285. Why You Stay Stuck in Jobs, Relationships, and Financial Patterns That Aren’t Working with Simone Stolzoff

21:07So the canonical example of this is people climbing Mount Everest. And when you're climbing Mount Everest, there is a fixed turnaround time, which is 2 p.m. Regardless of where you are in the mountain, at 2 p.m., you turn around because as the sun sets in the sky, the weather gets worse, the risks increase. And the reason they have that pre-commitment is to prevent you from it being sort of 155 and just trying to push all the way to the summit. And I think a lot of problems come to bear when we're in that position of making emotional-based decisions as opposed to rules-based decisions, particularly in our financial lives.

21:46It can be really easy to feel the sort of emotions of, I don't know, financial nihilism or your uncertainty about your career and let that influence your portfolio, your strategy. But a lot of the best financial moves are coming from a place of really clear principles. I'm going to have a diversified portfolio. I'm going to make decisions and think long term as opposed to doing things on a short term basis. If a stock goes up and down or if the market goes up and down, I'm not going to make a rash decision just to pull it out of the stock market because I'm feeling anxious or unsure right now.

22:26And I think it's a great sort of case for outsourcing some of this decision making, whether it is to a financial planner or an expert or a third party app or a robo buyer or something like that. So it's not on you to have to ride the emotional roller coaster of these ups and downs.

22:44Financial Feminist:Yeah. I mean, my strategy is always put it in an index fund and then you don't have to worry about a random company. It's like, cool. Every company. It helps mitigate that risk a little bit. This reminds me, I have a friend who is an entrepreneur and decided years ago that when she hit this amount of money in her investments, she was going to take a step back from her business. she actually did it. She hit the amount of money, did not move the benchmark, and it has stepped back. And when she was telling me this, I know myself well enough to go, oh, I would have moved the benchmark. I would have moved the benchmark.

23:23Financial Feminist:So what does somebody actually do in that moment when they're faced with a situation where they're like, okay, I set up the rule. So that was step Number one, I set up the rule. But two, the rule's here. And I don't like it. It feels uncomfortable. Like, how does somebody in that moment go, no, we're going to stick to the rule? I think in my life, what I try and do is try to outsource my willpower as much as I can. So for example, like for writing, it's hard to just like sit down and write when I say I'm going to write. But if I have an editor that's holding me to a deadline or I have a writing partner that's going to check in with me and ask how much I've written this past week and how much I plan to write next week, those are ways of not just relying on my own will to get the thing done.

24:10And so one thing that you can do is find people to hold you accountable in your life to your commitments. So when your friend told you that she was going to step out of her business once she got to a certain point, that is a way of not relying purely on her own willpower, but actually outsourcing a bit of that willpower so that you can hold her accountable as well. So that being said, it's really hard to do. We have this natural tendency both towards hedonic adaptation to sort of get accustomed to our new lifestyle creeps and to keep pushing the goalposts further out because then we start comparing ourselves to a new subset of peers.

24:49And I think one of the things that has really helped me, I'm sort of a kind of middle-class author, and I think a lot of my financial anxiety comes from my ability to provide opportunities for my kid and support my family. My wife is a teacher. But when I actually sat down and made a budget, it came from my head, this sort of amorphous anxiety and fear and uncertainty about the future, into the practicality of, oh, this is actually how much I'm spending month to month. This is actually how much I need to survive. And so the sort of answer for me isn't just always up and to the right, but it's actually to pay for a lifestyle and to be able to save and then know when my level of enough is.

25:34Financial Feminist:I think that's so smart. And it's something just, again, from the financial point of view, the amount of people I talk to who don't truly know their numbers, and yet they have so much anxiety around money and they equate thinking, oh, looking at my money gives me anxiety, so I'm not going to do it. I'm like, no, you're actually anxious because you have no idea what the fuck is going on. Like that anxiety is not actually from, oh, I look at my money and I'm not doing as well. It's like, no, you're driving a car without a gas gauge. You have no idea when your car is going to break down on the side of the road at 2 in the morning without cell reception in a place you've never been.

26:09Financial Feminist:That is actually what you're stressed out about. Even if my light's on, it's stressful. I don't have a lot of gas, but I know how far I can get. And I think that that is a very different experience than just raw-dogging life and expecting your anxiety to just go away. And you also made a distinction that I really love, which is that discomfort is not always a sign that there is something wrong. Sometimes it's a sign that you're really on the verge of a breakthrough. I just heard this. I'm listening to Emma Greed's new book. And what she talks about is like, fear is actually sometimes a good thing because it means you are pushing past your comfort zone.

26:42Financial Feminist:It means you're doing something that is a little scary, but that has the potential to change your life. So how do we tell the difference between, oh, this is good discomfort, this is something that is going to push me to get where I want to be versus, oh, this is my gut telling me this is bad? Yeah, that's a tricky balance to strike. I'll give one example that actually isn't in the book that I think is a nice sort of way to wrap up this question. There was a startup in the Bay Area in the early 2010s called Tiny Spec. And they were a gaming company. They built this game called Glitch that was heralded in the New York Times when it launched.

27:20They raised like$17 million. They had tens of thousands of active players in their first few months. And it was a success story, like this incredibly hyped new multiplayer game. And yet the founder felt in his heart of hearts that the business wasn't actually sustainable. It wasn't on a path towards success. And so he did something that others might have seen as crazy. he decided to shut the company down at sort of the peak of its success. And he offered to make his investors whole. He gave employees the opportunity to leave if they wanted. And then with the employees that were left, he decided to pivot the entire company around this internal tool that they had built to communicate with each other while they were building the game.

28:03And that internal tool is Slack, one of the most successful B2B businesses of all time. And the founder's name is Stuart Butterfield. And you hear him talk about this decision to turn towards the unknown. And he said, we didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out. We didn't know the opportunity that we were pursuing. But what he was able to find was that on the other side of his discomfort, on the other side of his fear, was something that was greater than anything he could have imagined. There's this metaphor that gets used often in statistics, which is the idea of a local maxima, where you might be standing on the peak of a mountain.

28:43You think like, I'm on top of the world, but you might not know that around the corner, there's another peak that's a little bit higher and requires you to descend, maybe face some of that uncertainty, face some of that discomfort, but then you can end up higher than you ever did before. And that's maybe a piece of advice that I'd give to our friend that's stuck in a dead-end job or stuck in that dead-end relationship is that uncertainty doesn't necessarily have to be a sign that something is wrong. It can be the beginning of a new chapter or a breakthrough.

29:14Financial Feminist:Is that the thing that breaks the cycle? Like when someone's in that wrong job, the wrong relationship, the wrong financial pattern, when they can see it but can't move, is that the thing that breaks the loop? The thing that breaks the loop is action. You know, there's a common phrase, which is that action absorbs anxiety. And I think that's incredibly true. The metaphor that I like is that being a leader in a business or in your own life is like rowing a boat on a lake that's shrouded in heavy fog. You might not be able to see very far in front of you. You might not be able to know exactly where you'll end up, but you have two jobs.

29:53The first is to maintain faith that you'll eventually reach land. Remember, you're on a lake. And the second is to keep rowing. And I think the keep rowing is the key. You know, I think so often the sort of cost of our discomfort with uncertainty is that it keeps us paralyzed. We feel that sense of doubt or that not knowing, and it prevents us from taking any action at all. Whereas the only way to like move through your anxiety is to take one step at a time. And that's how the clarity will emerge.

30:28Financial Feminist:I love having Simone back as a guest. And you just heard him talk about fear and uncertainty around money. And if you thought, well, cool, that's me. I know I could be better with my money, but I feel so frozen. I know exactly where you are. And I've literally built a program just for you. The 100K Club is the place to learn everything you need to know about money at a basic level. How to pay off debt, how to build your savings, how to budget, how to overcome your financial trauma, but also how to feel supported in community. We have so many members of the 100K Club that are pursuing whatever 100K goal looks like for them, but also making sure that they're pursuing financial freedom in community means that they're less likely to get stuck.

31:09Financial Feminist:They're more likely to feel encouraged, but also accountable to their goals. And anytime a question arises, they can come to the community and get answers from other community members as well as me and my team. You can go to herfirsthunderk.com slash ffpod to sign up for less than$100. That is so much support, videos from me for less than$100. herfirsthunderk.com slash ffpod. All right, let's get back into the episode. Tell me about Connie and Andrew and why you chose to open your book with them. Fascinating story. They are a couple. They've been together for 17 years, married for 10. and they both sort of know that there's something that isn't quite right in their relationship.

31:53And so they're out having a drink at a bar and they decide to do an experiment and they call it the year of living dangerously. And what they do is they say, we're going to go our separate ways for a year. And then we're going to come back to this bar a year from today and determine whether we want to stay together or not. And when I first heard it, I was like, this is like fiction, You know, like this isn't real life. Like, do people actually do this? And they did. You know, I won't spoil the ending of like what they determined. Like when I do sort of my informal poll of like, do you think they broke up or stayed together?

32:27It's like 50-50. You know, half people are like, it's the Pina Colada song. Like, of course, they fall back into each other's arms. And like the other half of people are like, no, there's no way that they like stayed together after like spending a year giving their energy outside of the relationship. but I think it's this fascinating little case study of what would it mean to actually turn toward the uncertainty you're feeling in the relationship and this isn't to say that like everyone should like do their year of living dangerously or their like relationship rumspringer or whatever but it was so fascinating to talk to them and maybe the the kicker is that their couples therapist was Esther Perel like the most famous couples therapist of all time before Esther Perot became like Esther Perot.

33:08And so I got to like talk to all of these experts about the situation. I talked to like an ethicist and a philosopher and a psychologist to all get their sort of read on what was going on. And it really kind of changed the way that I think about decision-making. Okay.

33:21Financial Feminist:So most people who are listening to this, I would dare to say maybe all are people with kids or people with a financial condition where they are, you know, they don't have the ability to do this or you know they're like yeah I can't break up my marriage for this so like what is the accessible version of the year of living dangerously like what does a personal experience or personal experiment like look like for this person listening yeah I think that's sort of the upshot that we can all take from it like what would it mean to prototype a question that you're wrestling with in your mind so maybe you're considering moving rather than just treating it as like a thought experiment, could you go to the city that you're considering moving to and like rent an Airbnb and like try it out for a week?

34:08Say you're considering like switching career paths or switching your jobs rather than just be in your mind thinking like, is this really what I want? Is there a way that you can get proximate to the actual experience of doing that work? Like, for example, I am a writer. I got a lot of people in my DMs that are like, hey, I want to write a book or hey, I want to be a journalist. Like, what should I do? And the first question I always ask is like, what do you like to write? What have you written recently? And the most common response is like, well, I haven't actually written anything, but I have all these ideas of what I might want to write about.

34:40And my advice is like, just go write the damn thing. Like you don't need anyone else's permission to try and run a time bound, low cost experiment to try and give you more information about the thing that you're trying to decide between. And I think it comes back to this paralysis point where so often when we're at a crossroads, We just feel stuck. And it's through that action. It's through maybe lowering the stakes and creating a little safe environment where you can try it out that you actually will get more information. I talked to this therapist about the Connie Andrew situation. And he said that when people are really uncomfortable with uncertainty, they tend to go one of two ways.

35:20They either become really impulsive or they become like insane information gatherers. And you probably know just listening whether you're on one end or the other end of the spectrum. We all have that friend who's trying to decide what job to take or something, and they ask everyone and they can't. They're Uber driver and they're yoga teacher and they're best friend, and they don't actually get quiet enough to listen to what they think for themselves. or we have another friend who like just like makes really rash decisions which I think is its own way of like avoiding turning toward uncertainty like the example the psychologist gave me is like if you're really uncomfortable with uncertainty and you need to buy a new pair of jeans you maybe either try on every single pair of jeans in the store or you just like buy the pair of jeans in the window whereas like a more adaptive approach might be like try on three pairs of jeans and figure out what you like and then make a choice two things from that that I find so interesting

36:14Financial Feminist:I'm trying to remember where this quote is. It might be the artist's way, but basically like, if you want to be a writer, write, then you're a writer. Like, no one is coming to bequeath you and knight you and say, you are officially a writer once you have published a book or a New York Times bestseller or written 10 books. It's like, if you write, you are a writer. If you act, you are an actor. If you do improv, you are an improviser. There is no person who, or society that's going to tell you, oh, you haven't achieved this, so you're not the thing yet. If you want to be that person, you just have to become that person.

36:46Financial Feminist:And the thing with uncertainty of, are you the person that's going to be impulsive? Are you going to do every single Google search you can? I see this so much with money, which is either, for me, it would be ostrich effect, which is like bury their head in the sand, act like their financial problems don't exist. They're like, I'll just ignore it. Or the opposite, which is like so much research, but no action. And we call that analysis paralysis, where it's like, I am not going to open the high yield savings account that I've heard Tori talk about a million times. I'm going to Google best high yield savings accounts and spend like 10 hours over the next couple weeks researching, which should be like a 10 minute decision.

37:26Financial Feminist:And so those are the ways I see the inaction crop up with our community in particular is it is like, I'm either going to completely ignore it. I'm just not going to do anything about it. Or I'm going to do so much about it that keeps me from actually doing anything. Totally. Yeah. I see this in my own life all the time. Like the other week, I was feeling super addicted to my phone. And rather than just like put my phone down, I read an entire book about phone addiction. There's got to be like a German word for this. Like you do something that's adjacent to the thing that you want to do as opposed to doing the actual thing.

38:01It's like rather than start the business, I'm just going to like listen to a thousand podcasts about entrepreneurship, you know?

38:06Financial Feminist:Well, because we're uncomfortable with uncertainty. I mean, it's all back to your thesis statement. It's actually easier to read the 12 books about how to start a business and to watch the 100 videos because that means you don't have to take a risk. That means you don't have to do anything. You can say, oh, I'm doing research. No, actually, you're at the point where the research has been over for a while. You're just using that as an excuse because you're just terrified to actually get started. Yeah, there's two frameworks that help me make decisions. The first is just understanding the difference between one-way door and two-way door decisions.

38:49So one-way door decisions are decisions that are harder to reverse. You walk through the one-way door and it's harder to go back on. Questions like, who should I marry? Should I buy this house? Should I assume all this debt to go back to graduate school? Two-way door decisions are decisions that are easier to course correct. They're decisions like, you know, should I open the savings account, which if I figure out it's the wrong choice, I can probably go back. Should I like order the pizza or the pasta, whatever? And the problem is so often we take the analytical framework of a one-way door decision and apply it to a two-way door decision.

39:27Like even a decision that feels high stakes, like what job should I choose? We have much more agency and ability to adapt and course correct than we give ourselves credit for. And the real risk is that you never transact, that you never actually make a decision because you're waiting for that certainty that may never come. Like, how would you know which of two jobs is better for you until you actually start working one of those jobs? Like, we have to be able to make decisions not in the absence of uncertainty, but in spite of uncertainty. And that's what it means to be a human. We have to be able to make decisions in spite of doubt.

40:13Financial Feminist:And I think the most successful people do exactly what you just said. I've never heard it approached from that. And so I think that's brilliant. The one way door versus the two. Like, I think that if you look at the most successful people, they are very good at making a decision and being like, okay, if it's not the right decision, I'm actually quicker to figure out it's not the right decision and make a change rather than spending all of this time doing nothing. It's like, nope, I'm going to make a decision. I think it's the right decision. And usually it is. And if it's not, then my energy is actually in course correcting as soon as possible, as opposed to A, waiting to make a decision at all, or B, not course correcting because of all of the hubris we were talking about before.

40:58Yeah. There's this philosopher named Ruth Chang, and she has this great idea, which is what makes a hard decision hard is that one option isn't better than the other option overall. One option is better for some reasons. Another option is better for other reasons. And yet neither is better overall. If one option was better, clearly, it wouldn't be a hard decision. It would be an easy decision. And so rather than agonized, going back and forth, creating the pros and cons list, creating the spreadsheets, talking to your Uber driver, you just have to be able to accept the trade-offs that you're willing to choose.

41:32And then retroactively, you can spend your energy convincing yourself of why you made the right decision. Another way to think about it is there's this ethicist who I talked to named Ira Bredzow. And we're talking about sort of moments of indecision in life. And he is a guidance counselor at a university. And he says he always asks his students the same three questions. The first is, what do you want to do? Which is a way to try and get out of our head and into like our body, our felt experience, our gut. The second is, do you want to want to do that? Which is a way to sort of abstract a little bit from the decision itself and tap into what's often called our higher order self or our second order desires.

42:12Like I want to smoke a cigarette, but I don't want to want to smoke a cigarette. And then the third is, what does this decision say about who you are as a person. And that is a way to try to connect your decision to your values and your identity. And hopefully we can make decisions that align with our values so that even if we don't get the outcome that we desire, we can still stand by that choice. And I think that is a really freeing way to think about uncertainty and decision-making. How can you make choices that reinforce the type of person that you want to be because you never know exactly what the outcome will give you.

42:54And to be honest, as humans, we are really bad at what psychologists call effective forecasting, which is thinking about how we're going to feel about how future events will affect us. The canonical examples are like people that get like left at the altar or people that win the lottery or people that become paraplegics. Like we all have a friend who like went through a breakup and then was like, that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. it's my life is over and then you talk to them six months later and they're like that was the best thing that ever happened to me what a blessing in disguise and that's a great example not to like rush to certainty about how an event will affect you is we honestly don't know

43:30Financial Feminist:i've talked on this show before that in yeah 2021 speaking of breakups i went through a very hard breakup but it was hard because i thought this person was my soulmate like i thought this person was my person. And so, you know, I look back at that time and at that person I was with such fondness because it was, you know, many people have breakups that were terrible and it is like devastating for that. But it was devastating because I thought, oh, I'm losing the person I'm supposed to be with. And one of the worst things I did was I tried to muscle through the grieving process. And I was, you know, I was feeling very deeply.

44:06Financial Feminist:I thought I was doing it correctly. I was crying a lot. I was feeling a lot of emotions that vary up and down, and I thought I was doing it correctly. And then finally, one day, I realized like, oh, I'm just trying to get to the end of this so that I can... This whole experience can have meaning. Because if it doesn't have meaning, then this is just hard. And again, cliche as it sounds, I just had to sit in it. and time did its thing. And that was what truly allowed me to like recover and grieve and then look at that relationship and be like, oh, that was the best thing that ever happened to me because it forced me to deal with uncertainty.

44:47Financial Feminist:It forced me to sit in it and not know what was coming next and be okay with the unknown. And yeah, it's taught me so much about the way I live my life, but it was deeply painful while it was happening. It was not a fun experience. Yeah, the canonical psychology finding. The only way past something is through it. Carl Jung. I think that is so true about every anxiety that we have in our lives. Have you ever heard of the parable of the Chinese farmer? I have it as a question, but I would love to hear it from you. This is the horse running away, horse returning. Is that what this is? Yeah, exactly.

45:23I just think it's such a great little story that gets to the heart of a question about will a breakup be a good or a bad thing? Yeah, tell us.

45:32Financial Feminist:Tell it for us. So there's this farmer and his horse runs away from the village where he lives. And his neighbors come to his door and they say, we're so sorry to hear about your horse. It is such a tragedy. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. The next day, the horse comes back. And behind it, there are seven other wild horses in tow. And so the farmer is just like, you know, 8X to his supply. And the neighbors come to this door and they say, oh, we are so grateful to hear about your horses. What luck. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. The day after that, the farmer's son is taking out one of the wild horses for a ride.

46:13And he falls and he breaks his leg. And again, the neighbors come back and they say, what a bummer. We're so sorry to hear about your son. And the farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And the day after that, generals from the military come to the small village to draft people into a war. And because the son has broken his leg, he gets out of the draft. And the neighbors again say, you're so lucky. This time you can join me. The farmer says, maybe yes, maybe no. And what I love about that story is that it shows the wisdom of not rushing to judgment about how something might affect us. There are so many financial versions of this where we think that our portfolio is ruined or we're going to the moon because crypto went up or whatever.

47:03And really, so much financial advice, as I'm sure you dispel on the show, comes back to putting yourself in a situation that can weather some of those ups and downs and trying to stay the course. Because, you know, NVIDIA goes up one day, what great luck. Next day, like a news headline, the stock goes down. What a tragedy. and if you are just riding that emotional roller coaster that's no way to feel grounded in your life that's no way to feel stable and secure that's no way to actually get what you are looking for from your money which is like opportunity to make choices and so by reserving the judgment to think about any event as like a blessing or a curse right in the moment we allow ourselves to stay in that space of unknowing and stay in that place of uncertainty where we can actually see what emerges as opposed to just trying to validate our assumptions.

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50:26Financial Feminist:You talk about Cheryl Strayed's concept of ghost ships and your conclusion. And first of all, I love her and I love her work. But the idea of the ghost ships is that, you know, the idea of every choice we're making is our other possible selves sailing away. And if you were to talk to my partner, he would joke that like peak Tory porn is any sort of media that talks about timelines or like, you know, books, movies that talk about, oh, this one decision. If I made this one different decision, how would my life look? So for a listener who is realizing that some of those ships have sailed, some version of herself is not going to be, what do you want her to take from that idea?

51:13So the image is, you know, every decision you make, there are many different decisions, many different paths that your life can take. And you can see each of them represented by the decision to like jump onto a ship. And the minute you jump onto a ship, all of these other ships sort of depart from the dock. They're all the other people you could have been. And we can't ride every single ship. The takeaway is that you have to be able to make peace with those ships that you didn't take. And part of what makes decision-making so difficult is the moment before you make a decision, all options are still on the table.

51:59All those ships are still possibilities in your life. And then you step onto a ship and immediately you foreclose all those other options, which feels like this incredible loss. And often in the immediate aftermath of making the decision, you can't necessarily see what will come of the decision that you've chosen to make. You just can feel all the decisions that you didn't make. You know, choosing to marry this person means that you can't marry that person or that person or that person. Choosing to move to this city means that you can't live in that city or that city or that city. But there's an incredible freedom if we are able to accept that we can't ride all of the ships.

52:39I used to be an international correspondent, like a travel journalist. And I remember when I was like 26 or so, I had this realization that you can go to a city like Paris, you're never going to be able to see everything.

52:53Financial Feminist:Or eat at every restaurant. That's the one that always gets me. Or eat at every restaurant. I can't eat at every restaurant in this city. But the natural extension of that is like, then maybe it's okay to go to Paris and not go to the Louvre. And you don't have to feel about the opportunity cost of how you've chosen to spend your day. You can just be grateful for how you did spend your day. And so the sort of ghost ship's story comes from the decision about whether or not to have a kid, which I know is one of the hardest decisions for a lot of people, especially in this world that we're living in.

53:27And you can look to like a guru like Cheryl Stray to say like, you should definitely have a kid or you should definitely not have a kid. But the truth is, each of them is a choice that will come with different life paths for you. You'll have the opportunity to make new choices. and if you want to live at peace you have to be willing to wave at those ghost ships as they fade

53:48Financial Feminist:into the distance and find like a genuine i don't know like both it's actually very similar to the way i view that relationship that ended where you know i don't have any longing for that relationship anymore i just have a quiet contentment of just like yeah i genuinely cared about that person i continue to care about him but I don't I don't long for that anymore and I think that is hopefully how we can view our ghost ships where it is an understanding of like that would have been a path my life could have taken and I probably would have been very happy but that's not that wasn't the path that happened and so rather than you know again I went through my grieving process But rather than continue to like long for that and then make myself miserable, there is this quiet contentment of, yep, that wasn't supposed to happen, at least not this lifetime.

54:46So, yeah. Have you read the book The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath?

54:51Financial Feminist:I actually have never. It's on the list of like, I will get around to it eventually. It's like, you know, of course, like canonical high school English class book. Classic, yeah. There is this great image at the end of the book about this woman, the protagonist, sitting underneath a fig tree. And she looks up at the fig tree, and each fig seems to represent a possible path that her life could take. There's the path where she marries this man, or a path where she marries this man. The path where she becomes an astronaut, and a path where she becomes a banker. A path where she chooses to pursue this sport and goes to the Olympics, and the path where she moves to the woods and becomes a writer, what have you.

55:29And she's beautifully talking about all of these different potential paths that her life could take. But in her indecision, she's just sitting there under the fig tree. And slowly, the figs are rotting and falling off the tree. And then there are no more paths that are available to her. And the lesson is that you have to choose a fig. You have to get on a ship. You have to transact in the world. And I think probably what would have been the worst thing that happened to you out of that breakup is for you to be so fixed on that one relationship to think that the only way that your life could progress is if you went back to the way things were.

56:10Financial Feminist:And that's what made me miserable. And that was the source of your misery. For that first year, I could not move forward past that. Yep. It sounds like I'm going to have to add the bell chard to my list because that has my name written all over it. I wanted to end our conversation if you're vulnerable enough to talk about it. There was a moment in your book where your wife, Katie, went through a miscarriage. You both went through this miscarriage and then also the subsequent pregnancy, which congratulations on your child. You're writing this book about uncertainty while living inside one of like the scariest kinds of uncertainty.

56:44Financial Feminist:So what did actually living the material teach you that the research didn't? Yeah, great question. So the story is basically, you know, my wife and I were trying to get pregnant. We got pregnant. We were so excited. You know, we named the unborn baby Poppy because the first time we like looked up the app of his size, he was the size of a poppy seed. and we've wanted to be parents for a long time and we go in for a doctor's visit around 10 weeks or so and the doctor says, basically at this point we'd expect to see a heartbeat but we're not willing to call it just yet. Why don't you come back in a week and then we can check in there.

57:30And I'm writing this book about uncertainty. I had just written about this one particular study where they found that for breast cancer patients, often the uncertain period between when you get a biopsy and you get a diagnosis is the hardest part of the entire breast cancer journey. Harder than chemo or any surgeries, it's the waiting. And here we are in this like week of waiting and with this dream of having this kid that we've wanted to have for so long. And in some ways it was hell, you know, In some ways, I thought back to this shock study and I was like, just shock me already. Say the quiet part out loud.

58:13But there was also something really beautiful about that week of waiting where Katie and I would be at a party and we'd catch eye contact with each other and hold it for a little bit longer. or just like, you know, have a little bit more sweetness in the way we held each other's hands as we were waiting to receive this news. And the mantra we kept repeating to ourselves was, we are open, we are open. And we come back a week later and we got the bad news that we lost the pregnancy. And, you know, thankfully we were able to get pregnant again. There's like a happy ending to this story. But I don't think the fact that there was a happy ending is what makes the story illustrative.

59:01I think the beauty of that experience for us, tragic and painful as it was, was that it really made us understand what we cared about and how much we cared about each other and what it is that we valued. And one of the pieces of advice that I give at the end of the book is to find your anchors. What are the things in your life that will remain certain amidst all of the changing winds? And my relationship was an anchor. I knew that Katie and I would go through this experience together, regardless of whether we got the good or the bad outcome. And another piece of advice I give is to separate what you can and you can't control.

59:48And as much as we wanted that baby and that pregnancy to work out and for the doctor to say, we found the heartbeat, everything was okay. Everything was fine.

59:59Financial Feminist:Yeah. There's nothing we could have done. And so rather than resisting reality, we had to accept reality. And through that experience, we were able to grow. Okay, hello. If you're watching on YouTube, I had to take a minute because that made me very emotional. But I do want you to plug your incredible book because I'm excited to read it for where I'm at in my life. And I think everybody listening, whether it's a moment of uncertainty you're having now or sometime in the future, this will be applicable to you. So I'm so excited to have you back on the show. Please tell us about this new book. yeah the book's called how to not know i think the cliche for authors is that you write the book that you need to read yeah but i feel like i'm also the beneficiary of very good timing so whether you're anxious about the uncertainty in the world or in your career or something in your personal life i hope there's something in it for you and you can find it wherever books are sold you're one of our favorite most thoughtful guests thanks for coming back Thanks for having me.