Elizabeth Weingarten
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
What a great question. So this was indeed the book that made me interested in learning everything I could about behavioral science. And the reason was it was really found this book really at the right time. I was At that time, I was at the think tank New America. I had recently started a policy program focused on global gender equality issues.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And the idea was to do original research and journalism to explore underreported global gender equity issues. And Iris was going to be coming to New America for a panel. And so somebody shared her book with me so I could read about her and her work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And it was one of those situations where I had been, that the problems and challenges that I had been trying to address through journalism, all of a sudden I saw her writing about those challenges in a totally different way. And introducing me to an entirely different toolkit for addressing particularly gender equity challenges in the workplace.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And so it was just this mind-opening experience of, oh, huh, I had been trying to solve problems with the toolkit that I possessed as a journalist. And here was this totally different way of seeing and framing problems. problems in terms of, in behavioral science, we talk a lot about context matters, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And so much of why we do the things we do and our behaviors are a result of our environments and the way in the kind of systems that we interact in. And so this was, at the time, a totally new concept for me and blew my mind. I just had never thought about my own behavior and the world in that way. And Eris just beautifully frames up this challenge.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I will say that Iris and a friend of mine now, Siri Chalazi, they have a new book out, which is really exciting building on that work. But this was a book that, again, I think I had this personal and professional passion around global gender equality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And this book came at the right time to really change the way that I saw how I could address those challenges and made me want to pursue that in my own career.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I love that. It sounds like we had a similar experience there of just something clicking on, right? And all of a sudden you see, oh, this is a set of tools that can really help me in a way in my work. And once you start learning about it, at least from my experience, it's just the most fascinating world. And there's endless learning because we humans are strange and complicated individuals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So always something to learn in the behavioral science field.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Gosh, so many things. And I do have to just give a tip of the hat to Evan Nestrak, who's the editor-in-chief of Behavioral Scientist. And he, over the years, has just built such a fantastic publication. And so he deserves so much credit for his vision. And it's been so fun to work alongside of him and see that come to life. I would say...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
For me, one of the most fun topics that I got to explore, I'll actually take you back in time a little bit to about 10 years ago, actually, when I was dating in Washington, DC, and I was going on all these dates with men and was having this experience where the men that I was going on dates with were not asking me a single question the entire date. And at first I thought, is this me?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
What's going on here? And eventually I became really curious about what was happening. And it led me to do a lot of reporting about if there were any type of kind of gender or sex differences in question asking, particularly in romantic contexts. And I ended up writing about that for Quartz.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And indeed there are, but that really set me on the path to being very curious about question asking and identity. And that's a topic that I do pick up in the book as well. But one of the pieces that I wrote for behavioral scientists was all about question asking behavior in different contexts and really looked at what does it mean when we do or don't
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
ask questions in a lot of the research that's been done is in academic settings. And so it's really about understanding if you have folks who are, if you, let me start over, sorry. What the research is trying to understand is a lot of times in academic environments, women and men would ask questions at different rates, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And a lot of times women would not ask questions at the same rate as men. And so the question that researchers were asking is, well, why is this happening? And does it matter? What can we learn from question asking behavior? And so that was a really interesting topic for me and something that I explored along the way to writing the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I'll also say another thing that, another topic that I explored at Behavioral Scientists that continues to be really intriguing and important to me is this question of technology addiction and how do we, how do we decouple from our devices and from the often kind of addictive behavior that comes from overuse of our phones. fun piece that I got to do.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And that was also in an audio piece that I recorded. I really enjoyed those two topics in particular come to mind.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So I opened the book with this question of whether or not to divorce my husband because that was one of the biggest personal factors for me that led me to want to write the book in the first place. And I'll just back up a little bit and tell folks what was happening.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
At that point where, you know, when the book opens, I'd been with my husband for about five years dating, but we'd officially been married for only a few months. And what was happening at that point was really a confluence of a lot of factors. For years, I'd had doubts about my relationship with him. We loved each other, fundamentally, we expressed care in different ways.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And to me, care was all about validation. To him, care was about critical exploration. And that difference for us led to a lot of fighting and hurt on both sides. And at the same time, we had this connection over inquiry and a willingness to explore uncomfortable questions. But that connection, unfortunately, could also create a lot of tumult and conflict.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Part of me thought that getting married would somehow absolve me of the questions I had about our relationship. But unfortunately, it just seemed to amplify those questions. The other thing that was happening at that time and in that kind of scene that we drop into in the first part of the book is I had recently left my job to work on a creative project, but it wasn't panning out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So I was burning through my savings. I was in this place of not knowing what to do next, of not knowing what I was going to do next. I felt deflated that this project hadn't worked out. And at the same time, my husband was, he was working at the startup that was really demanding a lot of his time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And at this basic level, I didn't feel like he was giving me the care I wanted and needed and he felt the same way. And so it was this perfect storm. And so when I opened up, I was in the book. I was questioning about whether or not we should stay married, what I was doing with my life, whether I'd ever have the success as a creative person that I was craving.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I just felt crushed under all of that. And it was around that time that I came across Rilke and Letters to a Young Poet. and was struck in that moment by how comfortable I felt with uncertainty and questions in my professional life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
As we were talking about, this was a topic that was fascinating to me and that I wrote about in Behavioral Scientist, but this comfort with questions completely broke down in my personal life. I, Rilke talks about loving the questions. Well, I had never felt further from loving the questions in my life. I hated the questions. I hated these questions about What am I doing with my life?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And should I stay married to this person? And so it made me really want to understand what would it look like to change that and to learn what people were doing who had learned this way of being in the world. So that was really, I wanted readers to experience early on the personal impact and the stakes for me in this journey.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Well, it's a really interesting point because I think what I was feeling and I think what so many other people feel is it's so uncomfortable to be in that place of uncertainty, right? And so I think what I was craving in that moment was somebody just tell me what to do. Somebody just give me an answer, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I think in these moments of uncertainty, there's really a tendency that we have to want to rush to a fast, easy answer rather than explore and sit with the questions. And I think you can look at it as, yes, this can be a really uncomfortable experience, but In a way, it's also, it can be really freeing to realize and accept that, well, I don't have to have an answer right now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I don't need to rush to take action on this particular unknown in my life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Yes. So this is the questions framework that I introduce early on in the book. And the idea is to really help frame up what are the questions that we're talking about here. Again, whenever I bring up the subject of questions, people are like, well, what questions do you mean? And so I liken different types of questions to parts of a fruit tree.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And you can think about the first category of questions as you talk about as peaches, right? These are the short-term answerable questions in your life. Just as peaches ripen quickly on the tree, you can also get answers to these questions on a shorter timeline. So these are questions like, will I get the job? The second category of questions are the paw questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And this is a fruit that takes a pawpaw tree five to seven years to grow this fruit. And so these are longer term answerable questions. So an example of a question like this might be how you might stay in a relationship if a new fertility treatment will help you get pregnant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
You know, these types of questions that might take a little bit longer to answer, but you will still ultimately get an answer to the question. The next layer of questions is the heartwood question. And heartwood is the inner wood of the tree. And its purpose is to help with balance, stability, and security. So heartwood questions are the ones that really stay with you throughout your life.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
They help you come back to your core sense of equilibrium. And these are the questions like, who am I? How do I live a life of meaning and purpose? And finally, there are questions that don't ripen into answers and we don't ultimately want to love or live or carry with us anymore. And these are the dead leaves, right? These are the questions that we eventually need to release.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So this book is really an exploration of how to fall in love with the questions of our lives, particularly the ones that can be painful, and especially in a culture in which so many of us have become addicted to fast, easy answers. And I'll say, too, this book is really about my journey to explore this question through science, history, philosophy, poetry, religion, art.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And these are often questions about past decisions that drive rumination and suffering. Like, why did I break up with this person? Or what would I, what have I done it differently? And I think the rule here is if a question isn't helping you grow and move forward, it may be time to let it go.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Absolutely. So Parker was such a special person. He's an educator and activist who has written so many books and has carved out such a wonderful life for himself. But as you were saying, as he was finding his way in his career, he was really struggling under the weight of expectations, right? Of his family and friends for him to follow a more traditional path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
They really saw him as somebody who was headed for this path of becoming a university professor, pursuing this traditional academic path. But that never felt right to him. And so he was struggling with this question of what are you doing with his life? And what are you doing with your life, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And in part, he was struggling with it because he hadn't yet learned to sit with and explore some of the hidden parts of himself, the parts that didn't conform to the expectations of others. And what I talk about in the book in Parker's story is how through a deeper relationship with questions, he used questions as tools
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
as an internal GPS to find his way back to himself, what he really wanted, his own evolving truth. And so he really needed to understand that before he talked to others about it, before he communicated that truth with other people. But for much of his life, it was really submerged under this sense of, well, this is what I should be doing. And I need to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
pursue this path that other people think I should. And so the story that I tell is really about how he, through asking different questions and through his own kind of journey of self-discovery, was able to understand the way that those expectations had been guiding him versus his own needs and desires and really understanding how he could let those guide him along that path.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Wow. You articulated something that is so central to the book. And I think the first thing I will say to your point is that kind of journey to self-awareness is really a lifelong one, right? I think we can get better at knowing ourselves. But one of the things that I've found is just it helps to have a sense of self.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
kind of humility and also a sense of humor about it because we're all learning and figuring this out every day and so it's not necessarily a destination that you reach and all of a sudden you figured it out and you know everything about yourself and you've achieved self-awareness but a big part of it is almost the recognition that maybe i'll never fully achieve that self-awareness that i so desire but i'll talk a little bit about something practical that i think folks can do but before that take a step back because
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
This kind of relationship with yourself was so central, what I found, to this question of how do we live better and differently with uncertainty. And for a long time, I'd imagined that the best analogy for loving and staying committed to a big question was our love for someone else, right? Like a challenging relationship to someone else.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
But I learned throughout my research and the folks that I spoke to that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
that instead the relationship that we have and this was true for me and true for many people that i spoke to so i'm curious how this will resonate with you and other listeners but my relationship to my questions was not a reflection of some other kind of relationship to another person but it was a reflection of my relationship to myself and that was at the root of being able to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
really exist and sit with uncertainty with more ease and patience. To love the questions, we really first need to learn how to show ourselves more compassion, more love, and to commit to that first. And one of the ways that I found helpful to be able to do that, and one of the kind of tools that I bring up in the book, is the questions map.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And the idea there is to share a series of prompts to help folks not necessarily to find answers to their questions, but to find clarity and to really help guide folks through the flow of different potential questions that you can ask yourself to find your way back to who am I? What do I want? What's maybe making me feel uncomfortable or anxious in this particular period of uncertainty?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And so the first part of the questions practice and the questions map is really about curiosity and even becoming aware of and curious of some of the questions that might be behind some of the feelings of anxiousness or discomfort that you might have in a particular moment of transition.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
the question, how do you maybe take action on learning about that question, figuring out what you may already know, what types of communities might you be able to rely on to help you get more clarity on that question? And then finally, it's about really coming back and reflecting on what you learned and whether you want to keep holding and living that question or do you want to let it go?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
But for me, I've found that is developing that questions practice is a really crucial way of continuing to check in with yourself and deepen your own relationship to what you genuinely want, who you want to become, and is really key to strengthening that sense of integrity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And if it's helpful also for listeners, I can share a story too that kind of, I think, illustrates what it's like to go through some of the steps on the map. So do you mind if I share? And this is a story that I tell in the book about Tom Rockwell. He's the grandson of the famous artist, Norman Rockwell. And Tom...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I wrote it because when I was facing down this really painful uncertainty in my life, I was creating a guide to help me navigate it. Not someone or something to give me the answers, but to help me understand the experience better, to share wisdom from folks who had been there and come through it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
When we meet him, he's really struggling with these questions of who he was, what he was supposed to do with his life. He was in the shadow of his grandfather's fame and even his father's success as an artist. And that shadow was really hanging over him. So he felt this tremendous pressure to contribute something big to the culture, the way that they had.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And this really led him down this slippery slope of perfectionism, eventually becoming a workaholic. And it was a life that drove wedges between him and the people that he really cared about. Just like you're talking about Parker Palmer. He was trying to live up to a set of expectations for who he was supposed to be, what success meant, how to live his life rather than exploring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
What did those things mean for him? And so he really had to start by becoming aware of some of the questions that were running his life and driving his anxiety. Questions that he described to me as being almost primitive, like how do I do more? How do I be special enough so I don't get in trouble? How do I not be terrified?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And from that point, he realized he would need to start asking new questions because those other questions had been like fueling that workaholism. So he started to ask, what is this fear? How do I address it differently? And the fear was that he'd be socially rejected if he didn't work all the time, if he failed to live up to his this particular standard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I mean, this is something that I've felt that fear too. And so it really resonated with me. And this was when, yeah, yeah. I think so many of us, and this was when he started to take action, to live out one of his questions and to see what he could learn from that. And the question was, what would happen if I didn't work all the time? And so eventually
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
He found other new questions that he wanted to ask and live like, how can I help others? But I bring up his story because I think his journey really illustrates a big part of what it can look like to have a questions practice. And it's a journey again, not to understand necessarily what are the answers, but to clarify things like what are the questions that are behind the anxiety that I feel?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Am I asking the questions that I want to ask? And if I am, What do I already know? How can I find out? Or what might be other or different questions that I want to be guiding my life?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I love that question. And one of the big things that I found in my book and in my work is that one of the most fundamental things that we need to be able to sit with our questions to commune with uncertainty is community. And so I do write extensively about lots of different types of communities that can help us exist in uncertainty and have that be sustainable for longer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I think one of the things to keep in mind there is that community was really, when we think about what community did for us when we were very early on in human evolution, community was there to help us feel more secure and more stable. And actually people have found that community Being in community reduces the kind of cortisol that we have, makes us feel like we are more stable and secure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I love that. I have had many nicknames in my life. Having a very long name like Elizabeth Weingarten, you have to expect that. But different people in different parts of my life have given me different nicknames. My high school friends used to call me Dubs and my college friends called me Eliz. So I've never had like traditional Elizabeth nicknames.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I think what I found too in my work was not only do we need community to be able to sit with an existing questions, but also that questions can connect us to entire communities. And with Miguel and with so many others, he found a lot of comfort connecting with other undocumented immigrants who had faced similar questions in their life, similar experiences of uncertainty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And it really wasn't about getting answers from those communities. It was about accompanying each other through that uncertainty and kind of witnessing the experience that we have. And that was something that I found that questions could be this portal to belonging and to feeling like you, again, don't necessarily need to
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
know or find an answer to that question, but questions that connected you with groups of people that were experiencing similar things. And this was something, there was another story that I told in the book of Oliver, who was a guy who was questioning his gender identity and found similarly that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
these questions that he had, he found relief and kind of solace when he was able to connect with communities of people online, in his case, who were really struggling under similar questions. And so I think questions can be these connections to relationships with people that are
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Again, are not necessarily going to tell us what is the answer, but can make us feel comforted, supported, and make us feel like we belong during those moments that can be really uncomfortable in our lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So One of the most powerful ways that I've found to really explore, is this the right question for me? Is it a question that you feel opens you up to a wider field of possibilities? Or is it a question that feels like it's limiting you, that's setting you into this binary, this kind of yes or no approach?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And for me, a big example of that was realizing that the question that I was asking at the beginning of the book, should I divorce my husband? Is this the right person to be married to? I had this realization that I talk about in different parts of the book that that question was one that fundamentally wasn't giving me that open space to explore. It was leading me down two paths, yes or no.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Should I get a divorce? Yes or no, right? Neither of those answers felt like the right ones. And so I really had to consider, well, what's a better question? What's a different question? And a better and different question was, well, what would it look like for us to be able to stay together? What would have to change? How would we each need to change in order to make this relationship work?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I've never really been a Liz or a Lizzie or a Betsy, but Yeah, people choose more eccentric nicknames for me in my experience.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And so I would say a big... Kind of a big tool that I found is really supportive when we're facing that heavy uncertainty is, is this, do I feel like the possibilities are narrowing for me? Or do I feel like this question is opening me up? So that's one piece of advice I would share that has been very supportive and helpful for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Sure. They can visit elizabethweingarten.com and the book is How to Fall in Love with Questions, A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. And you can find links to get it on my website and really anywhere that books are sold. So grateful to you for asking.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Thank you so much, John. It was such a lovely conversation. I appreciate all of your thoughtful questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Yes. So exactly as you said, I grew up with actually two parents who are journalists. And at night, at dinner, my dad would both recount the exciting experience he had as a journalist at work that day. And so I was hearing and seeing how much he loved his job. And at the same time, I think the challenge for him was
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
feeling like, well, journalism was so meaningful and satisfying to him, but it wasn't the most financially lucrative job in the world. And so I think what he was getting at was he wanted me to find some financial stability. And this was also a time that journalism was undergoing really significant changes. So my dad became a journalist in in the 1970s, a heyday of journalism.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And think about kind of the Watergate scandal, Woodward and Bernstein, right? These kind of golden days of investigative journalism. And so when I was growing up in the, or when he was having these conversations with me in the early 2000s. This was a time that the internet was coming. People didn't really know how it was going to shape media. It was already starting to change media quite a bit.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And he saw that this was maybe not the most stable career path in the world. And so that was what he was trying to impart to me. But unfortunately, I loved it. I loved the experience of interviewing people, of starting out not knowing anything about a topic and a few having the excuse to call up people from all different kind of walks of life and to learn from them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Fundamentally, that's the thing that has always really excited me and interested me about journalism is you just get to talk to the most interesting people and you get an excuse to do that. In high school, I was the editor of the paper, and that was really my passion. And then I ended up studying journalism in school and college and started out more traditionally in journalistic organizations.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So I worked at The Atlantic and Slate. But over time, I found myself interested in journalism and journalism. other subjects and wanting to navigate a career where I could use my journalism skills to explore, for instance, kind of policy and eventually behavioral science, which we'll talk about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
But I think I've really worked now at the intersection of science and storytelling, doing journalism and applied behavioral science research everywhere from these traditional media outlets to the think tank, New America, to the applied behavioral science firm, Ideas 42, and now in the tech world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I think maybe another way to wrap up this career path is by sharing some of the questions that have really motivated me throughout my career. So questions like, why do we humans do the strange things we do? How can we change our behavior to benefit ourselves and those around us and how through a deeper understanding of psychology can we all live more meaningful lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Journalism has really given me a lens through which to understand the world and ask questions and has guided me to some of these other passions that have now really informed where my career is at this moment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
I'm so glad to hear it. And that is you articulated so much of what the book aims to express and talk about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Absolutely. So to take a step back here, as you said, the book is really all about how we can develop a different and healthier relationship with the uncertainty in our lives and with these kind of big questions in our lives. And I'll pause for a moment to just really clarify what are the questions that we're talking about?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
Because questions are such a big topic and it can be everything from what am I gonna eat for lunch, right? To who am I?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And those are the types of questions that I'm talking about in this book, these kind of big life questions, questions about purpose, meaning, relationships, identity, the questions that fundamentally don't have fast, easy answers, the questions that you're not gonna find answers to in a Google search, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And the book really, the idea for the book and the passion that I had for writing the book emerged during a time in my life when I was buckling under really heavy questions. These were questions about my marriage, my career, and the advice that I found again and again in self-help and pop psychology books was just to embrace uncertainty and
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And to me, this felt like a really deeply unhelpful platitude. And luckily, it was around that time that I discovered a much older book that contained what was, for me, a much better piece of advice, if not a more challenging piece of advice. And that book was Letters to a Young Poet. For those who aren't familiar with this book, it's a book of correspondence between the
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
19-year-old aspiring poet by the name of Franz Kappes. It's from the early 20th century. And it's a book that counts people like Lady Gaga, Dustin Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe among its fans. And Lady Gaga, I learned, even has a line from it tattooed on her. Pretty amazing. The whole book is beautiful. Highly recommend that folks read it. But I was struck by one part of it in particular.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And this is a part where Cappas, this aspiring poet, is asking Rilke, who he's 27 at the time when he's writing to him. Cappas is asking Rilke for all kinds of advice, not only about how to become a poet himself, but how to live his life. And Rilke very famously responds not with an answer,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
per se, but by telling Capus how important it is to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a foreign language. And he also advises Capus not to search for the answers now to his questions, but talks about the importance of living the questions.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
But Rilke, in this passage, he never explained what he meant by living the questions now, or even how to think about practically what it means to love the questions. And he also, unfortunately, wasn't talking or thinking about how to do this in a time of AI, Google, smartphones, social media influencers.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So this book is really an exploration of how to fall in love with the questions of our lives, particularly the ones that can be painful, and especially in a culture in which so many of us have become addicted to fast, easy answers. And I'll say too, this book is really about my journey to explore this question through science, history, philosophy, poetry, religion, art.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And I wrote it because when I was facing down this really painful uncertainty in my life, I was craving a guide to help me navigate it. Not someone or something to give me the answers necessarily, but to help me understand the experience better and to share wisdom from folks who had experienced been there and come through it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
To research this book, interviewed scientists, artists, religious scholars, historians, philosophers, talked to a professor with a mysterious illness who devoted her life to figuring out how to live better in uncertainty. A woman who was paralyzed in a car accident, who was rediscovering her identity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
the grandson of a very famous public figure who was determining how to live his life and who he was outside of that shadow of fame, renowned teachers of Zen Buddhism, psychedelic therapy researchers, so many more. And I'll just say finally, just to give folks a sense of how this journey unfolds, divided the book into three big parts.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
So part one is all about how the search for easy answers can fail us. And we look at why we crave certainty, how our current culture has exacerbated our desire for certainty and how it really hurts our minds, our bodies and societies. Part two is all about the rewards of committing to our questions and curiosity.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And that's where I'm sharing a lot of stories of folks who show us what are the benefits of being able to live and love the questions and how did their lives transform when they changed their relationships to uncertainty. And finally, in part three, talking about how to start your own questions practice, ways to begin living and loving questions yourself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Elizabeth Weingarten on How to Fall in Love With Questions | EP 605
And that's where we get into some evidence-backed tools to develop that practice and to help navigate your own experience in uncertainty. So I'll pause there. I'm sure we'll chat about many different parts of that.