may appear boundless—limitless—but the very absence of certainty affords an equal opportunity to create it.
Random life tests like to spring up out of nowhere at the most inopportune times—led by that guy Murphy and his damn law—as a means to test us and challenge our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fitness as we attempt to confront these challenges head on. Possessing a balance of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual fortitude is what allows us to endure amidst ambiguity, tackle any challenge, and say, “I got this.” The challenge, of course, is that not everybody knows how to maximize his or her potential.
I have been fortunate in my life to have seen and experienced levels of performance that some people can only dream about, human achievements that bear no scientific explanation and no quantifiable evidence to explain how. And it all occurred under uncertain conditions.
If you consider the phenomena of certainty and uncertainty you can see an inextricably linked marvel: the fact that one cannot exist without the other. In other words, the very lack of certainty yields a one-way path toward certainty for the simple fact that nothing can be more uncertain than it already is. I know, this is deep, but hear me out.
Look at it this way: remember all those “F’s” you received on your research papers in school? (Maybe that was just me.) Getting a big red “F” at the top of a research paper says it all (i.e. “you suck”) as there was no “F” minus because you couldn’t really do any worse than you already did. “Bad” is bad, “suck” is suck, there is no “badder” and you can’t suck any more than you already do. The same principle applies to uncertainty. From uncertainty one doesn’t become any more uncertain. It’s like hitting rock bottom—and from rock bottom, the only place left to go is up.
So, what exists with both certainty and uncertainty is an interdependent system; a world, situation, or whatever you want to call it that only occurs based on the evolution and existence of the other.
No matter what system you employ to defeat the other, there are certain principles that govern certitude in human nature. For instance, you can’t have trust without honesty. Likewise, there can be no learning without humility, no selflessness without service, no innovation without disruption, no leadership without followership, and no fitness without “fatness” (kidding, but you get my point). What I’m trying to say is that each element depends on its reciprocal for two things:
1 Its existence
2 Its solution
The dichotomy that uncertainty presents, then, is both a serendipitous and deliberate opportunity to create something from nothing, to find opportunity where others see conclusion. After all, only from chaos can calmness emerge.
There is chaos we deal with as individuals, teams, and organizations; chaos that presents itself at the most inopportune times, and requires you to zig when you’d rather zag. No matter where you are, chaos finds you, and if you don’t know how to deal with change as an individual or as an organization, then you get eaten, swallowed whole, and left for dead.
The alternative, of course, is to never leave the womb. Or, once you do, to revert back to your safety net immediately after you realize that the waters you’re in are too cold and won’t suffice.
Anybody can perform a task that he or she already knows and understands. It’s when obscurity, doubt, and stress are interjected into the equation against the backdrop of survival that the creature of the unknown exposes us for who we are, not just what we know how to do.
Of course, not all chaos is bad. Nobody learns from personal successes as they do from personal failures, from what he or she should have done or said (or not). Just as uncertainty and change spur fear and trepidation, tackling the unknown makes you better because it forces you to call upon judgment and insight that you can use to make better decisions and navigate change next time. Let me illustrate this through the following example…
The Strategy of Movement
Consider this hypothetical situation:
You and your team of twelve are in a hellacious gunfight. Bullets are ricocheting off the rocks of the mountain slope you’re on and hitting all around you. You’re wondering to yourself not if but when that next enemy bullet is going to skip off a rock and lodge into your gut. Meanwhile, the guy next to you—your shooting buddy—is cracking jokes from behind cover, “Whooooh hoooo! Just like fuckin’ Vietnam!” despite the fact that he’s under the age of thirty.
Meanwhile, the enemy has identified your position and bullets are flying at you that elicit two responses from you, the fearless team leader. The typical first response is, “Fuck! We need to get the hell outta of here!” But it’s the second response that’s the real moneymaker: “Where can we go?” In other words, you begin to assess the terrain for a better position. You first begin to scan the surrounding area for alternative sources of cover because you’re not going to go running into a hail of bullets without first identifying the next safe position to move to. You want to make sure that another—better—vantage point does, in fact, exist before you order the team to move.
Once you decide upon the next best place to run for protection, you determine if the cover itself is viable for its intended purpose, which is complete tactical superiority over the enemy. Will that tree serve the purpose that I need of stopping bullets? I haven’t exercised lately, so maybe I should find a tree with a wider base. If the area in question will not do what you want it to, then you need to keep looking.
But, if it is worthy of protecting your now puckered-up backside, then you need to pinpoint the right time to move, to change. When the opportunity presents itself, you make a deliberate decision to get up with your team, shoot back at the enemy while screaming a loud, Rambo-like “AAAAAHHHHHHH!” and then run like hell toward your newfound sanctuary. Once there, you discover that this new piece of cover really only offers a fresh perspective in one of four ways:
1 It provides both cover and a fresh angle of attack on your enemy that will enable you to protect yourself, gain perspective, and win the fight.
2 It offers mediocre protection and partial exposure (at this point, you’re just prolonging the nightmare).
3 It serves as a great defense but obstructs all lanes of visibility, therefore hindering your situational awareness and ability to respond.
4 It is actually a bush and bushes do not stop bullets. It fails miserably and you die.
The Lesson
The bottom line is, if you have to move in a firefight, the marketplace, or a job role, you do so for one main reason: to strategically improve the position of your team or organization. Any discomfort, whether it be physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual, is secondary. If you aren’t experiencing discomfort, trepidation, or failure, then you’re doing something that will bring about far graver consequences: you’re trying to avoid it altogether.
In the hypothetical gunfight scenario, change only occurs when its significance has garnered the shared attention of everyone involved. You don’t just move because the leader told you to. You change position because there is meaning and purpose associated with the behavior to move.
Failure can’t be out-thought, out-strategized or out-worked. It’s an element of uncertainty that appears unexpectedly and challenges you to reveal the real you through new circumstance.
To bounce back from failure and change for the better requires effort, courage, and the tenacity to see things through—all performance-based criteria that will be covered in upcoming
