Cate Hall on Taking More Chances And Other Ways to Increase Your Luck

Doree Shafrir (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to Forever35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.

Elise Hu (0:16)

And I'm Elise Hu, and we're two friends who like to talk a lot about serums.

Doree Shafrir (0:20)

And today we have Cate Hall, who I mean, I think the best way to describe her is like fascinating person. Yeah, she's worn a lot of hats.

She's lived a lot of lives, honestly. She went from being a corporate lawyer, like on the partner track, Yale Law graduate.

Elise Hu (0:42)

Supreme Court clerk, I think at one point.

Doree Shafrir (0:44)

Super legit to leaving that all behind, becoming a professional poker player, which is where I first like learned of her because it was, it coincided with when I became very interested in poker. And so I was like, who aren't like the big female poker players? Like there's not a ton of them. And she was also very active on Twitter at the time. And so I followed her and she was like a great Twitter follow. And then she kind of like dropped off and like the pandemic, like I just kind of like lost track of her. Turns out she was addicted to drugs for three years.

And she got sober and started working in tech and wrote, like she wrote a couple books and her new book is called You Can Just Do Things and it's about, it's like all about how to take agency in your own life. I found it very timely for me personally. So yeah, I thought her book was like, and it's very actionable.

She's a lot of like exercises in the book of like how to do things and yeah, it's a good manual, I think if you're at a place in your life where you feel kind of stuck.

And she's just like super smart and cool.

Elise Hu (1:58)

Yeah, she was very wise. It seemed like she was wise beyond her years. And she had some takeaways actually from the book. We kind of drilled into a few of the things.

In You Can Just Do Things. So I've pulled out some of those things and put them in our newsletter, which is out now on our Patreon, but also goes into your inboxes if you already subscribe. And that Cate conversation is coming up later. But here we are.

Doree Shafrir (2:26)

Here we are.

Elise Hu (2:27)

In August, and we're already winding down our summers here on the West Coast because school, kids are going back to school in Arizona and in California and Washington and Oregon. And it's wild, like it's gone by so fast. And in some ways it's dragged on.

We've talked about the elasticity of time. But what are you looking forward to in the school year? What do you have coming up?

Doree Shafrir (2:58)

Well, you know, Henry's starting a new school. So a lot of unknowns. I'm currently like trying to negotiate with the school department about his bus stop because the one that was assigned to him is like very far from our house and has a super early pickup. And I was like, are there any other options? So trying to figure that out. Like there's just a lot of like, I don't know, it feels like there's a lot of like bureaucracy and setup that I'm trying to accomplish. And like navigate all of that in a new school and you know, just like new, everything is new.

So, you know, trying to go into it with like an open mind and curiosity and also be like, nothing is permanent. If this doesn't work for our child or our family, like he can go to a different school.

Elise Hu (3:56)

How is he feeling? Is he excited?

Doree Shafrir (3:58)

He seems neutral.

Elise Hu (3:59)

Okay.

Doree Shafrir (4:00)

Honestly, like he doesn't seem super anxious.

But he also doesn't seem like excited. It's just sort of like he's accepted it. You know what I mean?

Elise Hu (4:11)

Yeah.

Doree Shafrir (4:13)

So I don't know.

I think he so doesn't know what to expect that it's just like, how can he even fathom what it's going to be like? Right. So I don't know. We'll see.

Elise Hu (4:26)

Issa has expressed she was like, I don't know about this transition to middle school. I'm scared to go to middle school. There's so many kids. Is Ava going to talk to me? Ava's probably not going to talk to me because she's going into sixth and Ava's going into eighth.

Doree Shafrir (4:41)

Yes. Ava's like a big man on campus.