The Power Of Not Knowing: Embracing Uncertainty For A More Insightful Life With Maggie Jackson

What if not knowing was your greatest strength? In a world that worships certainty and quick answers, award-winning author and journalist Maggie Jackson invites us to pause and consider the power of uncertainty. In this episode, we dive into her acclaimed book Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure—a bold and timely exploration of how embracing ambiguity can lead to deeper insight, creativity, and resilience.

From leaping into life as a foreign correspondent in Tokyo without speaking the language, to becoming a thought leader on attention and social change, Maggie’s journey is a masterclass in the beauty of disorientation and the growth that follows. We explore the flashpoints that shaped her path, the uncomfortable magic of stepping outside your comfort zone, and why curiosity—not control—might be the key to thriving in uncertain times. Get ready for a conversation that’s as thought-provoking as it is inspiring.

---

Listen to the podcast here

The Power Of Not Knowing: Embracing Uncertainty For A More Insightful Life With Maggie Jackson

It is my honor to introduce my guest, Maggie Jackson. Maggie is an award-winning author known for her prescient writings on social trends. Her latest book, Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure, explores why we should seek not knowing in an era of angst and flux. Her book has been nominated for a National Book Award and was named the Top 25 Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Next Big Idea Club. Uncertain was also named a Top 10 Book of the Year by Library Journal, Greater Good Magazine, and the Artificiality Institute. It was chosen as a 2025 Non-Fiction Book of the Year by the Independent Publishers of New England.

A past foreign correspondent in Asia and Europe and former Boston Globe columnist, Maggie contributes regularly to major publications, including the New York Times. Her acclaimed book, Distracted, sparked a global conversation on the cost of fragmenting our attention. Maggie has advised leading executives, scientists, educators, and changemakers worldwide, and her work has been translated into multiple languages. It is truly an honor to welcome you to the show.

I’m so glad to be with you, Tony. Thank you for having me.

Sorry for having some mix-ups in the intro, but I'll tell you right now, it's wonderful to see the book getting the recognition it deserves. It's a fantastic book. Uncertain is one of those books that hit me. It was controversial to me because everyone wants certainty in the world, but we know that we need to lean in sometimes to the not knowing. I love that you wrote this book. I also love that we recently had the chance to meet in person, which is a rarity these days.

That is a great coincidence, a fun quirk of fate there.

Ironically, we also found out that we don't live too far away from each other. You're living in Rhode Island. I'm living in Massachusetts, so we're practically neighbors. I'm thrilled to have you on the show. We're going to have an exploration of how you got to be doing such amazing work in the world. We'll talk about the book and so much more. We'll have a great conversation.

We're going to talk about flashpoints. As we often do, we explore the path that got you doing this work through flashpoints, the moments that have ignited your gifts into the world. I'll have you share what you're called to share. We'll pause along the way and see what themes are showing up. With that, Maggie, are you ready?

Sounds great. That's wonderful.

Take it away. Let's start with your flashpoints.

Can you elaborate a little bit because I'm not familiar with that term?

What are some of the moments that have helped to bring you into the work that you're doing?

I guess seeking to move beyond what I was comfortable doing, which I also see as a theme of your work. I was always hungry to learn as a child, and that drew me to reporting, to being a student journalist and editor, and then to seek reporting as a career option when I was young. That curiosity also led me to move to Tokyo when I was 25, without speaking the language, and having never lived abroad before.

Moving To Tokyo & Navigating Uncertainty

I went on a vacation, sold my car, moved back, and landed a job. It was quite a steep learning curve. That's the thing I love doing, getting a little bit over my head, whether it's a topic for a book or an article, or trying out new things. That was a flashpoint, moving to Tokyo at 25, knowing no one whatsoever, not knowing very much about Japan, but knowing that at that point, it was a hot story.

I wanted to be there. Those are the flashpoints in my life. That's why I jumped from full-time journalism to being an independent writer, independent scholar, still a journalist, but writing books when I was 40. I wanted to make the move. I wanted to try new kinds of writing and dip my toe in the waters of lots of different kinds of writing and research. That's when I wrote my first book. Those are a couple of big flashpoints for me. I guess you could say, having not thought about it this way before, that the flashpoints came with stepping out of my comfort zone, but also the transitions. Anytime I get comfortable with something, I feel as though that's not where I want to stay.

First of all, starting with Tokyo is an amazing flashpoint, this idea of curiosity and the excitement of not knowing what was going on, but realizing that that was leading you into the space of this is exactly where I need to be because it's going to allow me to grow substantially through this process of discovery, learning, and all that. Tell me some of the most harrowing moments that you had in that experience. What did you learn while you were there? Maybe share a moment or two that you remember.

Navigating Uncertainty & Learning In Disorienting Situations

Through being in a culture that's so group-oriented, I starkly realized what it meant to grow up in our own individualist culture. They say that a fish can't recognize the water that it's in or doesn't understand the concept of water. To move to Asia, the doors open the other way around. Everything is opposite. People drive on the left side of the road in Europe or Britain, anyhow, but similarly there. Everything was flipped. Particularly, understanding what it meant to prioritize group harmony, for better or worse. I’m not saying that that was all good either. I learned quite a bit about that, and I learned about myself as an independent person, very far from home.

This was back before we had social media, or it was easy to call home. There were no cell phones. There was very little English on even the subway. As a reporter, I had to find my way around Tokyo with very few support systems other than my own independence. I guess I learned in a lot of ways. I can be a pretty impatient, high-energy, get-going, do, do, do, run, run, run person. I also learned with difficulty how to pause and take something in and realize that I could get through this. There are options that I need to draw a deep breath and move.

The last thing I'll say is that I learned the beauty that can be found even in what seems like very ugly circumstances. I mean that both literally and metaphorically, because Tokyo is a very big and bustling city. I think someone might have said 23 million, don't hold me to that, but huge city, very urban, concrete, not much greenery there, compared to some other parts of the world in the city. Yet, you round the corner and there is a gorgeous little Shinto shrine amidst the skyscrapers, or you might be dining under the train tracks, which is a thing. There are so many elevated trains. There are little pocket restaurants underneath the railroad tracks that are cool. It's not an icky thing, but then you'll get a dish that is conceived and aesthetically presented as if it were in a Michelin-star restaurant.

These tiny moments of beauty being part of life were how I was raised by my father, who was a teacher, a very homespun person, but he was very happy with the small moments of joy. It's not that he arranged his dinner plate in aesthetic fashion, but he did it experientially. We can do this in terms of all ways of perception and philosophy. I think they're connected. Finding moments of joy in daily life is connected to finding moments of beauty as well.

Finding moments of joy in daily life is connected to finding moments of beauty as well.

First of all, I appreciate what you're sharing, but there's a sense of “disorient, so you can orient.” I don't mean that in the sense that the orient, but you want to take things apart so you can put them back together in a way that makes sense for you. These experiences that you've had and the way that you've navigated are this ability to put yourself in situations that are chaotic or seemingly chaotic, but also finding ways to, in the small moments or the small pieces, put them back together with intention.

I think with openness, there's never a perfect box. There's never a perfect answer, but we can come to a sense of meaning sometimes when we least expect it. For instance, writing stories on the fly, I moved to London after that. You have very little time, often as a journalist, to write a story on a very new topic. You might not even have a track record or an education in that topic, especially as a general beat reporter.

What you're doing is throwing yourself into the frustration, the disorientation, and then the story will surface if you listen to it and have some patience. Sometimes, I would be completely confused about what the story was all about at 3:00 PM, when the story was due at 4:00, and yet the last phone call would be the one that was pulled together. Again, there's that space of uncertainty in the positive way.

One of the things I often hear from people who are former or recovering journalists is the sense that you don't feel like you're in control of the story. As you described, you don't know where it's going to go until the very end. There's also an element of “If it leads, it bleeds,” or that effect, this idea of whatever is going to be the hot topic of the day. When you started to get into the sense of writing your own stories or feeling like you are going to do things that are more long-form, it allows you to be more in control, have freedom. Tell me about that experience for you.

Even when you're writing about something that seems predictable, or a press conference, I remember I went on a press tour of the Japanese prison system. Of course, the authorities are giving you a very canned and packaged tour and presentation. You can always find something new, and you can always find subterranean meaning behind either your expectations or the assumptions that others want to give to you.

Whether or not you're writing in the moment or something long-term, that openness is a real key to originality. I don't want to use truth in such a terribly literal meaning, but something that rings true, something that is what's hidden behind our first impressions. That's an important part of what I've always tried to value as a writer.

To dig beneath the surface and see what's going on, but also what the truth is that I'm trying to unearth through this process. It's not on the surface. You're going to have to do some work there, which is the fun part.

I've always been drawn to, as I began to write books, big, messy topics that are right under our noses, like the nature of home, or what is attention? We talk about it all the time, or what is uncertainty? Also, try to parse these topics that, chances are, sometimes we live and breathe, but we don't think about or understand truly. That's happened to be the way I approach my books.

This is going to be one of those challenging questions. Here you are writing about interesting things like uncertainty, attention, and things like that, but when you think back to the child that you were, did you ever think you'd be talking and writing about this stuff? What did you think you'd be writing about?

I was always torn between theatre and writing. I did a lot of theatre. It was a toss-up until college, whether I was going to be an actress or a writer, two different but related creative tasks. I guess I wouldn't have predicted that I'd be writing about these big, messy topics. I think all the pieces were there in terms of curiosity and in terms of wanting to go out on a limb. You have to be vulnerable to put something in writing out there to act. A performance is out there for people to view. Somehow, I was always drawn to that as a way of finding meaning or living life to its fullest, I would say.

That's what makes it challenging. You're putting something out there that is going to potentially ruffle people's feathers, maybe get people saying, “What? That's controversial,” and they don't agree with it. That's okay.

Sometimes, you're offering social or technological criticism. I've written a lot of tech criticism, asking hard questions about these devices, and what they're doing to our minds and our relationships, long before people were asking those questions. Yes, there's a cost or risk to that. That's, I guess, where digging to the heart of things and trying to come up with meaning that's fair, being a communicator of the science but also an analyst of the trends, all of that means that you can take a risky stance, but you put in the homework. Before I do an interview or write something, I put in a lot of homework.

I know we're going to get into your latest book, but was there a period in time where you felt like you had to develop tough skin to the critics, to the people out there who were maybe challenging your thought leadership or your words along the way? Did you feel like that was ingrained in you early days when you were a journalist?

Developing A "Tough Skin" & Navigating Criticism

No, I'm a sensitive person. I've never had tough skin. That helps me be very observant, sensitive to my surroundings, in tune with things, and pick up on things. It's also hard as a person who gets counterpoints and welcomes counterpoints. I think when I wrote the Distracted book, the first time it came out in 2008, the iPhone had only been out a year, and distraction was seen as a joke. It was seen as positive that people would seek job candidates who were high multitaskers. Distraction was a badge of honor in these early days.

I was saying, “Wait a minute.” The subtitle to the first edition was The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age in 2008. There's an entire chapter about what constitutes a dark age, and why. To my horror, I could see the signs that we were heading into that age. Fast forward, and there has been a backlash against technology, even though we don't have all the answers about our relationship with technology. There were a lot of moments when people were thinking I was a dark Debbie Downer, Cassandra-like, what are you doing raining on the party? There wasn't the financial meltdown hadn't even happened when this book came out. It was a lonely journey at that point.

I have to say it was very difficult. It was maybe 5, 10, even 15 years later, the tenth anniversary edition came out in 2018, fully updated. That was a great chance to go back into the book and realize that most of the book was still timely. It's selling, I'm getting asked to talk about Distracted, and I kept up with the research, etc. I'm not saying I was right. Of course, I wasn't all right, but I was trying to ask those questions when very few people and even scientists were doing so. I'm heartened that at least we have a more mature, more complicated relationship to our technology than just, “It's all bad,” or “It's all good.”

First of all, I think you're a futurist. Maybe that's your title for now that we should own. I want to know what you're going to write about next because that's where we're going to be in the future. It is hard when you start writing about something that the day hasn't arrived yet, because you are the early thought leaders in this space. It can be lonely. It can be something that hits with a lot of criticism, maybe a lot of skeptics. You realize, slowly, people start to get on board and realize there's truth here. We need people to challenge the conventional wisdom. We need contrarians, if you will, because that's what allows us to break through the echo chamber.

I wrote an article about this in Fast Company a bit ago about the echo chambers that we get stuck in, because we say, “I think like that person. That's great, so I like that person.” The problem is that we get into that place, and it has become self-affirming. We don't need that. We need to break through and say, “Where can I get in the community with people who think differently?”

That is so important. It sounds simple, but it's very difficult. If we allow ourselves to remain in a society based on misunderstandings or hatred for the other side, and complete conformist agreement with our side, then everybody loses. When you are in agreement with your team or your in-group, the creativity falls, accuracy falls, and people cease to see one another as they cease to challenge one another. I call the agreement an opiate. It's important to break through not just unfair categorization of others, but also to break through that complacency of our side and our own thinking.

We fall into agreeing with ourselves where our own minds are echo chambers because of the weight of our biases, expectations, and assumptions, aka our knowledge. That's important. Knowledge is important. What we know is important, hard-earned, accrued, and practiced, but we've got to operate at the edge of that, and further into the world of what we don't know or what shakes us up, as we were talking about a minute ago.

It feels good neurologically to be right. Being wrong challenges everything, but we need to be wrong more often because that allows us to grow. That's where growth happens. I think that's an element of this. Maybe I'm using the terminology wrong, but this idea of allowing ourselves to lean into uncertainty, as we're going to get into in a moment. The whole idea of moving forward is allowing us to see things differently.

It's not just being wrong, although it's important, but being uncertain, which is not right or wrong. Allowing the possibility that we might not know is related to allowing the possibility that we might be wrong. All of that complicates things in a positive way.

The Journey To Writing Uncertain

First, I think that Uncertain was a book that you were destined to write, whether you like it or not. This is who you are in terms of navigating the uncomfortable moments of not knowing where you're headed. Tell me about the journey to getting into writing the book. Who are the people you talked to that you interviewed along the path of getting to this book? Let's talk about the book itself. We'll take our time getting there.

It was definitely a follow-up to the Distracted book. I ended the Distracted book with a chapter about thinking and reflection because attention is a vehicle. What do we want to do with our moment of focus or skillful attention? Probably, the top priority would be to think well. We want to use our attention to learn and to think well.

I started writing a book about what it means to think well in the digital age, when we prize the quick, the shortcut, the fragmented, etc. Those are types of thinking. I started thinking about what it means. Is contemplation only a religious term? What is reflection? I was messing around with those ideas. I planned a preface and a quick chapter on uncertainty, as this realm that I would get asked. It would then be a book about good thinking, and then uncertainty proves to be a sinkhole and a rabbit hole of wonderful scientific discoveries and constant surprises, and overturning my understanding of uncertainty, so I pivoted the book to be about uncertainty.

Every one of my books has started out with a question, which isn't the question that I end up answering. It's a portal into points of curiosity. I realized it's amazing how it seems easy to think about topics that are right under our noses and yet we couldn't barely define, as I say about these books. It's hard to think about what is ripe for the plucking, the fruit that fits in with our life and is an important aspect of humanity. That's how I came to journey into Uncertainty.

I want to pause for a minute to say that's a flashpoint, these things that we stumble across in the path of doing something else. You're writing a book about thinking, but then you stumble across uncertainty. That becomes the thing that you now want to follow up on in the thread. That's an interesting way to think about it.

The thing that won't let go, you have to know that that's a topic you want to live with for years, and that has a long life. I keep mentioning curiosity, but it's true. It's all about that and something that you feel is important to dig into.

It's a great way to think about it, too. Anyone who's written a book knows that this is not something where you write a book and it's like, “That was nice,” then you move on. It becomes something that is part of you after the book is written, which takes some time in its own right. It becomes a dialogue that you then continue with people as you get up and talk about it. It becomes part of you.

It's true. When my first book came out, it was a little thin book about the nature of home and the digital age. I got the box when it came to my apartment. I opened the box. There was the first printed copy. Everybody who's written something knows that's a very special moment. I carried a copy from room to room with me that day, I was treating it like a baby that could be left alone. That's the way I think about it. I think of these books as children, because you throw a kid into the world after this long gestation, relatively speaking. You don't know, children lead you in directions, open up worlds to you, and introduce you to people. That's the way I think about these books. They send them off into the world, and you don't know where they're going to take you, which is fun.

It's wonderful. Let's talk about Uncertain. Tell the audience. What is it about Uncertain that captures our interest and has us thinking that it's not just something that we should run away from, but we should lean into?

In a nutshell, Uncertain tries to take the new scientific discoveries in and around this topic and this mindset and unearth the idea that there's so much uncertainty that we misunderstand. We think of being unsure as weakness. We think of uncertainty in life as a negative, and yet, that's not true. There are two kinds of uncertainty. One is the uncertainty out there, the unpredictability, what we can't know, etc., but then there's also our unsureness. That's the human response to the unknown.

The Role Of Uncertainty In Creativity & Adaptability

In a nutshell, our epistemic or psychological uncertainty is critical for curiosity, for creativity, for resilience, for adaptability, because uncertainty opens up the space between question and answer. Therefore, I talk about skillful uncertainty or strategic uncertainty. These are all starting points about uncertainty that I think haven't been talked about. If we think of it as positive, we think of it as something to accept or let's be comfortable. Neuroscientifically, uncertainty plays a role in offering a signal that something in the environment has changed or is ambiguous.

Uncertainty is a good stress. It revs you up, your brain included. Your attention and working memory go up. It's a signal that it's time now to drop autopilot and start assessing or adapting to the world. When we put it in those terms, we can begin to see that it's not this abyss. It's not a disaster. It's not a quicksand that mires us in nothingness. It's a very active, dynamic set of cognitive skills, because we can be unsure in different ways in different situations. That's a little introduction to what it's all about.

It has me thinking also about the way we think about dopamine and how dopamine was seen as an end goal. You get excited or you're happy at the end of something being achieved. The reality is that's where we like the uncertainty of something not being known because it brings in a sense of excitement, or we're striving for something that is not known.

Yes. You get a little dopamine hit even when there's a possibility of new information. You might hear about a new bakery in town. There's a possibility of both a reward but also new information about eating in your town. Things have changed. It's not that you have an answer, per se, but curiosity is a rewarding state for the human brain.

That's important to hold on to. As you alluded to, to focus on the outcome, which is so much a message of our society. It’s your SATs, your ROI figures, your title. Outcome matters. The process matters both for gaining a good outcome, but also in terms of the pleasure of life. Investigating, digging in, and asking questions, all of these are related to pleasure and meaning in life. That's very much a part and parcel of uncertainty. What's important, as I mentioned, is that uncertainty is not comfortable because it's a challenge when something is new, unexpected, or ambiguous, and you're put in that state of good stress, but you want to investigate or resolve the uncertainty.

Society places heavy emphasis on outcomes—SAT scores, ROI figures, job titles—because results matter. In truth, the process matters just as much. It not only contributes to better outcomes but also brings pleasure and meaning to life through exploration and curiosity.

That's not an easy street. This is not the potato chip of cognitive science. This is a little bit harder to harvest, so to speak. It's where we invest in better answers, where we invest in the hidden meaning, and how we invest in getting beyond the first thought that comes to mind, which is based on what you already know. You can see the link between invention and creativity.

I love the way you approach this. First of all, you make things very approachable in general, but also this element of you need to have the desire to want to move to that first step that will then lead to the next thing. It becomes a ladder of motivation that keeps moving us forward. The thing that keeps us going is the uncertainty. The one thing that keeps on noodling around in my mind is this idea of when is too much uncertainty too much. I'm probably not asking you very well. Tell me when it can be too much to have an overwhelming sense of uncertainty.

Yes, I think so. There's no recipe. There's no single point I can tell you. It's different for every person. As you might be more or less shy, or I might be more or less extroverted, so too are we more or less tolerant of uncertainty. People who are highly tolerant will find a lot of uncertainty, not very overwhelming, and the opposite can be true. It's very subjective. I think total chaos, total drift, total randomness is overwhelming, but an important point is that it shouldn't stop us from being open to uncertainty.

Even in extreme situations, you have a cancer diagnosis, which seems overwhelming, and no one wants anyone to be in that position. At the same time, there's an opportunity to utilize the uncertainty of the moment for good. If you can be skillfully unsure, if you can meet that with curiosity, even though there's going to be fear, you're going to be better off, you're going to learn, you're going to grow, you're going to even have a better quality of life in that threatening situation.

Yes, there can be too much uncertainty. More our problem in society and life now is seeing it as a negative to begin with, closing down, retreating into certainty, whether it's dogmatic politics, or categorization, stereotyping of other people, or wanting to hide from all of the challenges of our current situation by retreating into comfortable things that don't allow us to grow. This is a challenging moment on a higher scale.

That doesn't mean we can't rise to the occasion. That's exactly what uncertainty does. It puts you firing on all cylinders. As I mentioned, all of these good stress, neurotransmitters, and hormones instigate these changes in your body and brain. You might feel stress like a beating heart. At the same time, your brain is also waking up, being alive. Don't retreat from that. Move into that uncertainty. Know that this is different from fear. It’s a very important point because the fear response is different from the uncertainty response.

If you're fearing the unknown, that's called clinical anxiety. You're shutting down. You're afraid. Your higher-order centers of the brain, particularly, are shutting down. Whereas with the uncertainty, your brain is preparing to learn and grow. It's ready. It's in a state that is prime for learning and growing. Distinguishing between performance mode and survival mode or uncertainty and fear is important. I think with practice, we can do that.

That example you gave is such a wonderful example, the cancer diagnosis. What people are often dealing with in that moment is this idea of it's almost coming to that momentum or a situation where you want to seize the day because I don't know what happens next. You start to act with intention. You start to move into the possibilities of what I can do right now with what I have. That's wonderful. Whereas if you have this sense of, “I have more time, I can go about my business and worry about whatever happens next.” That doesn't have you in that state. Having that little bit of tension, that uncertainty about having the next day, allows you to act with a little more energy.

That's very well put. It reminds me of this study that I might have mentioned to you, but it's about CEOs. During a very big crisis expansion of the European marketplace, researchers studied the response of 100 CEOs. It was a before-and-after longitudinal study. Long story short, the CEOs who were ambivalent at the beginning about whether or not this would be a good thing and didn't feel in control turned out to be the most successful in that moment of challenge and crisis.

They were more inclusive. They were more resourceful. They saw possibilities. That's another thing that people call uncertainty, a space of possibilities. A lot of scientists call it that. The people who didn't do anything stuck to the status quo. The CEOs were the ones who thought that they knew what to do. They thought they were in control. They retained the fallacy of control. That's not an energetic place to be.

Maggie, I could talk about this all day, and you're like, “I don't have all day.” I want to ask, what are some things that you've learned about yourself in the journey that you've been on in writing the books and the research you've done through a lot of these interesting topics that you haven't shared already?

That's a very good question. You mean what I've learned in terms of the topic of uncertainty?

About yourself.

Personal Reflection & Lessons Learned From Writing The Book

I guess I've learned some of the finer nuances between how to be curious and alive to the world, but to do so with more openness. You would say I'm all about that curiosity and openness. I have, but I also have always been a worrier. There was always a little bit of stress, not the good kind, worrying about the outcome. Now, this book has made me worry a lot less about the outcome, but not that I don't have goals, not that I don't work toward my goals, not that I don't envision scenarios to prepare myself. That's all important.

I can move into a situation like giving a very difficult presentation, even doing a new piece of writing, or having a difficult conversation, where I am less worried about which outcome I want and what outcome might be best and more surfing, if you pardon the ocean metaphor, surfing the situation at hand. With that comes a liberated feeling. I find that that's an enjoyable lesson to have learned.

It's a mic drop moment right there because there's something about that, which is to say that this book has been therapeutic to me and to many others who have read it. That's a wonderful thing when you can write a book that has had an impact on you and how you navigate your life.

All my books are posing big questions that I want to find out answers to, not just an answer, but answers and other people's perspectives. I would say that this one was very timely, in that it has helped me ride out COVID, deal with personal challenges, think about the transition into whatever chapters in life I want to go into as I get older, or think about where I want to live, where I want to base myself. All these questions are a little less scary. That's terrific. I do find that I've heard that from many people, and that is especially young people, it's so heartening to hear that this book, the science of uncertainty can help equip people to find even the biggest scarier challenges to be more approachable, that it equip them to have a little more joy, even these very dark times.

I didn't realize how much time we've eaten up here. I have one last question for you that I ask every guest. What are 1, 2, or 3 books that have had an impact on you and why?

I read so much. So many books have had an impact on me. In terms of uncertainty, the work of the philosopher John Dewey, who was a pretty homespun guy, is very accessible. His book The Quest for Certainty gave me a big picture historical look at the Western ideal of certain answers, which is now pretty much crumbled. That gave me a very big, long view on this topic. It was important.

I'm very fascinated by memoirs of childhood. I eat them up, people's autobiographies, or even biographies of people when they were children, as a child, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt. I'd love to know where they came from and how they survived difficult times. One of the ones that I love is Gorky, the Russian writer’s My Childhood. It's the first of a trilogy. He goes on to talk about his university days, etc. My Childhood is funny, raw, gritty, and beautiful. I found a lot of inspiration from that book. He had a very difficult childhood, but it's so full of life.

I love that you shared that. I love memoirs like that. This is why I created the show in many ways to look at the journey people go on. Especially when you look at the early days, sometimes, they hold the key to all the things we do later in life. We just don't know it yet. We got to look back and say, “What were those little glimmers that we had early days?” Wonderful.

I think so. I'm moving into, as part of the book, this Uncertain book was about children raised in precarity, and the strengths that they have that have been overlooked by society. I'm continuing on with that research. I'm very interested in where we came from and how that might shed light on how we can all live in what will continue to be a very unpredictable, volatile, uncertain era.

Maggie, thank you so much for coming on the show. You have given up so many insights and great stories and served us in so many ways. Thank you for being on the show.

Thank you so much. It was an interesting conversation. I loved it.

Before you go, I want to make sure the audience knows where to find you if they want to learn more about your work.

You can google 'Maggie Jackson Uncertain,' and you'll find my website. My website has a lot of other podcasts, interviews, articles, excerpts from the book, and how to contact me. I'm also on LinkedIn.

Thanks again. Thanks to our audience for coming on the journey. That is a wrap.

Important Links

• Maggie Jackson's Website
• Maggie Jackson on LinkedIn
• Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure
• Distracted
• Why Critical Thinking Matters Now More Than Ever
• The Quest for Certainty
• My Childhood

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! https://www.ipurposepartners.com/podcast