Melody Wilding: I will be honest with you, I have never been someone who just leans into the unknown. There’s this joke that sometimes goes around on social media and it says something like, oh yeah, I’m totally a go with the flow person. As long as I know exactly when the flow starts, when it ends, where we’re going, what to wear, and what’s the backup plan.

And yeah, that is me to my core. And maybe you can relate because I don’t think most of us are wired to love uncertainty. We tolerate it, we manage it, but love it and lean into it. That is a very hard sell for most of us. Now, what I’ve noticed over the last year or so is that our collective grip on needing to know, needing to control what comes next, prevent the worst case scenario plan for every possible outcome.

That has hit a fever pitch, and I get it. We all want to brace for whatever might be coming in our careers, in our lives, between the economy, the job market, ai, just the general sense that the ground keeps shifting under our feet. The desire to have answers has never felt more urgent or more out of reach.

So today I brought in some much needed reinforcement on this topic. Simone Stolzoff is a journalist, and you may know him as the author of the Good Enough Job where he challenged the idea that work should be defining our worth. He is a brand new book out that is very aptly titled, How to Not Know the Value of Uncertainty in a World That Demands Answers.

He describes it as a guide to dealing with uncertainty at a time when our lives and our careers have never felt less certain. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Simone breaks down why our capacity to tolerate uncertainty is getting worse over time and what that’s costing us in our careers and at work.

He walks through the three certainty traps that keep a lot of smart people stuck and settling. We dig into how to make decisions when there is no perfect answer. How to find stability when everything feels like it’s been turned upside down.

And a concept called active hope. This is one that can reframe when it means to achieve progress in completely turbulent times. So whether you are navigating a career crossroads, you are feeling anxious about your job, standing where your industry is headed, where your leadership team is going. Or you are just tired of feeling like you need to have it all figured out all of the time.

You will get a lot out of this. So let’s go ahead and dive in.

Simone, thank you so much for joining me. I’m so excited to be having this conversation with you. I loved your first book, The Good Enough Job when it came out. It was a huge hit. People could not stop talking about it, and now you are out with a new book, How Not to Know. What inspired you to cover this topic as your second book? What led you here?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, so you know, The Good Enough Job is a book about how identity came to be so central to our careers. And after it came out, I would go on tour or go on podcasts like this one and people often ask me some version of the same question, which is, how should I think about my career when the future feels so uncertain? When the labor market feels so volatile, the geopolitical landscape is precarious? How should I be thinking about my own career? And I wish I had sort of like a, a pithy answer. You know, I consider myself a journalist first and foremost. And I think one of the nice things about being a journalist is you don’t have to have all the answers yourself.

You can sort of like point to an expert over here, point to an expert over there. But the cliche among authors is that you write the book that you need to read. And so in many ways, How To Not Know is the book that I wanted to read to answer that question for others and also for myself.

Melody Wilding: And we were talking about, before we hit record, how so much has changed since your first book came out in the world, and the zeitgeist, and people’s attitudes and mindsets. How has that played into why you wanted to explore this topic?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, and part of it it’s just luck. You know, I started writing The Good Enough job in 2019, so this was before Global Pandemic really helped everyone renegotiate their relationship to work. And I was sort of the beneficiary of good timing. And I feel like something similar is happening now, where I started writing this book about uncertainty, how to get better at dealing with what we don’t know. And now we have what the World Health Organization calls a poly crisis. So there are these layered crises that sit on top of each other. We have a climate crisis. There’s economic volatility. There’s geopolitical instability. Maybe you’re dealing with a personal question or crisis in your own life. And so the book is really an attempt to look at uncertainty, not as a threat to be avoided, but to really ask what does it take to thrive amid uncertainty? How can we get better at developing comfort with uncertainty, tolerating uncertainty, so that when the inevitable unknowns in our life blindside us in an idle Wednesday, we’re better equipped to deal with them.

Melody Wilding: And there was something in the description of the book that stood out to me. There’s the sentence that says, from our careers to our politics, to our personal lives, the future is unknown, and yet our capacity to tolerate this uncertainty is in decline. Why? Why do you think our capacity to tolerate it is in decline?

Simone Stolzoff: There are a few reasons. One, and perhaps most obviously, is the rise of the internet and mobile phones. So there’s this great research that comes from the psychologist named Nick Carlson, and he’s basically found that, with the rise of the internet and mobile phones in particular, it’s done two things to our psyches. One is it’s created the expectation that answers should be readily available. You know, right now, and I don’t know, something, the thing I feel most inclined to do is reach for my phone and Google it right away. But the second sort of secondary implication of that is that it, has robbed us of the ability to practice sitting with what we don’t know. So whereas I might have been happy to not know the name of a given actor or what year Jimmy Carter became president, now I don’t hesitate to look it up right away. And that discomfort with not knowing is laying the foundation for being uncomfortable with not knowing in other aspects of our lives as well. And so now when it comes to what job to take or who to marry, we have this expectation maybe that if we just had the right ChatGPT prompt, we could find an easy answer. And yet there are certain questions in our lives that. Don’t have easy answers. They require us to be able to accept the uncertainty that is inevitable with any decision when it comes to the future, and persist nonetheless. And yet this sort of discomfort that we’ve developed, this lack of tolerance of uncertainty has made it more and more difficult to do.

Melody Wilding: I think will be a light bulb for people that this is something we have almost trained ourselves into that. It reminds me of when you scratch an itch and then it starts itching you more because you scratched it rather than if you didn’t, if you just left it alone, the sensation would go away. It’s kind of the same thing. And like you were saying, almost equating the questions you were bringing up earlier about what year was Jimmy Carter president and things like that. Those have, those have a binary right and wrong answer. Although we do live in a time where even truth is in the facts are in question sometimes, but that has a black or white answer.

Yet we equate it at the same level as some of these more abstract as existential questions about what do I do with my life? What job do I take? We’re almost, we’re psychologically putting those on the same level when they’re totally different planes of questions that we’re trying to explore.

So even unpacking that a little bit, I think could be a light bulb for someone.

Simone Stolzoff: I mean, I think it’s important to start with the idea that we are wired to see uncertainty from the perspective of it being a threat or imagine sort of our prehistoric ancestors, if you hear a rustling in the bushes or there’s like a piece of fruit that you’ve never tried before. That uncertainty can be lethal if you don’t figure out exactly what it is. And so our brains are wired to feel safe when we know and to figure our sort of fight, flight, or freeze response when we don’t know. And it’s that same wiring, that same fundamental DNA that we’re bringing into a modern world where the line between what we can and we can’t know is much more gray. There’s much more of a spectrum as opposed to sort of this binary, will this thing kill me or will this not kill me? The sort of fear of uncertainty is adaptive in the jungle, but in our modern world, we often treat smaller decisions as if they were life or death. And we can talk about all the implications of that leading us to rumination or anxiety or worry. But this book is an attempt to sort of rebrand uncertainty, not as a threat, but as the birthplace of possibility. Without being able to tolerate uncertainty, we never get to figure out what lies on the other side.

Melody Wilding: So interesting. Okay. Let’s, uh, I, I wanna almost combine both of your books together for this conversation to explore how uncertainty shows up at work and in our careers. In particular, there are three certainty traps that you talk about in the book. How do those show up for us in our careers?

Simone Stolzoff: So the three traps I talk about in the book, the first is comfort, which is the inclination to stay in situations that we know as opposed to figuring out. What happens when we approach something that we don’t know. So how many of us know,

say someone who’s stuck in a job that they know isn’t serving them, or in a relationship that they know isn’t serving them, but they’re too uncomfortable with uncertainty to actually leave the sort of devil that they know. The second certainty trap is hubris. So this idea that we know more than we do. Often, I think in a work context, there is an incentive to project a level of certainty about things that we can’t control. How many people have had a boss that tells you exactly what AI is gonna look like in five years or it’s. To have a 10 year plan that you wanna stick to rigidly. And the cost of this hubris is we become less adaptable as things change, and it closes our mind as opposed to opens our mind to new information as it presents itself. And the third certainty trap is control. So trying to control things that we fundamentally can’t. I’ll tell just a, a brief anecdote here, which is for a long time I worked as a journalist. I wrote for The Atlantic and some other magazines. And when I was about 28 years old, I was reached out to by a recruiter and I’d never been reached out to by a recruiter before. I thought it was very fancy and I took the, I took the call and she worked for a design firm called IDEO out in San Francisco. And I sort of passively went through this interview process. I found myself at this career crossroads where I had these two job offers in front of me. One was, you know, Simone, the journalist, another was Simone, the designer. And I couldn’t make up my mind for the life of me. You know, on one hand it’s like, woe is me, the agony of deciding between two attractive jobs. But on the other hand, you know, I didn’t feel like I was choosing between two jobs as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of myself. And so one insight was that, you know, my. Identity in my job had become so enmeshed. That was really the fundamental insight behind the first book that got enough job. And the second insight was that I was looking for certainty about which job was the perfect job or the right job for me, and I didn’t recognize that I was looking for certainty, in a situation where there’s no certainty to be found. Like how could I have possibly known which job was right? You know, what made the decision hard was that, you know, the journalism job was better in some ways. It was comfortable. It was something I knew, I loved to write. The design job was better in other ways. It better paying. It was in my hometown. I could be closer to my family. But no job was better overall. I think so many times we get stuck in these situations, particularly in a work context, and not just when we’re deciding between two jobs, but maybe deciding between two strategies or deciding between two headlines for a marketing campaign where we think there is this perfect right answer if we just bang our head against the wall at the right angle. When actuality, we need to be able to make decisions in spite of uncertainty, not in the absence of uncertainty. We can’t be looking for certainty where there is no certainty to be found because then we’re fundamentally trying to control something that we cannot.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. Such a great example. And I think so many people are there right now. So many people are overthinking their careers. I have clients who are deciding between kind of two paths diverged in a wood, uh, as you were. Or do we go with this strategy and that strategy? What, what advice or guidance techniques, what did have you uncovered about coming to a decision in spite of the uncertainty, how do you arrive at any action forward, rather than just sitting in the rumination and the overthinking and being suspended there?

Simone Stolzoff: Caveat by saying, take my advice with a grain of salt. I think often when we are in an indecisive place, we want someone else to make the decision for us or to give us that perfect heuristic that will just be like, okay, now I know. And the truth is, no one can make these decisions for you. I, I remember in my own like job and decision, I was talking to everyone I could about it. You know, I talked to my Uber driver and my yoga teacher about like, which job I should take. I was completely insufferable. I pity my friends in that era of my life. But, you know, I, I do teach a class called Designing Your Next Career Step, which is about this. It’s about how do you make decisions about the future of your career. And the first thing I always do in the first class is start by doing a values exercise. Where people get very clear on what it is they care about. And the reason why I always start with values is because hopefully values can be the steady boulders amist all that is changing around you. They’re the source of continuity or a constant. Between jobs or between partners or between where you live, et cetera. So I think that’s an important place to start to go one level higher than just what job to take or what strategy to choose. And start by determining your values. If you’re a company, maybe it’s your corporate values, ’cause those can be something that you fall back on. The second question that I would ask is, is an option safe enough to try? I think often we get caught in this pattern looking for perfection or looking, as I mentioned, for certainty about a situation that fundamentally can’t be controlled. I really like this idea, I learned it from a colleague named Alexis Gonzalez Black, about safe enough to try. It’s like when we come to a fork in the road, often we think the answers are yes or no, but often there’s a huge space in between which is like, this is safe enough to try. It’s what our mutual friend, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, would say is, uh, is a tiny experiment, you know, and changing the mentality from what is the right decision versus, what is an experiment that I can run and learn from? And the third thing that I’ll say is if you want, just like one question or one quick rule of thumb that might be helpful is I really like the question of which option is more expansive as opposed to sort of contracted. And the reason why I like that question is it gets us away from just these like thought patterns that we can get lost in, and it gets us more into sort of a body place. You can literally think about like expansive as something that expands your chest or expands your eyes or expands your capacity to take things in. Versus contracted. You can think about it as sort of that protective place where you’re sort of trying to avoid something from a fear based place. And, second, I think you know, often our natural tendency to avoid uncertainty keeps us from exploring opportunities that might lead to more growth. We often discount our ability to sort of course correct even if we’ve made a wrong decision. Our ability to go back and think about, okay, this was an experiment, but it didn’t cost me my career. It was just a little blur blip on the road. And so that’s a, a third place that I’d, I’d start with a, a client or a listener is thinking, okay, which of these options ahead of you might lead to the most growth?

Melody Wilding: Love that. I love that idea because it, leading to the most growth can include it having fear along with it, right? But it forces you to take a longer term view of it rather than the, this feels scary, therefore I will not do it. It’s more, this feels scary and it’s going to be a worthwhile challenge, so I’ll take it on.

Yeah. You talk about a concept in the book about making a choice right. And that stood out to me because there have been mentors in my life who have said to me, don’t focus on making the right decision. Focus on making the decision right. And I would love to know if there has been a situation, could be recent, could be in your past, where you have had to take that approach to making a choice about your work or your career to make the decision right.

Simone Stolzoff: Well, let’s go back to that fork in the road that I mentioned earlier. So, you know, deciding between this journalism job or this design job. Ended up taking the design job and I was convinced after I made that decision that I had a you know, I, I thought about reneging on my acceptance of the offer and trying to go back to my old career. And I think part of what makes it so hard is the minute before you make a decision, all options are still open, all options are still on the table. And the second after you make a decision, you have to deal with the grief of all of those roads not taking all of those foregone opportunities. Without necessarily understanding the benefits of what you’re walking toward. You know, one of my biggest fears in this job decision was that if I get a job in design as a designer at ideo, I would never write ever again. I would be blacklisted from the journalism industry. I would never see my byline appear and print ever again in my life. And one thing that I did to help make that decision, right was said, okay, I’m gonna commit to continuing to write and I don’t need anyone to give me permission. It doesn’t necessarily have to be for publication, but I will take this design job, so as long as I make sure that I can continue to cultivate this identity that I have as a writer. The TLDR is taking the job at IDEO ended up being the best thing I possibly could have done for my writing career because on the side of the job at ideo, I started working on this book proposal, The Good Enough Job, which became my new full-time job. And so even though in my mind I had like worked up this story about if I go to design, then I will never be a real writer. choosing to lean in to something that I could control, it actually led to me being a full-time author as I am now.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. I wrote down that phrase you mentioned earlier, birthplace of possibility. What a fantastic example, of that. Is there, when you say the birthplace of possibility. What else in your research and the conversations you’ve had as you’ve been writing this book are other examples of how being willing to sit in the uncertainty or navigate through it rather than avoid it has led to that?

Simone Stolzoff: So passionate about this. I mean, I think this is like the reason why I wrote the

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Simone Stolzoff: because I am such a big fan of originality when it comes to anything. When it comes to, scientific breakthroughs, or beautiful pieces of music, or really cool businesses. And in order to create something original, in order to really contribute something that is new to the world, you have to be willing to get to a point that you might be uncomfortable with. You might not know exactly where you’re going and to continue. There’s this great musician who I love named Brian Eno. He’s a sort of an ambient electronic musician, he has this quote where he says, I want to create music unlike any music that I’ve ever heard. And I love that because so many times when we get to that frontier, when we get to that point of uncertainty, our mammalian brain is saying, turn back, find something that’s safe, find something that’s comfortable. And that’s where you get all of this like derivative art or this sort of like AI sloppy LinkedIn posts or you know, these things that feel like you’ve seen them before. But, people who are real visionaries, the real change makers out there have gotten to a place where they don’t know exactly what’s coming next and persisted until they reach the other side. So no world changing business, no breakthrough scientific discovery, no genre busting piece of music or art has come without someone’s willingness to face uncertainty head on. And that’s why I wrote this book. It’s to hopefully inspire others to not see uncertainty as this thing that we have to be so afraid of, but actually see it as this opportunity to discover something new about what is possible in your life.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. What’s, what would you say to the person who is sitting in a knows? They’re in a lot of uncertainty. I think also ambiguity is a big part of this conversation and a thing a lot of certainly. My clients feel right now is everything feels uncertain and also unclear, and am ambiguous, and it doesn’t feel good. It feels scary. It feels uncomfortable. What would you tell that person who. Just wants those emotions to go away. What, what do you, what do you do when you’re trying to navigate through that and you just feel crappy? How do you keep going? How do you have the motivation to explore or to test or to experiment when the uncertainty itself may be bringing you down?

Simone Stolzoff: I, I feel you sister. You know, like that

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Simone Stolzoff: Is uncertainty’s job, right? When you think about, it’s sort of like biological purpose. The reason why it triggers worry and stress and anxiety and fear is because it’s your body trying to keep you safe. And what I would say is, you know, the only way to actually push past that is to go right through it. It’s sort of like, uh, any sort of tolerance that you’re hoping to build. If you’re afraid of spiders and you have arachnophobia, the best way to get more comfortable with spiders to expose yourself to spiders, maybe in a small, safe, controlled environment, to start by looking at a picture of a spider or looking up some fun facts of a spider. And then maybe you can be in the same room as a spider, and then maybe eventually you can learn to sort of face your fear, head on and touch your spider. It’s the same with uncertainty.

The best way to develop more tolerance for uncertainty is to build your own confidence and conviction that you can face an uncertain situation and make it out the other side. There’s many different ways to do this. You can look back on situations that you have faced in the past where you’ve been uncertainty and made it through and sort of build conviction through data. You can expose yourself to uncertainty in really small ways. Maybe it’s as innocuous as taking a new route to work or doing something new on a menu that you don’t normally try. Anything that you can do to build that confidence that you can face an uncertain situation and make it out the other side. And thing that I’d say is that, you know. Even though it might seem like others have it figured out, we are sort of in the phenomenon of like in middle school where everyone has a question, but no one’s willing to raise their hand. is the human condition. You know, like the best argument I can make for developing uncertainty tolerance is because we have no choice. To be human is to live with uncertainty. And, uh, it’s through a mindset shift, whether it’s through your actions, whether it’s through a story that you tell yourself, if you can get more exposure to that uncertainty, I can promise you that it’ll make it easier to adapt to whatever comes your way in the future.

Melody Wilding: Such, such great and I love those tactical strategies that you, you can do, because in the moment when you’re feeling like, I, I don’t know if I can handle this anymore, all of it feels out of my control to, to recall your resourcefulness of, well, I, you know, in 2009, I was facing a similar situation when the market crashed and I wasn’t sure if I was going to have a job and I made it through that. What, what worked for me? Then you can call on that, which is amazing. There’s also a concept you talk about in the book, you call it Active hope. What is that? And particularly, there’s a lot of people listening who feel a lot of hopelessness about the economy, the state of our world, whether their job is going to exist in 1, 3, 5 years because of AI. So h how does that active hope concept apply if you find yourself in that situation?

Simone Stolzoff: It’s a term that was coined by this environmental activist named Joanna R Macy. I love it. It Active Hope is an alternative to wishful thinking. the idea is, you know, there’s two words. There’s. Action. And there’s hope. And I think hope is about optimism, hoping that things will be better tomorrow than they are today. Action is about doing something about it. Uh, there’s this writer and journalist named Dan Harris, and he has this great phrase that action absorbs anxiety. And I think it’s particularly germane when thinking about something like climate change, where it’s this huge amorphous. Problem and it’s really threatening and there’s so much uncertainty, and it has the potential to cause a lot of anxiety. Well, the thing that you can do to help quell some of that anxiety is the same thing that the climate crisis desperately needs. Which is for people to take action. Doesn’t necessarily mean to dedicate your whole career to stopping climate change. But if you think about climate change is sort of this huge quilt, just figuring out that one thread that you can pull on so that you can feel like you’re part of the change that you wish to see. You know, you can think about this in the context of work as well. You know, maybe the, the best analog is, the, the threat of AI and how AI might undermine your job or your industry, or just the feeling that everyone else is, you know, mastering Claude code and you don’t even know your way around a chat bot. best thing that you can do to absorb some of that anxiety that you’re feeling is to take action, is to try and make friends with that uncertainty that you’re feeling. To maybe learn through doing by trying to use some of these tools that might be the cause of so much of your anxiety. There’s a metaphor that I learned at IDEO that I really like, which is to be an innovator, to be someone who is hoping to make change, which I hope all the listeners to this podcast are. It’s like, rowing on a boat, on a lake that shrouded in really heavy fog. You can’t see very far in front of you. can’t know exactly where you’re gonna end up, but you have two jobs. is to have faith that you’ll eventually reach land. Remember, we’re on a lake, the second is to keep rowing. And so that’s what Active Hope is to me. It’s to keep rowing despite not being able to see five years into the future. Despite not knowing exactly what job you might have at the end of your career. It’s taking it one action at a time. And through that action, through the doing it, it, it creates its own sense of momentum. It creates its own sense of hope, and so the two really fuel each other.

Melody Wilding: It’s such a great way to think about it. Yeah, sometimes I’ve, I’ve thought about it as you have a, you have a flashlight and the flashlight only shows like one, one stepping stone in front of you, but every time you move, then you reveal the next stepping stone. And, uh, it’s, it’s similar. So there’s, the last topic I wanted to cover, uh, is in the book you talk about certainty anchors. What are those? Why are they important?

Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, so certainty anchors built under this idea that when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So values, as I mentioned earlier, are a great example of a certainty anchor. If you’re really clear about what your values are hopefully those things will remain constant despite all of these other things in your life that might change. think part of the anxiety of uncertainty comes from this inability to find a, a toehold. You know, you want to find something solid to stand on, and yet it feels like you’re just flailing and like, oh, if my job as a writer gets, you know, automated by AI, then I’m not gonna know how to make money. And if I don’t know how to make money, I’m not gonna be able to pay for my kid private school. And if my kid doesn’t go to private school, they’re never gonna get a great job. And I’m a failure, you know, and this tendency to spiral or to ruminate. one of the things that I often recommend is start by determining the things that you know, the things that will anchor you. if that worst case scenario does come true. So maybe in your personal life, it’s something like knowing where you wanna live or knowing who your partner is. Or knowing sort of your, your friendships or the things that you do for fun, that will remain true no matter what job you have. Or no matter whether Julie gets a promotion over you. So that’s sort of step one, figuring out those things that are constant. And then once you know those things that are constant or those things that are non-negotiables, creates a level of freedom to explore with the variables. So for example, maybe your certainty anchor is, I am committed to, working in this industry, maybe, let’s call it food. Food is what I’m passionate about. I am calling food my anchor. Within that sandbox, there are many different ways I could work in food. Maybe it’s as a restaurateur, maybe it’s as a server, maybe it’s for a food tech company. Maybe it’s for a nonprofit that thinks about food insecurity. But by putting up those constraints. if they’re somewhat arbitrary, it gives you the freedom to explore as well. It’s sort of like budgeting for money. Often when we think about budgeting, we think about pinching pennies or constraining our ability to spend, but anyone who’s ever, you know, actually sat down and created a budget knows. It can be incredibly freeing to say, okay, I’ve got $300 to spend each month on entertainment, and so when I go to the movies, I don’t have to think twice about it because this is accounted for. So that’s the idea with certainty anchors. How do you find the things that you know will be true so that the other things that are maybe a little bit more up in the air don’t feel as all consuming.

Melody Wilding: It reminds me of a few things. One is the idea of diversifying your identity, which very similar to what you’re talking about, and I think a big part of what you talk about in your first book is don’t make your work your end all, be all of your identity, because if that’s not going well, then you have all of your.

Self sense of self chips in one basket. So have other identities. You know, I’ve had clients who are pilots or they do volunteering, or they really take their role as an aunt or an uncle very seriously. And so there’s, as you were saying, there’s these other parts of your life to fall back on just as you would diversify your finances. You’re diversifying the aspects of yourself. That was one thing. The, the second thing is also the, I I’m assuming the certainty anchors could also apply very literally to how you’re managing yourself throughout your day. I think for a lot of us, you know, but my husband is one of those coffee people, so he’s very ritualistic about how he makes us pour over and, that’s a certainty anchor in his day, no matter what. He knows that’s gonna be his sort of calming moment where he’s making his coffee and you know, you might have a brief meditation or maybe you’re writing down your three things that you’re grateful for, whatever it is. But it, am I correct that that gives you, kind of groundedness amid all the other chaos that may be around you?

Simone Stolzoff: and I think there’s a parallel between the first point and the second point, this point around diversifying our identity. Say you have a hobby. Like for me, I love to play pickup basketball. of the great things about my basketball practice is that it is so divorced from my job as an author that no one on my team cares how many words I’ve written or how many books I’ve sold that week.

It’s something that I just do for me that is not at the whim of a boss or at the whim of, uh, economic environment or, you know, the, the stock price of my company, it’s something that I have more control over. Because I have more control over it, it’s also a certainty anchor, which is, regardless of how my workday went on Tuesday, I know that I’ll be at Panhandle Park playing pickup basketball that day, and so they go hand in hand. It’s really important to diversify your identity as a hedge against uncertainty. You know, if you are what you do and you lose your job, who are you? It allows you to have a wider foundation. But it also is an attempt to find something that you have the power to influence. Whereas so much of what we worry about, especially in the professional realm, is out of our control. And that is like the, you know, the age old stoic wisdom that I think this book is built upon. The first step is controlling that we can control from that witch we can’t control and trying to dedicate our energy to the former and not spend so much of it worrying about the latter.

Melody Wilding: That was a great place to land this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me for all of this great and very much needed wisdom right now. Where is the best place to send people to find the book and connect with you?

Simone Stolzoff: The best place is to go to How to Not know.com. You can find all of my socials there and I am excited for you to read the book. I honestly think it’s a book that everyone could benefit from reading. Just because of how pervasive uncertainty is in all of our lives.

Melody Wilding: Absolutely. Thank you so much.