I’m currently reading Seth Godin’s newest masterpiece, The Practice. (If you haven’t purchased it yet, try ordering it from a Black-owned bookstore—Jeff doesn’t need your $16.89.)
The book is rocking my world. Today’s nugget of wisdom that is too good to keep to myself comes from page 62:
Reassurance is helpful for people who seek out certainty, but successful artists realize that certainty isn’t required. In fact, the quest for certainty undermines everything we set out to create.
For the past nine months, I’ve found myself bemoaning the certainty that the pandemic robbed from me. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve said something to the effect of, “There’s just no certainty. Things are changing so quickly, and I can’t keep up.”
Along the way, in the back of my head, a little voice has answered, “There was never any certainty, really. The certainty you felt before was just an illusion, cast by a culture that demands your unconditional productivity. The world always was—and will continue to be—susceptible to catastrophic change.”
Experts will study the longterm physical and mental effects of the pandemic for years to come. And each one of us will walk away from this year with our own unique combination of perceptions, experiences, callouses, hurts, and lessons. I’ve been collecting mine along the way, and today, I’m focusing on one truth that has emerged from the pandemic: the deep uncertainty that has been made abundantly apparent over the last nine months is the very thing that inspires necessary change, fuels creativity, and fosters compassion.
The stripping away of the illusion of certainty undermines our fixation on results, because we internalize—willingly or not—the reality that results are never guaranteed. The daily experience of uncertainty redirects our trust and attention to what we can control: our actions, our habits, and how we show up for others.
(Photo by Santiago Lacarta on Unsplash)