We are wired to crave certainty. For some of us, that means focusing our efforts on getting and maintaining safety and security. For others, it means hedging our bets in regard to anything we undertake. For still others, it means not even starting something without a guarantee of a satisfactory outcome. And for many, it means not stepping out of a narrow and well-worn zone of comfort and familiarity.
We’ve come up with a lot of explanations for the behaviors that go along with trying to fulfill our craving for certainty. In fact, one of the reasons we like explanations is that they make us feel like we understand, and that feeds our craving for certainty. A lot of our explanations are stories spun by the interpreter in our brain. They may be quite wide of the mark in terms of accuracy, so what they’re really giving us is a false sense of certainty. Unfortunately, as far as our brain is concerned—which means as far as we are concerned—a false sense of certainty is almost always preferable to any amount of uncertainty.
Yet people do take enormous risks and undertake challenges and ventures where the outcome is very much in doubt. I’m not talking about the compulsion for engaging in thrill-seeking high-risk behavior. I’m talking about doing something that’s never been done before—like the Wright brothers did—or doing something to bring about change—like Nelson Mandela did. Or doing something we’ve never done before. I’m talking about creating something: a piece of art, a business, a different approach, a change in one corner of the world.
When you start out to do something you have never done before, you can’t know what the outcome will be. Our unconscious causes us to pay more attention to what we might lose than to what we might gain. In trying to avoid loss, we shy away from taking risks or accepting challenges even when the potential payoff might be magnificent. But our unconscious is also notoriously bad at calculating odds, and it doesn’t take randomness and luck into account—both of which are far more significant factors to any outcome than we’d like to believe.
Certainty itself is an emotional state, not an intellectual one. To create a feeling of certainty, the brain must filter out far more information than it processes, which, of course, greatly increases its already high error rate during emotional arousal. In other words, the more certain you feel, the more likely you are wrong. –Steven Stosny, Ph.D.
Life, by its very nature, is risky and enormously uncertain. The truth is that there are no guarantees for any of us for anything. If we want to do more than survive, we might have to step out on a limb once in a while. We might even have to take a leap.
Last week, I was at a luncheon where one of the participants went around the room offering everyone a chance to take one of the tiny cards inside a wicker basket. The card I pulled had “success” on the front. Inside it said:
Anything I’ve ever done that ultimately was worthwhile…initially scared me to death. –Betty Bender
If there’s something you want to do and the only thing holding you back is uncertainty, try imagining a world where all is preordained, everything is known in advance, and there is no possibility of surprise. Is that really a world you’d want to live in?
[NOTE: This post is the fifth in a series. See also When the Going Gets Grueling, Fortitude: Don’t Leave Home Without It, Focus: Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and Patience: Learn to Play the Waiting Game.]
