Embracing uncertainty to do great work
We crave certainty, for things to happen as predicted. A degree of certitude is encouraging. It dispels our doubts and our fears. Paradoxically, a fixed or certain path could deprive us of embracing innovative routes to an outcome, potentially stumping us in growth.
Let’s flip this. Maybe, we should learn to embrace uncertainty.
🎥FourZeroThree - YouTube
A quick shout out! Here's a “video version” of the article.
Embracing Uncertainty
I came across this video where Gary Vaynerchuk (serial entrepreneur, Chairman of VaynerX, and CEO of VaynerMedia) talks about hard work and patience.
Gary started Wine Library TV, a video blog on YouTube, giving wine reviews and wine advice in early 2006.
“For 19 months I did that show five days a week,” Gary says “and nobody gave a shit.”
Interviewer: “Your first video got how many views?”.
Gary: “30, 75. I mean, nobody watched”.
At that time, Gary was running a successful wine business. Spending a lot of time on and obsessing about Wine Library TV pinched the sales of his wine business. “The show really didn’t take off, until mid-2007”. Gary notes that it was “a year and a half of five days a week doing a show, getting only hundreds, then a couple of thousand views.”
You could look at this as a game of patience. But, what makes this interesting and daunting at the same time is the prospect of uncertainty. The perceived road to an outcome is paradoxically unknown.
I loved this answer Gary gives a young girl asking him for advice.
Young girl: “How do you deal with the unknown?
Gary: “By recognizing I have no fu****g choice. Right? Like, because that’s actually life.”
I think this is a great way to approach life - a prime example of an infinite game, a game where there are no winners or losers, and where there is, in a sense, no defined end.
Instead we want everything mapped out before we start something. We want our decisions to go in a certain perceived direction. We want precision. We want a guarantee. Life doesn’t work this way, does it?
Commit with conviction
“You have to be mentally in a position to be ready to try something different, to be open to challenges and to be open to failing”, says Robert Greene in this podcast. He goes on, “So if you get too fearful now if you feel like you can't trust anything, if you feel like I better just grab whatever I can, you're going to be in a lot of trouble.”
Sometimes you have no choice but to commit to something with a lot of conviction.
Hedging your bets or trying many different things in the hope of having a cushion to fall back on if something fails is not always a good idea. Sometimes you have to take the plunge, go all in.
To do great work means wasting a lot of time since making bad bets happens all the time. On the flip side, settling for a rather promising or stable path might mean you could end up missing out on executing great work.
I think most people who stare at anxiety and uncertainty on their faces and do what they do is because they do it for the sake of it. Approaching anything in life this way is a great quality.
Obsess with your idea, your work. Because obsession often helps accomplish complex tasks. It helps you beat the fear of uncertainty. Things that you do for its own sake are things that you obsess over. You don’t care what others think about what it is you do. Often the goal or the outcome is not what matters. The work, the grind, the path you walk, that’s all that matters.