The Stickiness of Predictability

Why is it that people pull back towards a life that is Predictable? Why don’t they just lean over the edge and play the bold game of Possibility? Now that we’ve defined Possibility and Predictability (here), the next thing to look at in today’s post is the answer to this question.

You may read about Possibility and think to yourself “Heck yes, that’s the only game for me. That’s where I’m always playing.”

While that may occur like your truth, I generally find it isn’t. It isn’t, because you are a human, and our ego will naturally pull us back into a world of Predictability, without us having even the slightest awareness that this is what’s happening.

Predictability is safe. Even when something predictable involves failure, that’s a situation in which failing is safe to us.

Throughout this piece, we’ll use the example of Reggie, who has a hobby he loves, and a career he finds boring. His day-job feels kind of tedious, it’s not particularly enjoyable, but it pays him enough to be comfortable.

When I invite Reggie to consider the possibility of making the hobby they love his career, he might say something like “I don’t want to do that, because then my hobby will become my job, and then it will no longer be fun”. This is what Predictability sounds like.

Reggie knows how to feel bored and dull at work, but have it be steady and consistent. And Reggie knows how to enjoy his hobby outside of work without it generating income. This is all the land of Predictability for Reggie.

What is outside of Predictability for Reggie is the possibility of being able to earn income doing something AND for it to stay alive and joyous as he does so.

Reggie doesn’t see his response as a pull back towards Predictability. He sees it as good common sense. Reggie has evidence for why this is the way things are — he’s tried to do something he loved for money in the past, and this is the way it went.

This is always the case with Predictability, by the way. Predictability is predictable because that’s how it’s gone in the past. Reggie has tried this crazy idea we’re suggesting, and it doesn’t work.

So now, Reggie plays the game of optimizing inside his Predictability. That sounds like this:

“Given my hobby will become a job, and a chore if I try to make it how I earn my living, and, given that my job is not going to ever feel as good as my hobby, what’s the best way I can arrange my life?”

So Reggie goes about doing things like finding a job that gives him extra time off, or that provides special allowance for him to go away to trade-shows. And so on.

Reggie believes that he is creating Possibility, but ultimately, all of the arranging of his life is a function of figuring out the best way to live, given that he will never be able to have his joy and his income be integrated.

Your box of Predictability may not look the same as Reggie’s “joy/income trade-off”, but we all have our own flavour. We’re all actively working to optimize within that box, while believing that we’re really treading outside of our existing range.

This is what makes Predictability so sticky. We simply cannot see the compromise we live from, because it’s too close to us — too ubiquitous.

We don’t actually see the edge between Predictability and Possibility, because what is Predictable occurs more like “What is realistic” or “What is feasible”.

And so, we stay inside the realm of what is familiar, and consequently, safe.

Now that we’ve got Predictability clearly defined, we can start to look at why Transformation will not be generated from inside its box. Stay tuned

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