How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World | Anne-Laure Le Cunff
2025/4/22
Talks at Google
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Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 我曾经为了追求掌控感，对所有事情都说不，最终导致身心俱疲。我差点因为工作压力过大而导致血栓，这让我重新思考了我们与工作的关系。知识工作者虽然被雇佣来解决问题，但面对不确定性时，我们却倾向于寻求掌控感和确定性。传统的线性成功模式（设定明确目标和计划）并不适用于非线性的世界。在非线性世界中，坚持线性目标只会导致挫败、压力和倦怠。科学家将成功定义为学习新事物，而非达到特定目标，这值得我们借鉴。我们应该将工作和生活视为实验室，培养实验性思维，以好奇心战胜确定性。科学家面对意外结果时，会寻求学习机会而非自责，这值得我们学习。用好奇心取代对确定性的渴望，可以更快地找到解决方案，并减少焦虑和压力。科学家拥有实验性思维并非因为智力超群，而是因为经过训练。我们可以运用科学方法进行“微型实验”，将浮躁的焦虑转化为系统性的好奇心。设计实验始于观察，如同人类学家研究新文化一样，我们需要先观察自身的工作和生活方式。微型实验的方案只需两个要素：测试内容和试验次数（行动和持续时间）。微型实验不需要他人认可，但团队合作能加速学习和成长。成功应该被重新定义为共同学习的过程，而非基于线性目标的固定终点。面对不确定性感到焦虑是正常的，我们可以从小事做起，逐步建立应对不确定性的能力。我们可以通过元认知（思考的思考）来提升观察能力，例如每天记录感受和想法。即使时间紧迫，也可以尝试微型实验，从少量时间开始，逐渐调整方法。克服公开演讲恐惧的例子说明，微型实验可以从小处着手，逐步提升能力。微型实验中也存在假设，例如“这会起作用”或“这不会起作用”，但不必像科学家那样严格定义。公开承担责任有助于坚持实验并收集数据。领导者可以通过鼓励团队成员进行微型实验，并分享经验教训来营造实验性文化。我们遵循着各种认知脚本（例如顺序脚本、取悦他人脚本和史诗脚本），这些脚本有时会限制我们的选择。建议从24小时的自我人类学观察开始，记录能量高低和情绪变化，寻找改进方向。实验性思维非常适合神经多样化的人群，因为它鼓励好奇心驱动的探索和学习。我最喜欢的实验是那些我一开始认为不会成功，但最终被证明是有效的实验。“优缺点下一步”方法（Plus Minus Next）可以用来追踪、管理和反思实验结果。将不确定性项目定义为实验，可以改变对成功的定义，促进团队学习和成长。实验性思维并非要消除焦虑和不确定性，而是要学会接纳它们，并通过行动来减少不确定性。微型实验并非单纯的生产力技巧，而是帮助我们找到更温和、更有效的做事方法。
Emma: 感谢你分享如此大胆的邀请，让我们思考自己是如何运作的，以及在一个渴望确定性和知识以及特定目标的世界中，我们可能需要从自己身上得到什么。我看到了你分享的想法中存在的可能性和机会，所以我真的很高兴我们有机会能够一起讨论它们。因此，让我们从这个确定性的概念开始。你谈到我们是如何被设定为追求确定性的，我认为这是我们看到的事情之一。
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Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'It made me reconsider our entire relationship to work. It made me ask, why is it that so many of us push ourselves to the edge in the name of productivity? And it made me question our relationship to uncertainty in our personal and professional lives. This is actually a really interesting paradox.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'As knowledge workers, we are hired for our capacity to solve problems, to think creatively, to deal with complexity. But somehow, when we're faced with uncertainty, we have this tendency to want to feel in control, to seek certainty.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'This definition of success is actually based on something called linear goals. Linear goals are based on the idea that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'And so things rarely go to plan. Instead of going from point A to point B in a very neat way, we find ourselves navigating this complex web of twists and turns with unproductivity at each crossroads. And what do we do when we can't achieve our goals? We blame ourselves. And very often, we might even want to hide our failures from others.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'For a scientist, success is not reaching a specific destination. Success is learning something new.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'I want to convince you to start treating your work and maybe your entire life like a laboratory. I want to convince you that being curious is much more powerful than feeling certain.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'When a scientist doesn't get what they expected, they don't go like, "Shame, shame, shame. I'm such a bad scientist." No, they look at it and they ask themselves, "Huh, what's going on here? What can we learn from this?" And this is because they understand that we need failure to learn. Failure is an inherent part of learning.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'And in order to do this, we need to replace this desperate need for certainty with curiosity instead. You're still using your perception action cycle, but instead of trying to resolving uncertainty as quickly as possible, you're using that uncertainty as an opportunity to learn and to grow.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'The reason why scientists are so good at this, at having this experimental mindset, is not because they're smarter than all of us. It's because they've been trained to do so.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'You can actually run your own tiny experiments for any challenge that you're facing in your life and in your work. What I'm about to show you is, in essence, a very simple way to take the scientific method out of the lab and to apply it to any area of life and work. So you can go from that free-floating anxiety to systematic curiosity.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'And I like to call this self-anthropology, because just like an anthropologist goes and studies a new culture with no preconceptions whatsoever, you can actually study the way you think, the way you live, the way you work, and pretend that you don't know anything about the way things are done. And really taking notes and asking yourself, why are we doing things the way we are?'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'When you want to experiment, you don't have to have a full complicated experiment like a scientist would in the lab. You only need two ingredients. First, you need to know what you're going to test. And second, you need to know the number of trials. So you need to know the action and the duration.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'The great thing about tiny experiments is that you actually don't need to get any kind of buy-in from anyone. You just need to notice that maybe something might be worth trying, and that's enough to design a tiny experiment. That being said, we can actually grow and learn better and much faster when we experiment together.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'Ultimately, this shift in mindset is all about defaulting to curiosity. It's about learning to fall in love again with problems. It's about letting go of the fear of failure, the imposter syndrome, the analysis paralysis. It's about internalizing the belief that if you approach it with curiosity, any challenge can be an opportunity for growth and discovery.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'I think the first step is to acknowledge the fact that it's completely normal to feel anxiety when we're faced with uncertainty. Again, that's what our brains are designed for, to reduce that uncertainty. And so whenever we're faced with a situation where we're not quite sure what's going on, we're not quite sure what the threats are, what the risks are, who the other players are, our brain wants to reduce that uncertainty as quickly as possible. And so I think there is sometimes a lot of skepticism'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'There's a uniquely human capability that's called metacognition. And scientists love jargon, but it really just means thinking about thinking. So we know that most mammals are able to think. Anyone who has a pet here would know that you look at a cat or a dog, you know they can think, right?'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'I would say just experiment with it. That's why my book is actually not that prescriptive in terms of how you implement these things because I think it might look different for a lot of people. The idea here is to just experiment with different ways for you to pay attention to how you feel, your productivity, the way you work with other people, the way you communicate with other people, the way you lead and relate to other people.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'So I used to be terrified of public speaking. I'm talking terrified as in stomach cramps, nightmares for weeks before I had any kind of presentation. And so I asked myself, what is a tiny, tiny, tiny, the tiniest of experiment I could run around this? And so I said, for the next 10 days, I'm going to record myself with my phone for one minute and I'm going to post it on Instagram.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'that lack of the thing that I might learn and what that opens up? Yeah, so I actually, I didn't want to put the entire book in the presentation, so I skipped over that part a little bit. But there is a hypothesis, not only exactly as a scientist would actually write a hypothesis, but there is a hypothesis when you run an experiment. And usually the hypothesis is more along the lines of this is going to work or this is not going to work.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'You can run your experiments on your own. You don't have to share them with anyone, but it can really help to add this layer of learning in public, especially if it's something where you have quite a bit of resistance around it. And maybe you've tried it before. Maybe that was a habit you tried to build in the past and you couldn't do it.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'I would actually ask your team each person on your team to design a tiny experiment. You could pick a theme, a product, a challenge that you're facing as a team and say, "For the next month, let's all run an experiment and let's all report back." At the end of the month, everybody can share what worked and what didn't.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'This is a fascinating study that's from the late 70s, 1979, where scientists, it's a very simple, elegant study. They basically ask people, if you're put in that specific situation, how do you act? How do you behave? What do you do? And what they found is that most people, when placed in the same situation with the same scenario, end up all acting in exactly the same way.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'I'll go back to the advice of starting with observation. So that exercise of self-anthropology, I recommend doing for 24 hours. So the way it works is very simple. You choose a day during your week that's a pretty typical day. So don't do that on a Saturday where you go to your crazy festival. Do that on a day during the week that's pretty normal. And again, just like an anthropologist, start taking little notes throughout the day.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'This experimental mindset is actually perfect for neurodivergent people. My job at King's College London is actually at the ADHD research lab. So although this book is not about neurodiversity, that was something that was always on the back of my mind while writing it.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'Yeah, I love the meditation one. I actually love the experiments where I start thinking that this is not going to work. And when I'm proven wrong, this is the best. And as a scientist in the lab and outside of the lab, this is the best feeling.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'There's a tool that I really like that is actually in the book that's very simple to you, that is very helpful to track your experiments, but also to reflect on them and to decide what you're going to implement in your next experiments. Maybe if I had named it at Google, the name would be better, but I did that on my own. It's called Plus Minus Next.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'if you start from the very beginning by saying, this is just an experiment. This is just an experiment. Here are the parameters. And I think this is going to work, but I'm actually not quite sure. And I'm going to report after this duration. And I'm going to tell you what worked and what didn't. So you really completely transform your definition of success from this binary definition, where either it worked and it didn't, and if it didn't, you better hide it.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'This is a great question because I think a misconception when I talk about the experimental mindset is that it's about getting rid of the uncertainty or getting rid of the anxiety. And it's not. This is a completely natural reaction and it's very, very hard to get rid of it.'
Anne-Laure Le Cunff: 'So first, I don't see tiny experiments as a productivity hack, but I do think tiny experiments can help you figure out ways to be more productive without sacrificing your mental health. It's really about questioning the way you work and figuring out if there's maybe a gentler way that will give you the same result.'
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