Embracing Uncertainty

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

My favorite teacher is Brian Johnson. He’s the creator of Heroic, my go-to source of daily wisdom. His favorite teacher is psychologist Phil Stutz, so when Brian shared a summary of Phil’s new book, Lessons for Living, I eagerly listened.

Here’s the core message:

“In short, the nature of reality is this:

• Life includes pain and adversity.
• The future is uncertain.
• Accomplishment of any kind requires discipline.
• You are not special. No matter what you do, you cannot avoid these aspects of life.
• This will never change.

There is love, joy, surprise, transcendence, and creativity as well, but these never occur separately from the above five points.”¹

Today, let’s focus on the second point.

The Future is Uncertain

Uncertainty is never going away. It’s part of the price of admission for life. You can try to resist this fact, but that only amplifies your suffering. It would be better to accept and even embrace life’s inherent uncertainty.

But embracing uncertainty doesn’t mean throwing your hands up and saying, “It’s all random, so what’s the point of trying?!”

Embracing uncertainty means:

• Knowing that you can learn to be content with whatever happens.
• Working hard to make the future better and keeping your eyes on the process because you can’t always control the outcome of your effort.
• Adapting as life throws your curveballs, learning from your mistakes, and using difficulty as fuel for your growth.
• Accepting that not everything is going to go your way. Bad things will happen, and you won’t see them coming, but you’ll be strong enough to handle them and keep on living.

The first principle of Stoicism is to focus on what you can control while accepting what you cannot. You cannot control the future, but you can control how you prepare for it, and you can control how you respond to it. Or, as Tal Ben-Shahar puts it:

“Things don’t always happen for the best, but we can always make the best of the things that happen.”²

¹ Stutz, Phil. Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You. Random House, 2023.

² Ben-Shahar, Tal. Psychology 1504: Positive Psychology. Harvard Open Course, 2009.

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