David speaks with Simone Stolzoff, a journalist and author whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and on the TED stage. His debut book, The Good Enough Job, traces how work came to dominate our lives and makes the case for reclaiming life from its clutches. His latest, How to Not Know: The Value of Uncertainty in a World that Demands Answers, blends storytelling and research to show how to develop comfort with ambiguity and navigate the unknown with clarity.
They talked about:
🧭 Why uncertainty is the birthplace of possibility
💼 How work and identity became one and the same
🚪 One-way versus two-way door decisions
🎲 Why the quality of your decisions and the quality of your outcomes are not the same thing
🧠 How to use a decision flowchart for acute uncertainty
🌾 The Parable of the Chinese Farmer and what "maybe yes, maybe no" actually means
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Website: https://www.simonestolzoff.com/
How to Not Know: https://www.howtonotknow.com/
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David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜Full transcript:
Simone Stolzoff: [00:00:00] Uncertainty is what gives our life texture. And part of my goal with the book is to acknowledge that uncertainty can be uncomfortable, it can be distressing.
But uncertainty doesn't necessarily have to be a threat. It can also be the birthplace of possibility. To create new things, to create original work in this world, requires you to be able to dance with uncertainty, to get to a place where you don't know what's to come, and to persist nonetheless.
Uncertainty gives our life a sense of aliveness, and without it, our lives would be poorer.
David Elikwu: This week we are finally back from a little podcast break, and I am excited to share this conversation with my friend Simone Stolzoff. Simone is a journalist, a writer, and an author of two books, The Good Enough Job, and now most recently, How to Not Know. [00:01:00] So we had a really fun conversation digging into the topic of uncertainty and discussing the role that it plays in our lives, how we should think about uncertainty, how should we navigate it, how should we deal with it, uh, to what extent should we be trying to remove it and get rid of it, as is often our default, and to what extent should we be embracing it and seeing it as an opportunity to add some richness to our lives.
So we talked a lot about uncertainty as it relates to our jobs, our role in the workplace, our careers, and the way that we plan our lives, our relationships, et cetera. We talk about decision-making and some different heuristics and ways of thinking, ways of approaching the decisions that we make. And all in all, this was a really great conversation for me in particular, as we talked about some decisions that I had been making and wrestling with myself, [00:02:00] but I think this will actually be incredibly useful for so many people listening to this as well.
You can get the full show notes, transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io.
You can find Simone online on most social platforms at Simone Stolzoff. You can also find him at his website, simonestolzoff.com, and you can find out more about the book, How to Not Know, at howtonotknow.com.
And if you love this episode, please do share it with a friend, and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts because it helps us a ton to find other listeners just like you
David Elikwu: I have found both your books interesting. The latest one I haven't finished yet, but I've gotten through the first few chapters already. And we've had a conversation the last time I was in San Francisco. We talked a little bit about your background, and we'll, we'll go through some of that here.
But I'm interested in [00:03:00] how you see the books as distinct, because each of them, speaks tremendously to your background as I understand it. And your latest book, How To Not Know, focuses a lot on uncertainty and how we deal with that, how we approach the concept of uncertainty generally, and how we navigate it, and that's my understanding.
You can flesh that out. But The Good Enough Job, I think, covers some of that as it relates to jobs, but it's more about how to, I guess, finding or, or fleshing out a job that works for you in the way that you want it. So I'd love to hear you speak a little to that.
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, the books are in conversation with one another. It's by no means a sequel, but if "The Good Enough Job" is about work and identity and how to build a more healthy relationship to work, "How to Not Know" is really about how to get better at dealing with uncertainty, which is obviously true with our professional lives, especially now as so many people are feeling the existential threat of AI and the tight labor market.
But it's also a little [00:04:00] bit more broad than just thinking about it through the professional lens. And so whether that uncertainty is sort of macro uncertainties about the world and geopolitics or very personal uncertainty, should I marry this person? Should I move? Or something that is more squarely in your professional or your career.
They are books that come from a similar sort of philosophical perspective, but are sort of distinct in their subject matter.
Origin of The Good Enough Job
David Elikwu: Okay, let's talk about the, the first one first, because I'd love to hear maybe a bit about your background and what led you to that. And I suspect there'll be overlap just in terms of the uncertainty that you needed to navigate in your, in your professional life, in your career as well. But what led you to writing that first book?
Simone Stolzoff: The short story is that I am a journalist by training, and so my degree is in journalism. I worked in newsrooms for a number of years.
Journalism to IDEO
Simone Stolzoff: But when I was in my late 20s, I had a recruiter who reached out to me from a design firm, and it's this [00:05:00] design firm called IDEO based in the Bay Area, where I'm from.
And I was very flattered. I'd never been reached out to by a recruiter before. But I sort of passively went through this interview process, and then I found myself at a career crossroads. And so there was Simone the journalist on one path, Simone the designer on another path, and I could not make up my mind for the life of me.
I thought that this job didn't feel like I was choosing between two versions of work as much as it felt like I was choosing between two versions of me. It felt like my identity had become so enmeshed with my job. And that really became the insight that sparked this book, "The Good Enough Job." It was a question of: How did my work come to be so central to my self-conception, my sense of self-worth?
And I knew I wasn't the only one. Particularly in the United States, the country where "What do you do?" is often the first question we ask when we meet someone new, so [00:06:00] many of our jobs and our identities had become one and the same. And so the first book is really an exploration into how we got here and what is sort of the cost of treating work as the primary means of self-actualization.
And, you know, I'm sure we'll get to this a little bit later, but I think the second book is also in some ways inspired by that moment of career uncertainty that I felt. Because when I was trying to choose between these two jobs, I was looking for certainty. I thought there was one perfect job, and if I just banged my head against the wall at the right angle, that clarity would emerge.
And what I found in lots of sort of therapy and looking back at that moment in my mind is that I... The cause of my, my strife, my, my dissonance was the l- search for certainty about a question that you can never get a certain answer about. How could I possibly know which job would be the right job or the perfect job without having actually done it?[00:07:00]
And so in some ways, my second book is also a response to that moment of wondering: How could I become more comfortable with uncertainty, make decisions in spite of not needing to know exactly how they'll turn out?
Early Writing Ambitions
David Elikwu: What was your earliest memory of, first of all, a career worth wanting to have? And I'm interested to bridge the gap between, okay, where those first seeds came from and then deciding to go into journalism. Was that part of the prescriptive path that you saw clearly, this direct path to going into that, or was it something you stumbled into some way?
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I mean, there's many different sort of superhero origin stories that I've retroactively woven over time. One of them is that my brother and I went to different schools growing up, and he didn't have school one day. There was, like, a public holiday or something like that. But I had school, and my parents offered to take me out of school to hang out with my brother.
I think I was in the second grade. I was maybe eight years old. [00:08:00] And I said, "No, I can't leave school today. We have writing workshop," which was, like, my favorite period in school. And in some ways, you know, you could tell a story of my life where I've always known that I wanted to be a writer, and yet I've tried to convince myself that writing isn't a practical profession in many different ways.
So in college, for example, I studied creative writing, I studied poetry, but I also studied economics because I wanted to have something to sort of counterbalance that poetry. And then graduating into the world, I wanted to get a job as a writer, but I also wanted sort of the stability of the business world.
So the first thing I did was go into advertising, and I was a copywriter, and so writing sort of ads. And even when I, you know, went back to school, got my journalism degree, and got a job as a journalist, I always sort of had one foot in maybe what you'd call the commercial world and one foot in more of the artistic world.
And I still struggle with that to this day. You know, on one hand, I have these multiple interests. I [00:09:00] don't feel like there's this sort of purity of yesteryear about, you know, journalists can't be entrepreneurs, or journalists can't be thinking about the business side of things because you might be biased.
I think a lot of those rules are sort of breaking down in the new media landscape. But I also feel that sort of internal civil war sometimes between the pursuit of art or the pursuit of commerce or maybe the pursuit of self-expression and the pursuit of security and stability. So that's a constant juggle that I'm, I'm performing on my own.
David Elikwu: Fair.
Leaving Prestige Identities
David Elikwu: And the transitioning then, moving to IDEO into that next chapter of your career, how did you deal with that at the time? You hinted at, at it a little bit before, but obviously you talked about this sense of a loss of identity, and I, I can share a, a piece of that from my own experience. I definitely remember when I was leaving corporate law, um, you know, in a similar way to you, what you were just describing now of I first remember saying I wanted to be a corporate lawyer when I was [00:10:00] 14, and I'd never met one before.
I barely knew anything about it. I had just decided this is what I want to do. And if anything, it's more because I'd already decided this is what I want to do, that as I was learning more about it, then I kind of reaffirmed that decision. And then I get to university, I meet lawyers for the first time.
I'm enamored with the whole experience. I got to visit a bunch of different corporate law firms, and then eventually, you know, it takes a few years, but I get a dream, a, a job at my dream law firm I worked there, I spent half a decade there. And so now I'm coming to this point where I'm now considering making this decision to leave this career that I've spent by that point, maybe almost half my life trying to get into.
I, I've decided so long ago that this is the only thing I wanted to do. I've spent a tremendous amount of time trying to get to this point. Along the way, maybe you get numerous accolades, you start to build your identity around this thing that you do. You know, I got- I get invited to do keynotes and to speak here and there, and to do [00:11:00] loads of different things.
But even though I feel like people are inviting me because it's me or they wanna speak to me because it's me, there's also a part of me that thinks actually it's also part of this, this cachet, this role that I have. And so when you're leaving that, it's hard to separate that identity and almost have to re-begin and, and re-envisage your individual identity as distinct from your corporate one.
And I think it's something that's so easily to take for granted, even as I say it. I think it's something that very often people don't appreciate until they get to a point where maybe they have to move career or make a shift into a different type of role, and then suddenly they are having to realize, "Oh, I didn't realize the extent to which my psyche was tied to this identity that I have."
But I'd love to hear how that was navigating for you.
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think it's particularly true with people who have some sort of prestige associated with their career, where it's easy to think, you know, "I [00:12:00] produce, therefore I am," and because I have a job at this sort of prestigious place that is recognizable by others, that is the most important thing about me.
I interviewed many different workers during the pandemic, and I saw this was a very common struggle, where maybe someone had spent 20 years working at Google, and then the company came on hard economic times and then unceremoniously laid them off. And so the real argument of "The Good Enough Job" is about the value of diversifying your identity, of seeing your work as part of but not the entirety of who you are.
And if you're able to have multiple pillars bolstering your identity, even if one pillar were to crumble, maybe by no fault of your own, you can still remain standing. I think the risk is if we conflate who we are with what we do It becomes a risky proposition. It's like balancing on a very [00:13:00] narrow platform where you're susceptible to a strong gust of wind.
And I think part of why that decision to leave journalism was so hard for me is because I overly identified with being a journalist. I-- You know, my name was on everything that I did. My sort of success was quantifiable in the page views and the shares of the articles that I wrote. And so walking away from that didn't feel like I was just walking away from a job.
It felt like I was turning off part of who I was. I think particularly when we're in these liminal spaces or these moments of decision, it can feel like the loss is more acute than whatever it is that you'll gain. So before the moment where you make a decision, many options are still on the table. The moment you make a decision, you have to sort of foreclose on all of those options not taken, and it can feel like the loss of all of those options is more affecting than the potential [00:14:00] benefit that you get from the path that you did choose.
I think that's just an, an essential part of human nature, a combination of, of loss aversion and sort of the, the paradox of choice of all these options that we have in our current lives. And I think a lot of people are feeling this when it comes to their professional path. You know, especially if you have been privileged enough to get a high-quality education where it feels like you have options ahead of you.
Whatever option you choose means necessarily not doing the other paths not taken.
David Elikwu: Exactly.
Decisions and Lost Paths
David Elikwu: I think this is a big part of the core of decision-making, right? It's this idea, the, the, the Latin origin of the word is like, uh, it's two words, but it means to cut off in Latin. It's, it's this idea that you are cutting off the alternative path. There is something that could have happened and you are Cutting that strand of time off and you're kind of going off in a, in a parallel timeline.
And I think that's hard to let go of. I think that, I mean, this very much ties to what [00:15:00] we're talking about in terms of uncertainty now as well, because I think this is really what's at the core of it. It's this idea that you don't know what lies down another path. And in fact, in some ways, and actually I think you, you spoke a little to this, um, analogy a bit, and I like the way that you put it, and, and you can, you can speak on that in a moment.
But I think the core of it really is this idea that on one hand you could say if you knew exactly what lay down the other path, then actually many decisions would be quite easy because you could just, you would just do whatever you know is gonna work out the best. But, and this is something you pointed out in your book, there is still a sense in which, in fact, if you knew the outcome of all the decisions, that also takes away a lot of the joy in life, a lot of the serendipity, a lot of the happy accidents and, and things that you come across.
A, a large part of the joy of discovering something or winning something comes from the fact that you didn't actually know you were going to win, or you didn't know you were gonna find something, you didn't know you were gonna experience something. If you knew exactly what you were gonna experience, [00:16:00] how happy would happy things even make you?
Because you pre-anticipate them. You already know it's coming. If, if... You know. Do, do you know what I mean? And so I think that there, there's those two sides of, of a lot of these situations as well
Why Uncertainty Matters
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I often think about happiness as being the, the da-delta between our expectations and our reality. And if the future was already written, if everything was certain, then there would be no surprise, serendipity. You know, uncertainty is what gives our life texture. And part of my goal with the book is to acknowledge that uncertainty can be uncomfortable, it can be distressing.
But uncertainty doesn't necessarily have to be a threat. It can also be the birthplace of possibility. And if you think about any sort of revolutionary scientific breakthrough, or entrepreneur [00:17:00] generational defining company, or even like a genre-busting piece of art, to create new things, to create original work in this world, requires you to be able to dance with uncertainty, to get to a place where you don't know what's to come, and to persist nonetheless.
The alternative, like imagine a painter who's working on a painting and gets to a place where they don't know exactly what's to come. If they are too uncomfortable with that uncertainty, they'll reach for something that maybe they've done before or that they've seen before by someone else. The work, by nature, becomes more derivative.
And yet, if you're able to build uncertainty tolerance, if you're able to become more comfortable with stepping into what you don't know, that's where true originality comes from. And so on a micro scale, a lot of us are feeling the uncertainty of our lives, of the [00:18:00] world, of our careers right now. And yet, wishing a life free of uncertainty, I don't think is actually an outcome that we want.
You know, imagine if everything were already written. No movie would ever have come without a spoiler. There would never be the, the butterflies of a first date, you know? Uncertainty gives our life a sense of aliveness, and without it, our lives would be poorer.
David Elikwu: I completely agree.
Civilization as Certainty Machine
David Elikwu: And I mean, I might-- I'll let you flesh this out a bit more, but one of the things that this reminded me of is actually a, a post I wrote not long ago, which was around the idea that civilization itself is essentially a certainty machine. Like the entire work of all the things that we've done to get to the point where humanity is at now has largely been a function of removing or reducing uncertainty When we started with agriculture, a large part of the point of it is that before you don't know when it's going to rain, you don't know [00:19:00] when you're gonna have good crops or bad crops.
So how can we start to plan our fields? How can we start to harvest at the right time and sow at the right time so that we can have predictable good crop, predictable food? And, you know, you can move acro- along from there through different phases, phases of civilization, and you can see, you know, even when we have common law, right?
The entire point of the law is to know what happens when the uncertain happens. When a situation occurs, okay, we have this contract where we already sat down and thought about all the different ways something could go wrong or go right and what would happen. And we pay for insurance. We pay for insurance so that life happens and, and myriad things are out there, but how can we start to predict them?
How can we hedge against them? How can we save ourselves from the fear of uncertainty? I think once you start realizing that, you realize just how many areas of our lives we have put tremendous effort into staving [00:20:00] away uncertainty, how much fear we have of uncertainty, how much, you know, there is a sense where-- And, and we can talk about the, the counterpoint to this, but there is a sense where we really don't want things to be too unpredictable, too random.
Just as much as, for example, on social media, there is a large part of the engineering for things to be surprising and new and, and not boring. But if things are too random, then it-- you don't like it. What we secretly really want i-in some ways, that someone might say, is we want things that loosely align still with what we expect.
We still want the algorithm to feed us things we already are going to like and already are going to enjoy. And so I say all this to say that I think we have spent tremendous effort to remove the uncertainty from our lives, to make things predictable and understandable, because I think cognitively it is difficult to navigate the world, to [00:21:00] navigate life, navigate relationships without that sense of certainty.
I think relationships are a big one as well, right? And this is what causes us so much fear. And so I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about maybe two things. One, the different types of uncertainty as you see them, if you would split them into, into different categories of things. And then two, maybe just starting with what you think are the hardest to navigate or, or the ones that present the biggest roadblocks.
I know in your book you use a few different examples. One that's been in the back of my mind from near the beginning, 'cause it-- I had some familiarity with the experience, was about, I forget the girl's name, but she was a college student, and she was dealing with her religious groups on campus and the ways that that You know, going back to this idea of identity, began to shape her identity and also the relationships that y- that she had, also the way that she navigated the world.
But yeah, I'd love to hear you speak about a little more of those things
Simone Stolzoff: Definitely.
Acute vs Ambient Uncertainty
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I think the [00:22:00] point that you made that a lot of human history can be l- viewed through the lens of trying to stave off uncertainty is apt. The problem is that we can never fully banish uncertainty from our lives. It is an inevitable part about being human. Even thinking about something like it's raining right now, whether it's gonna be raining in five minutes is not a certainty.
It is a probability. And when we try and look for easy explanations for exactly how the future will go, we get ourselves into trouble. So the example that you brought up is an example of someone who joined, a, a religious cult, and part of the reason why organizations like cults are so attractive is they offer a level of certainty for their followers.
The leader says, "If you do this, this, and that, then you're gonna get the outcome that you want," whether that outcome is professional success or freedom from your suffering or go to heaven, what have you. And [00:23:00] it's really easy to just sort of buy a worldview off the rack and follow someone else's very clear sense of what the future holds.
I think a lot of authoritarian regimes, you know, play on that insecurity around the fear people have around uncertainty and having someone who's in charge. The problem is that it's easy until it isn't, and that's what, you know, the character in the book found, is when she realized that she had completely ceded all of her own agency or autonomy to this organization.
She was no longer feeling like she was an actor in her own life. She was just sort of following someone else's rules. It's important to say that we need some certainty and some uncertainty in our lives to be full. You know, I am not arguing for sort of, sort of full chaos, and we shouldn't-- we should just seek certainty in all moments of time.
You know, one of the best, uh, pieces of advice [00:24:00] that I think I offer in the book is when we are certain about some aspects of our life, it makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others. So when we are able to find some of those anchors, whether it is a commitment to a particular person or a commitment to a place to plant roots in a community, or a commitment to a problem to solve or a set of values if you're a business owner, getting clear on the things that you are certain about makes it easier to hold uncertainty in other realms.
Those anchors become like the, the boulders that will remain steady amidst all of the changing winds. And so in terms of, like, the types of uncertainty There's many different ways to slice it, but the two main distinctions that I make are between what I call acute uncertainty, so that's uncertainty about something that will one day be resolved.
Will I pass the bar exam? What will the results of this medical test be? Versus the more ambient uncertainty that a lot of us are living underneath right now. So [00:25:00] not knowing exactly what the future will hold, whether the world that my son will inherit will be safe for him to live, what the future of, um, college might look like, or when the war will resolve.
You know, it's not necessarily just an answer that will be given a, a distinct ending, but more of sort of these broader questions, our mortality, climate change, that are hanging over our heads at all times. And I think the two different types of uncertainty require different types of approaches.
Flowchart for Acute Uncertainty
Simone Stolzoff: So for example, for acute uncertainty, I like to think of a flowchart, like a decision tree.
And the first question might be: Do you have the ability to influence the outcome? So say you are a student applying to different universities, and you're really anxious about what university you'll end up going to. If you're in the moment before you've submitted a- your application, there are things that you can [00:26:00] do to help influence the outcome.
You can try and get good grades. You can try and put together a good application. You can try and, you know, network with people that might help you along your path. But if the answer to, "Can I control the outcome?" is no, then you sort of go down the decision tree, and the next question I'd ask is: Can you plan for different potential outcomes?
Can you do what economists often refer to as contingency planning? So say, "If I don't get into any universities, what will I do? If I get into this university but not that university, what will I do?" And trying to think about multiple different potential outcomes as opposed to staying fixed on just one.
And then once you go to one step deeper, can I control the outcome? No. Have I done everything that I can to plan for multiple different outcomes? Yes. Then it really just comes to how can you help yourself manage the uncertainty that you face, which is, like, how can you regulate your nervous system and become better equipped to [00:27:00] deal with the waiting before you get that answer?
You know, there's one study that I quote in the book that found that for women With breast cancer, often the hardest part of the entire breast cancer journey is the moment before they get a diagnosis after they've done a biopsy. So that waiting period where you don't know what result you're gonna get.
Or another study has found that professional uncertainty, so not knowing whether you'll have a job in the future, tends to have a similar effect on our health as actually losing our jobs. We're so uncomfortable with this uncertainty, and so once you've gone through all the things that you can control, it really comes down to how can I get better at dealing with the things that I can't?
And there you can have tactics like, you know, breathwork and meditation to help stay grounded in those moments. You can look for silver linings in potential negative outcomes or do what's called bracing for the worst, where you think about, you know, if the worst-case scenario were to come true, how would you deal with that situation?
Or you [00:28:00] can distract yourself and try and find other ways that you can just manage the time until you get that acute answer that you're looking for. Okay, I've been rambling for a lot. We can talk a little bit about ambient uncertainty too if you want, but anywhere you wanna go from
David Elikwu: Yeah. Okay.
Avoidance as Non Decision
David Elikwu: So one thought that came to mind, and you might tell me this fits already within the framework, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this. I think there are some kinds of decisions which are also a bit of non-decisions of some kind, which largely stem from this idea of uncertainty.
Two examples which come quite easily to mind. Sometimes you get people where, uh, they are not sure, for example, what major to take or what course to do at university. And so instead of wrestling with the ambiguity and even working through it to decide, okay, what, uh, you know, working through the flowchart, they just say, "In fact, I should just not go to university."
And I think very similarly, and I've had this conversation a few times, where there are a lot of people in, I guess, [00:29:00] maybe more so the millennial generation, I'm not sure about Gen Z and beyond, but I know there are a lot of people who have made decisions to say, for example, "Because I don't know what the future for my children will look like in terms of the climate and the environment or the economy or whatever the case may be, I should actually just not have children at all."
And it would be better to not have children than to try and figure out how they would be able to navigate the future. There should just be no children to navigate. And, and that in, in their mind might be a better solution. That--
Simone Stolzoff: Mm-hmm.
David Elikwu: so you're kind of not even getting to some of the later parts of the flowchart about what steps you should take and what things you might do because you've already foreclosed yourself from all possible options.
I'd be interested-- And, and that-- those are only two examples. I think that's a whole class of type of thing, and I'd be interested to hear you think about some of those types of things, where people prevent themselves from even getting to the starting line in some sense as well.
Anxiety and Uncertainty Intolerance
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, that was [00:30:00] one of the big sort of aha moments in my research for the book. I spoke with this psychologist named Mickael Dugas, and he was one of the first psychologists to link a lot of anxiety disorders to people's intolerance with uncertainty. And one of the things that he told me is that when we are very uncomfortable with uncertainty, we tend to have one of two different reactions.
The first is maybe more expected, which is we try to gather as much information as we possibly can. And so imagine you were uncomfortable with uncertainty. You're going to buy a new pair of jeans. Maybe you try and, uh, you try and try on every single pair of jeans in the store before you make your decision.
But the second reaction is on the other side of the spectrum. Some people become very impulsive, which is they're uncomfortable with uncertainty. They're not sure the perfect pair of jeans for them, so they just buy the pair of jeans that's in the window. And these are both not very adaptive methods. You know, we all have a friend who's trying to make a life [00:31:00] decision and tries to talk to everyone they know about it, and their Uber driver and their yoga teacher, and they can't have a conversation with anyone without trying to get their opinion on what job they should take or, you know, what color car they should buy, what have you.
And I think it's important to understand that to be a skillful decision-maker, you have to be able to make decisions without full certainty. And so even for the student who's not sure about what major to choose, you know, there are some small set of people that have convinced themselves with certainty that there's only one major for them.
But the truth is, there's often a lot more flexibility than we give ourselves credit for.
One Way vs Two Way Doors
Simone Stolzoff: So one distinction I, I like to think about is from Jeff Bezos, who talks about the difference between one-way door versus two-way door decisions. And one-way door decisions are the decisions that are harder to reverse.
So big questions like, "Who should I marry? Should I buy [00:32:00] this house?" et cetera. That isn't to say that they are irreversible, but it's much harder to go back. Versus two-way door decisions are decisions that are much easier to course-correct. And even something like a decision of what you should study or what you should major, it feels like the stakes are incredibly high, but we often discount our own ability to course-correct.
I'm sure some of the most interesting people you know do something for their career that isn't related at all to what they studied in university, for example. And so one piece of advice that Bezos gives, that I, I imagine that this psychologist that I talked to would back up, which is we should- Take action when we're about 75 to 85% ready.
If you wait till you're 100% ready or you wait till a day where you feel 100% certain, it's often too late, and that certainty or that 100% might never come. And so you want to be able to gather some [00:33:00] information to make decisions that are important for your life, but not waste too much time looking for a certainty that is not to be found.
David Elikwu: Yes.
Information Hoarding vs Impulse
David Elikwu: What you've said resonates in so many ways. I'll speak to the first thing I had in mind, and then I'll come to this point. But I- first of all, I really love that you made that distinction between, I mean, obviously it's coming from a researcher, but these two different reactions.
And, and what I was referring to before, I guess, one branch of that which is maybe, okay, you refuse to make a decision or you make a decision that allows you to avoid the further decisions down the line. But the opposite of that, like you pointed out, is this idea that sometimes we can default to looking for all the information.
So in, in the example I gave before, you have some people where it's like, "Okay, I, I don't even have a girlfriend yet, but I already know all the, the top 10 perfect schools for my child. These are the six streets that I want to live on. This is exactly how everything needs to be." And then so long as everything falls into place, [00:34:00] then life is gonna be fantastic.
So it was a good reminder that there are these two polar ends of the scale.
Analysis Paralysis Trap
David Elikwu: And it's funny, as you say that, I feel myself falling into that latter side more than the former. I know for myself, you know, even when I look around me on my desk, I have this water bottle. I probably watched no less than 15 to 20 different videos of reviews of different water bottles, and I watched scientific tests on how well they retain heat and cold, and I wanna know all these things so that I can just decide on, and it costs like, you know, 20 bucks in the end.
But while I, I feel like I, I still get the value out of spending that time, but I think it's, it's a microcosm of the way that sometimes we can be paralyzed by much bigger decisions in, in other areas of our lives. And so what you were saying about that resonates with me a lot. And the Jeff Bezos thing I think also resonates a lot.
Two Way vs One Way Doors
David Elikwu: One, one part I might add to that, that I, you know, I talked [00:35:00] about in the decision-making course, but I think it's this idea that sometimes, like you say, we act as though every decision might be permanent. And so we hesitate too much to make a decision in the first place. But like Jeff Bezos says, there's actually a distinction between things that are reversible and things that are irreversible.
So things that are reversible, you might as well try or do an experiment and see what happens, and just keep in mind the point at which you can safely turn back. But I think maybe an additional point to that is also the point that sometimes There are one-way doors that you can kind of turn into a two-way door in the sense that you can still make a partly irreversible decision a win-win just by thinking about it a bit in advance.
It doesn't mean you're gonna have the exact dream outcome that you always wanted, but you can certainly think about in advance, "Okay, if I do make this decision and I can't just suddenly turn back halfway, is there a way that I can still get something out of it even if it's [00:36:00] not my original dream outcome?
Is there a benefit I can still get?" So for example, we were using the example of college majors. There could be a sense in which that is irreversible for some people. Usually, hopefully you can just change your major once you begin a degree, you can transfer to something else. But let's say that you can't.
Okay, can I pick something where even though it do- I might not get, okay, this exact job that I wanted or the, the dream outcome out of it, is there something else that could be useful that I get out of there that I can still then say, "Hey, this was still useful and valuable in some way"? And not in the sense where we have to make up the narrative in retrospect and say, "Hey, you know, what, what could I say I learned from this thing that seems to have gone disastrously wrong?"
'Cause that can be hard to do at, at the time that everything seems to have blown up. But I think if the, to the extent that we can think about those things in advance, I think that can be useful as well.
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, there's this philosopher that I, I quote in the book who I really love her work. Her name is Ruth Chang. She's [00:37:00] at Ox-Oxford, and one thing she says is what makes a hard decision hard is that one option is not better than the other among all categories. If that were the case, then it wouldn't be a hard decision.
It would be an easy decision. What makes a hard decision hard is that there are trade-offs. One option is better for some reasons, another option is better for other reasons, and no option is better overall. And so one piece of advice that she gives is rather than agonizing over which decision to make, you should make a decision by any means you can, and then spend your energy convincing yourself of why you made the right decision after the fact.
The 'Only Option' Test
Simone Stolzoff: There's this, there's this paradox called Friedkin's paradox, which basically says when decisions are the hardest, it's often because they are the most similar and therefore The decision matters less than you actually think. So there's one heuristic that I use in the [00:38:00] book that I borrow from this decision strategist named Annie Duke, and she calls it the only option test.
So imagine you're deciding whether you want to go on vacation to Rome or to Paris. Now, this decision might feel high stakes. You might not get very many decision... I mean, many vacations over the course of a year. That it is a potentially expensive trip between flights and hotels, and so you think of all the reasons why going to Rome might turn out poorly.
You might get swindled by an Italian cab driver, XYZ, or all the reasons why you might have a bad time if you go to France. You might get food poisoning from some undercooked escargot, what have you. And what she says is, rather than compare these decisions like they're apples to apples, if someone put a gun to your head and said, "You can only take one vacation, and you have to go to Rome," ask yourself, would you be happy?
And then if someone else said, "You [00:39:00] only have one option. Your only option is to go on a vacation to Paris," would you be happy? If the answer is yes to both, the decision probably matters a little bit less than you think, and you can make that decision quickly. This isn't to say that, like, it is not a hard decision or a decision that might feel like it's incredibly high stakes in your mind.
But you can make that decision quickly because the likelihood that the worst-case scenario happens in either place is probably pretty likely. They probably have more in common than they have different, and therefore, you can make a de-decision like that quicker than you might imagine. There are other questions in your life that don't pass the only option test, and that's the type of one-way door decision that you need to bring a little bit more of an analytical framework to.
But often, when decisions are hard, it's not because they're so distinct. It's because they're actually pretty similar, and it's just a matter of which trade-offs you're willing to accept.
David Elikwu: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Hotel Safety Framework
David Elikwu: There's one thing I wanna share, [00:40:00] um, which is actually an experience I w- literally very recently had, as in it was yesterday. But the-- I just wanna signpost ahead of time the two questions I wanna ask you. One, which is I'd love just to hear more about some of the ways that you think about decision-making and other aspects of your decision-making approach.
And then the second is, how do you make sure you remember and keep these things in mind at the exact, at the time that you need them? Now, to go back to this situation that just happened, which kind of touches on the last aspect a bit, you know, I mentioned the decision-making, uh, course thing earlier, and a big part of the reason I started doing that in the first place is because I found myself in this trap of, like many people, I like the idea of, okay, mental models, and you can spend all this time gathering mental models and researching them online, and you can end up with this big list of, okay, these different, uh, rules and paradoxes and ideas and things that you'll apply, and then you never remember them.
And just
Simone Stolzoff: [00:41:00] Mm.
David Elikwu: recently, uh, we had to make a decision for a, a hotel for my younger sister, and we'd, we'd booked one. We already had one secured for, for my parents, and the one for my sister was gonna be a different one, not too far away, but just, just somewhere else. And we got there, we were checking out, and the front of the hotel seems quite secure and quite safe, but then the rooms themselves didn't have great locks, and so it didn't seem-- Wait, once you actually got up to the room, it didn't seem too secure. And so we're in this situation where even as I think about it now, okay, on one hand, things could be perfectly fine, right? The, the downstairs is fine. For the most part it's, it's reasonably good. But in-- You, you don't need many scenarios for it not to be fine, for it to be, like, disastrous, if you know what I mean.
And I think, so what it reminded me of is actually something I've taught loads of times in a corporate setting, which is this idea of, [00:42:00] uh, to explain it simply, if you think of instead of sometimes people make a list of pros and cons, but I think that can be quite simple. And then, so one thing people often do is pros and cons.
Another thing people often do is best case scenario, worst case scenario. If you kind of combine those two ideas, and what you actually do is you say, "Okay, in the average best case outcome," so let's say you surveyed 100 people that all did the exact same thing, uh, and then you take the average of the people who had the very best experience and what did they say, the people who had the very worst experience and what did they say, and then when you look at the middle, the people that had like a Non, non-remarkable but positive re- experience, and then non-remarkable but negative experience.
And then you measure the gap between like, okay, it was okay, nothing to write home about, but it was decent, and, oh, it was fantastic, like the very best. And what's the gap between, okay, it was not [00:43:00] too bad, but it was not great. It was a little bit to this side, and it was actually awful. And how big is that gap?
And there are many decisions. I'll use, um, wearing a seatbelt, for example. The very best case for not wearing a seatbelt is, oh my goodness, I was so tired I got to lie down in the backseat and take a nap. I really need to rest, and by the time I reached the airport or my destination, I felt so refreshed.
It was fantastic. Okay. But what is the, the, the kind of median good outcome? Okay, I was a little bit more comfortable because I didn't have to wear the seatbelt. It didn't like ruffle my shirt or something. That's, you know, in an average case, that's what the good person's gonna say. Okay. The average bad, uh, outcome, the, the median one, they're gonna say something like, "Ah, I was a little bit uncomfortable, and maybe my shirt got a little scrunched up by the time I got there."
Okay. It's not the end of the world, but it's not bad. Okay. The very worst case, actually you're dead or you're like severely maimed or injured. [00:44:00] Okay. The gap between a not too bad experience and the very worst experience is humongous compared to like, okay, I was a little bit more comfortable, and I was extremely comfortable.
There, there's not much gain to be had on, on that side of the equation, and so it's much better just to hedge against all the the wide spectrum of possible negative outcomes, right? Like there's so many people that will have different stories on the negative side like, "Okay, we had a bad turn, and I cricked my neck," or all kinds of things happened.
And so anyway, that's all a, a long preamble to say it's funny that... Okay, so this is something I, I've told myself before, but even in the moment it was a little bit hard to remember. If I apply that now, the answer is obvious, and obviously we decided that my sister should- We, we found a different room in the same hotel as my parents and, and we moved her there. And I still think that would be the correct decision.
But if I apply that framework, actually it's very easy, and I was thinking of that because you used the gun to your head example. Because if you put a gun to my head and you say, [00:45:00] "What is the most surefire best answer?" I know it's the second one for, for certain.
But I still spent a bunch of time in the interim trying to think about, ah, you know, it could be okay if this or how could it be fine if that. Um, and so yeah, I'd love to hear your thoughts on that, and then it, it connects to that second question I had which was, okay, even when I was in that scenario I forgot this slightly better way to think about this that, and, and instead I defaulted to weighing up all the different options.
Making Peace with Uncertainty
Simone Stolzoff: The first thing I'll say is that there's something really attractive about having heuristics or mental models that can make our decisions easier.
But if you were to actually up-level them all, the truth is decision-making has a level of uncertainty un- unpredictability that's inherent in them. And that's why I wrote this book about how to not know, is at the end of the day, even if you [00:46:00] have the best mental models in the world, or even if you have the most advanced LLM working behind you, or even if you've done the contingency planning for every single possible scenario that you can anticipate, to make a decision about the future means accepting some level of uncertainty.
There is no sort of decision-making without uncertainty. And so What you have to do, regardless of whether you move your sister from this hotel or you keep her in the hotel that she was originally booked in, is you have to learn how to make peace with the uncertainty that's inherent in making any decision about the future.
And there's a few things that I try and keep in mind. One is we are very bad at predicting the future as a species. So there's this canonical example from this professor named Phil Tetlock, and he collated data from a decade's worth of predictions [00:47:00] from academics and politicians and economists and journalists and compared them to what actually happened.
These are predictions about, like, what will the interest rate be next quarter? You know, how long will this war last? And what he found was that the average expert is roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Even the experts are incredibly bad at predicting what the future will hold. And then the second aspect of it is we are also incredibly bad at what's called affective forecasting, which is to say we are really bad at anticipating how future events will make us feel.
So some of the canonical examples here are, like, people that get left at the altar or people that win the lottery or people that become paraplegics, these sort of extreme scenarios of really either intense good or intense bad events. And what the research from psychology shows here is that we don't know how future [00:48:00] events will actually impact our happiness.
We... I'm sure we all have a friend who is going through a breakup and thinks that their life is over, but then you talk to them six months or a year a-later and they say, "Oh, it was the best thing that's ever happened to me." Or maybe the same thing happens, you get laid off from a job and it becomes this blessing in disguise, et cetera.
And so the sort of upshot is that any decision you make about the future has some level of uncertainty or chance associated with it. And there are things that you can do like, you know, pay for a hedge, like buy insurance, for example, that might help quell some of that uncertainty. But at the end of the day, you have to be able to accept all that you can't control.
And so especially when it comes to that second category of more ambient uncertainty, sort of like the more higher level existential uncertainties that we all live with, the first thing I'd say is, you know, separate what you can and what you can't control. We spend so much energy worrying about what we can't [00:49:00] control.
If you can keep your locus of control or energy or attention on that which you can control. You can actually influence part of how the future goes. The second thing is focusing on one right action at a time. There's this concept from Buddhism that I really like, which is always focus on the next right action.
And sometimes when we're in a moment of uncertainty, it's really easy for our minds to spiral and to loop and say, you know, "What if my sister's hotel room gets broken into, and then her passports get stolen, and then she has to stay in the country, and then she can't leave, and then her and I have a fight, and then we don't talk to each other, and then I'm estranged from my family?"
And you just sort of catastrophize. But rather than letting your brain spiral to all of those places, how can you just focus on one action at a time? So what is the decision at hand? We have to decide where she's gonna stay tomorrow night. Let's focus on that decision, and then we can focus on the next decision from there.
Maybe she has to stay in this current [00:50:00] hotel. Okay, is there anything that we can do to help make sure that her belongings are safe? Just go one decision at a time.
Choosing curiosity Over Fear
Simone Stolzoff: And then the third thing is maybe a little bit more philosophical, but it's just to choose curiosity over fear. So often when we're faced with uncertainty, we think about all of the threats, all of the things that can go wrong.
And this is, you know, biological. You imagine our ancestors in the jungle, they hear a rustling in the bushes. If they don't know the source of that noise, it can literally be life or death. You know, the uncertainty becomes lethal. But in our modern world, one, often the events that will have the biggest a- impact on our life are not things that can be anticipated or planned for.
They're the, the black swans, as I know that we both have done some thinking and writing about. And two, there's a chance that even that negative event that you're so afraid of can turn out to be positive [00:51:00] in the long run. And by being able to choose curiosity over fear, you- you're able to keep transacting.
You're able to keep acting in the world. Like, there's a metaphor that I really like, which is that being a leader is like rowing a boat on a lake that is 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 need to keep rowing.
That is how you find clarity. It's by rowing through the fog and maintaining the faith that you'll eventually reach land.
David Elikwu: I love that analogy. And I also love, uh, y- your reference, which is a quote from your book I had in my notes from towards the start, which was, "Meeting life's questions with curiosity instead of fear." So I, I really loved that example.
AI Anxiety and Agency
David Elikwu: When you think about the current moment, I know you referenced AI a bit earlier.
I'm interested in how you think of-- This is [00:52:00] potentially a question about prioritization and how we prioritize different things. But I think, for example, within the question of, okay, how should, let's say, how should we be thinking about what we do in, in the current moment? There's a lot of uncertainty around things like AI and the development of jobs, the development of programming and AI itself, et cetera.
But not everyone is equally influenced by that, and not everyone has an equal impact on how those things might go. So if you split that into, for example, okay, an AI researcher, someone that's actually working at a fr- at a frontier lab where their decisions actually have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of all kinds of things, do you think or, or how do you think their decision-making and, and the way they should think about that should be meaningfully distinct from someone else who just like, you know, you or another person on the street who, you know, [00:53:00] when they are thinking of the uncertainty around AI perhaps impacting their job.
And I don't know if you have specific directions or thoughts for, for people in those kind of situations, but even when we think about it generally, following that same flowchart you mentioned earlier, okay, to start with, there's some extent to which, okay, they don't have full control over the full spectrum of things, and then they can focus on the parts they do have control over, and there's a natural order that can flow from there.
But I was just pointing out that not everyone's in that position. I'm interested to see how you also apply it to someone who is in the position where they actually have a bit more influence. How should they be thinking about prioritizing? is still uncertainty for them. They, you know, people still barely know how AI works or what impact it will have, even if you listen to Sam Altman or some of these people. The people that are the CEOs of these frontier labs have very divergent opinions on what it means for humanity, what it means for jobs, what it means for, uh, you know, whether that's [00:54:00] engineers, what it means for everyone. And so, yes, yeah, I'm interested to know how you wrestle with that aspect of things or how you think about that when there are things that are still uncertain, regardless of how much influence over them you have.
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Well, that's when it comes back to acceptance. You know, I think let's start with someone who doesn't have much exposure to AI. I think one thing that I would do if I'm feeling particularly anxious is try to get more proximate to the tools themselves I think action can absorb anxiety, and part of what makes it so anxiety-inducing for someone that doesn't maybe have much knowledge about the tools is that it just feels like this sort of amorphous threat.
But by actually playing with the tools, it, one, can give you a sense of agency over a world that you might not feel like you have any control over right now, and two, it will help you understand the actual nuance of what it is that you're [00:55:00] talking about as opposed to this just sort of big black cloud.
When it comes to the researchers who are literally on the front lines building these tools, you know, I think part of the reason why you hear so much doomerism that comes from the people who are actually in these labs and who are actually building the tools is, on one hand, uh, maybe inflated sense of their own ability to influence the future because they do have a larger stake in actually determining their outcome, but maybe a little bit of a discounting of the fact of that there's still lots that are out of their control.
And the second is just that natural human tendency to catastrophize or to think about the potential loss. And, you know, one of the canonical behavioral economics findings is that lo- losing something feels worse than gaining something feels good. And so I think there's a bit of loss aversion that's at play when it comes to these people who are [00:56:00] really thinking about these worst-case scenarios.
Maybe Yes Maybe No
Simone Stolzoff: And At the end of the day, I, I often think back to this, this parable that I write about a little bit in the book, but it's called "The Parable of the Chinese Farmer," and maybe you've heard it before. But basically, there's this farmer who has his horse run away from him, and his neighbors come to his door and they say, "We're so sorry to hear about your horse.
It's such a tragedy." And the farmer says, "Maybe yes, maybe no." And then the next day, the horse comes back, and with-- there are seven wild horses in tow, and the neighbors say, "Oh, what great fortune. All these great riches. You now have eight horses." And the farmer says, "Maybe yes, maybe no." And the following day, the farmer's son takes out one of the wild horses for a ride and falls and breaks his leg.
And the neighbors say, "Oh, oh, we're so sorry to hear about your son. What a bummer." And the farmer says, "Maybe yes, maybe no." And the next day, generals from the Chinese military come to the town to conscript people into the army, and because the son has [00:57:00] broken his ar- his leg, he gets to avoid the draft. The neighbors say, "You're so lucky, and this time you can join me."
You know, the farmer says, "Maybe yes, maybe no." And I think when we're in these transitional, pivotal moments of society, there's a tendency to pull to the extremes, to think, "Oh, AI is going to save us all. It's going to automate all rote work, and we'll just be focused on higher level creative tasks," or to think, "Oh, AI is gonna be the destruction of society, and it's gonna lead to this class warfare, and the robots are gonna take all of our jobs."
When in actuality, the future is probably gonna be somewhere in the middle, and we don't know exactly what future we will inhabit. If you are a change maker, if you are someone who wants to try and make a little dent in the universe, you shouldn't want the future to be fully fixed. That's incredibly disempowering.
And so the uncertainty, the willingness to hold on [00:58:00] to that maybe yes, maybe no mentality, is actually what gives you the ability to change the world.
David Elikwu: Yes, I love that parable. Funnily enough, it came up very recently in my Chinese studies. It's, uh, there's a Cheng Yu, I think it's, uh, how do you say it? Uh, Sai Weng Shima is the, is the shortened version of that parable. The Cheng Yu are these kind of like four-word stories or four-word sayings, and that is, uh, the old man at the border who lost his horse, and that's the, the exact story.
And I, I lo- I love that story specifically because, like you're saying, it has wrapped up in it the idea that very often something happens and you don't know whether the outcome is good or bad. And like a big part of the story is that every time something happens, the villagers come to him and say, "Oh, isn't it good that this thing just happened?"
He's like, "Hey, I don't, I don't know. How do you know that it's supposed to be good?
Process Over Outcomes
David Elikwu: How do you know that it's supposed to be bad?" And then, you know, as, as [00:59:00] successive following events happen, it's easy in retrospect, as with much of our lives, and this is kind of the idea that we talked about before, the narrative fallacy is to draw this very simple line starting from the end and working backwards, where we say,
once we know how things worked out, "Oh look, of course this was going to happen and that was going to happen, and this is exactly how things ended up."
And we can, in retrospect, Annie Duke, who you mentioned, talks about the idea of resulting in Thinking in Bets, her book, where, okay, based on how a decision or an outcome goes, we use that to say this was a good decision. The decision-making process was good, and if the outcome is bad, the decision-making process was bad.
But actually, sometimes there are many intervening incidents, and there are many things and factors that are outside of our control that can lead to a good outcome or lead to a bad outcome that are completely separate from the decision-making process itself and whether or not [01:00:00] we made a good choice in, in good faith.
And I think, and you hinted at this, but I think it's important to emphasize that the quality of your decision-making is completely distinct from the quality of the outcome. And it's quite important to divorce those two things so that you can get better at making decisions, and also so you can get better at living with the outcomes.
Because just because something happened to swing your way or it didn't, like you referenced before, is a function of probability. You might make a decision that, okay, 60% of the time or even 70% of the time or more could have been a good decision.
Simone Stolzoff: Mm-hmm.
David Elikwu: But when you roll the dice, you could get one of the 30%, and, and that's just how life works.
But I think it's very easy to... And I think you see this happen with relationships, you see this happen in a lot of areas of life actually, where people really hold onto the negative outcomes, and they overweight the, the fact that, you know, "Hey, I tried to talk to this girl, and she shut me [01:01:00] down, and so this means all girls are bad," or, or, you know, whatever catastrophic takeaway from that you could have.
And so I think that there's loads of examples of the knock-on consequences of this when you start to overly weight the outcome instead of thinking separately about just the quality of the decision you're making.
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Dancing With Uncertainty
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good note to end on, which is all the decisions we make in life are going to be half chance. And so you can do some work to improve your decision-making skills. But at the end of the day, and sort of the thesis of the book, to live, to be a human, is to dance with uncertainty.
And if we're able to approach this uncertainty with a sense of curiosity, then you'll be able to be more resilient, more adaptable, more creative, in spite of what outcome you ultimately get.
David Elikwu: Fantastic. Thanks so much, [01:02:00] Simo, for, for sharing all of this. I think it, it-- I've really enjoyed reading the book. I'm sure tons of people are gonna really enjoy it. I think it touches on something that is specifically and meaningfully useful for people. It's... And, and specifically in the way that, like a lot of decision-making, I found people underrate the extent to which they need these kind of things.
Uh, the analog that I often use when I speak to in corporate settings is people hire-- Like, it's the equivalent of hiring lots of tall people and assuming you're gonna have a basketball team. It's how people hire lots of smart people and assume they're gonna be able to make good decisions. And people can just assume that, "Hey, because I haven't had any catastrophic outcomes, I actually make really good decisions."
But I think Uncertainty and decision-making proliferate in our lives in so many different ways, and there's so much we can gain from sitting with these things, from sitting with the meaning of uncertainty and, and actually revealing all the ways in which it's apparent in our [01:03:00] lives and the ways that which we underestimate it, and learning to change the way that we approach it to being something that, like you say, is a factor of curiosity and not just a function of fear.
Simone Stolzoff: Amen to that. If anyone wants to learn more about the book, you can go to howtonotknow.com. And yeah, I'm excited to, for you to read it.
I think the, the cliché among authors is that you write the book that you need to read, and I definitely wrote this for a younger version of me who was really uncomfortable with uncertainty. And so hopefully by engaging with it, you'll become a little bit more comfortable yourself.
David Elikwu: Fantastic. Can I ask one more question?
The Power of Dissent
David Elikwu: I'd love to know, is there anything that you yourself specifically learned in the process of writing the book that you-- that changed the way that you see things or see the world in some way?
Simone Stolzoff: Hmm. Yeah, tons of it. I mean, I think, like, that's why you wanna go on a journey of writing a book. It's to be able to change your mind and to get illuminated by different thoughts. Um, one thing that comes to mind, I have a chapter in the book that's about [01:04:00] dissent and creating room for divergent thinking within organizations.
We have a natural tendency towards confirmation bias and groupthink and all of these things that keep, um, consensus thinking sort of like the norm in a lot of the organizations that we run today. And so the chapter is about the Fed, the New York Fed in particular, the oversight body of a lot of the, the banks, and they also set interest rates and do some other really important work for the government.
And within the Fed, they created this team of sort of internal devil's advocates, whose job was to poke holes in central bankers' main arguments and try and think about things that are outside of sort of the narrow purview that economists think about. And one of the big things that I learned in that chapter is that having a group like this improves decision qualities.
If you have diversity, if you have people who are specifically there to point out some of the [01:05:00] cognitive biases that we all hold, it leads to better decision-making. But it also creates more friction, which means that it slows the process down by design. And a lot of times, organizations prize the lack of friction over the quality of decisions, and often the red teams or the teams that are there to help manage or mitigate risk are the first ones to go in hard economic times.
And so that's an idea that I've been sitting with a lot recently, which is if we want to make better decisions, we need to be able to incorporate other points of view or divergent ways of thinking, even though that's uncomfortable. The uncomfortability, that friction is actually what leads to better decisions, and when decisions are friction-free or it's easy to come to consensus, that makes it more likely for us to have blind spots.
David Elikwu: Okay, fantastic. Thanks again, Simo. Really appreciate your time[01:06:00]
Simone Stolzoff: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Cheers.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.
