Simone Stolzoff

You're increasing your surface area of luck.

You can control how you express your values, what is important to you, looking for someone that shares those values.

You can control your intentions to want to, for example, have a kid by a certain age and try to find a partner that wants to have that as well.

And you can't always control your biology, what happens in life circumstances, what happens in your career, whether your partner changes your mind.

And so keeping yourself grounded in that category of things that you can control, having those intentions, but keeping them as intentions as opposed to mandates is a much more adaptive way to live your life.

I'll give you one example.

When my wife and I got pregnant and trying to have our first kid,

We walked into the doctor's office on the first day and we created this list of how we wanted the birth to go.

And we handed the doctor the list and we said, okay, these are our birth plan.

This is exactly how we want it to go.

And the doctor looked at us and she said, it's your first time, isn't it?

And the idea was that, okay, it's great to have intentions of how you want the birth to go, but rarely does everything go to plan.

And so it's better to have preferences.

not a rigid plan.

And when we are too fixed on a rigid plan, whether it's a strategy for an organization or a plan of how we are going to live our life, it becomes like a narrow bridge that we're balancing upon.

We're susceptible to be blown over by a strong gust of wind.

Yeah, I think religion is an incredible anchor.

You know, that term that I used before, like, for example, last week, my grandmother passed away.

She was 99 years old.

And in the Jewish tradition, there's this tradition of Shiva, which is these instructions for what you do in the first seven days after a loved one passes away.