Is there a place for visualizing the future in your tiny experiments approach?

It's really funny you're mentioning this study because my dad mentioned it to me when I was a kid, and I actually spent a lot of hours visualizing that as a child.

And I am still not very good at basketball, so I don't know.

Simple set of one person.

That being said...

it is important to believe that you are capable of running the experiment, but then letting go of the outcome and knowing that whatever happens, whether it works out or not, this is completely decoupled from your sense of worth as a human being.

You are just a scientist conducting an experiment.

What do they tell you?

Is this something that you found that you've applied to all aspects of your life? So thinking about things like managing your finances or trying to put together plans for the future, is this something that you now apply to all aspects?

Yes, absolutely.

Anytime there is doubt, uncertainty, resistance, or even procrastination, I ask myself, is there a tiny experiment I could design here to help me figure out how to go about this? So doing my taxes, for example, I mean, we all know nobody likes doing this.

I am yet to meet one.

She tells me they love it.

And so I experimented with lots of different ways to do it.

And for me, in the end, the way that worked to do it was to not do it alone, to do it with a friend.

Are there any techniques that you've come across that really help lower the impact that procrastination can play in people's day-to-day lives? Procrastination is quite

How does that relate to the way that we think about structuring our day, the way that we think about new

goal setting, right? So in the case of toxic productivity, you're optimizing for Kronos, where you're trying to make the most of every single minute, even if that means canceling plans with friends or not taking care of your health or not sleeping enough.

You're trying to be as productive as possible at the cost of everything else.

In the case of mindful productivity, you're optimizing for the depth of the experience.

And that means that, yes, you can still optimize for your time, but you also want to pay attention to three other resources that are as important as time.

Your executive function, your energy, and your emotions.

Executive function is basically your attention and your working memory.

announcement on behalf of the industry.

Could you tell us a little bit about how that ended up happening? Like, how do th- how are these both true?

Yes.

I actually had a very non-linear career.

When I did my PhD in psychology and neuroscience, I was the oldest student in the entire cohort, because that's not where I started.

So I, I [laughs] did get kicked out of school as a kid, uh, when I was 13, and, uh, then I did studies that were a little bit more in business and creativity.

I started my career at Google, and, um, I absolutely loved it, but it felt- A bit too rigid for my way of thinking and, uh, and working.

I only started the psychology and neuroscience research in my late 20s, and by this time, I went back to university, not because I wanted to get a degree, but because I was genuinely excited to explore and learn.

[laughs] Yeah

Is this something that you found that you've applied to all aspects of your life? So thinking about things like managing your finances or trying to put together plans for the future, is this something that you now apply to all aspects?

Yes, absolutely.

Anytime there is doubt, uncertainty, resistance, or even procrastination, I ask myself, is there a tiny experiment I could design here to help me figure out how to go about this? So doing my taxes, for example, I mean, we all know nobody likes doing this.

I am yet to meet one.

She tells me they love it.

And so I experimented with lots of different ways to do it.

And for me, in the end, the way that worked to do it was to not do it alone, to do it with a friend.

Are there any techniques that you've come across that really help lower the impact that procrastination can play in people's day-to-day lives? Procrastination is quite

No.

I, as I mentioned, I was very fortunate that I started my career in a job that was really exciting.

I started my career at Google, and I, I became obsessed with work, really.

I became obsessed with work.

And I wish I could tell you that I realized on my own that something was wrong, but it, that's not what happened.

For me, it took a health scare to realize that my priorities were completely out of whack.

So I was getting ready to go to work and brushing my teeth in the morning when I noticed in the mirror that my entire arm had turned purple.

Right

Do you find yourself being pulled back into some of those old habits? Are you pretty, yeah, is it a constant kind of fight for you or what's your relationship with success?

My relationship with success is so much better, so much better now.

I'm a lot more experimental.

I'm trying to see things as an opportunity to learn.

But that being said, The more I work on more ambitious, more bigger projects with more and more successful people, it does take a bit of conscious effort to not fall back into some of those very linear patterns of success where you're climbing this ladder and trying to get to this fixed destination that society has told you is where you're supposed to be.

And that if you don't get there fast enough, then you're not successful.

One example was when my book came out, One of the measures of success, traditional measures of success for a book is whether you make it up to one of those lists, Sunday Times bestseller, New York Times bestseller.

What did you learn about yourself during that period of change? And do you have any advice to people that are thinking about doing something different?

So could you talk a little bit about, yeah, your own story?

Absolutely.

So I started my career at Google, and I felt really, really lucky at the time.

It was an amazing job, amazing team, amazing projects.

And because I felt so lucky, I also thought that someone would discover that they had made a hiring mistake and that I didn't belong in this company surrounded with all of these smart people working on these amazing, amazing projects.

And so as a result, I was saying yes to absolutely everything.

You could tell me at 6:00 PM you needed help with something that needed to be done by 8:00 AM the day after, and I would say, "Yes, absolutely.

Um, talk to me a little bit about overwhelm and how we can, I guess, know that we're putting our best foot forward in something we really care about, but we're not, you know, skating that path towards burnout because we're going too hard, pushing too hard on the accelerator.

Can you break down what the idea of a cognitive script is, and maybe where it might be showing up for people listening that they might not be aware of?

A cognitive script is a pattern of behaviors, of decision-making that we are applying automatically in our lives.

And very often, those patterns are borrowed from society, from the people around us, and, uh, they have a huge impact in terms of how we design and live our lives.

In the book, I talk about three big buckets of cognitive scripts.

There are thousands and thousands of cognitive scripts, but I find that most of them you can put in those three buckets.

So the first one I call the sequel script.

The sequel script is when you make decisions today based on the decisions you made in the past.

I'm curious if that's impacted how you approach goals or decision-making or productivity in your own life.

Mm.

And the, the big mistake people make is that if they have more information, they will feel more in control.

They will have more clarity.

And I would argue that instead of trying to, to find more information, to seek more information, we should maybe have a little bit less of that, a little bit less of, of that raw input that is really hard to turn into something useful, and instead really trying to cultivate knowledge, really thinking about your mind as a garden almost, where you're not going to keep on planting seeds and not taking care of them.

You actually want them to grow.

You want to, to see the, the branches grow and connect them and, and again, creating that web of knowledge.

And connecting back to Gen Z, as a millennial, I find it really funny how each generation, like, there's something, there's always something we need to complain about, right? I personally don't think that Gen Z is more depressed than previous generations.

[laughs]

Are there times where you've given the advice about experimentation to other people and they've implemented it in ways that are far more unique than you initially thought of?

So many times.

We have a private community at Nest Labs with about 2,000 people in there where people share their tiny experiments.

And so I see examples all the time that I think are fascinating.

Two of my favorite ones are...

Have nothing to do with work actually or work in the classical sense of the term, which is why I love them.

One of them is someone in the community who mentioned that he had gotten so busy with work that he lost touch with many of his friends.

how about let's maybe talk about the X and the Y axis with the curiosity and ambition thing.

Mm.

It's not copy-pasting, right? So that's purposeful.

And what's great is that when each tiny experiment is purposeful, you don't need to find a grand purpose in your work and life, because you just figure it out as you go.

Then actionable.

Something I hear people say quite often is, "Oh, I wish I could do this.

I wish I could try this experiment, but I don't have enough time, enough money.

I don't have the right professional network." I tell them, start with something you can do right now, that you can actually experiment with with your current resources, and this is what actionable is about.

... deciding.

Est-ce que tu peux nous raconter ? Parce que je trouvais que c'était hyper parlant.

Donc ce que j'explique, c'est un peu une, une métaphore que j'utilise pour visu-visualiser les réponses possibles qu'on a quand on se trouve dans un espace liminal.

Donc imaginez que vous êtes assis dans un avion et que vous vous rendez à une destination, donc plutôt un, un long vol, un long cours, plusieurs heures.

Il y a deux types de réponses.

Donc il y a soit les personnes qui vont se dire : ''Ouh là là, je sais pas si le pilote sait bien faire son travail, euh, je sais pas si, euh, il va y avoir des turbulences'', qui s'accrochent comme ça à leur siège, qui vont boire toutes les petites mignonnettes devant qu'on leur propose pour pouvoir, si possible, ne pas ressentir quelque émotion ou peut-être même prendre des somnifères pour se dire : ''Moi, j'ai pas envie d'être là.

Euh, j'aimerais juste, voilà, être dans un coma artificiel pendant les dix prochaines heures et attendre d'atterrir.'' Donc ça, c'est une réponse possible à un espace liminal et c'est se dire : ''Sortez-moi de là le plus rapidement possible.

Ah, j'ai pas le contrôle.

Mh.

So what are your thoughts around linear goals and, uh, a better way of, of looking at them or replacing them with something else?

I think linear goals are great if you know exactly what you want in life and how to do it, and then you just need to execute on this vision.

But I would argue that there are very, very, very few situations [laughs] in life that are like that, where we know exactly what we want and we understand every single parameter.

The reality is that the world keeps on changing, our work keeps on changing, we keep on changing.

And so instead of clinging to those linear goals that only give us the illusion of certainty, it's a lot more helpful, a lot more generative, a lot kinder to ourselves as well to let go of those rigid plans and experiment instead.

And so instead of starting from a place of certainty, wanting to know exactly what is the plan, what are the steps, what is the recipe that I can copy and paste the blueprint from another person? Starting from a place of curiosity, asking ourselves, "Okay, what is my hypothesis? I, I don't really know what's going on.

I'm not sure.

Oh, yeah.

est-ce qu'on fait pour passer de la situation 1 à la situation 2 et d'être à l'aise avec ces

changements-là ? Je pense que la première étape la plus importante, c'est déjà de comprendre et d'accepter qu'il est complètement normal d'avoir la réponse 1.

Notre cerveau, il a vraiment le rôle de soutenir et d'assurer notre survie.

Donc notre cerveau va tout faire pour réduire l'incertitude le plus rapidement possible.

Et ça a beaucoup de sens quand on regarde les environnements dans lesquels on évoluait, où le plus d'informations on avait, le plus de chances de survie on avait.

Donc que ce soit qui sont tes amis et tes ennemis dans la tribu, où se trouvent les ressources, quel est ce bruit un peu bizarre dans les buissons derrière toi ? toutes sortes d'informations que tu pouvais avoir allaient te permettre d'avoir plus de chances de survie.

Notre cerveau, il n'a pas beaucoup évolué depuis, et donc il fonctionne toujours pareil.

C'est flippant de dire à quel point notre cerveau anticipe des choses qui ne sont pas là, élabore des scénarios, et tu l'expliques bien dans le livre, qu'on vit avec des scénarios préconçus, en fait, pour nous rassurer.

I'm in chapter one.

Yeah, I wish I could tell you that I realized on my own that something was wrong when I was in chapter one.

But unfortunately for me, and it's the case for a lot of people, it took a bit of a...

I discovered this word in English, which I love, a lifequake, which I think really captures this idea.

But for a lot of people, it takes one of those lifequakes to realize that something is fundamentally wrong with the way you're living your life.

And in my case, chapter one, I was working at Google.

Great job.

If you can unpack it, that would be awesome.

Can you talk about that?

So I, as you said, I had what I thought was my dream job at the time, working with really smart people on really cool projects, and, and, uh, I was really excited to be there and to have that opportunity.

As a result, however, I said yes to absolutely everything.

Part of me thought that someone might discover that I did not belong there among all of these smart people, and, uh, I was so scared that, um, mmm, that, you know, that I would not be able to perform at the level I was supposed to at a company like that, that I would try to go over and beyond with every single project and take on even more than I, what I was supposed to do.

This is obviously not sustainable, and I wish I could tell you that I realized that on my own.

But as it is often the case, it takes a little bit of a, an external life quake for us to realize that our priorities are out of whack, and in my case, it was a health scare.

So I was, uh, getting ready to go to work, brushing my teeth in front of the mirror, and I noticed that my entire arm had tu- had turned purple.

So where does Nest Labs come in?

Can you explain a little bit more why this is so important?

So what I call a pact is a mini protocol for experimentation.

And I know most of the conversation so far has been quite high level and philosophical, but the pact is actually a very, very practical tool.

It's a way to design your own tiny experiments.

It's based on the scientific method.

So when a scientist wants to design an experiment, they only need two things.

I mean, Obviously, they need administrative approvals and funding and all of that.

One other thing you say about mindful productivity that I found really interesting is that we might be unfairly vilifying procrastination.

And what advice would you give for someone like myself that to embrace a little bit uncertainty to start perhaps with a little bit without a little bit of clarity and their goals? How do you coach someone who's deeply uncomfortable with not knowing to build tolerance for that space?

I think that's why tiny experiments work so well for recovering goal setters.

I love that, recovering goal setters.

So what you described, the first kind of system that you described is more akin to a routine or habit in the sense that it...

You're committing to this action forever.

You're saying every day I'm going to do this or every week I'm going to do this.

I'm going to write those thousand words.

I'm wondering, in the book, are there stories there where you share maybe someone that was maybe a little bit dubious about this idea, this tiny experiments idea could work for them, but a change happened? And what was the shift that happened for them?

What about time anxiety? Talk to me about that.

So time anxiety is the fear that you're not making the most of your time.

And, uh, it's, uh, it's based on, um...

It's based on a very quantitative definition of time.

So there's something I find really interesting is that in English, there's just one word, time.

And, uh, in French, my native language, this is the same, just tem and a lot of languages only have one word for time.

But in ancient Greek, they had two words for time, chronos and kairos.

So given that you've done an awful lot of these different experiments, which one in your opinion has had the most surprising impact? Or which one could you have not predicted the most?

Mm.

And so that's why, you know, teachers tell you, "Just write it in your own words," right? You're not just going to copy-paste it.

But the generation effect works across any kind of medium.

You, you mentioned writing, but as you said, podcasting, creating a video, even having a conversation with a friend where you're trying to explain the thing that you're trying to understand is going to help.

So I initially started the Nes Labs newsletter as a way to apply the generation effect, and I said, "Every week, I will pick a concept, something that I just discovered and learned about in my studies, and I'm going to write about.

But I need to write about it in a way that is clear enough that someone who is not with me in my class, in my cohort, in university, can actually understand it." So no jargon, no hiding behind complicated words.

It has to be something anyone can understand.

What does it mean to escape the tyranny of purpose or the tyranny of purpose?