Do You Think You Have The Answer?

Photo by Roman Mager on Unsplash

The thing is, no one actually has the answer. 

We want to believe someone does - perhaps that we do - but we don’t actually know that to be a fact.

Sure, we might believe our version of the answer right to our very core. We might be convinced that our boss or our peer can be trusted to get us where we’re trying to go. But what we’re trusting is our versions of the story. We’ve made a judgement based on the accumulated data at hand.

And that’s OK. It’s important that we do that and blaze ahead. The key is to realize that there is a possibility (less than 1, more than zero) that we might be wrong. That our answer may not even get us to where we want to go (maybe not even to 10%).

And when that happens, we haven’t “failed”. We don’t need to question our choices, who we are or our very existence. It just means we did our analysis, made our decisions, tried something and it didn’t work out.

That doesn’t mean nothing will ever work out, or that we‘re destined to live with our “lot in life”. That’s a bit too fatalistic for my taste. It just means we tried this and now let’s try something else.

Few of our choices in life are so consequential that there is no alternative path. That’s the good news. 

And that gives us the freedom, the license, to try.