The search for certainty is futile

We all love the idea of certainty but the search for it only stalls our progress.

Humans have a deep desire for sure things. We are constantly looking for a guarantee, or some other signal to give us assurance that what we are doing is proven, correct or somehow "approved". It's such a thing that salespeople send hours thinking of strong guarantees they can offer to reassure the customer that their purchase will be satisfactory.

Sometimes I feel that adulthood is to continually seek external permission slips to break beyond our self-imposed upper limit.

That's why we stay in jobs longer than we should, in relationships that don't serve us and otherwise self sabotage the good progress we make.

Asking others for approval is pointless.

I always find it interesting that I tend to swing from being a timid early adopter or worried that I've missed the bandwagon. In the middle is inaction. It's no secret that humans are motivated by either pleasure or pain. Each of these extremes is painful.

The most common question I get from people looking for my advice is "is it too late to ____".

This thinking shortchanges the true benefit of action: learning. Our brains completely discount the lessons we will learn in the process. The biggest payoff is in expanding beyond a previous comfort zone and the joy of redefining the vision you have of yourself.

Yes, the best time to do something was last year. But the next best day is today. At a certain point you have to try. You have to jump.

You just have to be willing to be embarrassed. Publicly.

I've recently discovered the no code movement and the concept of building in public. Thanks to my new twitter friends - I hope it's ok for me to project my friendship on you! (@Nicolascole77, @nocodelife, @dickiebush). I love that the movement includes writers, tech people and everyday tinkerers who have decided to take micro-bets on themselves in search of their (profitable) corner of the internet.

What's old is new again.

As a product development scientist who is actively is applying big city market making ideas to midwest real estate, these concepts are familiar. It's the basis of design thinking and what makes Proctor & Gamble a powerhouse in the consumer packaged goods space.

What I like about Build in Public is that it takes these ideas that large corporations have used for years and scales them down just enough to be applied practically and pragmatically to budding ideas. I think the next decade will be marked with concepts like these. Taking proven models and adopting them on smaller scales is already showing progress in direct-to-consumer retail, fair trade retail, real estate impact investing and is distinctly evident in the meteoric rise of outsourcing.

Seek small wins.

Maybe our search for certainty should be reshaped to seek micro-wins that when executed in mass, help us find what works and signal how we should dive deeper?

Thought for the day.