[0:00] Mike Spivey: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. We’re in the life/admissions category, because I’m joined today by the author of a wonderful book, How to Not Know, by Simone Stolzoff. While the book is brand new, it’s already making a lot of waves, and we were lucky to snag him for our podcast.
If I can guarantee you one thing, it is that you are going to have periods of waiting and periods of uncertainty in the admissions process. Not just the admissions process, the job search process, in fact, for the rest of our lives. So this is a known. Uncertainty is the known. How we can develop skills and tolerance for it is what Simone’s going to give us in this podcast. It’s highly applicable to what you’re going to be doing over the next year and the rest of your lives. So without further delay, this is me and Simone on How to Not Know.
Simone, great to have you on. Thanks for joining us. I have three quick questions about your book, if you can humor me.
[1:05] Simone Stolzoff: I would be happy to.
Mike: The book is How to Not Know. I just finished it on Audible. Wonderful read. I think I may go back and buy it so I have a hard copy, too. How long did it take you to write it? How long did you estimate it would take you to write it? And you just met Anna Hicks-Jaco. She and one other person I’m working on a second book with. Should our book be orange?
Simone: That’s all up to you. It’s hard to know exactly. Being a nonfiction author, you sort of have to live in the future, because the book itself will be finished nine months to a year before it’ll actually hit the shelves. You’ll have to pick the cover, you’ll have to pick the topic long before you know whether it’ll be in the zeitgeist. And my topic just happens to be à la mode right now, and the cover of orange is, like, the cover of the season. So there are four other books in May that all came out with orange covers.
It took me about three years to write it, and my estimation was about that. It’s my second book, and so because I’m a full-time author, I sort of just go to the next one. And so my first book, The Good Enough Job, came out in May of 2023, and then I pitched this book in the fall of 2023, and then it came out in May of 2026. And so I’m on a cycle, but you are right to assume that often projects take much longer than you would imagine.
Mike: You sourced that research in your book. If any of our listeners want to write a book, just know that most people underestimate how long it’s going to take them, including myself. Let’s dive into the book if you want to.
Simone: Please.
Mike: So, I’m going to steal a metaphor from you. We’re in a rowboat, all of us, and it’s foggy. In fact, the fog is denser than ever before, but we gotta keep rowing. What’s going on? Why is the fog so dense all of a sudden?
Simone: There’s two things going on. One is the world is becoming more and more uncertain. It’s no secret that the last few years have been particularly uncertain, between changing tariff policies and global pandemics and wars going on overseas. There’s this economist at Stanford named Nicholas Bloom who’s been tracking global uncertainty since the early ’80s, and he’s found that the five highest measurements since he began measuring have all occurred in the last five years. So there’s this sort of macro uncertainty.
The other thing that’s going on that’s less often talked about is that our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. There’s this researcher named Nicholas Carleton, out of the University of Regina, who has found that the rise of our intolerance of uncertainty has correlated with the rise of the internet, and more specifically, mobile phones.
I think phones do a few things. One is they create the expectations that answers should be readily available. So whereas 10 years ago, I might have been okay not knowing the name of a given actor, now I feel an almost involuntary need to reach into my pocket to find out. The second thing that the phones do is they bring all of the uncertainties of the world into our pockets. And so now you can track the real-time updates of a crisis happening overseas. You can track the real-time location of your children.
And yet access to more information hasn’t necessarily made us any wiser. So the world is more uncertain. Our tolerance for uncertainty is in decline. And that’s why so many of us feel like they’re that person on a rowboat trying to make it through the fog.
Mike: Just to set the stage for uncertainty, we had Dr. Judson Brewer on, and his work is that uncertainty produces anxiety. So I think when—correct me if I’m wrong, but when you and I are talking about uncertainty, uncertainty itself is neither good nor bad. In fact, you’re going to tell us it’s both good and bad. I think the problem is when we let the uncertainty cause anxiety. And I think Dr. Anna Lembke, who’s been on our podcast, mentioned availability, potency, and novelty. I don’t know if you saw any of her work, but when you talk about phones, I think about, it’s available 24/7, making it more and more potent.
Simone: Yeah.
[4:42] Mike: But your premise is not that uncertainty is the problem. It’s that it’s our aversion to uncertainty that’s the problem, right?
Simone: Our relationship to it. To be clear, uncertainty is uncomfortable by design. You can think about this biologically. If one of our ancestors was in the jungle and there was a rustling in the bushes, they didn’t know the source of that noise, that uncertainty could have been lethal. The problem is now, our brains are wired to see a lot of false positives, which is to say that we treat every uncertainty in our life as if it were a threat, when in actuality, uncertainty can also be what I call the birthplace of possibility. It can also be the precursor to learning and to growth. It can be the thing that happens before you discover the opportunity that’s waiting on the other side of your discomfort.
And so, part of my mission with the book is to help people develop a healthier relationship with uncertainty, not just so that they can navigate these uncertain times, but also so that they might be able to tolerate the uncertainty long enough to find that breakthrough that might be sitting on the other side of their discomfort.
Mike: So I think 98% of things we do are evolutionary. In every example anyone ever gives for evolutionary reasons, it’s either “find the yummy berry” or “the rustling sound in the bush.”
Simone: Totally. It’s always a saber-toothed tiger hiding in the bushes.
Mike: Right. In 300,000 years of Homo sapien existence, I think they were doing more than gathering berries and avoiding tigers.
Simone: [laughing] But it does show how a lot of these biological factors are deep-wired in our brains. And so although we live in these incredibly modern times, we still have these relatively prehistoric brain functions that are here to keep us alive, to help us survive, to help us predict the future. And sometimes those natural tendencies are in our favor, and sometimes they work against us as well.
Mike: Yeah, our reptilian brains, our subconscious mind takes over. What’s an example of when it’s in our favor, for modern-day times?
Simone: Our consciousness of uncertainty incentivizes us to say, “Put on the seatbelt,” before we get in the car, because we’re not sure whether the car is going to crash. It’s what allows us to plan for a flu vaccine for a flu season that hasn’t yet happened.
Our brains are sort of like these prediction machines, where they’re always trying to anticipate what’s to come based on what’s come before. And in many ways, this is an adaptive feature. It allows us to plan, to be able to anticipate potential threats. The problem is when we buy into that whole hog, and it prevents us from being able to see the upside of uncertainty, namely the possibilities and the opportunities that we often foreclose on because we’re so quick to reach for the safe bet or reach for what is certain.
Mike: The paradox is, we are these prediction machines, and we have more information than ever, and we’re getting worse at predicting than ever.
[7:29] Simone: Yeah. Well, I guess maybe we have the expectation that we can predict in situations that we can’t. There’s this great researcher that you’re probably familiar with named Phil Tetlock from the University of Pennsylvania, and he collated data from about two decades’ worth of predictions from some of the smartest people in the world, politicians, economists, journalists, et cetera.
And then he compared that to what actually transpired. And his canonical finding did not mince words. He says, “The average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” So as much as we want to predict the future, as a species, we’re not very good at it.
Mike: Right. I saw that quote in your book, and I liked it. Absent a dart-throwing chimpanzee, I think you’re going to give us the way to embrace the uncertainty better. You had a line in your book. I thought this line was beautiful, because I’ve been saying a version of it for the last 27 years of my life. Given what most of our listeners do, which is apply to college, apply to graduate schools, apply to law schools, and apply to jobs—how could you be certain about the right college for you until you’ve actually gone?
Simone: Yeah. So often in our brains, we get too fixed to one single potential future. And you can see the incentive there. It makes sense to want to know exactly what is to come. That’s what makes us feel safe and secure.
The problem is if you’re over-attached to one particular future, one particular school, one particular job, it can be incredibly unsettling if you don’t get the future that you want. And so one piece of advice that I give in the book is about the importance of contingency planning.
So I sort of think about a decision tree. At the top of the decision tree is, can you control the outcome? So say you haven’t yet submitted your application to graduate school or to college. You can do things that can actually influence the outcome. You can try to write great essays. You can try and perform well on your tests. You can try and network and do your research about the schools that you want to go to.
But then, once you’ve done everything that you can to control your outcome, maybe you submitted your application, the next step is, can you plan for different potential outcomes? So rather than just stay fixed on one idea of what your future looks, try and find the pros and cons of some of these different schools. Make sure you have a safety option. Do some of that contingency planning so that you can stay open to new possibilities.
And then once you’ve done what you can to prepare for different outcomes and what you’ve done to control the outcomes, then it just comes down to managing your nervous system. How can you better cope with the waiting? And there are certain embodied practices, like yoga and meditation, that can help. There are things like distraction or finding flow states and other sorts of activities.
But one of the canonical examples in the uncertainty research is about, say, students waiting to get the results of their bar exam. And it can be a really, really difficult process unless you’re able to make peace with the uncertainty that’s an inevitable part.
[10:22] Mike: In writing the book and doing this three-year, with stories, talking to people like Max in your book, who wanted to create so much uncertainty he took his own free will away—everything was an algorithmic roll of the die for everything he would do.
The analogy I would give when you’re applying to law schools or graduate schools or schools would be, yeah, prepare. Don’t have an algorithm pick the 12 law schools you’re going to apply to for you. You pick them. But then at some point, visit all 12. Don’t say, “Oh, Harvard is magically my dream school,” and I think this is what you were getting at. How could you know until you know? So to the extent that you can, visit all 12, do the best you can.
And then what are the traps? I think there’s three. The horsemen—why did editing take that out? I like the horsemen better than the three traps.
Simone: Yeah, originally I called them the “three horsemen of delusion,” and my editor thought they were a little bit too highfalutin, so we decided to call them the “three certainty traps.” And, you know, every nonfiction book needs its framework, so this is my framework.
How I break down the book is into these three sections. The first is about comfort and how our desire to stay comfortable, to maintain the status quo, keeps us from discovering the growth that’s on the other side of our discomfort. The second is hubris, so our desire to know it all or to think that we know best, and how that keeps us from seeing our potential blind spots. Other side of this hubris is humility that comes from admitting what we can’t or don’t know.
And last is control, which is maybe the most prevalent, which is our desire to plan, or to know exactly what the future will hold. And in many ways, this makes sense. When we are able to plan, when we think we know exactly what school we’re going to go and get into or what job we’re going to get after graduation, or the path to management or to becoming a partner, it makes us see the sort of goalposts that we can reach for. And yet, our desire to control the future is impossible. By definition, any certainty about something that hasn’t happened yet is a fallacy. And so, instead of this control, we can have the acceptance of understanding what we can’t control.
When it comes to how to approach it, I love this quote from the psychologist named Rollo May, and he says that “commitment is healthiest not in the absence of doubt, but in spite of doubt.” So say you’re deciding between two graduate schools to go to. You can’t necessarily know which option is going to be best for you. The reason why the choice is hard is because maybe one school is better for some reasons, another school is better for other reasons, but neither school is better overall.
So part of your job as an agentic human being is to be able to make that commitment in spite of not knowing for sure. And there’s lots of advice from philosophers and ethicists and decision strategists on how to make these types of decisions, but I think it all ultimately boils down to being able to transact, being able to row through the fog, being able to make a choice in spite of not knowing exactly how it will work out.
Mike: The hubris really plays into this, and it’s not just our individual hubris. You mention this in the book. Sometimes we’re the worst people at recognizing our own hubris. But also, the part you’re talking about with decisions to make, what job to take. There’s hubris of people who, their pride hinges on our success. So that comes into play.
About 20 years ago, I was driving to work. It’s when I was a dean at Washington University in St. Louis, and they talked about a Harvard study on NPR where they took a bunch of psychologists—the psychologists were the pool of the study. They also happened to be wine aficionados. So they did the classic test that you could predict, Simone. The great wine, the most expensive wine, the disheveled guy comes out, and it’s in a paper cup. This is the high-vintage wine. And they described it as cheap, not everyone, but the critical mass.
And then, of course, the cheap wine comes out with a person in a suit and a wonderful platter and tray, and the critical mass describe it as, “reverent” was the word that I remember. So this was predictable. But keep in mind, I know you already have this in mind, these are psychologists. These are the people most trained on the planet to be aware of our own biases.
So then they said, “Hey, by the way, this was just all a trick. We were curious if you would guess.” The critical mass of the psychologists said, “Oh yeah, I totally get the study, but you messed mine up. And mine, the cheap one was in the cheap cup, and the fancy wine was in the fancy glass. You did mine all wrong.” I tell this to sports fans all the time who always think they’re being wronged. That is the definition of hubristic thinking.
[14:47] Simone: Yeah, you know, and I think the fact that they’re psychologists is telling, because sometimes we assume that if we gain more expertise or we have more experience, then we’ll be immune to some of these cognitive biases. But there are certain cognitive biases, like the overconfidence effect, that actually affect people with more expertise greater than the sort of average Joe.
And so we all face some of these cognitive biases. Maybe a better mentality is understanding not that “I will be immune from them” or that “In my particular anomalous case, there was a mistake,” but understanding that “I am human just like the rest of you, and therefore there will be a level of blindness and misplaced thinking in anything that I choose.”
Mike: I like what Adam Grant said: great thinkers maintain doubt. And I like your solution, which former CIA Director General Petraeus talked at depth about on our podcast, and we do this. You met our red team. Anna Hicks-Jaco. And I think this is wonderful advice in your book for anything. Red team everything that’s of consequence to you. If you think you want to become a partner at a law firm, have someone play devil’s advocate for you.
Simone: Yeah. I think it’s easy to assume that we know best, but by definition, what makes a blind spot a blind spot is it’s outside of our field of view. And so that’s why bringing in diverse perspectives, people that might have proximate experience to the path that you want to take, can be illustrative for actually figuring it out as opposed to thinking that everything is just a thought experiment that you can work out in your mind.
Mike: Yeah, we definitely don’t know what we don’t know, and you talk about that in the book, too, with the Great Recession and what caused it. It was hubristic thinking. It was not knowing what we didn’t know. But there’s ways out. There’s a way to build tolerance for uncertainty. And I think to you’re going to tell our listeners some of them.
[16:36] Simone: Yeah, and, you know, in some ways that is the goal of the book, is to help people build their uncertainty tolerance. There’s a few different tactics in the book. Maybe I’ll give you one that is looking backwards, one in the present moment, and one for the future.
So when you’re looking backwards, the first thing that you can do is think about moments of uncertainty that you’ve been able to make it through in the past. Part of what it means to have a tolerance for uncertainty is to cultivate faith that you can face an uncertain situation and know how to make it through. If you can think back to a time, maybe, when you were applying to colleges, where you didn’t know where you were going to go, and then you were able to find the sort of best of the options that you had, that might help bolster your own anxiety or your own uncertainty about where you might go to grad school.
Another thing that I like to think about a lot is called the “end of history” illusion, which is this idea in psychology that when you think backwards at your past, it’s easy to think about all the ways in which you’ve changed. Your preferences have changed, your tastes, your desires, from maybe who you were 10 years ago. But when we think about the future, it’s often easy to assume that our tastes and preferences are fixed, that who you are and what you like today will always be true. And I think it’s incredibly empowering to understand that no, that isn’t necessarily the case.
I tell a brief anecdote about a friend of mine named Emily in the book, and she is a psychologist and a mental health professional. When she was in her early 20s, her mom was given this potentially terminal diagnosis. So she spent all these weeks by her mom’s bedside in the hospital, and she was really struggling to cope. And one day, a family friend of hers named Bill, who is an oncology doctor so has lots of experience dealing with people at the end of their life, came to visit Emily, and he said, you know, “Emily, how are you doing?” And she said, “Honestly, I’m terrified. I’m not doing very well. I feel like I’m riding this roller coaster of fear and anticipatory grief, and I have no idea what I’ll do if my mom were to pass away.” And Bill said something really wise. He said, “Emily, the version of you that will handle that tragic event, if or when it ever takes place, will be born into existence in that moment. And that version of you will have more context, more information, and be better equipped to deal with it than you are today. You have to trust in your future self’s ability to handle your future problems.”
And I love this idea of trusting in your future self. And I think it can be really pertinent to the students and different professionals that you work with, because you can’t necessarily know what the future will hold, and so often we rush out to meet our suffering. One definition of worry is the anxiety about something that may or may not ever happen. And rather than trying to spend all of your time catastrophizing or planning for these worst-case scenarios, if you’re able to cultivate some of that trust in your future self, you can, one, not worry about something that might never come to be. And in Emily’s case, her mom ended up making it out of the hospital. And two, not waste your energy on something that’s outside of your realm of control, and wait until you actually have the ability to influence it before you start to think about problem-solving and solutions.
[20:01] Mike: People grow, and that was a wonderful illustration that was given to the person. You’re going to grow, and in the future, your growth is going to be able to handle what comes down your way. I think one of your points in your book: look back at our wins. Yours and mine and everyone listening, look back at our wins. I would argue that the fact that I’m here right now talking to you, you’re talking to me, everything has been a win, because everything has been uncertainty. I don’t know what’s going to happen a minute, a second from now.
Simone: Yeah.
Mike: So everything building up to this point—if you’re listening right now, everything building up to this point in your life has been a win, because you’ve handled every piece of uncertainty. And to your point, the person in the future. This was also, I believe, a Harvard study—I read a very similar study to what you said—is, when we look back at ourself 10 years ago, we say, “Oh, wow, what a different person,” but when they ask people, “Do you think you’ll change 10 years from now?” the vast majority of people say, “No, no, now I’m set. Now I’m good.” It’s the growth in the uncertainty that you touch on in your book. It’s part of the process.
Simone: Yeah. I mean, I think there’s two ways to look at it. One is, uncertainty is unavoidable. It’s part of what it means to be a human being. You have to be able to make decisions without knowing how they’ll work out.
And the second is, imagine the alternative. So imagine if everything in our life was fixed. No movie would ever come without a spoiler. No first date would ever have the butterflies of “maybe so.” Uncertainty is what gives our life texture and meaning and serendipity and surprise. And so although we often perceive uncertainty as a threat, it can also be the source of so much of the magic of what it means to be alive.
Mike: Ralph Waldo Emerson, he said, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments, the better.”
Simone: Yeah. That’s a nice way to think about it.
Mike: Some other ways out, you talk about anchors. And I heard you start on a podcast talking about a woman—I was worried about myself—who went to bed at 9:00 and woke up at 5:00 every day, and I go to bed at 8:45 and wake up at 3:00 literally every day. And I thought you were going to say, “This is this horrible way to live your life.” But turns out, it’s all about the balance. Having some of these anchors is helpful, correct?
Simone: Yeah. So the idea is that when we’re certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So an anchor can be anything. It can be a routine or a ritual. It can be your commitment to your spouse or your commitment to live in a particular place. In a business context, maybe it’s your commitment to a set of values or your mission or your commitment to serve a particular customer.
But when you get clear about those anchors, they become the steady boulders that will remain constant amidst all of the swirling winds around you. And I think in a moment like this one, where it feels like technology is disrupting all of these different industries, we have the threat of climate change and these wars overseas, it can feel like everything is so systematically uncertain, especially when it comes to the future. But thinking about, what are those things that will remain constant, what are those anchors in your life, can make it much easier to hold uncertainties in other aspects of your life.
Mike: As a non-sequitur, you mentioned an MIT study about AI and memory retention, but you also mentioned, I believe, when you write and when I write, I don’t let AI correct me. I ponder away with my sloppy writing, rather than AI correct my sloppy writing. And I feel like while that takes longer, cognitively, I’m not heading toward this state of cognitive extinction like so many people. And I’m not a Luddite either, but some of these people are just incredibly embracing AI. I worry that five years from now—this is, again, a non-sequitur, but I am curious your thoughts. I’m worried five years from now, you and I won’t be writing books. I’m worried five years from now, I won’t be watching Ryan Reynolds in Deadpool 4; it’ll be AI-generated Deadpool 4. But I’m not worried about it. Right? So as you get older, you get a little more chill with the uncertainty.
[23:46] Simone: Yeah, I mean, it’s good to remember that you’ve probably reinvented yourself in the past, and you will continue to do so in the future. When it comes to the existential threat of AI, when it comes to jobs like ours, ideas-based nonfiction writing, who knows? I try and maintain a state of equanimity about it.
There’s this parable that I talk about in the book called The Parable of the Chinese Farmer, and it goes like this. There’s a farmer in a small village, and one day his horse runs away, and all of his neighbors come to his door, and they say, “Oh, we’re so sorry to hear about your horse. It’s such a tragedy.” And the farmer says, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The day after that, the horse comes back, and with it there are these eight wild horses in tow. And so now the farmer has nine horses, and the neighbors come to his door, and they say, “You’re so lucky. You now have all of these horses.” And the farmer says, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
The day after that, the farmer’s son is riding one of these horses and falls off the horse and breaks his leg, and the neighbors come back to the door, and like clockwork, they say, you know, “What a tragedy. 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 Chinese military come to the village to draft people into the war, and because the son has broken his leg, he gets to avoid the draft. And the neighbors come back, and they say, “What great fortune.” And this time you can say it with me, the farmer says, “Maybe yes, maybe no.”
And so that’s sort of how I think about this current moment of AI. It’s so easy to pull to one extreme or the other, to think that we’re headed towards inevitable class warfare where all of these industries will be disrupted, or we’re headed toward utopia where all rote tasks will be automated and it’ll free up all of this higher-level creative work.
And to be honest, I’m not sure, and maybe that is the most accurate way to think about the future. As much as some of these AI CEOs want to tell you exactly what percentage of entry-level jobs will no longer exist in 10 years or how big the GDP will grow because of AI’s growth in the economy, the truth is, from the moment we are sitting in today, we can’t know exactly what the future will hold.
And when it comes to stuff like higher ed, there are so many examples of these predictions from the past that haven’t held true. And so, we would do well to trade some of our hubris for humility and accept the fact that we don’t know exactly what the future holds.
Mike: Yeah. If you could bestow upon our listeners—vast majority, again, are college students. They’re applying for jobs, and it is uncertain times. To your point, maybe yes, maybe no. They said the same thing about the steam engine, that would kill jobs. That was before my time. They said the same thing about the fax machine. They certainly said that about email. And without social media, without email, without remote connectivity, our firm of 50 wonderful people wouldn’t exist. So maybe. Maybe yes, maybe no.
If you could bestow upon all our listeners the ability to know what job is going to say no to you and what job is going to say yes, or what law school is going to say, “We deny you admission,” and what law schools are going to admit you. After your three years of your beautiful stories in your book, you’re talking to these people in person, would you grant them taking away that agony of not knowing, or would you say, “Hey, the obstacle is the way, the process is part of this”?
[27:08] Simone: Well, maybe with, like, an acute piece of uncertainty, like whether or not you’ll get into school, it would be beneficial to have a shorter waiting period so you can find out more quickly. You know, that being said, as a species, we’re very bad at what’s called effective forecasting, which is predicting how future events will make us feel.
So I’ll just tell a personal anecdote, which is that when I was 28, I was writing for The Atlantic, and I got a job offer to join this design firm in San Francisco called IDEO. And I could not make up my mind for the life of me. On one hand, it’s, you know, like, “Oh, the agony of deciding between two attractive job offers. You know, world’s smallest violin.” But on the other hand, I really could not figure it out.
And I was insufferable. I talked to everyone I could about it, my friends and my family and my Uber driver and my yoga teacher, trying to make up my mind between these two jobs. And one of my biggest fears was that if I took the job at a design firm, that it would be the end of my writing career. It’s really hard to get a job in a newsroom, and I thought by going to the dark side and leaving journalism, it would be the worst thing that ever happened to my writing career.
And now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that it was one of the best things that ever happened to my writing career, because I had a job where I was working as a designer. I no longer had the strain on all of my creative editorial energy during the day, and I started working on my first book, The Good Enough Job, during nights and weekends, and now I’m a full-time author. And if I had stayed in journalism, who knows whether I would have been able to write a book or make this career for myself?
And so that’s what I’d tell your clients or students who might be listening to this. It’s easy to assume that if you don’t get into your dream school or you don’t get that job offer, then your life or your career is over. But the research has proven, again and again, that not only can you find silver linings in some of these negative outcomes, but in many situations, maybe the negative outcome is actually this blessing in disguise and will open a number of doors that you couldn’t have foreseen.
That’s the perspective I tend to take. And now that I work for myself as an entrepreneur, I still have the anxieties. I still worry about my ability to support my family, living in San Francisco, a very expensive city. And yet I come back to this idea that part of the fun of working for yourself is the adventure of figuring it out, is the process. And if I knew that I would stay in the same job for the next 40 years until I retire, I don’t think I would like that life very much either. And so it’s a balance. There’s some uncertainty that makes our life worth living, and you also need to find some certainty, so you know how to find a toehold.
[29:51] Mike: I love the antidote. It’s relatable to me. The last time I looked at a stat about this, the average person doesn’t change jobs seven times in their life; they change careers seven times. It happened to you, it happened to me. I never thought I would be a CEO of a company. My track was faculty to college president. First, I thought faculty member; I taught business ethics. Then I thought I’d be a college president, and that was my track, and then we plan, and the universe laughs.
Simone: Yeah, exactly.
Mike: I’m not in tune with country music. I went to Vanderbilt, but I know there’s a song on “unanswered prayers,” and I think that’s what you’re talking about, is the unanswered prayers.
I want to end with a quote from your mentor, and maybe you can expound a little bit more on this. “Some people do what they love for work. Others do what they have to do so they can do what they love when they are not working. Neither is more noble.” What does that mean to you?
Simone: Well, it came from, as you mentioned, this mentor of mine named Anis Mojgani, who is a professional poet. And in college, I studied both poetry and economics. And so my senior year, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, where I wanted to go from there, and I had this opportunity to talk to this professional poet, Anis. And I was expecting him to give me this pep talk. To say, you know, “Go follow your passion, kid. Go be a professional poet.” And he didn’t.
He said this thing that I’ll just repeat that I’ve never forgotten, which is, he said, “You know, Simone, I think some people do what they love for work, and others do what they have to so they can do what they love when they’re not working, and neither is more noble.” And I think that last part is the key, particularly with the folks who listen to your podcast or that you work with.
There’s often this assumption that we have to find what we love. We have to find a career that pigeonholes all of our values and allows us to always feel like we’re thriving. And here is my professional mentor, a professional poet no less, telling me that it’s okay to have a day job.
I think that’s, you know, a mentality that has been very helpful for me in my life. It isn’t to say that work is a necessary evil or that you have to have a job where you just clock in and clock out. But it is to say that work can give you things. It can give you a community. It can give you a sense of purpose, of meaning. But the most important thing that a job will give you is the money to pay for your material existence.
And so for one person, their good enough job might mean working in a certain industry or having a certain title or making partner or having something to show on their resume. But for someone else, their good enough job is a job that allows them to get off at 2 PM every day so they can pick up their kid from elementary school, or a job that allows them to go on that afternoon bike ride that they really get a lot of meaning out of.
And so this is to say, different strokes for different folks. And sometimes when we put so much pressure on ourselves to think that our careers are the vehicle through which we’ll self-actualize, it inflates our expectations and actually creates a lot of room for disappointment.
So this isn’t to say you must settle. It’s to say that you can get some aspects from your job, but your job is not your life. It is part of, but not the entirety, of who you are.
[33:02] Mike: And if you’re struggling with that, I’ll just mention your first book, The Good Enough Job.
Simone: Exactly.
Mike: Yeah, and you went exactly where I took your mentor’s quote, which is, look, if you want to go to law school to practice big law so you can provide for your family and take them on vacations, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s no less noble or more noble than if you want to go to law school and do public interest work or government work or be the change you want to see in the world. And that’s why I wanted to end on this quote. I think a lot of people struggle with, “Do I want to go this route or do I want to go that route? Neither route’s more noble or less noble.
Simone: Yeah. I think there’s no right choices, but there is the ability to make our choices right.
Mike: I love it. That’s a great note to end on. Thank you for helping—you mentioned clients; 99.9% of people who listen to this will not be clients. We do this for free. We don’t advertise. People like you, we’re so fortunate to have on, because it’s just a soothing presence in an unsoothing world at times. So thank you so much, Simone, for joining us.
Simone: Thanks for having me.
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