Simone Stolzoff

You have to put the chips on the table.

And often what makes a hard decision hard isn't that there's like a clear better decision and a worse decision and we're just too stupid to see.

It's that these decisions have trade-offs.

Having a kid might give you some benefits.

Not having a kid might give you other benefits.

And at the end of the day, you just need to choose which trade-offs you're willing to accept.

Well, it's hard to be a human species then.

I think one place to start is looking backward.

And uncertainty tolerance, as I argue in the book, is a muscle that we can build over time.

And one of the first things that I'll ask people to do is to think about past moments in their life that were incredibly uncertain.

Maybe it was a period of time after you graduated school before you knew what to do.

or maybe after losing a loved one, or maybe a personal decision that you were flip-flopping on.

And then think about both what helped you in that moment and what came of that tumultuous period in your life.

I think one of the best things that we can do when we really don't know is to find what I call certainty anchors.

Those things in your life that will be the boulders amidst all the changing winds.

And so maybe they are your values or maybe they are your commitment to live in a given place or your commitment to your partner.

And you might not know whether or not you want to have a kid, but you can know some things that will remain constant regardless of whether you have a kid or not.

And I think that's a great place to start to find some grounding when we are certain about some aspects of our life that makes it easier to hold uncertainty in others.

And then part of it is just chance.

And I think one of the things that I've learned through living some uncertain periods, whether it's been as a freelance journalist abroad or switching careers or deciding to propose to my wife, for example, is that you don't necessarily need to have a lack of doubt in order to commit.