Security

Your brain wants everything to be stable and predictable, but almost nothing is.

Your bubble won't protect you.

Our brains are designed to seek out security, to think in linear, predictable terms that trick us into thinking we’re capable of anticipating the future. This is an important aspect of our development as a species: in the simple environments from which we evolved, our ability to link cause and effect was often the difference between life and death.

Those who could spot basic correlations such as the presence of a predator and the death of a fellow tribe member tended to pass on their genes to the next generation. As a result, this sort of causation detection system in our brains survived the process of natural selection and we now all live with this inherited ability.

Cause & Effect in a Complex Environment

The problem is that, in a world of immeasurable complexity, this simple mechanism not only doesn’t work in many cases, it flat out deceives you. Because there’s so much information, so much raw material for your pattern recognition systems to work with, you can create cause-and-effect stories in your head that diverge from reality in dangerous ways.

To be clear, cause and effect will always have some utility. It’s good to know that if you mix ammonia and bleach, fatal vapors are created, or that not changing the oil in your car will ruin your engine. It’s when you try to scale up that kind of thought process beyond the simplicity of your immediate environment that you run into issues.

This is especially true in the world of business, where everyone is in a mad dash to create that illusive fire-and-forget money-making system that allows you to predict profits with 100% accuracy. It’s one of those areas of human life where linear cause-and-effect thinking moves beyond mere annoyance and into the realm of real danger.

Every organism, including you, wants to assert its will to live and reproduce within an environment it controls. In other words, you don’t want to just survive, you want to live life on your own terms and shape the world you live within. This stands in stark contrast to how powerless this chaotic, complex world makes you feel.

Stop Predicting the Future

Here’s the bad news: you will never be able to predict the future, nor will you be able to control everything around you. To survive and live on your own terms, you need to reorient yourself in ways that are at odds with much of what you currently believe and act upon.

Here’s the good news: there is a way forward that will allow you to adapt and win, and you’re living within a critical turning point in history. Nobody knows what to do, all the old ways are crumbling before our eyes, and those who recognize and leverage this will become leaders.

Furthermore, despite our natural inclination towards safety and stability, we also happen to paradoxically be one of the most versatile, adaptable species on the planet. It doesn’t make sense on paper, but it’s the truth: we’re designed to find and create both order and chaos.

The shortcut we often take is to throw up our hands and say "There's too much uncertainty!" If you've ever worked in or around large companies, you've heard something like this used as a scapegoat for poor performance, layoffs, etc.

From this point forward, I want you to promise yourself that you'll never use that phrase again. The future is uncertain by default—that's been true since the beginning. We don't fail because we can't predict the future, we fail because we don't recognize that the future is mostly unpredictable. Even when we say we know that, we continue to act as if we don't,

When you recognize that you're dealing with uncertainty while trying to solve an important problem, the solution isn't to fall into that trap. Instead, you must find ways to act that mesh with uncertainty, rather than fight against it.