Absolute Certainty Is the Prison
I heard something on a podcast a few weeks ago that I have not been able to put down.
Joshua Fields Millburn, one half of The Minimalists, made a point that lands harder the longer you sit with it — that we can fear the fog of uncertainty more than we fear the guaranteed mediocrity of staying put.
I had to sit with that one. Because I think most of us know exactly what he means, and most of us would rather not admit it.
The part that surprised me
There’s a study I went looking for after hearing that.
In 2016, researchers at University College London published work in Current Biology built on data from 25,189 people who played a decision-making game on their phones. It’s one of the largest studies of its kind ever run.
They found something I didn’t expect. As we get older, we don’t simply become more cautious across the board. What declines is very specific: risk taking for potential reward. Our willingness to chase an upside.
Risk taking to avoid a loss? That barely changes with age at all.
Read that again, because it’s the whole thing.
We don’t get more afraid of losing as we get older. We get less willing to reach for winning.
The twenty-two-year-old version of you and the version of you reading this are about equally motivated to protect what you’ve got. The difference is that she would have taken the shot. And you have quietly stopped believing the shot is for you.
Nobody decides to settle
That’s what makes this so slippery.
No one wakes up and thinks, today I’ll choose a smaller life. It happens by not choosing. By staying one more year. By waiting until the kids are older, until the market is better, until you feel ready.
The fog is what stops us. Not failure — fog. Not knowing what’s on the other side. And so we choose the thing we can see the edges of, even when we know those edges are too close together.
We call it being responsible. Sometimes it is. And sometimes it’s just fear wearing a nicer outfit.
Who has the most certainty?
Here’s the thought I keep coming back to.
If certainty is the goal — if what you want above everything is to know exactly what tomorrow holds — then ask yourself who in this world has the most of it.
Prisoners.
They know what time they’ll wake up. They know what’s for breakfast. They know where they’ll be standing at two o’clock next Thursday and the Thursday after that. Total certainty. No surprises.
And no freedom.
Absolute certainty isn’t safety. It’s a cell. The bars are just made of something more comfortable — a paycheck you’ve outgrown, a title that stopped meaning anything, a routine you could run in your sleep and increasingly do.
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
Chip Gaines gets at a version of that question in Capital Gaines. It’s a question worth asking out loud, because you can usually see the moment it lands — somebody stops calculating and starts dreaming.
It’s a good question because it removes the only thing that was ever really in the way.
So I’ll ask you.
What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
Would you start the thing you’ve been researching for three years? Would you leave the job that’s been fine for a decade? Would you finally build something with your name on it instead of somebody else’s?
You already know the answer. You answered it before you finished reading the question. That’s not indecision you’re feeling. That’s recognition.
The people who make it aren’t the ones with the best plan
I’ve watched enough people change direction to notice a pattern, and it’s not the one I expected.
It isn’t the planners who thrive. It’s not the people with the spreadsheet and the five-year projection and the perfectly mapped exit. Those plans are usually wrong by month three anyway.
It’s the ones who can keep moving when the path is invisible.
Momentum beats certainty. Action beats analysis. And being all right when something goes sideways — which it will — beats trying to build a life where nothing ever does.
You can’t plan your way out of fog. You can only walk.
So what are you dreaming about?
Maybe it’s your own business. Maybe it’s a career you’ve been circling for years and talking yourself out of every time. Maybe you’ve been in one thing so long that “stuck” stopped feeling like a problem and started feeling like a personality.
Whatever it is — the thing that came to mind ten seconds ago and that you immediately explained away — I’d just ask you to look straight at it for a minute instead of past it.
You don’t owe anybody the leap. But you do owe yourself an honest look.
And if what you’d try is something like what we do here, we’re happy to have that conversation. Not a pitch. Just an honest answer to what the work actually looks like, from people doing it.
The fog doesn’t lift because you stared at it longer.