Are You the Best Teacher in the World?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff is our guest on the 331st episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. After deciding to go back to school to study neuroscience, Anne-Laure created a newsletter that turned into the thriving business known as Ness Labs, a science-based learning community to become more creative and productive without the burnout. Anne-Laure shares how business owners can minimize content overload and make their lives simpler. Here’s how the conversation goes: Why Anne-Laure decided to go back to school and shift her career path. What is the generation effect and how it’ll help you learn more effectively? How a newsletter became a full-fledged business. The importance of finding the learning output that works for you. The reality of being an “expert.” Is there such a thing as the curse of knowledge? Why everyone could benefit from becoming a teacher. How do you connect all the things you’ve learned? What is mind gardening and how does Anne-Laure use it in her life? Are you holding onto too much random information? How she organizes her notes and filters through her mind as she takes notes. A book reading process – is it effective? How to decide what to learn next. What does creative chaos actually consist of? The benefits of breaking up your work into smaller tasks. How to work with your team in creative chaos. Do you have to change your work style for other people? Time management and themed days – could it work for you? How she balances her Ph.D. program and running a business. Anne-Laure’s advice for creating your OWN ladder and path. Do you have transferable skills? Assess before you pivot. How to run experiments on yourself, collect data, and conduct personal check-ins. What to watch out for to avoid burnout. AI and the future of copywriting. Tune into the episode or read the transcript below. 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,