] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Like a lot of things that happened with Nest Labs, there actually wasn't a very big thought process behind it because that's also why I called it Nest Labs. I see it as a laboratory where I can just experiment. I try things. If it works, I keep doing it. I do just more of that. And if it doesn't, I just kill it and I switch to another experiment.

In this case, what inspired me to start the community was the very beginning of the pandemic. I actually started the community in March 2020, and in my newsletter, I always encourage people to reply back, just whether it's to react to some of the content of the newsletter or to tell me how they're doing or to ask questions. I always told people, please, please just hit reply if you have anything that you want to tell me. And around that time in March 2020, I had a lot more replies from people telling me that they were feeling lonely, that they were starting to feel like they were disconnected from their work, that they had this sense of lack of direction. And that obviously, which, you know, this is absolutely not surprising, but it just felt very isolating being in lockdown, being at home, not being able to talk to colleagues.

A lot of people realized that a lot of the interactions, human interactions that they were having every day were with work colleagues. And once you remove that, you were feeling very lonely. So I figured that it would be a good time to try and go from this one-way or two-way, kind of like broadcast relationship where I was sending the newsletter and some people would reply and we would have those one-to-one conversations to try and fostering multi-way conversations between people of the community because after all, they already had that common interest in curiosity, mindful productivity, mental health at work. So they had that in common. It was still a bit of a kind of, of a gamble because I, I didn't know if that was enough for a community to form around these questions, but it did, it did work.

And so I individually invited one by one with a personal email, the first few hundred people based on the engagement that I was seeing in the newsletter. So all of the people that opened the newsletter every week without fail and the people who, who tended to kind of reply to the newsletter, the most engaged ones, I asked them first, what do you think? And all of them said, yes, I would absolutely love that. So I launched the community with that small group first, and then I opened the doors to everyone who was subscribed to the newsletter.

[42:20] Paul: And what, I mean, it's taken off now and it's sort of funding your life. When did it reach a point when you were like, oh, this is a thing and I'm going to be running this?

[42:33] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: That was probably at the end of 2020 when I had to hire a community manager. That I got to a point, it got to a point where I was not able to be here for everyone to reply to all of the messages. And where I need to get help basically from someone. And up to this point, it had been a whole, like, you know, I was a solo founder, just me doing everything. And it was really the first time that I had a project that had gotten big enough where it felt like I needed someone else to work with me and I need to hire someone. So that was definitely a turning point for me and for Nest Labs.

[43:13] Paul: I feel like I'm scared of hiring someone. I've had like complete ownership of like time and what I work on over the last year. What have you learned from bringing someone on?

[43:26] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I've actually reverted back to only working with contractors now. So I had employees for a year and it was great. They were absolutely amazing. They were so helpful. But that also came with responsibilities on my side that included managing, you know, supporting their career growth. And yeah, it had to be more of a two-way value exchange rather than just me paying someone to deliver some discrete amounts of work.

So after I started the PhD, I realized that I would not be able to be a good manager for employees. And so, when one of my employees had to go back for their studies, another one was hired by someone else. Instead of looking for new employees to replace them, I decided to hire contractors. And so we have a lot more, we still have a great relationship and it's really good. And I'm so happy that they're here, but it is a lot more of a transactional relationship. and it means that we don't have to have one-to-ones where we're talking about their, their growth and their challenges, et cetera.

We're only talking about the work that needs to be delivered and has become a lot more manageable for me. And it has also removed a lot of the anxiety that I had because I cared so much about my employees and I really wanted them to succeed and to feel good in the company that there was also a lot of mental energy that was going into that even when I was not directly working with them. So yeah, so I went on a little journey when it comes to, to employees or not employees. And at this stage in my life and in my work, I think that I've found a really good balance by getting the support that I need in certain areas of the business without having all of the anxiety and cognitive load of having to properly manage a team.

[45:25] Paul: So there are many people running online communities. Well, not that many. But there are, there are enough you can point to. There are probably not many people, however, doing what you're doing, writing online and also doing a PhD. So you're sort of on this end of one path. How does it feel?

I mean, do you have the sense that you're making something up as you go with this? How are you feeling about your path?

[45:55] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I still have no idea what I'm doing, but I I have become very comfortable with that. And the only thing I kind of keep an eye on is how do I feel when I wake up in the morning? And at the moment, I wake up feeling excited most mornings, not every morning. Sometimes there's days where it's mostly admin stuff. Like, I'm not going to pretend that every day I jump out of bed and I'm super excited about what I have to do that day. But most days, I'm very excited about the work that I'm doing.

I'm still learning. I'm growing. And I actually do like, to me it's a feature, it's not a bug that I don't know where I'm going. I would start worrying, I think, if I had a perfect path in front of me and I would know what the next steps are because I think that that would mean that I'm falling back into my old patterns. So the fact that I don't know where I'm going and that I'm excited most days when I wake up, I think makes me feel a lot more comfortable with the uncertainty.

[46:54] Paul: Yeah, you wrote when you were at Google that knowing where you'd end up sort of terrified you. Like, why does that terrify you?

[47:01] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Because there's really, I feel like, no point in playing the game if you already know exactly how it ends. It's a bit like seeing the spoilers for a movie. You don't really want to watch the movie anymore once you know exactly who dies at the end and who falls in love and who wins the war. So I think to me, I do need to, to feel excited and to feel curious about what's going to happen next. I need to have a certain level of uncertainty.

[47:32] Paul: I think a lot of people in full-time jobs sort of think that what we're describing, this uncertainty, like I experienced the same thing, like not knowing where I'll end up is actually exciting to me. But trying to convey that to somebody else, you can't convince somebody that that is exciting. They think that is the worst thing in the world. What are some of the unexpected upsides of being on an uncertain path?

[47:57] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: The most obvious one, I think, is that I've taken on challenges and I've been offered opportunities that I would have not even imagined were possible. Because if I was only thinking about the very narrow circle of potential next steps that I had in a path that is more clearly defined, then there are all of these more random things that are very fun and exciting that you're very happy that you get to do that I would have not even considered a possibility. So it would have not even pursued and would have not even been offered. So, you know, just like from events I've been invited to talk to, to collaborations, to being invited to give feedback on books before they're being published, to, Having all of those random conversations on Twitter about topics that I didn't even know were a thing a few years ago.

All of these things I think can only happen if there's enough room for uncertainty in your life. And so to me, that's the main benefits that I've been experiencing.

[49:01] Paul: And what's your relationship to uncertainty now? Like, what is the role in your life? How do you think about it?

[49:08] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I think that you need, you need balanced uncertainty, if that makes sense. But basically, I think it's really good to have a lot of uncertainty in all areas that touch to creativity, to personal growth, to self-exploration and self-discovery. That's really good. I also think that that can only happen if you feel like you have enough stability in other areas, such as financial stability, just knowing that your health also, you know, knowing that you're healthy, um, knowing that your loved ones are fine, those very, very basic things. It's like, it's very easy to talk about creativity, uncertainty, and just exploring your path, et cetera. But then you can only do that if you have the psychological safety of knowing that the, the very important things, the core things are safe basically.

Um, and so I do think that that's also why I wouldn't encourage anyone to just quit their job and go on that path. I would say, stay in your job, save money, experiment with a few side projects. And once you have enough money in the bank, and if you feel healthy, especially if in the US, so you don't need that crazy health insurance that your company is paying for, like, that's insane for me being French, but that is a factor to take into account. Once you have that and you feel like that side project is exciting to you and you you can afford to go full-time on it, then you don't need any certainty in terms of where you're going to take the project itself. That's fine to be completely uncertain about that. But you just need to make sure that you're safe in all of the other ways that matter.

[50:46] Paul: How have your parents shifted in how they see your path?

[50:51] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, they're, I think they haven't changed in terms of what they think of it. Is it, you know, they still think that stability and safety is the most important thing. But to them now, I've achieved enough of that that they feel good about it. So I haven't managed to convince them that uncertainty is good, but I've managed to achieve enough stability that they think that I'm safe again.

[51:15] Paul: Okay. Anne-Laure is not going to blow up her life, or at least not in the next year or two.

[51:20] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yes.

[51:23] Paul: A couple questions I ask every every guest. First one is, do you have a path role model?

[51:33] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Ooh, that's interesting. There's someone that I really admire, not that I have followed their path, but I think because I cannot follow their path. So there's this role model that I'll never follow, but I have a lot of admiration for people who are absolutely obsessed with something and that make it their whole lives. And again, not because that's what people expect from them or anything like that, but because they deeply care about it. And I'm incapable of this because I keep switching projects and I definitely suffer from the shiny toy syndrome. But I really admire Stephen Hawking, the physicist, because he really dedicated his whole life to one big question.

And that was his complete obsession for his whole life. And I used to dream that one day I would find that one thing, that big thing of mine that I would pursue for the rest of my life. And I now think that I'm just not wired this way so that that will not happen. But the admiration is still here.

[52:29] Paul: Yeah, similar. I think I've sort of accepted that I'm like this multi-interest person. It would be so much easier if you could just like have that one thing and be that kind of person. But I also like the fun of having many interests. What is one piece of content, either a podcast, a book, poem you read in the last 6 months that is really inspiring you or sitting with you?

[53:00] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: In the past 6 months, what have I read? It's something that I keep on kind of like thinking about. It's more of a work thing, so I don't know if it's good for the question that you're asking me, but it's up to you. It's called How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene, and it's both about learning in childhood and in adults. And something that I really liked about it is that it shows that, it really shows from a neuroscientific perspective that you do keep on learning during your whole life. It doesn't only happen in childhood.

And so whatever were your experiences when you were younger, you can kind of unlearn things and relearn things, which I think is really interesting and very aligned with a lot of the things that I've been doing and also a good reminder to me whenever I feel like I'm stuck in my own patterns, that they don't, it doesn't have to stay this way forever. And that I still have power as an adult to change those patterns, to unlearn them. And so I can learn new ones.

[54:09] Paul: And what, what's next on your journey, next steps on your path? How are you thinking about integrating like the PhD with the creator stuff you're doing?

[54:18] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I just signed with an agent and I'm working on a book proposal. So that's the next thing. It's very exciting, very scary, full of uncertainty. So everything I love.

[54:30] Paul: That's amazing. Writing a book was probably one of the most rewarding creative projects in my life, so I hope it's as enjoyable for you as well, and definitely going to be interested in that topic. We'll have to dive in again when that's released.

[54:45] Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Thank you so much.

[54:47] Paul: Where should we point people to? I'll link people up to Nest Labs, of course, but any other places you want to to direct people?