Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Tiny Experiments for Smarter Decision-Making
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Understanding what we truly want in life, both personally and financially, is actually more complicated than we think. Many of us set goals based on what society expects or what others around us are doing or what we assume will bring us happiness.

but what if there's a better way hi everyone i'm business coach steve sandusky for barron's advisor the way forward podcast my guest today is anlor lacombe anlor is a neuroscientist a writer and an entrepreneur who helps people think better learn faster and work happier and she's the founder of nest labs and the author of a great new book titled tiny experiments how to live freely in a goal obsessed world

In today's conversation, Ann Lohr challenges the conventional wisdom around goal setting and purpose. And she describes what's called the arrival fallacy, which is the idea that achieving a big goal doesn't necessarily lead to lasting happiness. And why is that? Well, part of it is because we often pursue goals that aren't even our own because we get caught up in mimetic desire.

And instead of rigid long-term planning, she advocates for a more experimental approach where we make decisions based on curiosity, exploration, and iterative learning. And when we apply this more flexible, curiosity-driven approach, it can actually lead to better outcomes for your clients so they don't get stuck living as if it's Groundhog Day every day. With that, here's my conversation with Anne-Laure LeCompte.

I think a lot of people who are ambitious focus a lot on how to get to a specific destination. And usually they're pretty good at it. They will find all of the information that's necessary to get there. Then they will work really hard. They will stay focused. If they get distracted, they will remember that they have to keep their eyes on the prize, get back on track. And then they get there most of the time.

The problem is that there is a psychological phenomenon called the arrival fallacy, which is that we think that once we get to that destination, we'll be happy. What most people discover is that once they get there, they're still the same person. All of their other problems are still here and they're not any happier. That's one of the main reasons to stop focusing so much on the end goal and focusing on the process instead.

It's that by focusing on the process, whatever the outcome, you'll still be happy exploring and experimenting while you're getting there during the journey. That's one thing. The second one is that

It's very hard to predict, especially for long-term ambitions, what you will want in the future. And so instead of having a long-term plan that you rigidly stick to whatever happens, even if your situation changes, even if the world changes, it is better to stay open-minded.

And whenever you see that, oh, actually, that plan I had doesn't seem to be so solid anymore. The parameters have changed. That's okay, actually. Maybe that's going to be an amazing opportunity for me to learn something new, to try something different. When you do that, you're not only going to open new doors and to explore more opportunities, but you're going to have a lot less anxiety in the process because you're not clinging onto a specific outcome.

And I think this is where it can become hard when, let's say, you're a financial advisor and you're working with clients. You're trying to identify what the client's goals are, what you're trying to save for, how much money you need to save, will you have enough money for retirement, all those kinds of questions. One of the issues that people will run into is,

not even knowing what their goals are. And I know you talk about this in your book as well. So how can we be more effective at really trying to understand what is it that we really want? Because a lot of people haven't really taken the time to sit down and think about what do I want for the next 10 years in my life? What are some of my goals? So maybe let's just start at that fundamental level. How do we know what we want?

We think that we're supposed to know. And I think that's the main problem. We think that we're supposed to know. And when the goals are not clear, when what we want is not immediately evident, we feel like something's wrong and we feel paralyzed. So first, I would get rid of that assumption. It's normal to not know. And that's completely fine.

And you can treat that as becoming the scientist of your own life, just like a scientist who doesn't know the answer. If they knew the answer, they would not be running any experiments, right? Science is about discovering something new. So when a scientist doesn't know the answer,

They don't freak out. They're not paralyzed. They say, OK, let's explore different research questions. Maybe let's formulate a couple of hypotheses and let's see how we can experiment, collect some data and make decisions based on that. And you can actually apply this experimental mindset to your own life and even to your financial decisions when you're not quite clear exactly what you want to do and what you want to achieve.

It's very easy to copy paste goals from others and especially financial goals. Everybody tells you you need to buy a house. Everybody tells you you need to save for retirement. Everybody tells you those are the big milestones that you should achieve. And the reason why everybody says that is that it is probably the case that for most people, that might be the case that this is the correct decision. But instead of starting from the assumption that should be what you should be doing, you can ask yourself, what is it I want?

And again, just like a scientist, you start from observation, observing your own life, observing what you like, observing what gives you energy, what drains your energy, where your curiosity wants to bring you. And for example, an exercise that I tell people to do is to just look at their calendar, open your calendar. We usually use our calendars just to put meetings in there and then we attend those meetings and we forget about them.

But instead of looking at future events in your calendar, open it and look at the way you spent maybe the past three months or six months and open a notebook. Look at your calendar and ask yourself, what were meetings, conversations, experiences, activities that gave me joy, that were intellectually stimulating, that I want more of in my life? And what were the ones that were draining that I wish actually didn't happen, that felt like a waste of time?

And how can I optimize my ambitions, whether in my finances, my relationships, my work and my career, in order to have more of those moments that feel good and fewer of those ones I would have rather not having my calendar at all.

And this can already be a really good indicator of some directions you can explore in terms of your financial goals. Based on that, you can then design some experiments. I'm not a financial advisor. So this is really more about the mindset of telling a client, okay, it looks like you might be interested in exploring this. That could be a good way of saving or that could be a goal that you might have, something you want to save towards.

let's design an experiment let's think about it and let's talk about it and let's try this for the next year see how you feel and then let's revisit in a year and see if that still aligns with what you feel is right for you and it's really about changing that approach from here is a 30-year plan that you're going to absolutely stick to to let's take it one year at a time and refine your goals and

until you feel like that's what I want. And once you're 100% sure, that's fine. You can say, let's go. Let's go for the next 30 years. One of the things that you started out talking about there was how do we know what we want? And you said, sometimes we just look and say, society says we need to have a house or we need to have this, or we need to do that, or we need to join this country club or what have you. And I know in your book, you also talked about mimetic theory. And I want to talk about that for just a second.

And Rene Girard, academic who's done a lot of work in that area, Luke Burgess wrote a book called Wanting, where in more layman's terms, he described that. I want to share a quote here from Luke Burgess's book here, and I'd like you to comment on it. And he said, most people aren't fully responsible for choosing their own goals. People pursue the goals that are on offer to them in their system of desire.

Goals are often chosen for us by models, and that means the goalposts are always moving. He goes on to say, memetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals. The more we bring that system to light, the less likely it is that we'll pick and pursue the wrong goals. So I'd love to hear how you think about that related to the experiments that you're talking about here. I love that idea of experiments because that's such a great way to figure out what

do we like as opposed to being trapped in this mimetic desire idea of we want what we want because we see other people want that and we think we should want that too.

This is such a great quote, and I love his work. I think the most important part in the quote is about how the more self-aware we become of this mimetic desire and how it drives our decisions and our goals, the more likely we are to question these goals and to make sure that we're following ambitions of our own. In the book, I have an entire chapter where I talk about cognitive scripts, which I think is also a related and very important concept.

Cognitive scripts have been discovered by scientists a few decades ago who realized that if you put people in similar situations, they tend to act in similar ways. So imagine you go to the doctor, you're in the waiting room, you'll go in there, you'll sit down, you'll wait. It's called a waiting room after all. And then your name is called, you go in the doctor's office and they might ask you to get undressed and check what's wrong, right?

If while you're waiting in the waiting room, the doctor came out and asked you to get undressed in front of everybody else, you would feel quite weird, right? And that's because that's not following the scripts that you're expecting. And we have lots of scripts like that where we have all agreed as a society that this is the way you're supposed to behave when you go to the doctor, when you go to the hairdresser, and when you navigate certain situations in your life.

which is fairly practical, good heuristics to have. You're not going to question how you're supposed to behave in every single situation. The problem is that they've since then discovered that you can find those cognitive scripts in virtually all areas of our lives. We follow these scripts when we decide on our careers, our financial goals, our relationships, and even whether to have kids or not. That will depend a lot based on the different scripts that you have around you.

So similar to what he writes in Wanting, you can start by just becoming more aware of the scripts, just realizing what are parts of my life where I'm making decisions based on scripts and where are these scripts coming from? In the book, I talk about three, the big bad scripts, the three biggest ones that I think are worth exploring, questioning and potentially replacing with your own scripts. The first one is,

is the sequel script. That's the one where we feel like because we've been behaving in a certain way our entire life, we need to keep on behaving in the same way. It needs to make sense. It needs to have a clean narrative, just like a sequel movie. And that's why, for example, some people who have been studying for something will only consider careers that align with whatever your studies were. And if they've been pursuing some certain types of projects or experiences

Living in a certain city, having a certain lifestyle, they'll just continue with whatever they've been doing and not really questioning that. The sequel doesn't have to repeat the same story as the first movie. First script, sequel script. The second script is the crowd pleaser script. And that's the one where you make your decisions to please people around you.

Those people could be your parents, could be your spouse, could be your friends, could be your colleagues. And you do this, again, subconsciously. Just whenever you're faced with a decision or two different paths, you'll pick the one that is most likely to make people around you happy and tell you, oh, that's great. We're so happy for you. This is great. And you're not going to consider the ones that might make you happier, but that might be a bit more surprising for the people around you.

And then the last one is the one that is the most, I think, insidious because it's being celebrated by everyone in our society. And this one is the Hollywood script. It's the idea that whatever you decide, it needs to be big. It needs to be bold. It needs to be ambitious. And if you go for anything smaller than that's failure,

This is the one that might make you decide to save for that big mention when in reality, you would be really happy with a smaller house that has enough space for your books and a little desk area and you don't need the big mention. But because you're supposed to be ambitious and go big, you'll go for the bigger version of the goal. And so that's something that is also interesting to question.

So scripts, part of it based on mimetic desire, but also just based on trying to fit in to be part of the crowd that we're part of our tribe. These are really good to question. I think this is going to turn into a therapy session for me because a lot of these things that you're talking about, I'm like,

Yeah, I can see myself in that. And this idea of following the cognitive scripts. And I think about my life. I think my life has been very linear, very traditional, very predictable from going to college to getting married, to having kids, to buying the house in the suburbs, to having a career. It's like these very natural linear progressions.

And in recent years, what I've really tried to focus on, is that really what I want? Because I read a lot and I read a lot about biographies and I'm really fascinated by these people that had very non-traditional lives and did things that were very different from sort of the tradition of

So I'm wondering what separates that kind of person who decides I'm not going to fall into the trap of mimetic desire. I'm not going to fall into the trap of these cognitive scripts that you're talking about, but I'm really going to break free. I'm really going to do what I want to do versus someone like me that's sort of gone a traditional route. I think you've given some ideas here. Is there something in the genetic makeup of these people that do something different or

Have they consciously decided, I want to do a different route. I'm not going to be subject to peer pressure. And I think this applies to people say that are making the big transition into retirement. It's like, I've done my career thing. Now I'm going to move to the next phase of my life. So how can we help people break free from the strictures of this is what I've done my whole life. Now retirement is just a sequel to my existing life as opposed to

I could write a whole new ending to my life if I want to. Yes, there is actually some genetic evidence that there might be a role of, there's a gene called DRD4 that is called the wandering gene that might have an impact. But that being said, first, this is very early research. And second,

I personally don't think, based on all of the other research, that the impact of this genetic mutation is strong enough that it would really be useful to use it to divide the population between people who can explore and people who cannot. This is really more about maybe tendencies that you could find for people who have this mutation. So I'm just going to focus more on what I do think have a much stronger impact and that has been studied as well. And there are several factors. The first one, which I think is really important to talk about, is genetics.

psychological safety, feeling like you're safe enough that you can experiment. It's very easy to tell people, just go and try something different and explore. But in order to be able to do that, you need to feel like you have a safety net, that you're not going to risk everything in your life in order for you to experiment.

And this is why my book is called Tiny Experiments. I don't tell people, go and change everything about your life. You can completely keep your full-time job and then experiment with something as a side project, as a hobby, as something that you want to try without taking a really big risk in your life.

If at this point in your life, you feel like you're pretty safe, that could be that maybe you're a little bit younger and you don't have kids yet, for example. And worst case scenario, if that doesn't work out, you go and you find another job. That's fine, too. You can quit your job and try that experiment. So it's really about asking yourself, where am I in my life right now? How safe do I feel?

And there's obviously another layer. There's always another layer here, but also questioning if that level of safety that you feel is actually your actual safety. Because sometimes we feel like the world is more dangerous than it is, that things are more uncertain than they are, or that the risk is bigger than it really is. So just, again, questioning the assumptions is

and checking in with yourself in terms of how safe you feel to experiment. So that's one big factor, just feeling safe enough to experiment. Another factor is simply being aware that this might be a mode of being that you can play with.

We talked about the scripts, unfortunately, and this is why I feel like this work, what Louis Burgess did with Wanting, the work I'm trying to do with my own book is so important, is that for a lot of people, what is lacking here is just awareness that there's another way to write your script for your life. If everybody around you is following the same script, why are you going to try to do something different?

Everybody is telling you that this is what success looks like, that those are the rules and that if you follow these rules, you'll be happy. And this is why you see a lot of people who almost if you think about the script again as a movie, they get to the end of the movie, they get to retirement and they feel like, OK, that was a pretty good movie. But what do I do next? All of a sudden, they're faced with one script that says you're retired now.

You're not going to be a productive member of society anymore. You're going to just wait to die, right? Some of them, unfortunately, become depressed. That's very common. But some others, for the first time in their life, they start questioning the script and they ask themselves, wait a minute, that's not how I feel. I feel like I still have a lot of energy. I still have a lot of creativity. I still have a lot of curiosity. Is there another script?

And they start experimenting and exploring. So obviously, the earlier you discover that you can do things differently, the more fun probably you're going to have trying different approaches. But there's really no age at which you can start. And you can start at really any age. And retirement is actually quite a common age for people to say, huh, let's try a different script.

Yeah. And I love how you're using the script writing as the analogy here and just this idea that

Awareness is one of the important things that we need to be aware that we can write a different script. We can write a new story that has a different ending. And I want to share something here that you wrote in your book. Along with that, you talked about when thinking about your life, pretend you want to craft a captivating story. And imagine that you want to write the beginning of an unputdownable tale, the kind that breaks free from well-trodden narratives. And then you go on to quote,

Leslie Dixon, who was the screenwriter of Mrs. Doubtfire. And Leslie Dixon said, there's only one rule of screenwriting, which is, does the reader want to turn the page?

And as I read that, I thought, wow, that's a great way to think about your life. Am I living the life where I really want to turn the next page or I want to get to the next day because this is so exciting. I want to see how this thing is going to evolve over time. And so I love how you use that as the analogy there for being the screenwriter of your life, I guess you could say.

Yeah, thank you. And I think this is actually helpful even for advising other people, whether in a financial capacity or friends, family who feel a little bit stuck and are not quite sure if there are several paths in front of them and they're not quite sure which one to explore. You can ask them, okay, imagine this is a book.

and you don't know what's going to happen next. Because obviously those two choices you're facing, it's not like you can predict the future, right? So there are uncertainties around both of them. But which one is making you more excited to turn the page and see what happens next? That can be a really good heuristic when you're faced with two choices that sound equally good, equally interesting, equally risky, and you're not quite sure which one to explore. Which one are you actually more excited about?

Yeah, and I've written a couple books, one of which was a fiction book, a story. And I had a bit of an outline before I started writing it, but what I discovered was

The story started to tell itself as I started writing it. And so this idea of make the reader want to turn the page as the author, I like, I want to make myself turn the next page and see what I'm writing. And when you get into the characters, then you start trying to think about how's the character think. And then the story starts to write itself. Again, I think a lot of good analogies here as it relates to writing stories.

I also want to talk about purpose. You share a lot about that, this idea of the tyranny of purpose. I think a lot of us feel like, oh, what's my purpose in life? Is it some big thing? Why am I here? Am I going to have an existential crisis? How do you think about purpose and how we cannot get so hung up on that yet still know that having a purpose, I think, is really important and core for all of us to have a meaningful life?

The reason why I started writing this chapter was when I found a stat that I thought was crazy, that the number of mentions of how to find your purpose has gone up 700% in the past two decades. People really want to find their purpose. Everybody is obsessed with it.

And then I ask myself, okay, but how do people actually find their purpose? And if you start asking around, you ask entrepreneurs, researchers, or even people who are employees and who wake up every morning excited to go to work and who feel like their life and their work has purpose, has meaning. And you ask them, how did you find your purpose? If they give you an honest answer, they'll all tell you, I stumbled upon it.

I was exploring this project. I was talking to this person. I decided to explore this possibility of collaborating with someone. We started doing this thing. And next thing I know, I'm super excited to wake up in the morning and I feel like this is a lot of fun. I want to keep doing this for the rest of my life.

And they didn't read a worksheet or followed a framework or found a course that told them, here is how you find your purpose. What they did is that they placed themselves in lots of situations where they could be exposed to different experiences, to different knowledge, to different people, to different ways of having an impact in the world.

Until one day they found that actually felt like the thing that they wanted to do. Another thing that these people have in common is that they're okay with the idea that this could be their purpose for the rest of their lives, but equally, they might stumble upon something else. And that might become their new purpose.

And so there's really this idea of purpose with a big P. That's the purpose that you're supposed to find for your entire life, which I think is very toxic and dangerous. And this is what makes people feel like you're missing something because they haven't found that yet versus small P purpose, which is just something that makes you feel excited to wake up in the morning right now, which might change in the future.

And so that's what I talk about in the book is that if you experiment, if each of your experiment is purposeful, then you don't need this big grand purpose with a big capital P. It's fine. You will feel like each moment has purpose in and of itself.

And that purpose can actually change. You're speaking my language. You talk about waking up in the mornings. My definition of success for my personal success is just simply going to bed at night, looking forward to getting up in the morning. And as long as I can do that, I feel like my life is on the right path and I'm doing what I want to do and living the kind of life that I want to live. And

Fortunately, I've been able to say that for quite a while. And I do think to your point, a lot of people can get hung up on, am I living my purpose? And I love your idea of the experiments in that expose yourself to a lot of different things. And I think parents try to do that with their children, where they try to get them involved in a lot of different things to see which of those things are actually going to click with them so that they can be exposed to it. Because I know there's a lot of adults and I'm

looking at myself that can look back and say, oh gosh, I wish I would have been exposed to this thing back when I was a kid. Because then I could have had a whole lifetime of doing that and enjoying that as opposed to just discovering it when I'm in my fifth or sixth decade. I love the idea of the exposure. And I think the core of your whole book is about

Don't bet the farm on something. Just do the little experiments and figure out what you like, what works. And also know that once you get going down a particular track, that doesn't mean you have to stay in that track. Like, hey, this is working for now. This is great. But maybe if I take a detour and I decide, oh, I like that route even better. So I'm going to go down that path. And so it's not a predetermined life. It's you're just figuring out along the way what seems to work. Would that be a fair way to think about some of your work?

Absolutely. I think a lot of us are making ourselves miserable by trying to cling onto the illusion of control. We try to make big plans and we try to stick to them and we try to hoard as much information as possible so we feel like we have clarity and visibility as to what is going to happen.

And the alternative is to embrace the fact that, again, the world keeps on changing. We keep on changing. And that's fine, actually. That's an opportunity. That's an opportunity to explore, to try new things, to make life more interesting, more surprising in a good way. And that's this reframe of uncertainty we talked about at the beginning. The uncertainty is still there. It's still the same. It's your relationship to uncertainty that changes.

One of the things that I've done for, I guess, about a decade or so is at the beginning of each year, I come up with three words that are sort of my theme for the year. This year, I decided to do something different and I came up with what I call three polarities. And so these are two words that are sort of opposite each other, yet both are important to me

And I want to play the juxtaposition against them. And okay, how do I make sure that I'm playing both sides of this in a way that I'm optimizing, let's call it my happiness. So one of them is control flow. So part of me is very optimistic.

logical, methodical, systematic. I like to control things. I like to prepare. I like to plan. But then on the other hand, I want to be in the flow too, right? I want to get so absorbed in something that it's just happening kind of thing. So as I think about these polarities, I think about curiosity. Again, something you talk a lot about in your work, yet there's a lot of people who are comfortable, who like

The way things are, they don't like change. How do you think about perhaps the polarity between comfort, I don't want to get out of my comfort zone versus curiosity might require me to get out of my comfort zone. And who knows if I go out of my comfort zone, again, I might find something I like a whole lot better than where I'm currently at. So do you have any thoughts on people who might be a little reluctant to do things differently than what they've done up to this point in their life?

It's really all about starting small and being intentional about which parts of your life where you want to experiment and start trying new things. And the ones where for now, at least you want to stick to what you know.

And as I mentioned earlier, psychological safety is quite important. And even when you think about creativity, there are a lot of creative people who actually like to stick to a very rigid routine and other aspects of their lives. So they will wake up exactly at the same time, have the exact same cup of tea every morning, journal for the same amount of time, and then they will start their creative work. And in that creative space, they're going to play. They're going to follow their curiosity and see what happens.

I think you can approach things in a very similar way where you can tell yourself, for now, for example, I don't feel financially stable enough that I'm going to experiment with my job. I'm going to stick to this job. I know what I'm doing. I know my team. I like them. This is great. And it might not be the most intellectually stimulating kind of work at this stage because I'm very familiar with what I'm doing, but I'm going to just stick to that for now.

So now that I've decided in a very intentional way that I'm not going to experiment in that part of my life, what are other parts of my life where I might be willing to experiment? That could be with your health saying,

What if I try to inject a bit more body movement in my life? What would that look like? What would an experiment look like? Am I going to maybe go for a walk for 20 minutes every day for 20 days? A tiny experiment just to see if that changes the way I feel. Am I going to experiment in my relationships? Maybe saying that for the next three months, every week, we're going to go on a date with my spouse and I'm going to be the one organizing this.

Am I going to maybe experiment with a side project where I'm going to take a little bit of the money that I've saved and I'm going to invest it in the startup that my son's friend is starting? And that's okay. That's money that if I lose it, that's fine. But it's a bit more experimental. As you can see, because you've become really clear as to which parts of your life you're not going to experiment in, you can then create space for experimentation in other ones.

And it's really about seeing these as containers for experimentation, making sure that those experiments have a beginning and an end. They're very clear. You say, that's the experiment I'm going to run. And I'm going to withhold judgment until I'm done with the experiment. Only when I'm done, I'll analyze the data like a scientist and ask myself, OK, how was that? Was that a terrible decision? Was it fun? Did I like it?

And it's very important to look both at external measures of success. So if you invested some money, for example, did you make money? That's one metric. But also, did you enjoy it? If you made money, but you were super stressed the entire time and that prevented you from falling asleep in the evening, maybe that's not something you want to repeat. But if you didn't make a lot of money,

So you're like, okay, external metrics, maybe not so great. I didn't make that much money compared to the time I spent on this, but this was so much fun. I kept reading new information that I liked, asking questions, connecting with people. I'm going to keep on doing this. So both external and internal signals are very important when analyzing the data.

And should we identify ahead of time prior to doing the experiment, what success would be at the end? Sort of the hypothesis, like I'm going to do this experiment.

And success in this experiment means blank. Should we have that defined prior to the experiment? Or is it more after the fact we analyze the data and the results and then determine if it was a success or not? You use the right keyword here, hypothesis and not success. So just like a scientist, you say, I have a hypothesis that this might be fun and make me some money, for example.

And then, so instead of trying to get to a specific destination, you're formulating a hypothesis, you run the experiment. And then at the end, you don't ask yourself, was I successful or not? You just look at the hypothesis and ask yourself, oh, was that hypothesis correct or not? And what's interesting is that sometimes it can be a complete miss. You thought it would be fun. It was absolutely terrible. But sometimes, and quite often, actually, the picture is not this clear.

So maybe it was more fun that way you expected, but maybe you discovered something else in the process that looks even more interesting than the initial experiment.

And that opens a new door. And that's okay too, because again, if you have this experimental mindset, you're not trying to get to a specific destination. That's your fixed definition of success. Instead, you're trying to learn something new. You have that hypothesis, this research question. As long as you learn something that you didn't know before you started running the experiment, that is success in scientific terms.

A polarity that is very common for financial advisors is save, spend. And so financial advisors help clients save for retirement. They get to the point, they retire. And now it's okay, I got to start spending. So it's a complete mind shift from a savings to a spending.

And any thoughts on some little experiments that clients could do to make that shift from a saving mentality to a spending? I know you've talked about psychological safety, which I think is so critical. I think that's been part of my key to some things that I've done here in recent years is just feeling more comfortable that I can do some of these other things that may be

Earlier in my life, I wouldn't because I didn't feel safe enough or secure enough, but now I do. And so I just wish I would have felt that way years earlier. Yeah.

Yeah, and experimenting with the way you spend your money is actually a great way to see this. You can say, I'm going to allocate this amount of money, something that feels safe, it's okay if it doesn't go very well, to trying something new every month. For example, I know people like that who have enough money, but somehow they still are subscribed to the local dingiest kind of gym. Yeah.

Where they go there, it's $15 a month and they somehow don't spend on going to a better gym with better coaches, right? It's those weird habits that we have where even though we could spend more, we're not. You could design a little experiment here where you say for the next three months, I'm actually going to go to the fancier gym. And again, I'm going to see how that makes me feel.

What's interesting is very often you have second order consequences that you could not necessarily predict. In this case, this is fairly obvious, but you might have more energy that might actually make you better at your job. That might actually make you more money because you're taking better care of yourself. But you won't really know that and experience it if you're not experimenting with this.

So a way to do this would be that allocate an amount of money every month where you feel like that's money where if I spend it and the outcome is not so good in terms of I actually didn't enjoy the way I spend the money, that's fine because my only aim here is to learn something new. And every month I'll decide I'm going to spend money on this thing that I'm

might seem frivolous to me, or it might be something that feels a little bit risky, or I've never tried before. And at the end of the month, I'll decide whether this is something that I'm going to keep on spending on because the benefits actually make sense. Or if now I know based on my own experience that this is not for me, and this is money that is better spent elsewhere. As we get ready to wrap up here, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you wish I would have asked you that you want to share here?

No, I think your questions were amazing, but I'd love to leave your listeners with a question for them, which would be based on this conversation that we just had. What could be a tiny experiment that you could start in the next month? Excellent. And if folks want to get connected with you and learn more about your new book, what would be the best way to do that? My book is available everywhere. So just type tiny experiments and you can find it anywhere books are sold anywhere.

And if you would like to subscribe to my newsletter, I send it every Thursday and I discuss some of these topics that we just discussed today together. You can go to nestlabs.com. All right. That's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms. And for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com slash podcasts. Take care and be safe.

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