Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's episode is going to be a longer one part of the series where I interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any advice they have for the rest of us. Today, I am delighted to welcome and Laura Lecomfe to the program. She is the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments. So and Laura, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, excited to have you here. So please tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
I'm a ner scientist at King's College, London, and I also write a weekly newsletter called nest Labs, which is all about how to explore your ambitions without sacrificing your mental health. Yeah.
And the ness part is that maybe you can explain that a little bit.
Yeah, absolutely so. Ness is the suffix that you add at the end of a word to describe the state of being something. So consciousness, the state of being conscious, mindfulness, awareness and Labs was because I wanted to create a little laboratory for myself to explore these ideas.
Yeah, and your new book is all about tiny experiments, So what are these tiny experiments?
Tiny experiments are all about replacing the linear definition of success, where you have a fixed goal and then you work really really hard to get there, sometimes at the expense of your mental health, with tiny experiments where you don't start from a clear vision of where you need to go, but you start instead with curiosity, a hypothesis, a little question, and then you start exploring and in that process you learn more about yourself and your work and the world.
And go from there. Yeah, we talk a lot about in this post podcast about how to iterate in life and try different things, so hoping you can give us some practical tips for how we might do that better. And one of the things you talk about doing to start all this as you're figuring out what little tiny experiments to do in your life is a bit of self anthropology. So let's talk about self anthropology and what it might mean to be doing field notes on yourself.
So think about what an anthropologist does as their job. Right, they go and they study a new culture that sometimes they know nothing about. So they go there and they take the little notebook their field notes and they try to capture all of their observations and they ask questions like why do people care about this? And why do they do things in this specific way? And why is this so important in their culture? So you can do the same thing. And that's what I call self anthropology.
It's being an anthropologist with your own life as the topic of study, and you look at your life as if you knew nothing about it. It's your first time, you're completely new to this culture. And for twenty four hours you can take little notes. You can do that on your phone or in a notebook, and you ask the same kind of questions, why do I care so much about this? And why do I have this routine? Why is this a priority for me? Why is this something that I think a lot all the time? And
you take those little notes. And what's amazing with this exercise that I've done with hundreds of people is that all of them say I had not realized how many decisions I was making on an everyday basis that were automatic that I never questioned. It just seemed obvious to me.
I'm very curious when you first did this to yourself, was there anything surprising to you that came out of this self anthropology.
Oh absolutely. I thought, for example, that I was a knight ol. I had thought that for a very very long time. But then when I started paying attention to my energy levels throughout the day, I realized that actually I had a lot more energy in the morning. And so based on that, I started readjusting a little bit my bedtime so I could make the most of that energy in the morning.
Awesome, Well, and a podcast called Before Breakfast. We're gonna be sure to talk about your morning energy later in this show. But one of the parts, you know, anyone who's been in science class, even if it's been a few decades, you know you're supposed to have a hypothesis as part of an experiment. So what exactly is a hypothesis? And maybe you can talk a little bit about what it means to come up with ideas that are actually testable.
Yes, So a hypothesis when it comes to personal experimentation is really about starting with this magic word that I really really love, which is maybe maybe if I did this, I would feel this way. So maybe if I went to bed a little bit early earlier in the in the evening, I would feel better in the morning. Maybe if I woked more, that would give me more energy.
Maybe if I went to more meetups, even though I feel a little bit introverted, I would meet interesting people and that would be a good thing for me in
my life. So maybe maybe maybe that's a hypothesis. And it doesn't necessarily be to be need to be testable in the scientific lab like kind of way when it's your personal and professional life we're talking about, But it just needs to be something you can try for a specific duration and then you can look back on and see if that hypothesis was correct or not very cool.
Well, when we come back from our first ad break, we'll talk a little bit more about what those, you know, experiments for a certain length of time might look like. So I am back with Anne Laura Lacombe, who is the author of the brand new book Tiny Experiments. We've been talking about what it would mean to do a tiny experiment and come up with a hypothesis about.
Your own life.
So one of the things you suggest is making packs packs with yourself pacts. I guess how you spell that.
Everyone's like, what wait, what did she just say?
And that takes the form generally I will do X for why amount of time, So maybe you could give some examples of that and talk about why this is a wise way to approach your experiments.
So Tanny experiments are inspired by the scientific method, and you have two very important components. When you design an experiment, it's deciding what the test is going to be, what the action is going to be, and then how many trials and scientists decide that in advance, right, they don't stop in the middle or feel like that's not going where I wanted to go. They say, I'm going to conduct this experiment for this period of time, and I'm going to withhold judgment and I'm only going to analyze
the data at the end. And so a pact is really just a mini protocol to design your own experiments. And the way it looks like is, as you said, you decide on an action and a duration. So that could be like I'm going to go for a twenty minute work every day for twenty days. That's a pact. It's a commitment to conduct this experiment. I'm going to reach out to a new person on LinkedIn every Monday and tell them that I want to talk about their work, and I'm going to do that for three weeks. That's
a pact. You have the action and you have the duration, and you can use that for literally any area of your life. That's what's amazing is that you can do that to explore different ways to be productive, to be creative. You can use that for your relationships. I've seen people who said, I'm going to make the pact that for the next four weeks, I'm going to organize a date for me and my partner on Friday every evening for the next four weeks, and when we're done, we're going
to see if we liked it or not. So that's the idea behind the.
Pact, And how can we come up with the right amount of time for a pack to be useful, like you could have some actual useful data, but maybe not feel quite so overwhelming like I'm doing this for the rest of my life.
I love that you're asking this question because I talk about the maximalist brain in the book, and it's our tendency to always want to go for the bigger, most ambitious version of something. So whenever you design a pact, try to think small, tiny experiments. That's what you want to go for. But obviously you need to be long enough that you have enough data to know if it worked or not. So first think about the pact itself.
What is it. If it's a daily action like going to bed at the same time, or going for a daily walk or stretching every morning, maybe two weeks is enough. You'll have enough data after you've had those fourteen to fifteen repetitions. If you say, actually, I'm going to start a newsletter and I want to write a weekly article that I'm going to post online, well, obviously one week is not going to be enough for this, so maybe you do it for one month or for six weeks.
And in doubt, it is very likely that someone else has run a similar experiment in the past, so you can even use that as a way to connect with other people. You can reach out to people and say, hey, I see that you've been writing online for a while, or that you've been going for daily runs for a while. I'm going to start this experiment and I wanted to ask you how long do you think I should go for it? Like when did you know that it worked or it didn't for you? And then you use that
for your experiment. So when you.
Started ness Labs, I think you had a pact going to do it for maybe one hundred newsletters.
Is that what that was?
How did you come up with that?
It was a hundred articles for every day or one hundred weekdays. And I came up with that at the time because I actually felt a little bit lost. I didn't really know where to focus my creativity and my attention. It just felt like an interesting experiment, and for me, the inspiration came from the fact that I had always loved writing in the past, but didn't really have a
lot of space for it. And also when I restarted my studies and went back to university to study in your science, I discovered this very neat psychological phenomenon called the generation effect, which shows that by creating your own version of something, you're going to both understand it and remember it better. And I felt like, oh, this is
really great. So I'm going to take something every day that I study at university and I'm going to write a newsletter about it, and that's going to be my pact for the next one hundred weekdays.
Do you have any packs going right now?
It's really funny because my current pact was to work for twenty minutes every day for twenty days, and I actually this morning decided to not go for a walk because my back hurts a lot. And that's the interesting thing too about a pact is that because it's not a goal, it's completely okay. If there are days where you can't do it. You just make a note. That's data,
and that's interesting for you. So in my case, maybe it means I've been pushing myself a little bit too hard the past couple of weeks and I need a little break, and so I'm making a note of this. But there's no sense of failure of the fact that I didn't do my walk today because I'm just experimenting. I'm just collecting data.
Yeah, well with that, I mean, I think you said earlier we kind of want to both hold judgment the end, right, we want to see how this pack plays out, how our experiment goes.
We'll run the experiment, see what comes of it.
But it sounds like we.
Are tweaking in the middle too, right that you know, we are sort of analyzing what's happening, like, oh, yeah, well, maybe if I walk every day or do all this other stuff, my back starts to hurt, I can deal with that or you know, maybe you aim to go out with your partner every Friday night and you realize that you're both just so incredibly tired. By the second Friday, You're just like, it's you're in a bad mood. I mean, should we analyze and decide to tweak in the middle.
So ideally what you want to do is just collect the data. So in the case that the example that you gave, you make a note you say, actually, that Friday night, we didn't do it because we were feeling too tired. But you don't necessarily make a judgment about the entire pact at this stage. It's at the end where you look back and you say, okay, So, out of six dates we had planned for this pact, we ended up going on four of them and we missed too.
One of them was of external circumstances, something happened, couldn't do it. Another one was because we were too tired. How do we feel about the remaining four ones? Actually we felt really really good. So maybe for the next iteration we say every two weeks instead of every week, because every week was maybe a little bit too ambitious here, And so it's really about waiting until you have collected all of the data about the pact, so you can
look back and decide what you want to do. If you want to keep going, if you want to pivot and redesign it in a way that makes more sense, or if you hated it, which is completely fine you just stop. But now you know because it's based on your own experience.
Yeah, well, what are some questions we should be asking at the end of it? I mean to figure out did anything come of this? Am I happy with it? Did it result in what I wanted? I mean, what should we be asking ourselves?
What's really important at the end of an experiment is to consider both external and internal factors, and a lot of us are more comfortable with one or the other. Some people they will just want to open a spreace and look at the data, and other people they will maybe be more comfortable asking about how they feel. It's very,
very important to look at both. If an experiment is successful on the outside but make you feel miserable while you were conducting it, you probably don't want to keep going. So the questions to ask yourself are externally speaking. If I just look at metrics of success, So if you were writing a news that or having you subscribers and likes and comments, do people open it and read it? And then internally speaking, how do I feel? Did I actually enjoy writing this? Did I like it? Did it
bring me joy? And only when you consider both internal and external signals you can decide whether you want to keep going or maybe tweak it.
Excellent. Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then we will be back with more on Tiny Experiments.
Well, I am.
Back with an Laura Leconte, who is the author of Tiny Experiments. We've been learning about all sorts of different packs. We can have ourselves at pacts. Try doing this for one hundred days, see what comes of it, See if we enjoyed it, how it felt. So one of the things you talk about in your book is, you know, creating your community, finding your tribe of people as you're doing these experiments. So maybe you can talk about what
is the upside of doing that. And then also these sort of three levels of involvement one might have with an online with a community, you know, being the apprentice, the artisan, the architect.
Absolutely, I talk a lot about learning in public in the book. I think it's extremely important. There may be the temptation to wait until you feel like you're ready you're the expert to start sharing your knowledge, But you will actually learn better and faster if you start sharing your journey from the very beginning. And if you say that's what I'm experimenting with, I'm sharing it with the world. Does anyone want to follow me and also help me? Maybe?
So learning in public is extremely important, and and there are different levels of engagement. Some people might feel a little bit scared of learning in public because they feel like it means I have to start a community and I have to do all of this, but you can start quite small, actually, So what I call the apprentice is really just paying a little bit more attention to the way you create your network, the people you connect with and who you want to learn from. And that's
also something we rarely make time for. So just doing that already is going to allow you to learn from other people in a better way. The artisan is when you start creating your experience at a higher level. So maybe you start actually contributing to those communities and you start posting sharing saying I'm actually happy to co host this event with someone, and just being a little bit
more active in those communities. The architect is when you're finally ready to launch your own community and to actually decide who's going to join, what the experience is going to look like, and really being more of a leader when it comes to learning in public.
Yeah, And I think people are often a little bit wary of this learning in public because I don't know, I guess they think they might be might do something embarrassing, which which is entirely possible. Is there a way to kind of psych ourselves up for that?
Oh? Absolutely. I have sent newsletters with things and them that were actually wrong, and I had people reply and tell me, you know, actually there's new research that came out and that shows that what you wrote is not correct. And once you managed to move past the embarrassment, you realize that it's actually amazing that you got to share that information in public. Someone corrected you, and now you know, instead of walking around your entire life thinking that this
information was correct. So it is really not about getting rid of the embarrassment that you might feel. This is a very normal human reaction. It's more about rewiring your response. How do you deal with the embarrassment And once you manage to look at it as a sign that you're growing and learning. You almost welcome these moments where go like, oops, I actually did not know that, but now I know.
Yeah, wonderful. Well, I want to pivot more to your own experience. You mentioned earlier in the show that you had thought you were a night owl. You analyzed your energy found you had more energy in the morning than you were aware of. I'm curious how you spend your mornings these days.
I always start with journaling. This is my most important ritual and I always try to do this before I open my computer or do anything else. Cup of coffee, journaling, a little bit of stretching, and then I get into work and I try to do as much as possible to kind of work where that's creative, where I can be focused the research, the writing, and then I keep my meetings for the afternoon.
When you're journaling, is there something specific a format to it, or it's whatever is in your head.
I have two ways of journaling. My daily morning journaling is very free flow, writing whatever comes up, and I often start with today I feel dot dot dot, and usually starting with this thread, I do end up finding a lot of interesting things that are on my mind. And then every week I use plus minus next, which is a very simple method to review your week that's a little bit more structured, shorter, and where I have
three columns. The first one plus is for everything that went well that week, the second column minus for everything that didn't go so well or when was unexpected, and the last column with a little arrow next is anything I want to focus on next or I want to experiment with during the following week. So those are my two ways of journaling and reflecting throughout the week.
Yeah, and you mentioned that you try to do your creative work in the morning and you're more focused work, then move your meetings to the afternoon. I wonder if you have any other sort of productivity tips that have been helpful for you as you try to get everything done in your life.
So for me, it's really about taking little breaks in between everything, and not just a break in go and take your phone and scroll on something, or but really a conscious break where I pay attention to how I'm feeling in the moment. And then that might mean that I will take literally five minutes to walk outside the house and just be in the sun being outside before
I go into my next meeting. Maybe sometimes it means having a glass of water, a little stretch, But I try to avoid looking up from my computer at the end of the day and having no idea as to how I'm feeling, so really just staying in touch with those signals awesome.
Well, that probably answers my next question. I always ask people if there's something they've done recently to take a day from great to awesome, But it sounds like being aware of those signals is a good one.
Are there any things you're looking forward to right now? So after the book comes out, I'm going to take a little break for a few weeks. I'm going to spend a lot of time with my parents, and I'm also going to try to limit my screen time for a few week because I won't have to be in so many meetings or answer so many emails. And as someone who is a your scientist, I spend a lot of time in the lab and also a writer, I spent a lot of time in front of my laptop.
Spending a couple of weeks with not so much screen time I think is going to be amazing and I'm very much looking forward to this.
What do you think you're going to do with your time that's not going to be spent on screens. I think that's always people's problems. They're like, well, I've spent so much time on screens. I don't even know what I'm going to do when I'm not plugged in.
So one of my experiments in the past year was around meditation, something that I always thought I was terrible at, but then through running an experiment, I discovered that I actually enjoy it and has become part of my practice. So more meditation, going a little bit deeper. I also sign up for a course to learn more about plants
and how to make different teas and tinctures. So I'm kind of looking for different things I can experiment with and learn about that will be in the way they're designed. Intrinsically speaking, they don't require a scream Yeah, awesome, awesome.
Well and Laura, thank you so much. Where can people find you?
You can go to nesslabs dot com and I have a newsletter that I send every week or on social media. I am at at nuran n E U r A n n.
E excellent excellent. Well, and Laura, thank you so much for joining us.
Everyone.
Please check out her book Tiny experiments. Thank you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback on this or any other episode, you can always reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com and in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening and here's to making the most of our time cool.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.