Learn How To Handle Uncertainty With Simone Stolzoff

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2:31Morra Aarons-Mele: I'm Maury Aaron-Smele, and this is The Anxious Achiever. What if the thing that you're most afraid of, not knowing what comes next and imagining the worst, is actually the condition that makes growth, creativity, even a meaningful life possible? My guest today is Simone Stoltzoff, and he's author of two books that together make a pretty radical but cool argument about how we should relate to work and identity and uncertainty. And as an anxious achiever, you might have a lot of feelings about them. His first book, The Good Enough Job, made the case that we've become dangerously over-invested in our careers as a source of who we are, our identity, and that when the job might disappear, our sense of self goes with it.

3:20Morra Aarons-Mele: And maybe that's not a great way to live and we should think about, like he says, diversifying our identity. And Simone's new book, How Not to Know, goes deeper into the psychology underneath uncertainty. and what it costs us. Simone is a former journalist and designer who has thought more carefully than almost anyone about the stories we tell ourselves when the future feels uncomfortable. Right now, with AI reshaping entire industries and layoffs hitting without warning, and a general sense that it's kind of a mess and the old rules don't apply, I think his timing is pretty good with this book that will help us understand how not to know.

4:07Morra Aarons-Mele: We talk about the three traps that keep us addicted to certainty and why diversifying your identity might be more important than diversifying your income streams. And his grandmother's bicep. I'm serious. It's a great story. You'll understand when we get there.

4:26Morra Aarons-Mele: Simone, welcome. Welcome to the show. I've got you in the middle of your book promotion, so I'll try to make it spicy for you.

4:32Simone Stolzoff: Thank you so much. And I probably will try to not make it too salesy for you.

4:37Morra Aarons-Mele: I appreciate it. Well, you've got your book in the background. That's awesome. So everyone should go buy it. That's my pitch.

4:46Simone Stolzoff: There we go.

4:48Morra Aarons-Mele: You have this lovely anecdote in your first book about your grandmother, I think it is, in Italy. and um she pulled espresso for a living quite literally you know she worked in the days of

5:05Simone Stolzoff: manual espresso machines and so what I say is it's sort of like an allusion to that famous quote about how my grandfather was in the army so my father could be an engineer so I could be a poet and I think there's some version of that in my own family history where my grandma did not look to self-actualize through her work. She worked at a cafe in the small town in Italy that she grew up. And the reason that pulling the lever is important is because she had one large bicep and one small bicep. She was sort of like Popeye. And then my mom, you know, became a therapist, a psychologist, and moved to the United States.

5:44Simone Stolzoff: And then I was able to grow up and literally become a poet. Well, I studied poetry in college. Now I guess I'm more of an author. But the reason why I use that anecdote to open the good enough job is a fewfold. One, our contemporary notions of using work as our primary means of self-actualization or meaning is relatively new. And it's also relatively American. There are lots of cultures that have higher priorities like religion or family that supersede sort of the need for work to help us. become our greatest selves. And the second is that it's relatively new in that the argument I make in Good Enough Job is that there's been a decline in some of these other institutions, like organized religion, but also neighborhood and community groups that once gave people a sense of meaning and identity.

6:40Simone Stolzoff: You know, the question, what do you do to my nona would fall on deaf ears. You know, her work was her livelihood. It was not her life. And so in the book, I sort of trace how we got to this point, how work has come to be such a central source of meaning and identity and community for so many people. And I used her as an example just to show that it hasn't always been this way.

7:01Morra Aarons-Mele: It's funny. I mean, listen, I have a lot of feelings about this argument. I studied with Robert Putnam in graduate school at Harvard. I believe in the power of the third place and community ties and all the things that bond us and make us feel like we belong. But there is a piece of me that wants everyone to find the joy of craft. And when you can get paid for that, I mean, you must admit, it feels amazing.

7:40Simone Stolzoff: it feels amazing and it also comes with the risk of that identity being taken away from you so for example you know my book came out in the middle of the pandemic I talked to so many people

7:53Morra Aarons-Mele: who like you and me had found what they thought was sort of their calling a vocation of sorts

7:59Simone Stolzoff: only to be unceremoniously furloughed or let go by their employer who they thought would once look out for their best interest. And so the argument isn't necessarily against finding meaningful work or alignment between how you earn a living and how you want to be spending your time. It's an argument against treating your job as a suitable substitute for your identity. So it's not so much love for software engineering. It's the desire to see yourself as a Googler first and foremost before you see yourself as, I don't know, a father or a neighbor or a citizen or someone who loves the craft of writing great code.

8:45Simone Stolzoff: And so the argument isn't necessarily as extreme as like care less about your work or don't follow your passion. It's more about the value of diversifying your identity. So rather than having all of your eggs in the work basket, how can you see your work as part of, but not the entirety of who you are.

9:04Morra Aarons-Mele: I understand that. I think also, though, that any piece of your identity that is aligned to something external can be taken away from you at any time, sadly. You know, you speak with people who've been through divorce or who've lost a spouse, and that's a piece of wonderful identity. So I understand that. And I also, you know, I've interviewed a lot of lawyers for example, you know, and being a lawyer, not tied to an institution, but being a lawyer, the spirit of inquiry, the values of justice, and everything behind that identity is really powerful. And it comes with a lot of baggage and expectation.

9:49Morra Aarons-Mele: Like, it's a tricky one. Yeah.

9:53Simone Stolzoff: And it comes with a lot of time and the opportunity cost of that time as well. and you know I think the sort of losing a spouse or going through divorce is particularly resonant for me you know my parents are divorced and I think one of my big fears sort of core wounds will go straight into the therapy session is this fear that if I commit to anything that will be taken away from me and I think that's part of what makes decision making so hard for some people it's the moment you make a decision you're sort of foreclosing on all these other options that you might have chosen. And so when you choose to marry Jill and not Sally, or you choose to take job A over job B, in the immediate aftermath of that choice, it can feel like a loss because you are intimately familiar with what you're giving up and you're not yet in close proximity with the benefits of the choice that you have made.

10:46Simone Stolzoff: And yet to be a human being is to have to make choices. You know, one of the quotes that I love from the book is from this psychologist named Rolo May. And he says that commitment is healthiest, not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt. It's that we have our doubts, we have our insecurities, and yet we have to be willing to transact. We have to be willing to make choices in spite of those doubts. And in some ways, reckoning with the doubt or the fear of your loss is what helps you refine your character. It's what helps you make choices that are in line with the type of person that you want to be, because there is no certainty.

11:27Simone Stolzoff: There is no sort of guaranteed outcome with the majority of the choices that we make.

11:30Morra Aarons-Mele: So I have The Meaning of Anxiety on my shelf right here by Rollo May, and it's a book that I treasure. And it's part of the reason why I love anxiety. And we talk about your new book because I think that, you know, anxiety is such a gift in many ways because although it is a very ancient thing, it's also a signal alerting us to something that we care about being on the line. And I feel like that's an essential piece of our humanity as well. I mean, when I gave birth to my first child many years ago, my mom said, you're a hostage to love.

12:08Simone Stolzoff: Hmm.

12:10Morra Aarons-Mele: You know, you make the choice to create another human being and you make the choice that every day you might lose that human being that you love more than anything.

12:21Simone Stolzoff: Like I think Rollo May would say like that is the existential state of human and it creates a hell of a lot of anxiety. Totally. I mean, you talk about skin in the game, you know. I mean, I think this is one of my critiques of so much of the sort of longevity movement or the desire to live forever. I think part of the reason that life is meaningful is that it's not permanent. And I think we can live in this death-denying culture or try and take the serum that will make us live for five years longer or whatever. But the great benefit of facing our mortality, the great benefit of looking at our anxiety or looking at our loss head on is exactly what you said.

13:02Simone Stolzoff: It makes it plain what we care about and how we should live our lives. I'll tell you just a brief anecdote from my personal life that sort of bridges the first and second book in a nice way, which is I was 28 or 29 years old. I was writing for The Atlantic. I had a cushy magazine writer job and a recruiter from this design firm called IDEO reached out to me. And I sort of passively went through this interview process and I found myself at this sort of crossroads and there were these two paths that opened up in front of me. It was sort of Simone the journalist and Simone the designer. And on one hand, it's like, you know, woe is me, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers, you know, like world's smallest violin.

13:46Simone Stolzoff: On the other hand, the decision felt so existential and I could not make up my mind for the life of me. Like for a period of weeks, I would talk to everyone I knew about it, like my Uber driver, my yoga teacher, like which job should I take? You know, it's insufferable. I was like a really bad friend, a really bad partner because I was so like self-obsessed. And I think there were two sort of insights that came out of that period of tumult for me. The first was that my identity and my job had become so entwined and it didn't feel like I was choosing between two jobs. It felt like I was choosing between two versions of me.

14:21Simone Stolzoff: And in some ways that's like the central insight that led to my first book. And the second was that I was looking for certainty where there was no certainty to be found. I thought that if I just, you know, banged my head against the wall at the right angle, I would know exactly what was the perfect job for me. When in actuality, like how could you know when you're, you know, standing at that career crossroads or if you're in that liminal space? I'm sure, you know, some of our listeners have been in similar decision points and there isn't like a framework or a pro-con list or a heuristic that you can use to make some of these decisions in your life for you.

14:59Simone Stolzoff: You have to be willing to, you know, as, as Rolla May says, you know, commit in spite of your doubt. And so that's sort of the, the benefit of anxiety to me. It's like, I was anxious because I really cared. You know, I really like what I did for work mattered, what I did to spend my time mattered. But rather than thinking I needed a hundred percent certainty before making a choice, in some ways, having to make the choice in spite of my doubt, in spite of my uncertainty, allowed me to become the type of person that I wanted to be.

15:32Morra Aarons-Mele: I love that. Well, I'm going to make a connection between your two books. Although I haven't read your second book, your new book, but that I thought of this morning, which is around AI, you know, and I'm going to use AI more as a symbol than an actual thing, because I think AI is actually a symbol, which is that, you know, in this age where AI is being seen as an existential threat to our livelihood and actually to the identity that we attach to work, to you, what's the through line between your first book, which is basically, what if you just had a good enough job? What if your job wasn't your whole identity?

16:22Mm-hmm.

16:25Morra Aarons-Mele: And not knowing. Charlene Lee has a quote I love, which is very much similar to your book. It's like, we have to learn how not to know right now. What's your perspective having studied both?

16:42Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I mean, there's like the practical origin story, which is like I'm on tour for this book about work and identity. And the most common question I get in the audience is like, how should I think about my career? Or like, how should I think about AI? And like, the truth is -

16:57Morra Aarons-Mele: Is that really the most common question?

16:58Simone Stolzoff: Mm-hmm, yeah. And almost every single circle, you know, it's like almost inevitable that I get that question. And so, you know, you can either like come up with your AI hot take or whatever, or you just throw up your hands. And in many ways, I just want to be like, I was a poetry major for God's sakes. Like, I don't know what the future of work actually looks like. But I think, you know, there are a few connection points to me. One is in the face of an uncertain future, one of the best things that we can do is to diversify our identities. You know, the reason I made the case for diversification in my first book was mostly because of the looming threat of layoffs and partially due to AI, etc.

17:42Simone Stolzoff: But you think about other industries like financial planning, for example. Why is diversification like the number one piece of advice? It's because you don't know whether the stock is going to go up and down. And so in the face of an unknown future, I believe a mindset that is able to tolerate uncertainty is more important than any strategic plan. And so you can think about what the future of your career might look like or how your industry might be impacted over the next five or 10 years. But really the meta skill that I think is more important is to cultivate faith in your own adaptability, to trust in your future selves ability to course correct or to reinvent yourself or to be able to sort of bob with the changing waves.

18:28Simone Stolzoff: And so that's, I think, what the connection is between the two. You know, if the first book is a permission slip to not need your work to be your identity, the second is a permission slip to not need to know all of the answers. Because any certainty about the future, by definition, is a fallacy. We don't know what's to come, even if you are the CEO of Anthropic or whatever. And so the more comfortable we can get with not knowing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

18:57Morra Aarons-Mele: I mean, I think what I hear you saying, which I like, which is super interesting, is that we've heard a lot of advice to sort of, and I mean, I have six jobs, so I guess I take this advice, to have a portfolio career, a diversified career, diversified income streams, right? People are obsessed with passive income and blah, blah, blah, your side hustle. You're not saying that. You're saying a diversified identity. What does that mean?

19:26Simone Stolzoff: It means honoring the multifaceted aspects of who you are. And I'm not here to prescribe exactly what identities you need to cultivate, just to say that we are all more than just workers. We exist on this earth to do more than just produce economic value for ourselves or for our corporate overlords. And so maybe that those other identities are, you know, being a good sibling or an amateur artist or an avid traveler or a good friend. But thinking about how you can align what it is that you purportedly value or stand for with how you're actually spending your time. The sort of like bombshell quote that framed a lot of my thinking on the first book came from Esther Perel.

20:23Simone Stolzoff: And she said, too many of us bring the best of ourselves to work and bring the leftovers home. And so I wrote the book to help sort of balance the scales. Not to say that work can't be a source of identity or meaning or friends. I've certainly made some of my best friends through jobs I've had. I take an incredible amount of pleasure from the fact that I can write for a living. And yet I know that it's not all of who I am. And so the book is sort of a push to help people conceive of work as part of, but not the entirety of their reason for being. Yeah.

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25:15Morra Aarons-Mele: That's Mark with a K. Getmarksbook.com slash anxious, and Mark will send you two. Let's talk about uncertainty. What is the central thesis? I mean, you may have sort of shared it, but share it very succinctly. The thesis of your new book, How Not to Know, and how do we cultivate the practice of not knowing?

25:39Simone Stolzoff: The thesis is that certainty closes our minds, and not knowing or uncertainty allows us to stay open. And And I think particularly in today's day and age, we see so much false certainty get peddled around, whether it's you turn on the TV and there's someone predicting exactly when the market's going to crash or who's going to win the game or who's going to win the election or if the Democrats are going to flip the house or then you open your phone and social media is like, this is the way to sleep train a six-month-old baby. Or like, if you do not eat this superfood, you will die. and there's just like this obsession with certainty and you can see the allure you know like the I think most extreme example is like a cult you know what does a cult promise its members it promises its members certainty that if you just follow this protocol or these steps or this guru then you will get your desired outcome you will go to heaven you will get financial riches what have you it's attractive of course like rather than have to wrestle with the messiness of figuring out what you care about it's easier to buy a value system off the rack the problem is that it's it's easy until it isn't you know and the book actually profiles someone who was wrestling whether or not to leave the cult and that's what she told me she was basically like you know it was great to have this sort of built-in community and this like one way of seeing the world in this very narrow lens and then it came in contact with reality and I had to sort of rebuild the pieces of who I was after everything shattered and I think our obsession with certainty is the root cause of so much of our mental ailments so much of our political polarization our assumptions that we know everything about someone based on who they voted for in the last election, nor our unwillingness to go outside of our comfort zone because we would rather the sort of certainty of what we know than the potential learning and growth of what happens when we step outside of our bubbles.

28:01Simone Stolzoff: And so, you know, in the book, I break it down into sort of three categories. There's comfort, hubris, and control. Originally I called them the three horsemen of delusion, but my editor didn't like that. I call them the three certainty traps, you know, the things that keep us wedded to certainty when reality is often much more uncertain and messy. And the first is comfort, our desire to maintain the status quo. You know, we all have a friend who's in a relationship that they know isn't working for them or in a job that they hate, but they would rather stick with the devil they know than have to confront what they might discover outside.

28:38Simone Stolzoff: And second is hubris, this tendency to feel like we know more than what we do. You know, the know-it-all CEO or the person who is overly confident about something that can't have a certain outcome. And I think we see this a lot from our leaders, but what we really need to do is trade some of that hubris for humility, to be more willing to admit what we don't know, especially in kind of a business server context. And loss is control. And I think that is the root cause of so much of our anxiety is the desire to want to know exactly what the future holds for us, the desire to want to plan everything.

29:19Simone Stolzoff: You know, we are unique as a species in our ability to sort of both predict what is to come and plan for these potential futures. and yet when we spend too much time trying to control, we can sort of lay these mental tracks into oblivion and just go to dark places in our mind. And so it's about finding the middle path. Yes, we need some certainty and actually having some certainty allows us to be better holders of the uncertainty but we can't expect a certain future because the truth is no one really knows when is to come.

29:55Morra Aarons-Mele: Mm-hmm. What do you think about that aspect, though, that we're sometimes fighting with our biology and our chemistry when we're trying to lean in to uncertainty?

30:09Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I mean, you think about this biologically, you know, and ancestors in the jungle and they hear a rustling in the bushes. If they don't know the source of that noise, it could be lethal, you know, like it is really could be the difference between life and death. And that is our wiring. That is our sort of natural tendency.

30:27Morra Aarons-Mele: I mean, that's Brolo May's big thesis, right, is that we evolved, you know, as he says, men who had to run from tigers. Now we have no tigers to run from, but the existential, the threat is still with us.

30:42Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, just the next email notification. I love the feeling when maybe you're off the grid for a day or you're camping or something. you always think that there's going to be this like incredible email that's going to change your life when you finally turn your phone back on and it's it never is you know but you know i think

31:00Morra Aarons-Mele: this fear of uncertainty especially if you're in our business right yeah totally oh no the podcast

31:07Simone Stolzoff: got rescheduled you know i think there's this fear of missing out on the threat and that's why so often we see the false positives. We think that something is going to be existentially threatening when it's not actually. And what I'm trying to push people towards is, you know, treating uncertainty as both the source of threatening fears, but also the source of opportunity and possibility. And unless we are willing to confront our uncertainty, we'll never discover what lies on the other side of our fear. You know, it comes back to anxiety too. Like uncertainty is uncomfortable for a reason. You know, if you're uncertain about whether the car is going to crash, it might incite you to put on your seatbelt.

31:55Simone Stolzoff: But we can't let that fear stop us from entering the arena, stop us from actually living our lives. And so it's not about trying to banish anxiety or uncertainty from our minds as much as learning to live with it.

32:13Morra Aarons-Mele: Yeah, it's a mindset shift.

32:16Simone Stolzoff: There's a metaphor that I liked that I learned while working on idea, which is being a leader, you know, being a human being, I'll say, is like being on a rowboat on a lake that's shrouded in heavy fog. and you might not be able to see very far in front of you or you might not be able to know exactly where you'll end up but your job is to keep rowing and it's through that action that the anxiety gets absorbed. It's through that action that the clarity begins to emerge and what we need to do is we need to cultivate the faith that will eventually reach land, so to speak. Remember, you're in a lake.

32:59Simone Stolzoff: You're going to reach land eventually and you can't let you know that fear of not knowing exactly where you'll end up stop you from

33:07Morra Aarons-Mele: from trying so when people ask you the question about I have so much uncertainty both of like what's going to happen in a month and will my child ever be able to get a job ever and it's hard for me what do you say yeah I mean there's sort of two types of uncertainty

33:30Simone Stolzoff: that I see in my mind. One is acute uncertainty. So this is like uncertainty that will be resolved. You'll get an answer. And then there's the more sort of ambient uncertainty, which is like these existential questions about whatever. And I mean, acute uncertainty is really difficult to deal with. You know, there's been a few studies. One showed that people would rather have an 100 % chance of receiving a painful electric shock than have a 50 % chance. They would rather like a certain bad thing happen than after grapple with the ambiguity of not being sure. Another study of breast cancer patients found that the period of time between when you get a biopsy and you get the results of the test is often the hardest part of the entire breast cancer journey for patients.

34:17Simone Stolzoff: Harder than chemo, harder than surgeries. It's the not knowing. And so with like pieces of acute uncertainty like that, I often like to think about like a decision tree. and at the top is the question like can you do something to control the outcome so for example you're a senior in college or a senior in high school maybe like you're not sure where you want to go to college where you'll get in you're really anxious about it if you haven't like submitted your applications yet do what you can to submit the best application possible you know do what you can to control the outcome and then if you've done what you can to control the outcome can you plan for multiple potential scenarios?

34:55Simone Stolzoff: Can you do some sort of contingency planning as opposed to just getting overly fixed on one vision for your future? So maybe you say, you know, I hope I get into this school, but if I don't get into that school, what are the silver linings if I go to that school? Or if the worst case scenario happens, I don't get to any of my top choices. Is there a backup school, et cetera? How can you think about multiple possibilities for yourself? And then one layer deeper, it just comes down to acceptance. comes down to how can you regulate your nervous system and be able to wait you know there are things that you can do like brace for the worst you know there's a lot of research about the psychological benefits of actually thinking about the worst case scenario and how you might respond to them there's been some interesting research about yoga and meditation these different ways to sort of ground yourself in the waiting game or another body of research around flow state activities as a form of destruction.

35:49Morra Aarons-Mele: Yeah, there was an interesting study where they were giving people a test and then waiting

35:55Simone Stolzoff: for them to receive the results of the test. And they broke the participants into three groups and gave them each a game of Tetris. And one was really easy. One was really hard. And one was sort of like right at the brink of their challenge. And the people with the easy game and the hard game had a really hard time waiting. But the people who were like being challenged by the game like fell into a flow state and were able to like better cope with not knowing. and so you know these are all tactics but I really think at the end of the day it comes down to you know separating what you can and you can't control yeah and then we can talk about the sort of ambience uncertainty of sort of existential questions as well but maybe that's a good time for me to shut up and let you ask another question it's just I mean I

36:36Morra Aarons-Mele: think we all we all know that feeling it's the worst feeling in the world when you're waiting for potentially bad news.

36:43Simone Stolzoff: Yeah.

36:44Morra Aarons-Mele: And, you know, from a workplace perspective, I see companies making it so much worse because they'll say, we're going to have layoffs in a month, in three months. We don't know exactly when, but your manager will tell you. Yeah. And they're sort of like intentionally wielding that fear. I never understand why they, I mean, I understand why they do it from a corporate perspective, But I feel like intentionally giving people the threat of terrible news over a long period of time is like, that's torture for us. So what's your advice? What's your advice for the millions of people out there today who are like, okay, am I going to, you know, maybe not millions, thousands certainly in this country who are like awaiting a layoff maybe in one month, maybe in four months.

37:41Morra Aarons-Mele: Will they be one or will they not be chosen?

37:44Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think my most basic advice is to try and take a little agency back from the universe. Find something that you can control. whether that's inside or outside of the realm of your professional life. So inside, you know, maybe rather than just, you know, stick your head in the sand and fight about some of these AI tools, is there a way that you can try to use them yourself or get a little bit more proximate to the source of your fear? There's an image from a movie that I often think about is Milk, the movie about Harvey Milk, and he gets all these death threats and he decides to like put the death threats up on his refrigerator and what he says is basically when it's here when it's visible it has less control over me but when it's in the drawer and I'm trying to suppress this fear that's when it really controls my life and so I think there's a lot of wisdom there and you can benefit from being able to think about okay what are the things that I can do can I have a conversation with my manager can I you know try and think about how I might be part of the solution as opposed to just worrying if I'll be redundant.

38:56Simone Stolzoff: Outside of our life, there are realms of our life that we can share up our anchors. That's one piece of advice I give often is find the things that will remain constant amidst all that is changing. And whether that is a commitment to a partner or to a place or to a certain activity, What are the sort of things that will be the boulders amidst all the changing winds, the things that you hope will not be changed, even if, you know, the robots show up with pink slips. And then the last part is just like, you know, it's a Buddhist concept, but just thinking about the next right action. You know, just thinking about what is the one step in front of you, as opposed to sort of the spiraling thoughts of everything that could go wrong.

39:43Simone Stolzoff: asking yourself also what could go right and what can I have the agency to to do to help find that sort of optimistic outcome as opposed to just the natural tendency to catastrophize or to think about all the things that can go wrong um but I'm right there with you you know like I'm a non-fiction writer you know it's one of the things that AI does the best you know and the last thing is just like how can you find the others you know how could you find community And so you're not just handling this alone.

40:14Morra Aarons-Mele: I like figuring stuff out with other people. And that's why I like Notion. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster and they cut friction and cost by consolidating tools and they stay aligned. But Notion is really good for people because you know what? You put your idea down, you put your rough draft down in Notion, your colleague can access it, hash it out, give feedback, and it's all there and organized. Is it possible for AI to make room for more human connection, not less? Notion says yes, and it will help you do your best work.

41:00Morra Aarons-Mele: Learn more about how Notion can support your business at Notion.com slash Achiever. That's all lowercase letters, notion.com slash achiever and try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. You know, the other day I was talking with my friend who is both certified financial planner and a financial therapist. We were talking about money and emotions. Money is way more than dollars and cents. It's emotional, right? And I'm trying to teach my kids to have healthier emotions around money than I did. But I'm getting better every year. And part of it is that I use Monarch.

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43:10Morra Aarons-Mele: Think about it. You probably have a mushroom ornament or a little mushroom figure that you may put out sometime in the fall or holidays, mushrooms. If I had an online store, Or I would sell all manner of decorative mushrooms. I know it sounds silly. And I would do it on Shopify. Shopify is the platform for a record-breaking, reliable holiday selling season at every stage. There's a reason why so many businesses thrive on Shopify. You can easily sell everywhere people shop, online, in person, across social media, even in AI chats. If you launch your store before Black Friday, a time of year when more people are already shopping and ready to buy, you can take advantage of the extra online traffic.

43:56Morra Aarons-Mele: If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever and start your free trial. Shopify.com slash anxiousachiever to hear your first... Yeah, I mean, to me, community, it's so funny this happened to me this morning, actually. um I I've just been having a rough year I've had a lot of health stuff for me my son smashed his knee work has been so up and down like it's such a weird time and I found myself just kind of I mean I run towards depressive in despair and this was in January and then it got really bad in March. And I thought, I have no control over so much right now.

44:48Morra Aarons-Mele: I was also awaiting a breast cancer diagnosis. And I thought, back to my values. And my biggest value in life is generosity. Like the single biggest value that I try to live by is generosity. And I thought, okay I'm going to give my time to people if it's helpful I have a lot of hard skills because by training I'm a political consultant and marketer and and digital expert and content creator and stuff so I was like you know what I'm going to be generous not for their sake but for my sake and I and I and I realized and I only realized it like this morning um because of an offer of help I gave to people like you know I think that whatever we can do to align with our values and take some action I mean this is classic acceptance and commitment therapy right is is the thing you know because when you're in the swirl it's so personal right and it's like oh you can get so stuck so it's like anything you can do to align with one of your values and go outward although some people might I guess some people might want to go inward they might want to go on retreat or they might want to dive into spiritual text I don't know what you think about

46:14Simone Stolzoff: that um I love it I think values are a great example of an anchor you know those are things that you market or boss or you know jobs report can take away from you I remember in the first

46:27Morra Aarons-Mele: book, I spoke to a lot of her type A overachievers.

46:31Simone Stolzoff: And there was this one woman in particular, Liz, who, you know, she was a D1 athlete. Actually, she was two times. She both swam and was on the water polo team. And then she did, you know, Teach for America and like poured herself into working 80 hour weeks as a teacher and then went to law school and, you know, tried to graduate at the top of her class. And then in her mid-20s got diagnosed with a chronic illness that she went from basically like, you know, swimming four hours a day to her mom spoon feeding her chicken soup in bed. And I think one of the big things that you learn, or at least that I learned from the chronic illness community, is the value of defining yourself by your evergreen traits as opposed to just your accomplishments.

47:18Simone Stolzoff: And so she started to see herself as, you know, I am a generous friend. I am kind in my interaction with strangers. I will show up for the people that I care about, et cetera. And kind of similar to you, like connecting back to those values. And that's what she had the power to control. Like she didn't know whether she would have enough energy to make it through a nine hour day or whether she would make partner at her law firm or whether she would have the capacity to show up intellectually as the best version of herself. But she regrounded herself in those evergreen characteristics, and that's what helped her find solid ground.

48:06Simone Stolzoff: And I think about that often. It's one of those things where we can learn from the extremes for what we might be able to apply to ourselves. Even if you don't have a chronic illness, are there ways in which you can think about your values or think about those evergreen characteristics that actually supersede any sort of resume virtue that you might have.

48:24Morra Aarons-Mele: I think, oh, God, that's really beautiful. That's really beautiful, and that's an admirable trait, you know, because I'm curious what you think also. You mentioned the power of just like the power of catastrophizing a little bit, like exploring the catastrophe. Do you have stories of that, or have you personally experienced that when things feel really uncertain?

48:46Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I mean, you know, the canonical studies, is for students who are about to receive the results of a test. And where your mind can go is like, I failed this test. You know, of course, I got an F. And then when you get your B plus or whatever, you're pleasantly surprised. And, you know, the tendency is called bracing for the worst. And it can be psychologically adaptive in certain situations. the problem is when it becomes an obsession where you're just thinking about the potential downside of any situation and you're not thinking about the potential upside so one personal example you know I my wife's a teacher I'm a writer we live in San Francisco we're not sort of raking it in financially and the city is getting very expensive and so I've been like anxious about like my ability to be a provider, give my son opportunities.

49:41Simone Stolzoff: And I had a friend who was like, have you run the numbers? Like, have you actually like budgeted what you need to live your life and what you're hoping to save? And it was this huge mindset shift because I always thought budgeting was about like pinching pennies and like, you know, being very disciplined. And it was incredibly freeing to like understand exactly how much money I needed to live and my marginal costs and how much money I wanted to put away for retirement. And it actually made me more comfortable spending my money because I was like, oh, I do have like, you know,$400 set aside for meals out and entertainment this month, you know.

50:19Simone Stolzoff: I think that is like a mental accounting that we can apply to other facets of our life as well. I think sometimes our anxiety is most oppressive when it's amorphous. But when you can like name it and understand the fear that's underneath, the worry, then you can tame it a little bit more.

50:37Morra Aarons-Mele: I wrote a great book about that called The Anxious Achiever, just hopefully my audience, if you're listening and you haven't read The Anxious Achiever, please read The Anxious Achiever. Yes, you know, I went down a rabbit hole of financial therapy about five years ago. I became obsessed with this field of financial therapy, which is awesome. I mean, that sounds like a great job to me. But anyway, you know, one of the things that financial therapists are very big into is actually looking at the data because I don't know about you, but like I'll feel poor. Sometimes I feel poor because I went out to dinner with someone who's rich or like, which I'm sure in San Francisco happens all the time.

51:20Morra Aarons-Mele: Or I like check my stocks or I read a newspaper headline or I got rejected for a speech. and, you know, the power of actually looking at the data and running the numbers is kind of the first step towards healing, which I guess is kind of the opposite of uncertainty, but maybe an example of what you're saying of giving yourself control and agency where you can, you know, so that you feel a little bit more buffeted.

51:50Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, very much so. I think about the serenity prayer. You're probably familiar with it, but it's like very popular in addiction communities. And it's the upshot is like, God grant me the serenity to understand what I can't, can control what I can't control and the wisdom to know the difference. And, you know, I think part of what running the numbers is, is like it's something you can't control, you know? And like, there's the metaphor that I think about it. My wife and I, before we had our kid, where we were looking at different houses and we were thinking about like, okay, can we afford to buy a house?

52:24Simone Stolzoff: and we have a family friend who's a contractor and he came to look at a house with us and it's this you know four bedroom house it's beautiful and he's like you know the house is great but what I think for you guys is that you should get what you need and he was talking about it from like you know housing standpoint like we probably don't need a big four bedroom house with the backyard and stuff like that but I do think the sort of like get what you need when you need it mentality is helpful because like I do have faith in like my own ability to like make money and if like push came to shove and I like was really feeling strapped or like Luca my son like really wanted to go to that expensive summer camp like you probably find a way to like find the money to pay for him and just about like accepting the the trade-offs that I've chosen to to bear you know there's this great New York Times op-ed from a few years back called Why You'll Marry the Wrong Person and it was by Alain de Botton.

53:19Simone Stolzoff: And the argument was basically like, when we think about potential suitors or partners, we love to romanticize like their great traits. But maybe a better question is like, in what ways are they crazy? And in what ways are you crazy? And is that like a type of crazy that you're willing to put up with? And the same issue with jobs, like every job has its downside. You know, like we work for ourselves. It sucks to have to like sell to our community and to like make content when we're not really feeling it. But that is just like the cost of doing business. And there are enormous benefits of being able to control our own time and not go to meetings that should have been emails.

53:53Simone Stolzoff: And sometimes I romanticize, oh, it would be really nice to like work on Wall Street and have that stability. But I'm not thinking about like all of the downside tradeoffs that would come with that path as well.

54:03Morra Aarons-Mele: Totally. Totally. I love it. Is this the kind of crazy? I mean, I'm celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary this year. So I will definitely attest to the power of like, is this the crazy I can live with? Or is it not? My mom's best friend, Marshy, growing up, who was very wise, would always say, when you're thinking about a husband, you need your non-negotiables and your negotiables. Like, does he have good teeth and hair? Negotiable. You know, like, I thought that that was really funny. And I think you're right. It's like very true. It's very true for life. But, you know, I do believe I'm going to I'm going to give both of us just a little pushback as we as we close, which is like we're talking about this in a way that assumes the human beings are rational and that our emotions are rational and that we can cultivate all these great skills and we're all going to be self-actualized.

55:03What do you say to most of us who just we're just like trying to get through the day and like turn on Netflix at the end and not think about it?

55:10Simone Stolzoff: yeah, at first I relate, you know. I know, right. So many days I just want to like throw up my hands and say, uncle, it's like, why do I have to deal with like this polycrisis of like these wars and this, you know, like climate change and this fear about the world that my son is going to inherit and like whether I'll be able to make rent next month. But, you know, what I'd say is like imagine the alternative. Like imagine a life where everything was written, where we were all sort of on these conveyor belts going toward a known destination. I don't think it would be as magical or fun. You know, I think the uncertainty is what gives our life texture.

55:56Simone Stolzoff: And yes, it can be hard to deal with. And, you know, I don't want to like sometimes I push back against the phrase of like embrace uncertainty. You know, it's like, like imagine me giving this book, like how to not know to like someone fighting on the front lines in Ukraine right now. It's like, fuck you.

56:10Morra Aarons-Mele: You know, like fuck you.

56:11Simone Stolzoff: Embrace uncertainty. No, uncertainty sucks. Like, why would I want to embrace that? But I do think that like a life that is certain would not be as meaningful and no movie would ever have a sport, come without a spoiler or like no first date would ever have this sort of uncertainty. the butterflies of maybe so. And that's what makes life worth living. That's what makes us, you know, even the path is like a self-employed entrepreneur. There's lots of aspects that I wish were different about it. But part of the fun is the adventure is the figuring it out. And I guess that's my goal with the book, is that people can reframe uncertainty as something that might show them something that they didn't know about themselves, about the world.

57:04Simone Stolzoff: And our fear doesn't keep us from trying.

57:11Morra Aarons-Mele: I would argue, and I would say most anxiety swallers would argue that without uncertainty, we would never evolve. We would never innovate. We wouldn't have the wheel or cars or, you know, all the things that we innovate in times of struggle and crisis and not knowing like I kind of feel like uncertainty unfortunately and anxiety is is the human condition and the only thing we can do is be like okay like yeah this is where I'm at

57:49Simone Stolzoff: yeah this is where I'm at I mean I think about this in terms of like art often like fine art in particular like imagine you're a painter and you get to a point in your painting where you're like I'm not sure exactly what is to come if you let that voice in your head of like anxiety or uncertainty like really drive the car you're likely to find like the safe way out you know you're likely to like make something that's derivative of something you've done or someone else has done in the past but if you want to make something that's like really original you have to be willing to row through the fog you have to be willing to get to that precipice of what you know and like keep going forward and the same is true for scientists or entrepreneurs or or just people who live creative lives you have to be willing to keep moving toward what you don't know because that's where the learning and the growth and the discovery comes from you do you do

58:47Morra Aarons-Mele: it's so hard um and when i reflect simone just i've i've been an entrepreneur for 20 years this year too it's like a big year for me i'm turning 50 i'm married 20 years and i'm an entrepreneur for 20 years and it's like when i look back at all of the dips and the valleys and the times that i thought i was literally gonna have to sell my house you know it's like you have to let it go i mean that's that's the only thing i've learned getting older the only thing i've learned yeah but it's helpful yeah it's beautiful maybe i'll end with a quick story which is please i have this friend named emily and she's a therapist um she works with

59:32Simone Stolzoff: like lots of she's kind of like a therapist of the stars she works with like that's how we met Oh, yeah, through Emily, of course. And Emily has this great story about this time in her early 20s before she became a mental health professional. And she was basically sitting by her mom's bedside, and her mom had just been given this potentially terminal diagnosis. And Emily was really struggling, and she was sort of riding this roller coaster of anticipatory fear and grief. And one day, a family friend of hers named Bill, who is an oncology doctor who spends a lot of time with people at the end of their lives came to visit and said you know Emily how are you doing and she said honestly like not very well I am terrified I don't know what I'll do if my mom were to die and Bill said first of all the version of you who will deal with that tragic event if or when it ever happens will be born into existence in that moment.

1:00:33Simone Stolzoff: And she will have more context, more information, and be better equipped than the version of you today. You have to trust in your future self to handle your future problems. And I love that idea of, you know, a past version of Maura was really anxious about whether she would find a partner or whether she could afford her house.

1:00:59Morra Aarons-Mele: She was anxious about everything.

1:01:01Simone Stolzoff: or whatever. And like, you know, that's the data. That's the evidence. And the current version of Maura is anxious about, you know, her kids' knee prognosis or what university will look like for them or what have you. And the future version of Maura will be the one who is a badass who will actually figure out how to get through those moments too. And if we trust our future selves to handle our future problems, that can allow us to be more present in the life that we're living today.

1:01:35Morra Aarons-Mele: Amen. Well, thank you. I wish you a good book tour. And thank you so much for sharing your time with us.

1:01:44Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I love this conversation. There's a great sort of topic interlocutor alignment, which I'm always appreciative of. Yeah, the book's called How to Not Know. And you can find it wherever books are sold.

1:01:57Morra Aarons-Mele: Such a good title. Thank you.

1:02:03Morra Aarons-Mele: That's it for this week's show. If you like the show, follow us and tell your friends. And please leave us a review. It really helps the anxious achiever get found by people just waiting for our content. I'm your host, Maura Aarons-Mele. Lots more to come in the next episode.

1:02:30Thank you.