This last one year has been an emotional rollercoaster. It has been a year of internal transformation where the learnings that I knew theoretically and felt that I understood happened in reality. Which made me realize that understanding things on paper is very different than reality. It felt as if I was in a playground where I had to find, learn, decide and fight everything. In those moments, it felt quite tough, but when I look back, it led to so many new learnings which my brain was not wired to comprehend and do.
This might feel like a very vanilla learning. But I think there is a difference between knowing something and fully internalizing it. Knowing something doesn’t really equip you with dealing the situation because it is not equal to actually being in the situation.
Since our childhood, our brains are wired and shaped by our experiences and unconscious survival strategies that we pick up. We become comfortable in things that happen multiple times because our brains learn from repeatability. Whereas, experiences and things that we avoid make us uncomfortable and the thought of doing them always haunts us.
Internalization is when our brain adapts and understands that the new thing that we were avoiding because we thought is uncomfortable is actually not uncomfortable. And this is what happened in last one year with me I suppose. I have always been someone who had wanted things in control, someone who would take actions when everything is 100% certain. But the experiences and the situations that I was in in the last one year were not like this – many times I was in a play-space where I didn’t have full information and I didn’t have control over things, but I had to take actions and decisions in order to move forward. The first time it happened, I was too scared, the second time it happened, I was less scared than the first time. The pattern repeated multiple times and I finally became comfortable with uncertainty.
When I was thinking about this today, there is a term that came to my head which was certain uncertainty. The only thing that is certain is that there will always be uncertainty. There is no point in trying to analyze everything all the time and take actions only when 100% of the information is there. What this does is delay our actions and the goals that we want to move towards.
Embracing certain uncertainty means playing an infinite game: staying adaptive, compounding learning and letting the variance work for us.
azeem panjwani 