How to Not Know 🙃

Max Hawkins had a “perfect” life. At twenty-three, he was a software engineer at Google, living a dream he’d envisioned since middle school. Every morning he woke up at exactly 7:00 a.m., drank the highest-rated coffee in his neighborhood, and followed the most efficient route possible to his office. He had successfully “optimized” his existence.

But then Max read a study that unsettled him: human mobility is so repeatable that researchers can predict an individual’s future movements with startling accuracy. He realized that his own life had become so programmed that it felt like he was reading a story he’d already read. He had optimized his way into a bubble, drifting farther away from anything outside of his own routine.

To break the cycle, Max did something radical. He wrote a program that summoned an Uber to a destination known only to the driver. That first ride dropped him off at a psychiatric emergency center. Undeterred, he found a bar around the corner and had a great time. Soon, he was letting randomization algorithms pick his food, his music, and even his tattoos.

Max had discovered what author Simone Stolzoff calls the “prison of your preferences”.

Presenting big Ideas from the book : How to not know

Core thesis: From our careers to our politics to our personal lives, the future is unknown. And yet, our capacity to tolerate this uncertainty is in decline. How to Not Know will help you prepare for and even appreciate the uncertainty that surrounds us.

Through gripping stories of people grappling with big problems without easy answers from an economist trying to predict the next market crash to an island nation reckoning with the existential impact of climate change acclaimed journalist Simone Stolzoff shows how to develop comfort with ambiguity and build tolerance for the unknown.

The Core Idea: Trading Comfort for Curiosity

The central thesis of How to Not Know is that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved; it is a skill to be developed.