I am incredibly excited to introduce an L she is a neuroscientist with a specialy in curiosity who's also the founder of Nest Labs um NES Labs provides content coaching courses in community to help makers put their minds at work she also has a new book uh titled tiny experiments coming out in March of next year which I'm very much looking forward to uh I am so incredibly excited for this conversation um as most of you will know by now uh I believe attractors generally and curiosity specifically is the most interesting topic I've ever explored uh an not only is your work on curiosity fascinating you've also got some deeply practical recommendations on how to structure experiments to explore it so um I wanted to kick off with kind of a broad question but you and I both believe curiosity is quote unquote an attractor um I'm I'm sure not sure that a lot of people will kind of understand what we mean by that so what do you mean by that yeah I got that idea based on the definition of what an attractor is in physics where it is the end state that a system tends to point towards to whatever the starting conditions are and I feel like curiosity is that state that point that we keep on going back to whatever we want to do and specifically we have some Curiosities in life that could be projects that could be ideas that could be places that we feel a very strong pull towards to a strong drive to explore and no matter how maybe irrelevant these things are to our current work how no matter how urgent it is for us to work on these things we just can't get them out of our head we keep on thinking about you know one day I will need to work on this and to me those are the strongest kinds of attractors there's this IDE aidea I've run into that the Universe Trends towards complexity and the definition of complexity is differentiation and integration so it's this kind of weird paradoxical definition where the world is trying to make you the most differentiated version of you that you can be while also keeping you integrated into the system like your body is made up of all these wildly differentiated little parts that are also kind of integrated into the system and there's this idea that Curiosity or what you're interested in is is something that's pulling you in that direction that almost seems kind of paradoxical like one what are you what are you most differentiated what what skills you most differentiated in but also how does it serve the system better um I don't know if you have thoughts on that or whether it plays into your perception of the different kinds of curiosity that's so interesting I almost see it as a process of convergence and Divergence and then convergence and Divergence uh or rather starting with Divergence and so you start by exploring by going broader and this is the the moment the phase where you feel like you're pulled in those different directions where it almost can be a little bit hard to decide which path which trail of curiosity you're going to follow and this is where things become more complex and then after a while you start learning different things discovering new ideas and connecting them together and you start simplifying those making them your own and you integrate them and that's the convergent phase of exploring your curiosity and after a while I think a lot of us have experienced that if you almost stay in the same spot if you just keep on exploring the exact same idea for a while you will after some time feel like you need to go and explore again you need to go into Divergent mode again so I think that's how I think about it in terms of of curiosity so very much aligned with the idea of diversion and conversion thinking yeah it kind of sounds like I guess it's another way of saying like explore exploit um you wrote this fantastic piece and I would Point all listeners to your um to your newsletter but you wrote this fantastic piece by saying like Okay like a lot of us particularly in today's really attention St World get pulled in a lot of different directions but there are ways of working out how to stay well how to how to which ideas to pursue and when I guess is what I want to say and you talked about how the stickier an idea is the the more it just keeps coming back to you as an indication of whether you could pursue it are there any other things that kind of stand out as like okay it's now time for me to really take the plch I think there's the the quantity aspect you just mentioned which is linked to that concept of a tractor which we just disc discussed which is how many times you keep on going back to the same idea that's a strong indicator but there's also a quality aspect uh that uh strength of the poll the intensity of it and this is something that is obviously very subjective but again I think we've all experienced that when there's something that makes us feel deeply excited and it's even more interesting when you notice that this is not NE necessarily something that other people are as interested in as you are you can't stop talking about it you tell your friends about it they look at you and they're like come on shut up let's talk about something else this is a strong indicator that this should be something you and no one else explores in a very very deep way so I would look at that quantity and quality but that that's why I find this so fascinating because that's also resonant with this idea of differentiation and integration that you don't totally have full control over what you're interested in which is like another kind of brain scrambling idea which is that like if you don't control your interests what does and you have these things so you know like my wife is is interested in completely different things to me and and yet this idea that if you're if you're increasingly occupying an evolutionary Niche they should be super different and they should have this really different energetic signature to them when you're getting interested in things um but one of the one of the the the questions stroke kind of dismissal of this concept of curiosity I get a lot is that um you can be curious about dumb things right you can be curious about like oh even if things don't don't seem stupid they're not productive things or they're they're actually kind of bad distractions that have no usefulness in the world like how do you know when you're pursuing a niche that's going to be fruitful relative to one that's just going to waste your life it's so interesting it kind of connects back to what you were talking about a little bit earlier about this impulsive drive to explore it's uh it's interesting because there's actually Neuroscience research showing that you have shared neural mechanisms between impulsivity and curiosity um so we we really have this impulse to resolve uncertainty this impulse to know and because of that sometimes we don't have our rational thinking part that kicks in to ask wait a minute am I actually interested in this and this is actually what social media company exploits because if they create this little Gap in curiosity and knowledge you just you want to know what happens next and so you keep on scrolling and they don't give you enough time for you to stop and think about whether you're actually curious about this piece of information or not so I would say that's the first step is just slowing down a little bit very often we don't even give ourselves the time to consider whether we are deeply curious about something or if it's just a dumb thing that someone is feeding us or if it's just something that we're using it's a type of curiosity called diversive curiosity when we're using curios as a way to procrastinate to avoid working on other things uh or just because we're a bit bored for example which is completely fine I do that all the time and I sometimes fall into very interesting Wikipedia rabbit holes because I was trying to avoid working on something I should be doing but it's really about this intentionality just posing and asking yourself is that really what I want to do with my time right now so first posing the second one a good filter I feel like is not necessarily asking yourself whether this is a smart use of your time or if it's a dumb idea to explore but whether it connects to something that is currently useful to you in terms of work or in terms of personal aspects in your life growing in your relationships or maybe some type of creative project that you have if it connects in just even the a very simple way to that you can then again in integrate it and incorporate it into those different projects or those parts of your life that are important when you do this sometimes even a very dumb idea can actually transform itself into something that is very generative and useful and can lead to some very creative like to some creative breakthroughs so dumb ideas are okay as long as they connect to something you're actually interested in man that's so interesting because um I think a lot of people know that the guys who set up notifications in most of the social media companies they came from slots uh from designing slot machines and um you know this's this this's this wild book called the world be uh beyond your head uh called by Matthew Crawford where he talks about how slot machines everyone thinks slot machines are kind of like simple and benign but he talks about how you know once they connected people's bank accounts to the slot machines you know a woman is interviewed and she said she um she would have to wear dark TR because she would soil herself rather than get off the stool and that they they talked about this relief that once they' emptied their bank accounts they could finally leave and go home because they were so addicted to this and the way I've thought about it is um these are kind of unresolvable dilemas that slot machines are designed so that they always present this kind of Gap in your model but it's not resolvable you're never going to find an answer to the slot machine it's presented so that you might be able to find an answer but to the stickiness of ideas one of the ways that sticky ideas were described to me once was basically there's a gap in your model of the world that there's this dissonance is caused by you not understanding things very well and and so the reason why it won't go away is it's kind of your environment being like you don't understand this you don't understand it your model is incorrect your model is incorrect and the longer you persist in that like the worse the worst the dissonance can get but that dissonance is resolvable whereas in certain situations it's designed so that it never will oh that's absolutely fascinating very sad also and uh that's the case with a lot of the the ways are brain works where from an EV evolutionary perspective those were mechanisms that were designed for survival but either they have become maladaptive today because of the way our society is designed or in the case you just described you have people who have learned to exploit them to their advantage very often to grow some type of business yeah it's it's nuts and I guess it points to when you're when you're when you're kind of pursuing your curiosity although this sounds incredibly trivial it's like is is this resolvable is this mystery resolvable is there an answer that can can come out of it um you've also um uh you mentioned uh diversive curiosity but you've also kind of broken curiosity out into a number of different categories how do you see the breakdown of of the different kinds of curiosity you've had lots of research and different models of curiosity with different dimensions uh the one I find the most practical to use in everyday life and to navigate your own curiosity is dividing it into three types the first one is epistemic curiosity second one is empathic curiosity and the third one which we just discussed is diversive curiosity the epistemic type of curiosity is the one where you're seeking to understand the world so you're trying to find new knowledge new ideas it's an intellectual kind of curiosity the second type empathic curiosity is about understanding other people you want to connect with them you want to understand how their minds work how their emotions work and this is really part of the social fabric of what makes us human as a society and the last one again diversive curiosity is the one we used in order to avoid doing other things it's the one we use when we're a little bit bored and um it's uh it's it's one that can be very impulsive and very hard to control a lot of people would say you should completely avoid having diversive curiosity in your life and I'm not part of that school of thought I think diversive curiosity is very fun sometimes and is Again part of what makes us human and so there's no reason to try to be over controlling here but we just need to be a little bit aware of when we're exercising that type of curiosity and whether This is Our intention or again in the case of slot machines or any kind of other apps or social media if there's someone else here who's gaining some sort of advantage in keeping us in this Loop of curiosity instead of directing our attention somewhere else yeah it's super interesting and and this may sound a little woo woo but it's it's been too productive in my life for me to ignore which is I've I've increasingly cultivated an energetic signature to go with my curiosity where like there are kinds of Doom growing that are like fast food they leave you feeling you know pretty bad afterwards certain certain topics that don't resonate with you but you find yourself pursuing we all know what they are you know like politics bad news whatever it is but I've also found that if if you if you inject love into these interactions like I've met you know 10 to 20 really good friends through Twitter but it's basically been creating a human connection where I you know I do a zoom call like this and I get to know someone and I get to meet them and I acquire that depth of of relationship ship but also I've noticed this energetic signature attached to New pieces of information that if I really pay attention to a book recommendation or an article link it will often indicate to me where I should pursue things and I I guess that plays into what a lot of what you're saying in terms of like is it linked to something that I've been pursuing is that something you find or is that kind of crazy sounding well I mean energetic signature the name you give it does sound a little bit woooo but describing does make sense to me uh we're obviously going to feel like some uh ideas make us feel good others don't make us feel so good and when we consume these ideas in a very high volume as we do on social media these effects are compounded and I think it's really about here almost like designing your playground and creating the experience so if you go on a platform like Twitter something that's fairly nice I mean the algorithm keeps on changing but for a long time by following the right kind of people you would also have a very interesting feed and very similarly to you I could actually scroll for a very long time on Twitter somehow I didn't feel so bad about it because I saw a lot of ideas I would bookmark a lot of articles I would have very quick conversation sometimes with someone by replying to their tweet and it felt a lot more mind nourishing than scrolling on other platforms where I have zero control over what is being fed to me uh an example obviously is Tik Tok or Instagram reals where who you follow doesn't really have an impact on what you're going to be fed they use the type of content that you engage with while you're scrolling my problem is that I tend to engage with very dumb stuff on these reals and so I get fed more of that dumb content that has no connection whatsoever with any of the areas that I want to explore in my life whereas on Twitter I can be a little bit more intentional and really curate the people that I follow and design that playground that I have so in that way where when you're in the right kind of playground you can almost let go a little bit more you don't have to be on your guards you can be truly curious and explore and let your attention go where it wants to go because you have created some basic parameters where you feel like most of the content you're going to engage with is going to be somewhat related to your intrinsic type your intrinsic curiosity so something that's already dropped out of this conversation and appears to be like absolutely fundamental to to the pursuit of curiosity is this idea of space right that you you can't explore if you're always exploiting and you know experiments seem to be absolutely critical to this process and you have literally written the book or at least you W in it so like how do you think about structuring experiments what's the relationship between experiments and curiosity so I actually think about designing experiments in a very similar way to the way scientists design experiments you start with a question and that's what's so beautiful about experiments is that it allows you to turn any kind of doubt that you have not into a source of fear and anxiety but into an opportunity for learning so whenever you're facing something that you don't understand whenever you have this uncertainty this Gap in knowledge and this could be about the world this could be about others or this could be about yourself you can then formulate a hypothesis so let me give you an example um you know a question like maybe why actually I'm I'm going to use um a real real experiment that I I did myself uh I I like why is it that I have never managed to meditate in my entire life I've maybe managed to do it for two or three times in a row you know on those apps where they have the 10day onboarding program I've never managed to finish one of these so I that was my question why why is it and then I had a hypothesis uh which was maybe I'm lacking accountability to do it because no one's watching at the beginning especially because it's new and it's quite hard and I don't see the benefit straight away I just stopped doing it so I designed an experiment where I said I'm going to meditate for 15 minutes every day for 15 days and I'm going to do it in public so I created a Google doc and I announced on Twitter that I was going to conduct this little experiment on myself and that every day at the end of each meditation I would take notes in that Google doc and it was absolutely amazing because I had lots of people every day who left comments in the Google Doc and who told me so for example if I wrote oh is it normal that I always feel a little bit itchy everywhere am I supposed to move am I supposed to to you know scratch it or are you supposed to be like in the movies where they really don't move at all and people would say no that's fine you can either scratch it or you can meditate on the edge if you want to and explore it again with kind it's kind of meta but with curiosity and uh I I based on the comments of people I tried different techniques eyes open I closed a bit of breath work before um doing it uh sitting or on my knees Etc so that was one experiment and in the the the way that I think is very useful to see it is as a cycle where you ask a question you formulate a hypothesis you then run an experiment that allows you to test that hypothesis and then based on the results of that experiment you're probably going to have a lot more questions that are going to arise from this and you can pick one to run your next experiment I mean it reminds me of what else you said about pursuit of curiosity that you need like a doing buddy or at least it helps if you have a doing bud someone to kind of keep you accountable and to help you like formulate the experiments but also kind of make those leaves yes especially for people who are very curious there can be a tendency to start a lot of things and not finish them because we kind of suffer from the shiny toy syndrome where then we see a new idea a new project that we're very curious about and committing to one aspect of our curiosity and then having a friend or a colleague where we say hey I'm going to do this let either let's do this together or maybe you do your own thing I do mind but we meet every week for coffee or we have a zoom call and we just talk about it we talk about our progress about what we learned and we can even brainstorm new questions for future experiments together can be really really helpful you also made me think of this um I don't know if you've run into this gentleman called Rory souland um but yeah he's he's incredible at the idea of like counterintuitive experiments so you know he says that often Evolution optimizes for interesting and an anecdotes like you listen to him I listen to I interviewed him once and I listened to 10 podcasts and and I realized that he uses really trivial sounding anecdotes to make incredibly deep points so he's the opposite of most podcasters that they're sitting there trying to sound intelligent and actually saying nothing he sounds like he's really trivial and if you spend 20 minutes thinking about it you're like oh my God that was so deep but he says that one you should pursue anecdotes because if something is interesting it probably contains evolutionarily important information but also he said often that requires being like deliberately counterintuitive so he says to you know people whose product is failing have you tried raising the price that you suddenly create like a VIN good or a luxury good like no one thought of a $15 coffee or a $300 vacuum cleaner before Starbucks and Dyson I guess like do you have any thoughts on that like how do you know when like a totally irrational experiment is too irrational or how do you know when you should be taking the leap I I think you don't really have to worry about this if you keep your experiments very small at first especially if it's something that's very new so if it's something that looks a a little bit like crazy you've never tried it you can do it for a short amount of time so just for a few weeks to see how that goes and especially if it's something like in my case meditating in public like on the crazy Spectrum for me who's actually pretty shy in some way doing this was actually quite challenging so I kept it to two weeks and if it's something that feels a little bit more comfortable you can then do it for longer and in the same way once you finished a tiny experiment um and you feel like that was good actually I really like that I want to go deeper you can then rerun it and go through another cycle of experimentation that is a little bit bigger so if you did it the first time for two weeks you can do it for a little bit longer in that sense you don't really have to to worry about it that's the idea of an experiment is that you really should not judge whether this is for you or not before you finish collecting your data just like a scientist is not going to make a decision about the results when they're halfway through running the experiment you just collect your data you show up you do the things you say that you were going to do and then at the end there's a reflective period where you ask yourself okay how was that how did that feel what did I learn what would I do differently if I were to run that experiment again but you only do this after you're done collecting all of the data so for the last four years like for context I had the world's most horrifyingly badly executed midlife crisis nervous breakdown career transition where I I made every conceivable mistake uh but a lot of it involved you know taking leaps and not really interpreting the results that I was getting from them very accurately um and the question I now get when I speak to a lot of people in transition is like this is all great but like does it work and you've obviously made this your you know your life's work and and and experiments are the focus of your career like there's a huge amount of inner resistance that people have to really putting often anything out there like what gives you the sense that this experimental structure works what have you seen around you what have you seen in in data or in real life to indicate that this is worth people's time um I mean there there are all of the members of my community that have like done it hundreds of people who have seen success with this method myself most of the projects that I've worked on that have had a significant impact on my life have been designed as a form of experiment even my newsletter my newsletter started as an experiment I said I'm going to publish a 100 newsletters in a 100 weekdays so that was the experiment and it's designed in this way every single experiment is like this you just commit to do it doing something for a certain number of Trials you decide on the number of Trials beforehand and then you complete all of the trials and then you analyze the data at the end of those 100 week days I looked at the data and I was like oh well I like doing this and people seem to like what I'm writing also so I'm going to keep going and I now do this for a lot of different things that I I want to do I just commit to it for a short experience ment I analyze the data and then I do it there's really nothing that new and groundbreaking the only thing I'm doing with my work is packaging it into a very simple framework that people can apply but a lot of the the way you know we work we do research science or even if you think about the Socratic method of asking questions getting answers formulating new questions based on this intely as human beings we've been using those types of cycles of experimentation across a lot of different things that's what a chef does when they cook they add a few spices they taste it that's the reflective part and then they adjust the recipe that's how athletes train that's really how any type of person who has had long-term success is really behaving but just not necessarily in a codified way in the way I talk about it and I write about it so this is where I really struggle because um I'm a writer uh and occasionally like speaker like go on podcast and I love that and I I always did but I never had any sense that that was where I would would end up and actually my experiments were kind of blind luck that the reason why I'm now a professional writer is because I wrote something I sent it out to a small distribution list and my former employers were like this is great we're going to hire you as a writer and so when people are like okay well you're a writer that's a kind of obvious experiment few to run even though I had no idea that would eventually be my Landing place but for people that feel like they don't have any connection to something creative you know quote unquote that they can offer to the world like what are what are the kinds of experiments you've seen people run in reality that have produced like kind of cool results or like at least really low hurdles for people to get over if they want to just test this thesis with kind of zero consequences or low consequences oh yeah I just want to clarify that it doesn't have to be for Creative projects at all it just happen so as I said I did it with meditation for example has nothing to do with a creative project one of my favorite ones from the community is someone called Jamie and he run an experiment for a month where every day he would send a text to a friend and that's it he had noticed that by you know becoming a little bit older and not hanging out as often with the people that he loved he was starting to lose touch with some of the people he really cared about and so he just designed that experiment where he said every day I have to pick someone from my contact list and just send a text hey how are you doing how are things and that's it and because of that experim he's reconnected with a lot of friends that he hadn't talked to in a while you can imagine the positive impact it had on his life on his well-being in general and to me that's an example of just a very small experiment that's easy to do that's just the right level of uncomfortable where you know you're growing you're doing something a little bit different but that is nothing crazy creative or putting yourself out there or even doing it in public you don't need any of this you just need to pick something decide on the number of Trials do it and then reflect on it it's so funny because um when I use the when you use the word attractive with people you're like well if you've got 100,000 romantic Partners to choose from and they've got 100,000 romantic Partners to choose from when you're mutually attracted to each other like that seems to be a way that kind of nature solves the problem of combinatorial explosiveness where there's just too many options and too little time and I've always wondered whether like information works this in a similar way although we wouldn't think about it that way but then in your work I was looking at you know you said that Curiosity keeps you young curiosity helps you learn curiosity Fosters better relationships that kind of like if you can apply this energetic concept which I like to everything the connectivity of of you to those things actually comes out and I think when people read that Curiosity keeps you young like they'd be like like what but is that something you've noticed like what are the what are the side effect benefits of curiosity that you don't think are immediately obvious to people yeah for for keeping you young when you think about the mechanism behind it it actually makes sense because by being more Curious uh you then keep on learning new things which is really good for neuroplasticity and which can help save off cognitive decline so that's the link here uh in terms of better connecting with people when you're curious you also tend to ask better questions to really try to understand people and so you form deeper relationships as compared to if you're not that curious there are so many different studies showing different benefits um it increases well-being in general because when you're curious you tend to look at the world with more o and wonder than if you're not as curious so if you're feeling a little bit low or if things have been a little bit hard in your life being curious allows you to still look at the the world and feeling like pretty cool to be alive actually so many interesting things and um it's also good for work performance because curious people tend to also ask more questions and that makes for better work in general when again we take the time to really understand what we're doing and sometimes to ask difficult questions um so those are some of the the ones that just come to mind right now Jesus it just sounds like this incredible superpower that you know I I do have a lot of people come to me and they be like I'm just not a curious person and like I'm actually not really interested in anything and that's something know like you know like I like golf or like is there like where do people who like don't think they're curious at all start uh but maybe they start with golf actually because maybe that's what they're really curious about I think it's more of a mindset uh they're probably very curious about golf they've maybe read everything that there is to read about it or if they're not readers maybe they've watched every single game or match I don't even know I watch don't watch go so I have no idea how it works but they're probably really curious about it so maybe instead of saying I'm not curious about anything I just watch golf they could say yeah I'm very curious about golf like that's really that's my curiousity to attractor that's the thing that gets me excited and once they've identified and recognized that this is curiosity actually they can then try and direct that same kind of energy towards something else if they want to they don't even even have to but just recognizing that we are naturally curious there's really no such thing as a human being that is not curious we have evolved to be curious um again Neuroscience Studies have shown that we have the same brain networks that are activated when We crave informations as When We crave water and food so when we're curious about wanting to understand something our brain reacts in the exact same way as when we want to have food uh or or water so when we talk about having a thirst for knowledge that we really couldn't use a better expression and it's really about just telling people hey you're actually curious It's just that maybe that's not the term that you would be using to describe this deep interest you have in gold for example but you are already curious and if you want to you can be curious about more things I appreciate this as a broad question but given you're writing a book is there is there anything that I haven't asked about that you think is like a really killer practical tool or approach that people can be using to bring this deeper into their lives there's a tool I really like that is useful for the reflective aspect of any kind of experiment and it's called plus minus next is very simple it's three columns plus the First Column minus and next in the plus column at the end of your experiment you can write everything that went well in the second column minus everything that didn't go as planned that was unexpected maybe not in the best way and in the next column with an arrow you can write anything you want to try for your next experiment so any tweaks that you want to make or even for next you can write actually I'm done with this thing that was horrible I don't want to do it again that's completely fine or you can decide to you can say I'm going to do it again but I'm going to do it bigger or longer or I'm going to do it again but this time I'm going to do it with a friend so that's what goes in the next column where you think about what does the next cycle of experimentation look like that's so cool and you made me think of something my friend um my friend Jim o shy I was wearing up the decision of whether I was going to start this company I've just started and he said of all the different options in front of you about everything you're going to do with your life you know at the time for me it was like there there were six different flavors six different varieties of what I could be doing and he said map them out on a tree but then imagine that you've already done each one and it has succeeded or it has failed now say what are the good things that have come from that success or the good things that have come from that failure which was kind of a weird weird way for me to frame it it was almost like the collapse of these Quantum possibilities where I was like okay that's already happened oh actually if I become a success at this do I do I want that success do I want to be managing that kind of business and it was a really powerful way for me to work out in advance because it was a way of almost kind of frontloading that energetic outcome where I was like oh like actually even if everything goes right I don't want to do this with my life I love that because it also shows that you know I mentioned earlier that you can direct your curiosity towards the world or others or yourself but what you're saying right now makes me also think that you can direct your curiosity towards the past the present or the future and there is really value in in any of these you can either really look at history and again history of the world or other or even your own past history and look at that with curiosity in a very neutral way to try and learn from it or you can be deeply curious about the present moment and your current experience or in your case with that excise what does deep City look like when it's directed towards the future and I imagine it looks something like that exercise that you did it's funny because um one of my favorite quotes comes from Beno mandelbrot where he's like my life seemed like a random series of events but when I look back I see a pattern and you know I I came from the world of investing and you know two of the Gods of investing are Ed Thorp and Jim Simons and what was really interesting about both of them is that they were like stupidly successful in the world of Finance but I didn't know until Jim Simons passed away recently he spent 10 years in a strip mall failing over and over again and then his hedge fund did like 60% a year for 30 years like it's insane he's the best of all time and he always said he was Guided by beautiful problems he he he seemed to be he was intrinsically Guided by this sense of beauty and curiosity and then Ed Thorp was another example where he was um he was an academic then he got convinced that he was going to was able to break roulette he ended up doing it with like a computer and then the mob tried to killed him in Vegas so he then moved to being like a hedge fund manager but it I was looking back through his life and yes he did have abundant resources but he was always able to flip really quickly between these different domains when was like oh Academia isn't interesting to me anymore I'm going to go pursue this and a lot of people think of of Finance people particularly very successful Finance people as kind of these very boring State people that fit into boxes but I found it like pretty amazing that they they also found so much Beauty in what they were doing yeah I really like that I also like the idea of which is linked to curiosity and lifelong curiosity of allowing yourself to reinvent who you are through your own curiosity and I think unfortunately a lot of people limit themselves in terms of which types of Curiosities they can follow because maybe it's too different it doesn't align with their current identity so as said sometime someone working in finance may think oh maybe like I can't become that curious about cooking or or art or whatever like I can do it as a hobby but maybe I can't take it so seriously that that becomes the main thing in my life right now but when you allow yourself to almost to to die to let that identity die and then letting yourself being reborn into a new curiosity you can have many lives over and over again um so yeah I think letting yourself die and letting yourself being reborn in a new type of curiosity can be really powerful and a way to live a beautiful life it's so incredible that you said that because I've been doing this series on accelerating wisdom and I you I've spent months on it now and what you see as this meta theme is this ability to embrace rebirth all the way through but cognitively over the course of a life and whenever anyone comes to me at the very start of the journey that they're starting to hear that you know they're called to Adventure and they know that they're not happy with what they're doing I recommend a book to them which is a book by herminia iara called working identity and she basically says exactly what you say that this this kind of really deeply unpleasant Lial stage where you you have to shed a Persona that no longer works but you don't have a new one yet and for most people particularly for me when I shed the finance persona for like 3 days I was like fantastic and then I had no idea what my next Persona was and it took me uh nearly 3 years and the thing that iar's work showed is that yeah it typically takes about 3 years and that was a source of comfort to me but also a source of abject Terror because like I knew that I was going to have to experiment for three years and it did take me three years but only after I think I'd failed time and time again that's amazing I didn't know about this work and when I think about my own experience when I left Google and then I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next I would say three years is accurate that's about the time it took also to find my next cycle of experimentation and I guess that speaks to the strength of your work which is that maybe just maybe you can create a safe space where you can start to experiment with these alternate identities and these alternate experiments without blowing up your life like sometimes you have to blow up your life but you know for me it's like can you dial back the day job 10% so that you can find these these lowrisk experiments absolutely I find it very dangerous and harmful whenever I read online people telling others just quit your job and go and do that new thing when it's completely unnecessary and it adds risk and fear and anxiety around something that should be fun and joyful so that's not what I recommend to people I do tell them start a side project do something on the side join the community of practice around those topics that you you're curious about and if you feel after a while that this is one of those very strong Cy attractors then maybe make the jump yeah and I I guess something I've spoken to a lot of people about is when they make the jump they kind of assumed that that jump is going to be the right jump and when that collapses beneath them that's a horrifying moment for people because they're like well I've made the jump I kind of expected to be held and I I think I I went through you know five different identi and at least four different jobs and every time it failed I was like oh my God I'm a failure I've been very successful in my life up until that and then I was just like you know being turned down for 20 grand a year jobs in Midtown like it was it was absolutely brutal and it was hard for me to hold fast to the thread of what I knew was eventually going to be the right place because I I didn't even know I was a writer at that stage so if anyone's going through this I'm very sympathetic to that yeah absolutely I think this is also why I like the container of experiments because if to design those experiments again without having to quate your job or anything like this there is no possible failure really because you're designing the experiment to collect data and to discover something new about the world or about yourself so you're asking a question designing the experiment running it and then you have more information so you understand a little bit more and in the same way that when a scientist doesn't get the outcome that they expected they don't go shame I'm horrible I'm so bad at my job they just go oh that's interesting what's going on here that's what that's really the power of running experiments is that it really changes your mindset in the terms in the way you're exploring potential paths for your life yeah there's this wonderful um so this gentleman called Cedric chin who's going to be doing one of the episodes in this series and he introduced me to the work of uh this woman called Leah Dello a cognitive neuroscientist and she basically found as you and I expect it's reps that matter that if you get 60 reps in a bounded domain in the right domain that often means you can approach Mastery which like that sounds like a crazy low number until you're like well how many things have I intentionally failed at 60 times right like particularly for very typ a people it's like what have I been willing to fail out 60 times and I think that for me was a helpful reframe it was like oh I've got to find something I love and then kind of intentionally failed it and at least took the stigma of of failure away in I think a lower Stakes environment that's amazing and uh and you're absolutely right that particularly for type A people it's very hard to accept failure and in some way we're really limiting our own growth when we're doing this um a lot of the the best entrepreneurs and the best scientists and the best athletes are people who are very comfortable with failing and who fully Embrace not as an idea or something you say but fully embody the idea that failure is actually part of the process and they they almost want to go through that process they want to fail because they know it's necessary and they look forward to it so they can learn and so they can keep on growing so it is really part of those cycles of experimentation and I think this is one of the best gifts we can give to ourselves is to really allow ourselves to to fail not only fing in love with problems but also falling in love with our mistakes I'm going to ask you an impossible question um which is that because I get asked it all the time and I don't have any good answers which is when you failed at something how much of it is the universe saying no go try something else like you you failed at this it's over you've got to Pivot and how much of it is saying just keep iterating on this idea and you'll get a better one because when for every Jim Simons working for 10 years in a strip mall there's probably a thousand variants of Tim Simons that didn't make it that were working in different strip malls so I I think people get very upset with the the survivorship bias in this concept is that something you run into or you even have a sense of I I think the the question is not so much about the universe but about more of your internal Universe how do you actually feel about it in his case for example he probably kept going because he couldn't see himself do anything else he would have been miserable if he didn't keep on trying and in that case keep on trying if there's something that you feel like is calling you in a way that is so strong that there is nothing else that makes you feel curious or or that you want to explore just keep going because you're still happier doing this and failing our and over again that you would be pretending to like something else but if and that's the problem very often our goals are not even our own goals it's the entire theory of mimetic Desire we're just copying what others want and if you try something and you fail and maybe you try a second time and you fail and it's not really something you want that deeply it's just that it seemed appealing based on seeing someone else succeed at this maybe you felt like oh yeah maybe I kind of want to be an entrepreneur maybe I kind of want to do this thing I would say try and find something else you're curious about to experiment with because if it's not working and it's not something you're deeply deeply curious about there's no point in keeping on torturing yourself yeah well this conversation has um exceeded my higher expectations I'm so glad we did this and I'm so glad our curiosity brought us to each other um where can we learn more about you um let's pre-order the book uh tell us tell us how we can find you uh the easiest would be to go to nls.com ns.com or I'm on Twitter X nuran ne ne and thank you so much for your time it's been a delight thank you so much