I turned 36 earlier this month and based on my life experiences, I’m starting to see the world through a different lens of uncertainty and order. I’ve noticed that embracing uncertainty can provide me with many new opportunities, but it can also offer disappointment and regret if things don’t work out.
A cognitive bias that we have is that we don’t like to feel pain and will seek to avoid it. People prefer order in their lives because the likelihood of pain associated with disappointment and regret is less likely to happen. However, the perceived order that comes from avoiding uncertainty can give people a false sense of security in the short term if they don’t learn to embrace the future and all of its unknowns.
Now I’m starting to see that the person who can handle and face the world’s uncertainty will be the one that will most benefit from the opportunities that life can provide. Embracing uncertainty can knock someone down, but they can avoid the misery of staying down if they know how to pick themselves up and go after another opportunity.
Reaching higher levels requires letting go of certainty and going through the motions of the current events. For the past couple of months, I have had difficulty finding the right place in Mexico to live, which has affected my business. Then I was having problems with my computer and the type of video editing I wanted to do, so I decided to pivot and move back to Colombia, where I know I can be productive and still practice my Spanish.
I love my time in Colombia, and I wouldn’t know about this feeling if it wasn’t for a week-long trip to Colombia in 2019 after quitting my old job to start my financial planning firm. Being a digital nomad has had its ups and downs, but the idea is that I’m going to keep picking myself up until I get the life that I want. And because I have done a lot of different things, I know what I want for my future, and embracing more uncertainty will be part of the formula. Only seeking order would have limited my options and caused me to make choices that restrict my liberty. If you look at a ship, it’s the safest when it’s in the harbor, but that’s not what it was meant to do.
When it comes to obstacles, you can’t go around them. You have to go through them. To handle the uncertainty of going through my obstacles, I have to thank the stoic philosophy for giving me the principles to live life, which are:
- Live In Agreement With Nature – The stoic goal of life
- The world is chaotic and can only have order within you
- Live By Virtue – The highest of all goods
- We have many opportunities to compromise ourselves, and we will have to live with the consequences
- Focus On What You Can Control, Accept What You Can’t – Quickest way to move on
- You can control what’s internal. Everything external can’t be controlled
- Distinguish Between Good, Bad, and Indifferent Things – Know where to focus
- There are a lot of distractions, and to know what is important and essential to spend your time and energy on
- Take Action – Be a warrior of the mind
- The distance between your dreams and reality is called action, and you can’t solely manifest your way to success
- Practice Misfortune – Ask, “What could go wrong?”
- Realize that on average, every 90 days, something will go wrong in your life
- Add A Reserve Clause To Your Planned Actions – You will have to make pivots in life to get past obstacles
- Create a life where your problems only last five minutes
- Amor Fati – Love everything that happens
- Going through tough situations gives you the power that external events can’t defeat you
- Turn Obstacles Into Opportunities – Perception is key
- You can’t go around obstacles. You go through them. What stands in the way becomes the way
- Be Mindful – Mindfulness is where it all begins
- What matters is what you see and looking at something doesn’t mean you see it
These 11 principles have helped me tremendously over the past seven years because they allowed me to embrace the world’s uncertainty and live life on my terms. And the way things have been over the last two years globally, these principles have helped me out more than ever.
More importantly, these principles allowed me to go after new opportunities and experiences in this world. Life is short, and I recommend that people read “The Tail End” by Tim Urban to see how short life is. But also realize all you can do, is all you can do, make you’re doing all that you need to be doing with the time you have.
Two thousand years ago, Seneca wrote that we tend to suffer more in imagination than in reality. It comes from a lack of not wanting to face uncertainty because we believe a negative outcome will be unbearable to deal with. But if things do get bad, we can learn to live with those setbacks and get stronger from them because now failure is rarely fatal. Journaling my thoughts helps me get false narratives out of my head to get the correct perception of what I should do, leading to less anxiety and depression.
There are limits on how much uncertainty we can handle, but the more we train our minds using the 11 stoic principles, the more uncertainty we can take and the more liberty we can enjoy. I loved reading in the book Sapiens how wheat domesticated people who were seeking order. A wheat farmer back in the day had to spend all day in the fields, seven days a week, to grow their corp. In comparison, a hunter who knew how to embrace uncertainty and had the proper skill set could hunt for one day and then spend the next three days socializing and spending it with family. Embracing only order typically requires someone to trade their time and free will to get that order.
Also, realize that you can be the perfect person, and bad things can still happen to you. This can cause resentment, a natural feeling since it’s a cognitive bias ingrained in our DNA to seek fairness when things are not perceived to be fair. This feeling of resentment can be good if you know how to have the right perception in the event, but it can create a more toxic environment because we seek justice in a chaotic world where many things are out of our control. However, the toxicity comes from striving to be an important person and not focusing on doing important things.
And this is one of the factors that come with dealing with uncertainty. Are your actions based on trying to be an important person, or are they for doing important things? And if you focus on doing important things, the uncertainty will be easier to handle. There will still be struggles because something unpleasant will happen. Still, you know to continue with the uncertainty because on the other side of it is where all your dreams are.
As the author Robert Greene has said, the need for certainty is a disease of the mind, so don’t be fooled into making an irrational decision based on the need for complete order. There is a lot of untapped potential in this world and dealing with uncertainty is a good way to unlock it.
