Quotes About Uncertainty

The more I heard, the less I knew.

complication …. In that particular foggy business, I couldn't at this moment make out the wood for the trees, but one thing seemed fairly certain: this was

Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell.

I define anxiety as experiencing failure in advance…and if you have anxiety about initiating a project, then of course you will associate risk with failure.

If all you do at work is hope to survive, your day can't be much fun. We're all working too hard. Putting in more hours than we'd like, nervous about the future, uncertain about our roles and our goals. We work too hard to hope for mere survival. Our goal must be to thrive and prosper, not just get by.

begin to realize that the safest thing you can do feels risky and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.

Commit to the frightening work of flying blind

Fear of living without a map is the main reason people are so insistent that we tell them what to do.

if it scares you, it might be a good thing to try

So here we are. We live in a world where we have the

A Timid Trapeze Artist Is a Dead Trapeze Artist

change is the first sign of risk.

The challenge is to ask a two-part question: What next? What now? Asking is the hard part.

Those places that felt safe—the corner office, the famous college, the secure job—aren't. You're holding back, betting on a return to normal, but in the new normal, your resistance to change is no longer helpful.

Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly reexperiencing failure in advance. What a waste.

Those who fear risk also begin to fear movement of any kind.

The act of trying to guarantee the success of an innovation is almost certain to make it less likely that it will succeed.

People want to be told what to do because they are afraid (petrified) of figuring it out for themselves.

Recent research estimates that 40 percent of the workforce has a job that requires innovation, human interaction, and decision making. And for each of these people, every day exposes them to the feeling of being a fraud. Of course you're not sure it's going to work. How could you be?

We hesitate to make a promise like "the show will be on at 11:30," because we're not sure we can meet the deadline and make it happen in a way that allows us to control the outcome.

For the important work, the instructions are always insufficient. For the work we'd like to do, the reward comes from the fact that there is no guarantee, that the path isn't well lit, that we cannot possibly be sure it's going to work.

There's nothing that we can do to ensure that tomorrow turns out exactly as we hope it will.

Hope is not the same as reassurance. Hope is trusting yourself to have a shot to make things better. But we can hope without reassurance. We can hope at the same time that we accept that what we're working on right now might not work.

The more important the project we take on, the more difficult it is to find certainty that our work will succeed before we begin. We can begin with this: If we failed, would it be worth the journey? Do you trust yourself enough to commit to engaging with a project regardless of the chances of success?