Possibility vs. Predictability

Over the next month, we’ll be diving into the realm of Possibility.

Possibility is the essence of transformation.

If you just want to find new ways to accomplish what you’re already reliable to achieve, you won’t need to engage with Possibility, and you will be unlikely to transform. I’ll be covering that in a future article this month.

For now, before we can describe Possibility, we need to define Predictability.

In transformational work, and in particular, the results you seek to create, we are using the term Predictability in a specific way.

The realm of Predictabillity covers all of the results that you are already reliable to generate.

For example, staying at the same job, for another year, and making the same salary will require very little on your part to achieve, and is probably something you consider very predictable.

The realm of Predictability also includes all of the results that you could generate but may require some rearranging on your part. For example, if you’re an entrepreneur and you make $X each year in exchange for working Y hours, then you could predictably make $2X in a year, by working 2Y hours.

You may not want to create that kind of result, but it’s inside of the realm of what is predictable.

What is predictable for you is everything that you could achieve, without needing some fundamental shift in the way you relate to yourself or the world around you.

When I was in software, I chose to become a lawyer. This meant I had to qualify for law school, go back to school as a mature student, work harder than I had previously, and get good grades.

That all required work and effort on my part, but it was completely inside the realm of predictability for me. I simply had to be the way I always had been, but… more so.

This is the hallmark of predictable results — they simply require us to be the way we’ve always been, only better, harder, faster or stronger.

So to be clear, something being Predictable doesn’t mean that it will happen automatically. It means that you can figure out how to create it, from where you currently situate yourself.

Sometimes people get caught up trying to prove to themselves that it’s not bad or wrong to be inside the realm of Predictability. They’ll insist that they can do all kinds of things, and that there are plenty of options.

These people are correct, because the realm of Predictability is infinite.

You can always find new things to do that exist within your current range of predictability.

This is not about making Predictability bad or wrong, or anything like that. Nor is it about trying to prove that you should be elsewhere.

It is helpful, however, to recognize that while the realm of Predictability is infinite, it is also distinct from what is available in the realm of Possibility.

Possibility is everything that lies outside of what is predictable for you. If making $2X by working 2Y hours a year is predictable for that entrepreneur we mentioned earlier, perhaps making $4X by working 1/2Y hours lies exclusively in the realm of Possibility.

A more accurate term for Possibility is, ironically, the realm of what we deem to be Impossible.

It’s everything that we’ve concluded is simply unavailable to us.

To achieve results that lie in the domain of Possibility, transformation is required. This is part of the hallmark of Possibility: to achieve this kind of result, it will demand a fundamental shift in terms of your view of yourself, or of the world around you.

In general, it is very hard to even conceive of goals that lie in the realm of Possibility. Instead, we subtly end up pulling our way back towards goals that are somehow inside of what is Predictable for us.

Think of it like a fish, swimming in a pond. You could ask it what it wants, and it could come up with all kinds of goals. But all of those goals will be limited by the fish’s perspective created by the pond that makes up its world.

The fish may say it wants to swim to the other side of the pond faster. Maybe it wants to be able to meet up with other fish that it knows live inside this pond.

What that fish will be unable to do is tell you that it wants to go to an ice cream shop and eat an ice cream, because that Possibility simply doesn’t exist inside of its worldview. It wouldn’t even be able to conceive of this.

We’ll be talking more about why Possibility is so challenging to conceive, how we keep it out of our lives, and why Predictability is so compelling. Finally, we’ll take a look at how to work with Possibility, and support others to do the same.

For now, here’s a simple question to have you begin to poke into the realm of Possibility.

What is an example of a result you would love to have created, in one year’s time, that currently seems impossible to you? Aim for something that you could imagine someone else achieving — just not you.

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