On Navigating Uncertainty
One year on from poker and my new thoughts on uncertainty
Hey Friends,
Poker taught me how to deal with uncertainty. You detach yourself from the outcome and focus on what you can control. But after a year in entrepreneurship, the level of uncertainty in this world is a different beast – Anything I do is uncertain.
Five months after starting my coffee business, I found myself in a predicament. Two people had told me they thought my true interest wasn't in coffee but in writing and behavioural science. They both asked whether I had considered pursuing writing instead. The fact that I’m delivering these words to you now, I’m sure you can guess what happened.
Although this was a new predicament, it felt familiar to me. I first encountered this situation back in October 2015. Stay in my corporate job and work my way towards investment banking or quit and go back to poker? The second time I was in this situation was in July 2021. Stay in high-stakes poker or leave and start a coffee business?
It was the case of choosing an exclusive path over another. They were serious and consequential decisions. The problem was that every move was a good move, but also, every move was equally bad. Every decision I make could go wrong. It was hard to tell which decision was the right move to make. The answer to my predicament lay beyond the barrier of what I knew. I didn’t know if poker would work out, I didn’t know if starting a coffee business would work out, and I don’t know if writing will work out.
And that is what uncertainty feels like.
We humans are wired to avoid uncertainty. We go to great lengths to not think or deal with uncertainty – at least not on a day-to-day level. We want our lives to be rhythmic and predictable as possible.
Even my day-to-day life runs on a predictable schedule: wake up, coffee, read, write, lunch, business, write, dinner, work out, read, bed. Uncertainty still intrudes in my life in untimely moments – like last month someone decided to rear-end me on the motorway. The few days after my accident, I reminded myself how I was grateful to be alive, and that life was precious. Eventually, I stopped thinking about the accident in such vivid detail and focused back on the humdrum of daily life.
I’m often asked why I do so many things that have an element of risk and uncertainty. See, in poker, you can't win big if your strategy is to play it safe. And if you don’t take any risks, the blinds (forced bets) will bleed your stack out slowly, and to be honest, that’s a pathetic way to go. The same analogy can be applied to life. The truth is I’m quite risk-averse. But I refuse to limp my way to my deathbed and then look back on my life and say I should’ve done something different, something more. That’s the thing with safety and certainty, it gives you this illusion of control, whereas uncertainty is ever present. Life can change at a toss of a coin, a flip of a card or a flap of a butterfly's wings. So it’s best to figure out how to take risks and learn to thrive in uncertainty.
There are two worlds we live in. The first is the predictable world where if you work hard, focus on one thing, be consistent, put in 10,000 hours and follow each other’s footsteps, you will most likely find success. The second is the stochastic world. In this world, there’s a lot of randomness. You do things by trial and error. You focus on multiple things at once. The Pareto principle is evident. And the only way to ensure moderate success is by focusing on protecting the downside and surviving for as long as possible. A lot of life operates in this stochastic world, but because we’re wired to avoid uncertainty and randomness, we tend to turn a blind eye to it.
I can get nerdy on you and talk about risk, probability, fat tails, ergodicity, black swans and uncertainty. Or, I can take what is the more effective approach and talk about it from a psychological perspective. Because it’s one thing for you to intellectualise with numbers and mathematical models, and it’s entirely another thing for you to understand if you know how it feels. This is important because you need to feel in order to act effectively. And I can assure you this: you’ve already felt uncertainty and know how to navigate it.
COVID gave us this experience of uncertainty. It’s been 2.5 years since COVID announced itself to the world. As a result, we’ve all experienced this uncertainty together. We were locked in our homes, not knowing what the next month would be like, whether we’d be laid off, or when COVID would go away. We, at some point, couldn’t fathom planning more than a few weeks ahead or whether we could buy toilet paper.
I vividly remember the penetrating fear and deafening silence in Central London. I remember the dread of not knowing when I’d next see my family, when I was going to hold my ex-girlfriend, or when I’d be able to laugh with friends again.
There were endless articles talking about the new normal, languishing as the new emotion, the end of brick and mortar and so on. But I’d bet my bank account the journalists at the time had no clue themselves. We didn’t know, and still don’t, the full extent of the economic downturn, nor can we know the full psychological impact COVID left on our lives. The only thing we did, and instinctively knew, was just try and survive. We all collectively share an anchor point in our minds to refer to whenever we want to remember what uncertainty feels like.
A lot of your dreams, goals and aspirations are in the stochastic world. But when you play in the domain of the stochastic world, you don’t know what’s going to happen. Even those who’ve ‘made it’ didn’t know either. In the many conversations I’ve had with other fellow entrepreneurs, every single one of them told me the exact same thing: they had no clue as to what they were doing.
When you deal with uncertainty, shit goes wrong all the time. But when you learn to embrace uncertainty, there’s a sense of confidence that grows, a sense of self-belief that you will be able to handle and adapt to whatever comes your way.
See, to navigate uncertainty, you can’t make effective decisions if you’re paralysed by the unknown. You have to get used to the fact that you will never know if you’ve made the best decision or not. You have to be comfortable with fear. You have to let the fear surge through your body and take action anyway.
And that is what navigating uncertainty feels like.
— Jason Vu Nguyen