by Anne-Laure Le Cunff
Ironically, soon after I retired from public school librarianship in 2020 I started binging on productivity authors and podcasts. I had been a long-time follower of David Allen (Getting Things Done); he really did help me get a lot of things done in both my professional and personal life. For a while I was an avid listener of Cal Newport, whose books and Deep Questions podcast really did help me complete a full draft manuscript of a middle grade novel. Then came Tiago Forte, whose “building a second brain” concept has done almost as much to make me a good organizer of information as did my Masters of Library and Information Science degree. As much as all these guys have helped me, I did get kind of tired of the “bro-y” atmosphere in that world, so I was relieved to run across the work of Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a French-Algerian computer scientist who dropped out of Google to get a doctorate in neuropsychology. She too, of course, has a website (Ness Labs) with a paid membership option, and a newsletter, and now her new book, Tiny Experiments.
It was delightful to listen to the audiobook edition of her book because of her charming French accent. It was an enjoyable listen, well researched, good storytelling, quite worthy in and of itself. The best takeaway for me is the simple shift from the idea of “setting goals” at which you either succeed or fail, to setting up (like she says) “tiny experiments” to just try out new ways of living in a much more low-stakes way, and then assess to see what to keep, change, or abandon. Her whole approach is based on what she learned in her neuropsychology training, so it seems solid and reliable. I am trying it out a little in my life, and it is a much more enjoyable approach to growth and self-improvement.