Can an experimental mindset help you navigate your transition to retirement? Anne-Laure Le Cunff, author of the new book Tiny Experiments, discusses how to become a scientist of your own life and unlock new habits, interests, and behaviors for your next phase of life.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff joins us from Austin.

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Bio

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World.  She’s a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. A former Google executive, she went back to university to earn a Ph.D. in Psychology & Neuroscience from King’s College London. As the founder of Ness Labs and author of its widely read newsletter, she writes about evidence-based ways for people to make the most of their minds, navigate uncertainty, and practice lifelong learning. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed academic journals and mainstream publications such as WIRED, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and more.

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For More on Anne-Laure Le Cunff 

Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World

Ness Labs

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Best Books for Retirement

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Podcast Episodes You May Like

Tiny Habits Can Lead to Big Changes – BJ Fogg

Design Your Life and Get Unstuck – Dave Evans

Growing Old, Staying Rad – Steven Kotler

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Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.6 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.

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Wise Quotes

On Becoming a Scientist of Your Own Life

“An experimental mindset is one where we have both high ambition and high curiosity. This is really embracing the fact that you need both if you want to grow in life. And if you want to achieve more than what you think is currently possible, if you want to achieve more than what is within the realm of your imagination with what you know today, you need hard work, sure, but you need to keep some doors open for exploration, surprises, serendipity, and those kinds of collaborations that we can’t really plan for. And an experimental mindset is really about becoming the scientist of your own life, treating everything, every challenge and uncertainty in general as an opportunity to experiment and to learn something new.”

On Reframing Retirement

“I think retirement is such an amazing phase in life for experimentation. But unfortunately, because all of a sudden, everything we knew, all of the routines and the ways of working are changed for lots of people overnight, we find ourselves in that liminal space, that space of uncertainty. And so we might tend to have one of those three automatic responses. Because we might experience cynicism, escapism, perfectionism, instead of experimenting. Some of the key benefits of embracing this experimental mindset are really to use this phase to discover new things that you might want to do. To maybe reconnect with things that you were curious about and had to pause or put aside because you focused on your career or on your family or on any other projects. And it’s really considering that time as a time of possibility. All of a sudden, you don’t have someone else deciding what your calendar and schedule is supposed to look like. And you have this newfound freedom, which, yes, comes with a lot of uncertainty. We can also come with a lot of creativity.”

On Tiny Experiments

So tiny experiments, as I described them in my book, are inspired by the scientific method. But you don’t need a lab, you don’t need equipment. You certainly don’t need to apply for funding. You can just run your own tiny experiments by designing your protocol. And I call this protocol a pact because it’s a commitment to curiosity. The way you design a pact is by choosing an action, something you’re curious about, and committing to performing that action for a certain duration. And again, it’s inspired by the scientific method where when you conduct an experiment, you say, these are the number of trials we’re going to conduct, and this is how we’re going to collect data. And to choose on an action, it always starts with, again, with curiosity. So you can use this magic word, maybe. Maybe if I did that thing, I would feel more creative. Maybe if I did that thing, I would be more productive. Maybe if I did that thing, my garden would look better. Maybe if I did that thing, I would meet new friends. And so you start with maybe and you, that’s basically the hypothesis. That’s your hypothesis. And then you say, okay, what is the thing? So let’s say you kind of want to grow your professional network after you’re retired, you want to meet other people who maybe are retired and working on interesting projects and you want to connect with them. So you say, maybe if every Monday I reach out to someone I admire, someone whose work I enjoy on LinkedIn, I send them a message and I do that for six weeks. So that’s your pact. I will reach out to a new person every Monday for six weeks. That’s your data collection. That’s your pact. And the great thing is again, same as scientific experiments is that you withhold judgment until you’re done. A scientist doesn’t stop the experiment in the middle and say, I don’t quite like what I’m seeing here. Let’s stop. No, they collect the data and then the assess it. So you finish this, you send your six messages on LinkedIn over the next six weeks and at the end of the six weeks, you ask yourself, did that work? Was my hypothesis correct? Did that help me grow my professional network? Did I meet interesting people? And do I want to keep going? And if yes, that could even turn into a habit. Thank you. There’s a completely different definition of success and failure when you design experiments.”