Simone Stolzoff

And so there are these different competing values that I had.

And I was waiting to resolve all of them by just finding the one right choice, discounting my own ability to make that choice right.

I think a lot of us, whether it's deciding in a relationship whether you should stay or should go or whether to move, you're trying to find certainty.

You want to know exactly what is the, say, right college that you should attend.

But it's impossible to have full certainty about anything that happens in the future.

And by driving ourselves towards looking for that certainty, it can be a source of our suffering or our dismay.

Yeah, I'm glad you made that distinction.

I think about it in sort of two different ways.

There's acute uncertainty.

So that's, for example, not knowing whether you passed the bar exam or not knowing the results of a medical test that you went through.

And then there's this more ambient uncertainty.

Questions like, how will climate change affect my life?

Or will I have a career in 10 years?

And I think it's important to differentiate between the two.

So we can start with acute uncertainty.

If there is a question that will have an answer one day.

There's some really interesting research that I quote in the book from this researcher named Kate Sweeney.

And she specifically studies breast cancer patients and sort of the process and the journey of going through a cancer diagnosis.

And one thing that she found was that the hardest part for the majority of the patients that she worked with was the period between getting a biopsy and getting the results of that biopsy.

That was harder than any sort of chemo or any sort of surgery.