TCC Podcast #331: Neuroscience, Productivity, and Building Something Unique with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

The people and stuff we mentioned on the show:

The Copywriter Think Tank
Kira’s website
Rob’s website
Ness Labs
Anne-Laure’s Twitter page 
The Copywriter Club Facebook Group
The Copywriter Underground
Free month of Brain.FM

Full Transcript:

Rob Marsh:  There’s a term renaissance man or renaissance woman that refers to people like Leonardo da Vinci, who had many interests in hobbies from writing and art to engineering and architecture. Another word used to describe people like this is Polymath. Isaac Newton and Benjamin Franklin were Polymaths. And Polymath or Renaissance woman are the terms that come to mind when I try to describe our guest for this week’s episode of the Copywriter podcast. She is Anne-Laure Le Cunff, and she knows a lot about a lot. She’s a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and ex-Googler, expert note-taker, and all-around genius. Not to mention that she’s a really cool person to hang out with. I have been following Anne-Laure for a few years and was thrilled when she agreed to join us to talk about learning and neuroscience and expertise and getting things done and so much more. I think you were going to love this interview.

Kira Hug:  But before we jump into the interview, this podcast is sponsored by the Copywriter Think Tank. That is our mastermind for copywriters and creatives and other marketers who want to figure out what’s next in their business. That could be anything from stepping on a stage for the first time or creating a new product, maybe a new podcast, maybe a new video channel. Maybe you want to build out an agency or a product company. Maybe you just want to be the best-known copywriter or expert in your niche. Regardless of what it is, or even if you don’t know what it is exactly, but you know there’s something out there for you, this is how we help copywriters in the Think Tank. You can learn more if you’re interested in being a part of a mastermind and joining us at retreats. You can learn more at copywriterthinktank.com.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, let’s kick off our episode with Anne-Laure Le Cunff. How did you become writer, neuroscience student, mindful productivity nerd, AI specialist? All of the things that you do, tell us the pathway.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Wow, that’s a big question. How do we become who we are? I always enjoyed writing. I was already writing short stories and poems and little essays about big philosophical questions when I was a kid, but I didn’t really think of it as a potential career. I am half French, half Algerian, and I grew up in a family where success really looked like following the traditional path. So I went to university. I got a job at Google. I did everything that I was supposed to do. So it took a little bit of time for me to find myself on my current path, and I had a little bit of a squiggle-y carrier. I left Google, I worked on a couple of startups, figured out that wasn’t really what I wanted to do and found myself feeling completely lost, not knowing what was next. What do you do when you don’t have that very clear ladder in front of you anymore when you don’t know what are the next steps that you’re supposed to climb in order to be successful?

So I asked myself, what is something that I would always be interested in, no matter the money I would be making, no matter the fame, no matter the recognition from my peers, what would be something that I would love to keep on learning about and wake up every morning and study in an intrinsic manner? And for me, that was how the brain works, how the mind works, why do we think and the way we think? Why do we feel and the way we feel? So I went back to school at the ripe age of 28, went back to university. Everyone was much younger than me there, to study how the brain works. I started a master’s degree in neuroscience. I did that. Loved it.

And in the process of studying neuroscience, I discovered something called the Generation Effect that shows that by creating your own version of something that you want to learn, you’re going to both understand it and remember it better. So I started writing online about what I was studying for school, and that’s how I started my newsletter. So you can see it’s very quickly, there was no grand plan or anything like that. I started writing a weekly newsletter about neuroscience and specifically about how you can apply it to your daily life and your daily work. And that started growing pretty quickly. And that turned into the business that I’m running today, which is called Ness Labs. Again, no grand plan, nothing like that. Just learning, experimenting, and sharing my work online.

Kira Hug:  And then can we talk about Ness Labs and what you’re doing today before we dig into your story. What happens there?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  So Ness Labs is basically a newsletter, also a blog and an online community. So I usually choose to keep it short. I just say that it’s an online platform because we do lots of different things. If you think about anything an online creator can do online, there’s probably something like that that we do in Ness Labs. There’s consulting, there’s coaching, there are online courses. The common pillar, the thing that links everything together is that we’re helping knowledge workers achieve their goals without sacrificing their mental health. So the people we’re trying to help are very ambitious people, people who deeply, deeply care about their work and who have burned out in the past or who feel like that’s something that could happen to them in the future. And our goal is to equip them with the tools and with the support and the community for them to avoid that and to do their best work while also maintaining their well-being.

Rob Marsh:  So you mentioned the generation effect, and this feels like a really powerful idea that a lot of people who listen to our podcast may be using it, not realizing because we’re all building our own businesses. But can we talk a little bit more specifically about that? What do you need to do to start to generate that positive outcome? Are there steps for making that happen? Is there a framework that we can think about as we go through creating that positive outcome for ourselves?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Yes. So there’s no complex framework, but really the key ingredient here, the key thing to do is to rephrase whatever you’re trying to understand in your own words. So this is why, and kind of instinctively, we do know that. When you were in school and you were just writing down whatever the teacher was saying without rephrasing anything, as soon as that was on paper, you would close your notebook and that was completely forgotten. But when you were asked, and this is why a lot of teachers ask you to do this, they ask you a question and they ask you to explain the topic in your own words to really think about it in your own manner, to also connect it to other things that you learned about in different disciplines or from different lessons. This is where the magic of the generation effect happens. And the reason why it works is that by doing this, you’re making that knowledge your own.

You’re creating links, and associations between that new knowledge that you’re trying to acquire and the knowledge that you already have. So you’re really making that knowledge your own and acquiring it in a way that is going to stay in memory versus just looking at it and forgetting about it straight away. So that’s really the generation effect. In terms of how to do it, it really depends on how you like to create best. You could use the generation effect through writing by writing your own little essay. That’s what I’m doing. Writing is my thing. But if you’re someone who is more comfortable maybe talking, if you were to create your own YouTube video about the topic, for example, again, rephrasing it in your own words, or if you could do a podcast, you could do even a little mind map, something a little bit more visual, any way of creating a different output that is truly yours, that is not just regurgitating the thing that you’ve just consumed. If you do that, you’re using the generation effect.

Kira Hug:  And what would you recommend for someone who wants to do that, who hears you give that advice, but they struggle because they feel like an imposter? Or who am I to teach this and talk about this? Or, “Oh, I can do this, but I need to wait until I know a little bit more information about it and then I can start teaching and talking about it?”

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  This is such a great question. I’m a big fan of learning in public because I think that… And you’ve heard that before, the best way to learn is to teach. But to people who feel like, as you said, people who experience imposter syndrome, who feel like maybe they should wait a little bit more until they feel like they’re an expert to be able to teach other people. Well, the first thing is that you will never feel like you’re an expert. It’s really interesting. But the people who don’t have imposter syndrome are often the ones who maybe should have imposter syndrome. So you can learn as much as you want about a topic. The thing is that every time, the more you learn, the more it pushes the horizon of everything. You notice that now you don’t know. So the more you know, realize how much you don’t know. So you’ll never feel like an expert.

So that’s one thing to keep in mind, that time you’re waiting for when you’ll finally feel confident and feel like you know enough to start teaching, that will never happen. So that’s one thing out of the way.

And then second, teaching doesn’t necessarily mean that you are the most knowledgeable person on the earth who knows everything about the topic. To be able to be helpful to someone, you just need to know a little bit more than they do, and that’s it. You just need to be one step ahead of where they are. And there is something interesting that’s called the curse of knowledge, which shows that people who are very advanced in a topic, they actually become worse and worse teachers when it comes to it because everything seems so obvious to them.

So in a way, actually, by teaching stuff that you just learned, something that’s very fresh in your mind, something that you just discovered, you may be the best teacher in the world for that specific topic because you know exactly what were the challenges that you faced when you learned this. Nothing seems obvious to you and all of the different ways that you can make it a little bit easier to understand. You also know what you wish someone taught you when you were going through this process and how that could have been made easier for you, and you can be the person who makes it easier for people coming right after you. So it’s not even that it’s okay to teach if you just learned something, it’s that you may actually be the best teacher in the world for that specific topic right at that time.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. So you should be teaching more. We should all be teaching more as we’re learning things. So as you go through this process and you’re writing down your thoughts about something that you’re learning, how do you connect it with things that you maybe learned last year or another book that you might have read on a similar topic a few months before? I guess this is maybe a little bit about note-taking and how you connect all of that stuff. And I know this is something you love, you talk about. But what’s the process for making that work? And full disclosure, I struggle with this. I have notes in marginal in my books or whatever, but then a year later or two years later, I forget what I was thinking about then. And so how do you put it all together?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Yes. So as you can see, this is part of the compounding effect of the generation effect, a little bit meta, but because you’ve been generating all of these ideas, all of these things into your own words, and you have them in your note-taking system or maybe some of it published online, at least you have all of this material somewhere that you can access even a year later if you want to connect it back to what you’re working on right now. Now the challenge that you mentioned that’s a very common challenge is that okay, it’s there, it’s somewhere, it’s captured, it’s written, but how do you actually go back in there, know what’s relevant, how do you connect it, et cetera? So I’m not saying that there’s a perfect system for this because if there was, that would be a solved problem. And there would not be hundreds of books written on the topic every year with people coming up with new systems.

So I’m just going to share how I personally do it. And I’m not saying that it’s going to work for everyone. But something that I do is that I link my notes as I go. So I’m not waiting until I’m creating something new today to figure out what would be a link that I could make with something that was a long time ago. I constantly link things. So while I’m typing my notes, I’m thinking, what does that remind me of right now? And because this is something I do constantly every week, I do maintain things fresh in my mind a lot more than if I was waiting for a long time. I call this mind gardening because I always feel like the sensation is like I’m planting little seeds and then I’m growing branches in between ideas. And it makes it easier than to collect the fruit, the produce of all of those plants that I’ve been growing little by little.

So I would say that the reason why it feels so daunting is that a lot of people are looking at all of those notes that they’ve actually mediated over the years and they’re like, “Oh my God, what am I going to do with this? I don’t know how to use this.” I would just say, scratch that. Just forget about them. Archive this. You don’t delete them because you never know if there’s something you want to look up later, but just forget about them. But then start practicing mind gardening today with your new notes. Start afresh. It’s a new garden. Start afresh. And from now on, every time you add a new note to your note-taking system, practice, always linking it to at least another one. The rule is no or fun notes. There should be no note that is unconnected to anything else.

So every time you add a note, ask yourself how is that maybe connected to some goals I have for my business? Or how is that connected to something I read in another book, or an idea that I have, a project I have for the future? And just connect it like that. Just create links like that.

Another reason why I love doing this is that it acts as a filter. If I want to add a note to my note-taking system, and after a couple of minutes, I really cannot see how that connects to anything. Maybe it’s just something nice that I read and I don’t need to add a note to my note-taking system. It doesn’t need to come into my garden. It was nice. Not everything you read needs to be turned into a note. It can just be something interesting. That was great. I enjoyed reading this article. I don’t need a note because it really doesn’t fit with anything that I’m dreaming about or thinking about or working on at the moment. So this is also why the linking habit is really nice. It’s a good filter to make sure that the seeds that you plant in your mind garden are actually going to grow into ideas that are helpful for you.

Kira Hug:  So I want to get into your brain and your process as you’re talking about this. A couple of questions. What tech tool, what are you using for note-taking? Because there’s so many tools, and I know that’s not what this is about, but I’m still curious. And then when you’re reading, what is your process for reading? Do you read something first and then go back and take notes and then read it again? What does that look like?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Okay, so for tools, I personally use Roam. If anyone wants to look it up, it’s roamresearch.com. And I’m not affiliated with anyways. But Rome is great, I think. But any other tool that if you go on their landing page and if they mentioned anything like bidirectional linking or network thinking or any of those keywords, that means that they have features similar to Rome that allow you to do what I’m doing. So other tools include Obsidian, Logseq, there’s so many of them now. So really just if you’re listening to this and you want to give a try to mind gardening and connecting your notes together, just look up on Google, networked notes, bidirectional links, anything like that.

It sounds like a lot of fancy, complicated words, but really, the main thing about these apps compared to older apps like Evernote or things like that, is that they really have baked-in several simple features that allow you very easily to link your notes and then to see when you look at notes, what are all of the other notes linking back to this one. So hence the bidirectional linking. So you can always see where a note lives in the galaxy of notes that you have in your tool, and that really allows you to go back and explore, make new connections, et cetera. So that’s for the tool. And then what was the second part of the question?

Kira Hug:  Your reading process?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Yes.

Kira Hug:  What does that look like?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  So for reading, it depends. If I’m reading something like online or if I’m reading on paper, despite being a little bit of a nerd when it comes to note-taking, I love the sensation of reading a good old paper book. And I’m seeing your shelves behind you and I see that we’re the same.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, there’s one or two books back there. Yes.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  So the way I do it, if it’s a paper book, I usually have a pen or a highlighter and I will just highlight or underline anything that I find interesting as I’m reading it. And it’s a very instinctive process. I’m not at this stage thinking how does that fit with anything or how does that connect or link back to other stuff I’m working on? It’s just anything that feels interesting really. So this is really interesting. So I’ll do that and I’ll add a little dog ear at the bottom of the book because at the top of the book is to mark where I’m at, where I stopped reading for that session at the bottom of it, and I’ll just finish reading the whole book. And then when I’m done with the book, I’ll take it and I’ll sit down. It’s pretty quick, and takes about 15 minutes.

But just going through these while sitting in front of my computer and figuring out what I want to import. And it’s interesting because sometimes the things that I thought were interesting while reading them, and then when I sit in front of my computer, I genuinely can’t remember why past me thought that this was interesting. So again, another filter. So this doesn’t go in my note-taking system, and if I ever reread the book, it’s still nice to see what I underlined and what I highlighted, but it doesn’t need to go in my note-taking system.

And if it’s digital, it’s a very similar process except that in that case, I have to be a bit more intentional as I go because I have a digital highlighter. And so if I do that, it goes in my note-taking system straightaway. So I am going to be a bit more intentional, which works really well because I feel like when I’m reading a paper book, it’s a bit more immersive and I don’t want to stop every few paragraphs to go and take notes. I want to really enjoy the experience. Whereas when I tend to read something online, a PDF or something like this, I’m usually more in active work mode. And it does make sense that I’m fishing for information, I’m actually trying to collect data that I want to have in my note-taking system. So that’s how I do it.

Rob Marsh:  So you’re doing it actively, when you’re doing it online. How often are you doing it when you’re reading a book? Is it, I wait a week, I put the book down and just let it sit for a while? Or is it almost immediate?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  It’s not necessarily immediate. It may sound like it when I describe your system, but I am more of a chaotic rather than systematic person when it comes to my creative process. So I’ve tried doing the thing where you sit once a week and you do it, but then it started feeling like homework and I love reading too much and I love doing research too much to make it feel this way. So it’s more of something I’ll do every couple of weeks, sometimes more, sometimes less, but it’s typically the kind of thing I would do on the Lazy Sunday where I’m like, “Oh…” I live in London, so it’s raining outside. That happens very often. Raining outside, I don’t feel like doing anything else, and I just want to do something that’s relaxing and low effort, and I’ll just pick one of the books that I read in the past few weeks and I’ll do that.

And again, it does feel like… Actually, now it’s funny that I’m using this metaphor because I’m a terrible gardener. But it’s a bit of a mindful experience, basically just going through the notes, figuring out what do I want to add, what do I not want to add? Trying to remember why I thought this was interesting. So I do it when I feel like it, and I’m very fortunate that I very often feel like it. So I never really had to put in place any forcing mechanism for me to sit down and do it.

Rob Marsh:  And I guess a related question, as you’re capturing this stuff, I’m curious, what’s the thought process about what to read next? How do you decide what’s the next thing that I need to learn? I know a lot of us, we hear from other people, “Hey, this is a great book,” and so we add it to our list or whatever. But are you deliberate in choosing what you read or what the next thing is? And how do you go about filtering that?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Oh, this is so hard. This is so hard. Especially when you’re lucky to have lots of very smart, curious, interesting people around you who keep on recommending books that seem amazing. So I do have a running list, but I actually don’t use it very much. It just makes me feel good when someone recommends a book to add it to the list and I know it’s there. And so I have two ways of deciding, two signals. The first one is just in time decision where I need to do something. So it could be for Ness Labs, it could be for my own research, I need to learn about something. I just stumble about something I don’t understand, I want to learn more. Or maybe I’m preparing a presentation that I want to give, a workshop, and I actually want to know what I’m talking about regarding certain topics, I’m going to read more about it.

So that’s one way I decide where I really just read the thing whenever I need to read the thing in order to be able to do my work effectively.

And this is why it’s funny, I don’t actually use that list this much because it happens sometimes that a book keeps on getting recommended by lots of people, and I never really had to check the list. You just feel like, oh, it’s been there three times. I just started noticing because when the course of a month or two months, you hear the same book being recommended five times or six times, you start noticing. And so that’s something that I would tend to get that book then. And I know we’re supposed to be original, but I trust the people that I work with and I hang out with, and I think they’re very smart. So if a lot of them tell me that a book was really good and helpful for them, that’s a really good signal. So I’ll usually do that. And obviously, all of this is for non-fiction. For fiction, I don’t know. I look at the cover and I feel like, “Ooh, that sounds interesting.” That’s it. There’s no thought process going on there.

Kira Hug:  All right. So you mentioned chaos, and I would love an example of what creative chaos looks like in your life. Maybe a recent example. And then in addition to that, because I think a lot of our listeners can relate to chaos, that’s how we work. I relate to that. What do we need to be careful or avoid when we’re someone who operates well in chaos? Because there’s definitely some repercussions to that. There’s some damage that can be done along the way, creatively, business-wise, relationship-wise in so many ways. So if you were operating chaos, what advice would you give to that person?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Yes. So first, what does chaos look like for me? I am not going to show you, but you should see my desk. It’s a complete mess.

Kira Hug:  I was going to say it’s usually the desk that is usually a big deal.

Rob Marsh:  I want to see the desk now. Only when we finish the podcast, you can show us.

Kira Hug:  It probably looks like my desk.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Yes. So yeah, it’s notebooks and empty cans of sparkling water everywhere and it’s books, pans. Yeah. And weirdly, I know where everything is. I can reach and grab and I know that this notebook is here and that’s where I put those notes, et cetera. So it’s some form of organized chaos where I know where my stuff is. So in terms of how to make the most of chaos and minimizing some of the more challenging aspects of it, I think there are two things, whether you’re working solo or working with other people. When you’re working solo, to me, I think the only potential negative effect of having a bit more of a chaotic creative mode of working is the potential impact on your mental health. Because if you always wait until the last minute, wait until inspiration strikes, or just go with the flow of your creative inspiration, I think we’ve all experienced this, this self-destructive procrastination, and we wait until the very last minute to work on the project and then we panic and maybe we don’t get enough sleep to try and finish it.

And because we’re good at our job, we end up delivering work that’s pretty good. We always know that maybe if we did it a little bit differently, maybe if we had more space, more time, maybe if we had embedded some process to consult with more people, maybe the work would’ve been better. And also maybe we didn’t need to have all of that negative impact on our stress levels and our sleep, et cetera. So I think for that, things that have been very helpful for me is to have a little bit of scaffolding. This is why I have a weekly newsletter, because I know that every week the newsletter needs to be sent. So instead of having this one massive project that I need to ship every quarter or something like this, I think it would be terrible for me with the way I work. I have those small chunks of work that I need to deliver every week, so it never completely gets out of hand.

So I would say design small chunks of work where within those buckets it can be as messy and chaotic as you want to, but then you end up shipping whatever that unit of work was. You just ship it and then you start from a clean slate, it gets chaotic and messy again, but then it’s okay because you start with a blank slate again and again. So for me, it’s a weekly newsletter. But for any work, you just try to figure out how you can chunk your work basically. And if you’re working with other people, the problem is a bit more complicated because your chaos becomes everyone’s problem.

Kira Hug:  Not everyone else loves the chaos.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Exactly. And so for this, I haven’t found a perfect solution, but something that has been really helpful with working with my team is really just transparent communication. So we do something with my team where every time someone new joins, they feel a personal user manual. So as if you were going to IKEA and buying a piece of furniture or installing new software or something like this, you would have a booklet that tells you this is how it works. So it’s the same for you. This is how I work. And so you fill it and you explain what are the best ways to communicate with you.

Do you prefer to jump on a quick meeting to solve problems, or do you prefer asynchronous communication? Just explain to me the whole problem in an e-mail, and then I’ll sit down and I’ll come back to you and I’ll send you a long e-mail and everything is going to be in there, and that’s the way I work.

Do you like to work in sprints or do you like to have a little bit more space and time for planning, et cetera, et cetera? So we have that for everyone in the team, and it’s been super helpful because it helps diffuse any detention that could arise from different working styles. And so for me, for example, I know I’m chaotic, but I also know… I mentioned the example of the e-mail. I’m chaotic, but if you explain to me written in an e-mail what the problem is, what you considered, what you thought about, and tell me how I can help, I can sit for an hour and really properly think about it, really give it the time that it deserves and the attention it deserves, come back to you and with something I think is going to be really helpful.

But if you keep on pinging me and sending me lots of different chats and I get all of those notifications, I’ll be stressed. You’ll be stressed because you’re not going to get the answers you need from me. And we’re all going to end up unhappy with a problem that’s unsolved. So I don’t think we should necessarily change our working style, but just having processes in place where we can communicate how we work in a more transparent way, just saying, “Look, I know these are my challenges, and so by the way, you can also call me out when you notice that I’m doing something that’s been unhelpful for you. But it’s okay because I told you that’s something I struggled with. So please tell me when you notice it, and I will make an effort to try and align with your working style when I need your help.” So that doesn’t solve everything, but it helps at least to avoid people killing each other.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. Which is a pretty good goal when you’re running a business. Right? Yeah. So that’s got me thinking, I’m curious, what does a typical day look like for you, Anne-Laure? You’re obviously writing the email, you’ve got classes, school, study going on, you’ve got this community that you’re supporting. I’m sure you’ve also got friends and other relationships that you want to keep up. So what does that typical day look like for you? And do you have any productivity hacks that make it all work?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  I don’t really think in terms of what my days look like. But in terms of what my weeks look like, which makes it a lot more manageable for me and a lot more flexible. So in order to avoid too much complex switching, I’ll allocate days to specific areas of work. So for example, I know that on Tuesday I have my weekly update with my PhD supervisors and I need to tell them about everything I did in the past week. So usually Monday to Tuesday when I meet them, that’s purely PhD work. And very often, I’m actually catching up on stuff I should have done the week before. But it’s okay because I end up showing up to that meeting on Tuesday with all of the work that I was supposed to have done. So I’m head down focused on this. Then Thursday is the day I send a newsletter.

So I also do all of my one-to-ones with my team members. I write the newsletter, I catch up with the community. I’m in Ness Lab’s mode. I’m reading in business mode. I don’t think about my research at all. I’m super focused on this. I’m available all day over e-mail for my team. They know that if there’s something important that they want to discuss, Thursday is the day. And I’m obviously fortunate that I run a small business where I’m not like a neurosurgeon with people waiting on the operating table for me to do something right now. So it has never really happened that something could not wait until Thursday for me to have a look at. And if that happens, I will have a look another day. But ideally, I tell them, “Wait until Thursday. We have our one-to-one. We can review everything together, set the goals for the next week.” And it’s a very slow, mindful way of working together.

Friday is also Ness Labs, but more for deep work. So this is where I do research, this is where I think about ideas for articles that I want to write about. Strategy, if I’m thinking about launching a new online course or anything like that. So planning, et cetera. So instead of working, we have no meetings with the rest of the team that day. Everyone is focused on doing more creative work, knowledge work, et cetera on Fridays.

And Wednesday, I keep it as a buffer. So it really depends on the week. Sometimes there’s more work for the Ph.D., more experiments to run with different things to do. And so Wednesday will be dedicated to this. And sometimes Thursday is coming and I feel like I haven’t done enough for the newsletter and nothing’s ready, so I’ll use Wednesday to catch up. So it’s really nice to have Wednesday in the middle of the week. That’s a little bit of the buffer and it’s flexible. So that’s why I was saying I think in weeks and not-in days, because it really helps me a lot to know that today, this is my area of focus. This is where all of my mental energy and my creativity is going and nothing else.

Rob Marsh:  Okay, Kira, so many insightful points that Anne-Laure has already shared with us, but let’s just chat about a couple of favorites. Where do you want to start?

Kira Hug:  I’m going to start with the generation effect and how sharing and teaching knowledge is one of the best ways to learn and for it to stick. And so that’s something that I think we talked about in-depth, and there are many ways you can do it, whether it’s writing or creating videos or whatever it is. But I think at least for the two of us, for me, it’s podcasting and being able even to do what we’re doing here where we listen to an interview we were a part of, and then dissect it and take concepts and talk about it and dive deeper into it. That is a great example of how it’s helped me learn and understand in a more powerful way than necessarily just consuming something and leaving it after that. So there are many ways to do it. I think just the key is figuring out what works best for you.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah, the key for me in thinking about the generation factor, it’s not just learning. It’s not just doing stuff new, but it’s taking those things and putting it into our own words and sharing it in a way that maybe we can only share that somebody else might not be able to do it our way. And in doing so, you’re not just generating knowledge, but you are generating this wealth of ways that you talk about things in the world, or ways that you can show up differently from everyone else. So I think it’s definitely something more copywriters should be doing in their niches with their deliverables, with their clients, everything.

Kira Hug:  Yeah. And what else stood out to you, Rob?

Rob Marsh:  So a lot of stuff stood out to me. So just initially, as Anne-Laure was talking about what she wanted to do in life, she talked about how she was on this path that maybe other people had set up or that it wasn’t clear. And the question that she asked herself which, I think is really insightful is, what do I want to keep learning about? Rather than saying, “Hey, I want to be a neuroscientist,” or, “I want to be an entrepreneur,” or whatever. It’s what do I want to keep learning about? And I think that’s a great question because it’s not about the position or the title, it’s about the thing that excites you. And it could result in all kinds of different positions, titles, pathways. But knowing that I want to keep learning about this kind of thing can take you a long way down the road.

So it’s worth asking if you’re starting out in marketing, in copywriting, is this something that you want to keep learning about not just for a few weeks or a couple of months, but for years? Is this the kind of thing that you’re excited about, learning about, persuasion and sales and all of that stuff? If not, maybe it’s not the perfect fit for you. But if it is, then what we talk about could be an amazing career or at least a part of a career that you’re building for yourself.

Kira Hug:  Yeah, that’s also a question I wrote down. I felt like that was a really great guiding question. And you’re right. As copywriters, as marketers, we do so many different things. And so there might just be one sliver of what you do as a business owner or as a copywriter that really excites you and you want to learn about every single day. And so even just figuring out as you look at the big picture of everything you do, what is one piece that just excites you every time you get to focus on it, and how could you do more and more of it? And maybe that can help guide you through the different pivots along the way.

Rob Marsh:  Yeah. Going along with that to Anne-Laure mentioned that she had no grand plan. It was all about experimenting and sharing online. And again, I think as we think about showing up as experts in our niches and in the things that we do, we don’t necessarily need a grand plan that we’re going to have a bestselling book, or that we’re going to be speaking on TEDx stage about something in particular. We don’t necessarily need to know the end goals. It’s just about constantly experimenting. So I appreciate that approach that Anne-Laure has, and something that more of us need to be doing,

Kira Hug:  But it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to let go, and I think many of us just cling to that plan, and we want to know all the steps along the way, and we want to maintain control over that entire pathway. So I think what she’s doing, what she talked about is what I aspire to do. But if you listen to that and you’re like, “Ah, I’d like to be that way.” It’s not always easy to experience your career that way, but it’s something that we could keep trying to achieve in our businesses.

Rob Marsh:  Well, that ties into what Anne-Laure was saying later about never truly feeling like an expert. It’s going back to that imposter complex. The people who are experts or at least do know enough, oftentimes, they understand the limits of their knowledge, and so they don’t feel like they’ve got an expert, that they are an expert and that they can show up in the ways that they should. This is a really good place, I think, to plug our interview with Tanya Geisler, episode 47, where she talked about imposter complex and all about this. But Anne-Laure is basically saying the same thing. When you’re feeling like you might not know enough, it’s probably a sign that you’