379: Anne-Laure Le Cunff — Tiny Experiments

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. Today, I'm talking to Anne Laure Locombe, neuroscientist and author of the book Tiny Experiments, where she shines a scientific light on how we set goals and what experiments we should think about and how we can deal with uncertainty in a high stress world. This episode is sponsored by paddle.com, my favorite payment provider. I personally use Paddle on several of my software projects, and I've been very happy with them over the last couple years. Since they're a merchant of record, they really help me be confident in charging for all my businesses and doing that internationally. Paddle takes care of sales tax and expiring credit cards, invoices, and all that. So I can focus on my business instead of chasing money. So go to paddle.com to check it out. It's one of those important foundational choices that you really wanna get right for your business. And now here's Anlor. Anlor, welcome to the show. I've been looking back at my own creator journey over the last couple years, and I do wonder, are we hardwired to eventually run out of steam, out of energy? Is doing the same thing over and over again with the same joy and intensity even possible? I wonder about this. Is that a thing that our brains do to us? Like, where does this come from? That's actually fascinating. We're hardwired for exploration, actually. As human beings, we like things that are new, that are interesting, that pique our curiosity. And so if you keep on doing the exact same thing over and over and over again, you are going to run out of steam. You are going to be bored. And I think that's why it's very important to inject a little bit of playfulness, a little bit of experimentation, a little bit of, trying to get out of your comfort zone in what you do. And even though it can be tempting once you feel like, oh, I figured out how this thing works, to just keep on doing the same thing over and over again to make space for yourself to try things a little bit differently. And this is how you're going to be able to sustain effort over the long term, by making sure that that effort doesn't look exactly the same every single day. That's the thing. Right? Like, a lot of people, they're looking for stability and knowing what is gonna come, and it becomes static, and that is where it gets boring. Right? Like, if there's no experiments, if there's no change, no variance in this, even though it's probably good for if you're a founder or if you're somebody who's trying to do something, get to a certain kind of goal, it is nice to know what the path looks like. But if that path becomes the same thing over and over again, it becomes a problem. Right? Yeah. And that's very interesting that …