The Wisdom and Wonder of Uncertainty – Maggie Jackson

The Retirement Wisdom Podcast

We’re surrounded by uncertainty and we don’t like the feeling of not knowing. But there’s often hidden strength in some things that make us uncomfortable. Maggie Jackson’s new book explores the research that shows that uncertainty is not a weakness, but instead can be a powerful tool for navigating complexity with creativity and adaptability.

Maggie Jackson joins us from Rhode Island to discuss her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure and why we should embrace uncertainty as a catalyst for curiosity – and more.

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Bio

Maggie Jackson is an award-winning author and journalist known for her prescient writings on social trends, particularly technology’s impact on humanity. Her new book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure has been lauded as “remarkable and persuasive” (Library Journal); “trending” (Book Pal); “incisive and timely-triumphant” (Dan Pink); and “both surprising and practical” (Gretchen Rubin). Nominated for a National Book Award, Uncertain was named a Top 10 Social Sciences book of 2023 by Library Journal and a Top 50 Psychology book of the year by the Next Big Idea Club. The book inspired Jackson’s recent lead opinion piece in the New York Times on uncertainty and resilience.

Her acclaimed book Distracted: Reclaiming Our Focus in a World of Lost Attention sparked a global conversation on the steep costs of our tech-centric, attention-deficient modern lives. With a foreword by Bill McKibben, the book reveals the scientific discoveries that can help rekindle our powers of focus in a world of overload and fragmentation. Hailed as “influential” by the New Yorker and compared by Fast Company.com to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Distracted offers a “richly detailed and passionately argued … account of the travails facing an ADD society” (Publishers Weekly) and “concentrates the mind on a real problem of modern life” (The Wall Street Journal). The book is “now more essential than ever,” says Pulitzer finalist Nicholas Carr.

Maggie Jackson’s essays, commentary, and books have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, New Philosopher, on National Public Radio, and in media worldwide. She wrote the foreword to Living with Robots: Emerging Issues on the Psychological and Social Implications of Robotics (Academic Press, 2019) and has contributed essays to numerous other anthologies, including State of the American Mind: Sixteen Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism (Templeton, 2015) and The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking (Penguin, 2011). Her book, What’s Happening to Home? Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, was the first to explore the fate of home in the digital age, a time when private life is permeable and portable.

Jackson is the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships, including a 2016 Bard Graduate Center Visiting Fellowship; Media Awards from the Work-Life Council of the Conference Board, the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and the Women’s Press Club of New York. For a National Public Radio segment on the lack of labor protections offered to child newspaper carriers, she was a finalist for a Hillman Prize, one of journalism’s highest honors for social justice reporting. Jackson has served as an affiliate of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto; a Journalism Fellow in Child and Family Policy at the University of Maryland; and a Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum for Art in Wood in Philadelphia. Her website has been named a Forbes Top 100 Site for Women three times.

Jackson is a sought-after speaker, appearing at Harvard Business School, the New York Public Library, the annual invitation-only Forbes CMO summit, the Simmons and other top women’s leadership conferences, and other corporations, libraries, hospitals, schools, religious organizations, and bookstores. A graduate of Yale University and the London School of Economics with highest honors, Jackson lives with her family in New York and Rhode Island.

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For More on Maggie Jackson

Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure

Website

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Wise Quotes

On Tolerance of Uncertainty

“So, tolerance of uncertainty is a personality trait. It’s basically, in a nutshell, if you’re intolerant of it, you are fearful of the unknown, you see uncertainty as a threat. If you’re more tolerant and open to uncertainty, then you actually see uncertainty as challenging. So we’re not talking about Easy Street, but challenge versus threat makes all the difference. In fact, scientists and clinical psychologists now see an intolerance of uncertainty as being a root vulnerability factor, a risk factor basically for most mental disorders. So basically when you’re fearful of the unknown, you shut down, your thinking becomes rigid, the opposite to that kind of arousal and wakefulness and good thinking that I’ve been talking about.”

Why Uncertainty Can be a Gift

“Quite simply, humans and many other organisms need and want answers. So therefore, we’re built to basically have a stress response when we are uncertain. So just to unpack that a little bit, when you meet up with something new or unexpected or ambiguous, your body and brain kind of spring into action. And contrary to uncertainty as a mindset being synonymous with inertia, for instance, actually uncertainty, in effect, wakes you up. Scientists call this arousal. So the stress response leads to your palms sweating, you’re in a traffic jam, you are not sure if you will get to the meeting with the boss, your cortisol levels rise, but at the same time, your brain becomes more receptive to new data. Your attention sharpens, and scientists call this curious eyes, which is a wonderful term, and working memory improves. So there are a raft of cascading effects on the brain, literally because you’re uncertain. That is, you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge, and you recognize that maybe it could be this or it couldn’t be that – that you don’t know. This is not ignorance, but it’s that uncertainty is really a kind of almost a stimulant. In fact, doctors in sticky situations show, or report, this heightened attention as well as they tend to look ahead to muster resources to contend with a problem or situation. And CEOs in crises who are ambivalent actually outperform their ultra-decisive peers. They’re more inclusive, they’re resourceful. So here’s a incredible positive aspect of human thinking that we denigrate and have long ignored. So it’s quite interesting. The unease of uncertainty is actually a gift.”

On the Value of Pausing

“Pausing is really important for memory making. So if you’re learning different things, and say you are doing two different lessons on a software to learn French because you going to Europe next summer, pause just for a few minutes between those two different lessons, and your memory for the vocabulary will be about 20 to 25 percent more. This is true even when people show some memory loss, which is pretty stunning. Pausing also allows the brain to catch up with experience in other ways, to not just encode memory, but to sort of sift memory. So you’re actually able to insert the memory and you relatively, simplistically speaking, you’re able to store memories in places where you emerge with insight….a night’s sleep will do it too. So this is really important for meaning -making. It’s not doing nothing. And that’s one way in which learning about this kind of uncertainty, the suspense of uncertainty the space of the uncertainty has changed. I used to race from thing to thing when I was working – interview to interview and reading scientific papers and juggling….Everybody knows that feeling. Now I pause in between things just for a couple minutes, and I find that that actually has an incredibly potent impact.”

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About Retirement Wisdom

I help people who are retiring, but aren’t quite done yet, discover what’s next and build their custom version of their next life. A meaningful retirement doesn’t just happen by accident.

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About Your Podcast Host

Joe Casey is an executive coach who also helps people design their next life after their primary career and create their version of The Multipurpose Retirement.™ He created his own next chapter after a twenty-six-year career at Merrill Lynch, where he was Senior Vice President and Head of HR for Global Markets & Investment Banking. Today, in addition to his work with clients, Joe hosts The Retirement Wisdom Podcast, which thanks to his guests and loyal listeners, ranks in the top 1 % globally in popularity by Listen Notes, with over 1.2 million downloads. Business Insider has recognized Joe as one of 23 innovative coaches who are making a difference. He’s the author of Win the Retirement Game: How to Outsmart the 9 Forces Trying to Steal Your Joy.