1168: How to Thrive When You Don’t Know What’s Next with Simone Stolzoff

Pete Mockaitis
Simone, welcome!

Simone Stolzoff
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn, once and for all, how to not know, and we’re all about sharpening the universal skills here. So it sounds like not knowing is, in fact, a skill that needs to be sharpened. Explain.

Simone Stolzoff
I definitely think that we live in an age where certainty is prized. You turn on the TV or you open social media and there’s someone telling you exactly when the market is going to crash or who’s going to win the election.

But the truth is, particularly with things that haven’t happened yet, certainty is a fallacy. And so in this age where the world is becoming more uncertain and our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline, being able to tolerate what we don’t know, to be okay with not knowing, to admit what we can’t or don’t know is an increasingly vital skill.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Our tolerance for uncertainty has gotten worse. Well, Simone, I would imagine we’ve had so much more practice in recent years or decades than before, I’d imagine our uncertainty skills muscles would be enhanced, would be strengthened, but it’s worse. Tell us the data, the research, the tale behind this.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, so there’s two things going on. One is that the world is becoming more uncertain. So there’s this researcher from Stanford named Nicholas Bloom, who’s been tracking global uncertainty over time. And what he’s found is the five highest measurements of uncertainty since he began collecting data in the ‘80s have all occurred in the last five years.

So between the pandemic, we have these wars overseas, economic precarity, AI, etc. But the other thing that’s less often talked about that I mentioned is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. Now, if you were comparing sort of apples to apples, you can’t necessarily take someone who was a hand-bloom weaver in the Industrial Revolution or someone who was living in Florence during the bubonic plague, and compare that feeling of uncertainty to our current moment.

But what we can do is look at how the internet and mobile phones, in particular, has affected our ability to sit with what we don’t know. And there’s another researcher named Nicholas Carleton out of the University of Regina who’s found that the rise of mobile phones has correlated with a rise in our intolerance for uncertainty.

I think phones do a few things. One is they create the expectation that answers should be readily available. I think this is even more pronounced when you think about chatbots or some of these AI tools that can give you a definitive answer for every single question you ask.

But the other thing is that it robs us of the practice of sitting with what we don’t know. Building a tolerance for uncertainty is built through exposure. And when we can always reach into our phone to either distract ourselves or get a pseudo answer about what might be on the horizon, we no longer have to build that tolerance or build that muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay. So while we have more practice at being surprised by the upheaval in the world, we have less practice in the small daily things of not knowing because it’s, well, hey, I guess there’s been quite the evolution from, okay, the internet made it faster than going to the library, then the mobile phone made it faster than going to there, and then you had Google in the mix.

I remember when my teachers were excited about, “Wow, this Google thing is really handy.” It’s like, “You know what? It really is.” And now with the AI chatbots, which, occasionally, end your uncertainty but tell you the wrong answer, which is a bummer at times. So, understood. And how are we, I guess, fundamentally measuring uncertainty tolerance?

Simone Stolzoff
So there’s a few different ways to measure it. There is a diagnostic test that was devised by this psychologist named Michel Dugas that is, basically, answering 20 questions and it measures your uncertainty tolerance.

There are other ways to look at it in more of a high-level way. So, for example, one of the ways that a lot of the economics professors and researchers measure uncertainty in the world is through some proxy metrics, like looking at the mentions of uncertainty in newspapers or in earnings reports, etc.

But it’s also just a felt experience. Whereas, ten years ago, maybe, I would’ve been okay not knowing the name of a given actor. Now I feel this almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out right away. And that’s a little bit of a lighter example.

But when it comes to things like what my career will look like, or how the war overseas will impact my business’ future investments, or how I think about the prospect of owning a home, these are the types of macro uncertainties that so many, particularly young people, are having to deal with right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, we’re feeling it. I resonate with that. And so I’d like to know, with all of your research and putting this book together, any really striking, surprising, and fascinating discoveries you’ve made with regard to us humans and the state of uncertainty?

Simone Stolzoff
Well, for one thing, we often would rather a certain bad outcome than have to deal with the ambiguity of not being sure. So there’s a few really interesting studies that have brought this to light. One was from the University of College London, where they broke research participants up into two groups.

And one group was given a 50% chance of receiving a very painful electric shock. And the other group was given a 100% chance, they were definitely going to get shocked. And, somehow, the group with the 50% chance were far more anxious and stressed than those with the 100% chance.

Another example comes from the healthcare space where there was a big study of breast cancer patients. And what they found is that women going through a breast cancer journey often found the period between getting a biopsy, getting a test, and getting the results of that test, as the most stressful part of the entire experience, more stressful than chemo or any surgeries.

And so our brains have this natural aversion to uncertainty, to ambiguity. And in some ways, this is biologically wired within us. If you think about an ancestor of ours in the jungle and there’s a rustling in the bushes and they’re not sure the source of that noise, that uncertainty could be lethal. And so our brains are trained to, when faced with an uncertain situation, try to get out of it as quickly as possible. We enter the fight, flight, or freeze response.

But the problem is that the fastest way out or the quickest or the safest way out isn’t always the best way out. And so I think about the sort of upside of building an uncertainty tolerance as being able to discover the possibilities that are sitting on the other side of our discomfort.

So maybe you have a friend who’s stuck in a job that they know isn’t quite right for them, or stuck in a relationship that they know isn’t quite right for them, but they would rather stay in this sort of low-grade suffering than have to deal with the ambiguity or the uncertainty of leaving that relationship or job and figuring out what’s on the other side.

We might know someone who is a creative, an artist or an entrepreneur. And unless they’re willing to tolerate their uncertainty of getting to the precipice of what they know and persisting, they’re likely to reach for derivative answers or things that look like other things that have been created before.

And so the argument of the book is that if we are able to develop more tolerance for uncertainty, we can more gracefully adapt to whatever the future holds and be able to create things that are beyond our imagination of what could exist today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking about my low uncertainty tolerance, which is funny because, you know, I’m an entrepreneur, I’ve got businesses and it’s uncertain what my income will be month to month. Wildly so. And yet, there are a couple of times, I’m thinking about, like, early COVID in terms of it’s like, okay, there’s all kinds of uncertainty.

“What I want to know is, Is this a big deal? Are we going to be locked down for a long time or a short time? I want to know.” And so I would keep going to news and it would be it, well, it’s unknowable, right?

And I would just keep going. It’s like, “Well, some doctors being interviewed, so he might know a thing, and some analyst is being interviewed, okay. And someone who’s studied pandemics historically so he might know a thing.”

Or, right now, I’m in it, in terms of like, “Okay, so are we, in this AI business, is it going to take all of our jobs? Or is this bubble going to burst? Or is it not?” And so I’ll go to these YouTube videos, like, “Okay, this is a computer science genius who’s looked at a lot of technology.” He’s, like, “Absolutely it is, you know? And it’s underhyped.”

And then someone else says, “No, these things are…they don’t know anything. They’re just statistical models. They hallucinate left and right, you know? Look at all these people who’ve embarrassed themselves when they relied on the AI.” And it’s like, “Okay, but I kind of need to know. Like, do I need to go learn plumbing? Or should I pull my money out of the stock market?” And it’s unknowable, but we want to know.

And so we can go into, I’ve done this, a dangerous loop of repeatedly seeking information that’s not going to do anything. And I recall, like, CNN and the other news organizations during COVID, or like elections, like, “Who’s going to win this thing?” Like, it really peaks because everyone’s seeking that information again and again and again.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, it’s a survival instinct. When we think we know exactly what the future holds, it allows us to plan for that future and it makes us feel like we can survive. It’s the same reason why we like music that’s based on repeating patterns. When prediction is easy, we feel safe and secure.

The problem is, so often, we looked for certainty where there is no certainty to be found. So whether it’s, you know, “How long will this pandemic last?” or, “What will my job look like in ten years?” Or, one personal example, there was this moment in my own career where I was writing for The Atlantic, working for a magazine, I got a job offer to leave journalism to go join this design firm called IDEO. And I could not make up my mind for the life of me.

On one hand, it’s like, “Oh, woe is me,” you know, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. On the other hand, it didn’t feel like I was choosing between two jobs. It felt like I was choosing between two versions of me. It felt like my identity was so wrapped up in my job, which was the topic of my first book.

But, in many ways, I thought that if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, or if I talked to my Uber driver or yoga teacher, I would know exactly what is the perfect job for me. When, in actuality, when you’re at these career crossroads or at a moment in your life where there’s sort of path A and path B, you can’t know for certain which path will be better for you, ultimately. You have to be able to make choices in spite of the uncertainty.

And so, in many ways, this book, How to Not Know, is my own sort of existential balm for that younger version of me that couldn’t decide. And, hopefully, by helping people get more comfortable, more tolerant of uncertainty, they can be able to make decisions, live their lives in spite of not knowing exactly what is to come.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing there when you said you can’t know with certainty. And that’s true, you can’t know with certainty. And yet, on the flip side, it’s possible that there are some things that are knowable. And if you go know them, you’re like, “Oh, wow, I have to do that as an IDEO consultant? Forget it. Whoa, good thing I asked. No way.” Although that sounds like one of the coolest jobs ever for the record, so I’m a fan.

So there are some things that are knowable and it’s almost like, for me, as a pathologically curious person, it’s kind of dangerous. It’s, like, I have a false belief that, “Well, if I just ask the right questions of the right source, then I will know the right path.” And what’s so tricky is that’s often true and other times not at all true.

And other times this thing in the middle, like, “Yeah, you can learn a good chunk, but, yeah, it’s still going to be a mystery. What kind of project are you on? What’s your team like? You know, what’s the office culture like?” You you don’t know it till you’re in it.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, the psychologist who I mentioned, Michel Dugas, who was the first to link uncertainty intolerance with a lot of these anxiety disorders, the guy who came up with the diagnostic test, told me that when his patients are particularly intolerant of uncertainty, he tends to see one of two behaviors.

The first is they become obsessive information gatherers. So these are the people that need to, say, read three hundred reviews for a plastic water bottle before they buy something on Amazon. And the other is people become extremely impulsive. They just sort of take the first option they can because they don’t want to have to grapple or sit with that uncertainty.

And the truth is there’s a middle path between them. Yes, you’re absolutely right. There is things that you can do to gather more information about the decisions that you’re making, but, often, there are diminishing returns. And you can’t know exactly what a job will be like until you actually do the job.

And so, sort of in the idea parlance, you need to be able to run the prototype. You need to be able to treat your life a little bit more experimentally and provisionally and be able to actually take action rather than thinking that you can just work out every decision as a thought experiment and then know with a 100% certainty that you’ve made the right choice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, walk us through some of that then. In terms of in a world full of uncertainty and a human biology that doesn’t care for it, if we’re at risk for doing things impulsively or over-researching or spending too much of our life on CNN or YouTube and feeling our energy sucked away by these worries, information-seeking, etc., what are the most impactful moves, strategies, practices that we should take on?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we can talk through a few. I mean, one distinction that I like to make is between more acute uncertainty. So this is uncertainty about something that will be resolved, like, “Will I get this job?” “What will be the results of this test?” versus the more ambient uncertainty of, like, the existential threat of AI, things that we’re living underneath.

So when it comes to that first category of things that will actually be resolved, let’s use an example of a high school student who is uncertain about where they’re going to go to college. The first question I’d ask is, “Is there anything that you can do to control the outcome?”

So, say, the student hasn’t submitted their applications yet. There are things that they can do to actually control that outcome. They can try to get good grades, they can try to build good relationships with professors, they can try to write great essays and submit their application. So those are things that you can do to actually control the outcome.

If you’ve done all of those things and the answer is, “Okay, I’ve done what I can to control the outcome,” the next step on the decision tree is, “Can you prepare for multiple potential outcomes?” So often, when we are seeking certainty, we’re trying to resolve this internal dissonance that we feel. And so we fix our mind to one potential path or one potential outcome, and say, “I really want to go to UCLA. If I don’t go to UCLA, my life is ruined.”

But, in actuality, a more adaptive approach is to think about multiple potential outcomes. Think about maybe the pros and cons of these different choices rather than tying your entire identity to one particular path. And so if you can prepare for multiple contingencies is what the social scientists often say.

Then after that, once you’ve done what you can to prepare for multiple outcomes and do what you can to control the outcome, it really comes back to being able to regulate your nervous system, to be able to develop a level of acceptance for the uncertainty that you face. And so there are things that you can do, like yoga or meditation has been proven to help people get better at waiting.

Distraction. There’s a really fascinating study where they were measuring students’ stress levels as they’re waiting to receive the results of a test, and they gave the students three different types of Tetris games, and the first was very hard, the second was very easy, and the third was right at the threshold of their difficulty.

And they found that the first two groups had similar levels of stress and anxiety, whereas, the third group who were immersed in this flow state as they were playing this challenging game were able to better cope with the waiting period.

You can also look for silver linings in potential bad news. So this is what’s often called bracing for the worst or emotionally preparing for potential negative outcomes. But, at the end of the day, it comes to accepting the uncertainty of any sort of decision, like where to go to college.

And so you can apply this to applying for jobs or other sort of questions that you may be facing in your life. And I’ll stop there because I’ve been talking for a while, but we can also talk about some strategies that might be helpful with the more sort of ambient uncertainty that many of us are living underneath today.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, it’s so funny, even as you were describing the situation with the, you know, picking a college, I thought my brain immediately went to information sources, “Oh, well, there’s websites such as Unibuddy and ZeeMee which allow you to speak with a student on the campus to get an inside perspective of blah blah blah.”

And so, it’s funny how hardwired and instinctual that is. And, certainly, I think that, and maybe this is where I’m in a bit stuck, in a bit of a loop. It’s like there’s, often getting more information is a great move.

And often there is some creativity to be exercised, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t know those websites existed where I could talk to a real student and get the low down, the real dirt, you know, on the campus.” And then there comes a point in which it’s like, you know, paralysis analysis, spinning your wheels, just amplifying your uncertainty.

Do you have any good pro tips in terms of, like, “This is where to draw the line.” Like, “Okay, we’ve done enough information gathering and now we’re moving on”?

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I mean there’s no hard and fast rules. One thing I think about is, if you’re having conversations and not learning anything new, that might be a sign that you’ve sort of exhausted your information gathering.

Jeff Bezos and other people have made arguments that you should transact when you’re 70% ready, for example, because if you wait until you’re a 100% ready, you might miss the opportunity or it might never come.

There’s a great passage from the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath that I really love, where she’s describing this young girl who’s sitting underneath a fig tree. And each fig, in her mind, represents a different potential life path for herself.

She could marry this person or marry that person, or she could, you know, become an Olympic swimmer, or she could move to Paris, etc. And she’s going through this thought experiment of all these different potential figs that she could pick off the tree. And as she sits there, the figs are slowly ripening, and then over-ripening, and then rotting, and then falling off the tree.

And it’s this beautiful image because, you know, so often, if we’re in that information-gathering space, we might do it as an excuse or its own sort of form of comfort because we think, “Oh, we’re gathering information. We don’t need to make a choice yet.” When, in actuality, not making a choice is a choice in and of itself. And some of these opportunities that we think might be there forever are more time-bound that we think.

So, for the book, I talked to this professional poker player and former decision scientist, and her name is Annie Duke, and she gave me a few kind of nice proxies for when you can go fast versus go slow. Often, with these decisions, it’s not about sort of whether or not you can be certain about making the right choice. It’s about whether you can move quickly in making the decision or whether they require a more deliberative, slowed-down analytical thought process.

One of them that she taught me that I really like is called the only option test. And so imagine if you have two choices: go on a vacation to Paris or go on a vacation to Rome. You might think that the choice is really high stakes because it’s a costly vacation. You might not be able to take very many trips like that in your lifetime. And so you spend all of this time gathering information and creating spreadsheets and having pro and con lists.

But she asks a question that I think cuts through the noise, which is, “Imagine your only option was to go to Rome. Would you be happy? And then imagine your only option was to go to Paris. Would you be happy? And if the answer is yes to both of those questions, you can probably make the decision more quickly than you think.”

That’s not to say that things can’t go wrong, but the likelihood that you get swindled by an Italian cab driver or a Parisian cab driver or get food poisoning from undercooked escargot or, you know, undercooked pasta carbonara, or whatever, are probably equally likely. And because the answer is yes to both of the situations, you can imagine, “Okay, if it were my only option, I’d be happy with it. So maybe the decision matters a little bit less than I think.”

So there’s certain sort of like proxy rules or tricks that might be helpful in those sorts of situations of whether gathering more information is actually in service of making a better decision, or it’s just something that you’re doing because there’s a certain comfort in being able to feel like you’re making progress where you have control over an outcome, even if the outcome isn’t necessarily in your control.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot as a shortcut. And I’m thinking about, so, you know, I have a company, Cashflow Podcasting, we launch podcasts for people. And sometimes, and I’ve been through it myself, agonizing over the microphone choice because it feels so consequential, and yet it’s really not.

People have their preferences, you know, about what they like to wear. And that is also, you know, not all that consequential. But people will speak intensely on reviews of microphones about how one is better than the other or whatever. And it’s like, “Yeah, that one’s fine, too. That one’s also fine. That one was also fine.” And so I love that.

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, one thing I like to think about is, like, the difference between one-way door and two-way door decisions as well. So one-way door decisions are decisions that are hard to reverse, things like, “Who should I marry?” “Should I buy this house?”

But the majority of decisions that we make in our day-to-day life are two-way door decisions. They’re decisions that, even if you buy the microphone that is not ideal, it’s probably a lower-stakes decision than you think. You could return it, you can get another microphone, you could eat the $150 or whatever the microphone costs.

And the problem is so many of us take the analytical frameworks of one-way door decisions and apply them to these reversible decisions, these two-way door decisions that we make every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good. That’s good. More of these, please. Give us the tricks.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, there’s this ethicist I spoke to, who I really liked a lot, named Ira Bedzow. And so he’s an ethicist, he works for Emory University, so he both works as the ethicist in the hospital and he consults with college students as they’re about to embark on their careers.

And whenever someone comes to him with a predicament or, you know, a question where they’re trying to decide between multiple paths, he always asks them the same three questions. The first is, “What do you want?” And the idea here is to try to get out of your head and into sort of an embodied felt experience out of your brain and into your body.

And the second question is, “Do you want to want that?” which is a little bit heady, but it taps into what philosophers often call our second-order desires. So, “Do I want a cigarette? Sure. Do I want to want a cigarette? Maybe not.”

And then the third question is the one that I think is the most important, which is, “What does that choice say about who you are as a person?” And the reason why I like that third question is because it ties our decisions to our values and our identity.

Because when you’re at a point of indecision, often you can’t know at that moment how that decision or how that choice will actually work out. But if you make a choice that’s in alignment in with the person that you want to be or your value systems, what you believe in, hopefully, you can stand by that choice even if you don’t get the outcome that you desire.

And so I like those sort of three questions as a framework to help someone work through a moment of indecision, “What do you want? Do you want to want that thing? And what does that choice say about who you are?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice trio there. And what’s fun about the last question is, sometimes, the answer to the last question is, “What does it say about who I am? Like, nothing. It’s really pretty minor, actually, now that I think about it. Huh? Okay.” So I guess in such scenarios, what’s your take on just like flipping a coin or rolling a die?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, you know, there’s a chapter about this in the book where I profiled this guy named Max Hawkins, who basically flipped a coin for every decision in his life. He created an algorithm that would make all of his life decisions on his behalf.

So it started with tapping into the Uber API and creating an app that would call an Uber to his house and bring him to a location in the city known only to the driver to try and randomize his existence and get outside of his bubble. And then he started doing it with Facebook events where he would, you know, roll the dice and go to a random public Facebook event chosen by this algorithm.

And at its most extreme, he created an app to tell him where he should live around the world. And he quit his job and, for two years, every month or two, he would pick up and leave and go to Gortina, Slovenia, or Dubai, or Hong Kong, or Ho Chi Minh City, depending on where this app told him to live. And, you know, it’s an extreme case of randomization or rolling the dice.

But I do think that having some aspect of rolling the dice or flipping the coin can be helpful. There’s a study out of the University of Basel in Switzerland where they had people flip coins when making big decisions about their life. And what they found is, even if you don’t go with whatever the coin tells you to do, having that as a data point can be really helpful information.

You flip a coin, you say, “Oh, thank you. Finally. It gave me the answer that I actually wanted.” Or you flip a coin and it tells you to do something, you say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to do that.” It can be really revealing of what your actual true preferences are.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, I’ve done that with my kids. It’s, like, flip a coin and then it’s like before we reveal, it’s like, “Well, which side do you really want it to be? Well, then how about we just do that?”

Simone Stolzoff
That’s great. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“And we don’t even need to look.” And then they’re like, “No, we have to see.” “Okay, here it is.”

Simone Stolzoff
Totally. Yeah, I have a friend, Jordan, who, whenever someone comes to him with, like, life advice or whatever, he always comes out of the gate super strong, and says, “Okay, you should definitely do this.” And, by being so strong, it gives his, you know, mentee or his patient or whatever, something to react to, and often that reaction can be really telling.

Because, often, when we’re gathering information or flipping the proverbial coin in our heads, we are really good at playing our own devil’s advocate. We can sort of make the bear case to whatever we might be inclined to choose. But, often, life is about transacting. It’s about being able to make choices in spite of not knowing, in spite of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, any everyday pro tips for professionals making the decisions that pop up regularly?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, one principle that I talk about in the book is about finding your anchors. So when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So, professionally, maybe you are dealing with some of the anxiety or stress of not knowing whether your job will be made redundant in the next few years because of AI, or whether you’re working in the right industry, or whether the economic future of your organization is sound.

One thing that I often say is, “How can you bring some certainty to that equation?” So when you find those anchors, whether they are your commitment to live in a particular place, or to be married to a particular person, or your commitment to a set of values, those anchors become the steady sort of rocks that will remain amidst all of the changing winds around you.

The second thing that I often tell people is that you have to be willing to trust in your future self. And so I had this friend named Emily Anhalt, who is a fellow author. She wrote this book called Flex Your Feelings, and she’s a psychotherapist.

And she had this moment when she was in her early 20s. Her mom was given a potentially terminal diagnosis, and she spent week after week in the hospital by her mom’s bedside, and she was really struggling to cope. She was riding this sort of anticipatory roller coaster of fear and anxiety.

And one day, a family friend of hers named Bill came by to visit. And Bill is an oncology doctor, so he has a lot of experience with people at the end of their lives. And he said, “Emily, how are you doing?” And she said, “Honestly, I’m not doing so well. I’m really struggling to cope and I don’t know what I’ll do if my mom dies.”

And Bill said something very wise. He said, “Emily, the version of you that will handle that tragic event if or when it takes place will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more context, more information, and be better equipped to handle it than you are today. You have to be willing to trust in your future self’s ability to handle your future problems.”

And I love this idea of sort of trusting in your future self because, so often, we rush out and meet our suffering. We think, “Oh, if this thing happens, it’s going to be bad for X, Y, and Z reason.” And in Emily’s case, she’s really glad that she got this advice because her mom ended up making it out of the hospital and she didn’t needlessly have to suffer about something that never came to pass.

And then the last sort of piece of advice that I’ll just give to people in facing uncertainty is to try to choose curiosity over fear. As we talked about in the beginning of our chat, our natural tendency when faced with uncertainty is to perceive it as a threat, to see it as something that might be, you know, at odds with our survival.

But, in actuality, there are so many great things that can come from the other side of uncertainty. And curiosity has this magical power to alchemize uncertain situations from things that are just the source of fear into being able to see the possibilities or the opportunities that may emerge. So find your anchors, trust in your future self, and try to choose curiosity over fear.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like about that notion of your future self being born into being able to handle it is that if we look to our past selves, we can see, like, “Oh, I’ve been dealt some challenging circumstances, like this thing happened. Remember when we had to deal with this, this, and this all at once? Remember when this person died? Remember when I was broke?”

Like, there are elements in our past. It’s like the past self managed to deal with that more or less fine. And so, too, we may expect the future self to do likewise.

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, we all suffer from what social psychologists often call the end of history illusion, which is this idea that when we look backwards, when we look at our past, we see all of the different ways that we’ve changed and evolved and been able to handle adversity.

But when we think about the future, we often think the person that we are today will be fixed forever. We think that, you know, we’re fully baked. And what I like about understanding this sort of cognitive bias or this, you know, illusion is that we are going to continue to change. And, in some ways, that might take some of the pressure off.

Your preferences in 10 years might be very different from your preferences today, because your preferences 10 years ago are probably different from what they are today, your desires, the person you want to be, what you need from your life.

And so rather than think that you need to know exactly what the future holds or have it all figured out, you can have a little bit more humility. You can trade some of that pride or hubris for a sense of openness and, hopefully, accept that you don’t know exactly what is to come, but in some ways, that’s what gives life its texture. That’s what brings serendipity and surprise and some of the magic.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, well, you know, related to what we were saying, there’s this quote I have in the book from this psychologist named Rollo May, and he says that, “Commitment is healthiest not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt.”

And I love that because he’s basically saying that you don’t need to be a 100% sure before you commit. And, actually, committing, even if you hold a little bit of doubt, can be a great way for you to build your character.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Simone Stolzoff
There’s another study that I like from the book from Northwestern University, where they had a big group of students who were all associated with the Greek life. So they were in fraternities and sororities. And they had different groups solve a murder mystery.

And some of the groups were all people from the same organization, so people that were all in the same frat or same sorority, and other groups were heterogeneous, so they had a mix of people from different groups. And what they found is when people were in groups where they were only with people from their organization, they came to a decision much faster.

They were more confident in the decision that they came to, and they were more often wrong. Whereas, when there was a mix of people from different organizations, there was more friction and they felt less good about the process of coming to a conclusion, but they were much more accurate.

And I like this because it talks about, you know, the value of diverse perspectives and decision-making, but also that, you know, part of what makes group-think so attractive is that it’s the friction-free path to certainty, when you can just sort of all agree and outsource your decision-making to maybe the loudest person in the room or the highest paid person in the room.

But, in actuality, when multiple people are able to voice their perspectives, you come to a better decision, even if it doesn’t feel as good while you’re coming to it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Simone Stolzoff
It’s called London Falling. It’s by this reporter from The New Yorker, and it chronicles this family in London whose son tragically committed suicide and sort of why and how.

And it’s this incredibly well-reported, deep research, page-turning read about how a family where everything seemed to be fine on paper was torn apart.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at job?

Simone Stolzoff
I always carry around a back-pocket notebook. And I find that, like, when I have my mole skin, it’s, you know, like, wallet, keys, cellphone, mole skin, I am more open to the ideas that the world holds.

And I like that it’s analog. I like that I don’t get distracted by it because there’s no other apps besides just the ability to write things down. And so having just a really accessible way to jot down ideas or to make observations as I have them has been an invaluable tool for me as a writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Simone Stolzoff
I listen to the radio every morning. This is a relatively new habit. But my wife and I, as we’re cooking breakfast for our son, always turn on this radio station called KEXP that’s based in Seattle. And it’s a sort of a college radio station for adults. It’s this really eclectic music sourcing. And it’s really nice not to rely on an algorithm or to rely on my own preferences, and let these experts in music curation sort of take us into the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate, folks quote it back to you often?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I mean, from my first book, The Good Enough Job, the big idea is about the value of diversifying your identity. And I think the quote that really resonates with people the most is that, “Some people do what they love for work. Others do what they have to for work so they can do what they love when they’re not working, and neither is more noble.”

And I think that’s particularly relevant to a show like this where, you know, yes, we want to be awesome at our jobs, but also that being awesome at your job or having a great job is in service of, hopefully, having a great life and to not confuse the two, I think, is very important.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, my website has all my socials, etc. It’s just SimoneStolzoff.com or you can go to HowToNotKnow.com, which might be a little bit easier to find. I also have a Substack called “The Article Book Club,” where I just send out one great article written by someone else every other week. And so if you’re into long-form journalism or just reading the best of what the internet has to offer, I would suggest “The ABC.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Simone Stolzoff
Yeah, I think, as we talked about building tolerance for uncertainty, one of the best ways to do so is through exposure, through microdosing uncertainty. So if there’s a way this week, whether it’s taking a new route to work, or striking up a conversation with a new colleague, or trying to do things a little bit differently than how you might have done things in the past, being able to expose yourself consciously to that uncertainty will do two things.

One, it might expose a better way of working or a better way of doing things. And, two, it’ll cognitively prepare you for other uncertainties that you may face in the future. So how can you shake up the routine? How can you choose to expose yourself to uncertainty so that you might be better equipped to face the uncertainty that you’ll face without choosing in the future?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Simone, thank you.

Simone Stolzoff
Thanks for having me, Pete. Cheers.