In My Mind 13 - Uncertainty, Consistency, and Delayed Gratification

Certainty is the enemy of growth

The only things that are certain are the things that have already happened, and death. However, even things that have already happened are only certain from your perspective; someone else may see those things from a different lens making what you "know" to have happened, subjective.

Life is full of uncertainty, you can never truly know whether what you're doing will bring the results you hope for, but if everything was certain and pre-determined, there would be no joy in accomplishments for the success was already a "done deal" before you started. You can see this in everything. We celebrate birthdays because the next 12 months aren't guaranteed, we celebrate exam results because you can't just attend the exam and instinctively get an A*, and we celebrate job promotions because it didn't have to be you that was promoted.

The trouble with certainty is that you can seek it and, in some respects, sit in it and be comfortable. If you're in a job that's 9 to 5, you don't have to put in all that much effort but you know the exact minimum effort required to stay under the radar, you'd be forgiven for thinking you've found certainty in being employed for the next year. But does this way of living truly make you happy? By putting in additional effort while being unsure whether it will grant any greater success, you open the door to promotions, more learning opportunities and greater job satisfaction.

A lot of people like the idea of working for themselves, the trouble is that in comparison to a full time job working in someone else's business, there's a boatload more uncertainty in running your own business, the difference is that when you're running your own business, you're in more control over things that create uncertainty. In someone else's business you're at the mercy of the boss, they may decide to sell the business putting your role in jeopardy. They may decide to restructure in a way that makes you redundant. Running your own business allows you to make these decisions, with the responsibility of keeping the business afloat.

Consistency over intensity

When wanting to make a change in our lives we often go for the "nuclear" option, spending whole days planning the execution or making a massive change in the first few days hoping that it will continue and you won't drop back into old habits. The problem is that this intensity is very hard to sustain for any period of time which makes us more likely to go back to the starting point. Consistency however relies on making small changes frequently while maintaining the previous changes and compounding them over time. If you're looking to lose weight a trainer may begin your plan with attending the gym 3 times a week, and hitting 8 thousand steps a day. In themselves, each of these steps seem small but when they're followed in two/three weeks with the goals of reducing takeaway food to once a week and drinking 2 litres of water a day suddenly the compounding effect of these activities starts.

A famous quote from James Clear's Atomic Habits says:

"If you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done."

Reading that the numbers almost seem impossible, and yet, from small actions you can see this happen. I'm a gym goer which is probably one of the easiest places to see progress as people's bodies are literally changing in front of you and I enjoy seeing people that have started the gym, stay consistent and move towards their goals over time. Those that come in (typically in January) and start doing 7 sessions a week only tend to last a month (if that long) until they burn out.
I've dived deeper into consistency in this article: The role of consistency in lasting change.

Delayed gratification

A linked idea to consistency is delayed gratification. As mentioned above, if you improve 1% each day you will be 37 times better in a year's time. But you won't see that improvement for 12 months. You may see small changes here and there, for example in the gym you might be able to lift slightly heavier next week, but any big change isn't going to show itself for some time. On that basis, we have to be comfortable making efforts today that you aren't going to immediately see the benefit of.

There was a study known as "The Marshmallow Test" where young children were sat in a room and offered a reward (typically a marshmallow, cookie or pretzel) but they were told that if they could leave the reward for 15 minutes they would get a larger reward (2 marshmallows, cookies, or pretzels). The study found that those children that were able to wait for the larger reward tended to have better academic performance, better social functioning, and better stress management skills. All of which makes sense with a bit of thought. In academia you have to put in a lot of work studying and learning new subjects in the hope that in the future you will be able to put it together in an exam. In our social lives we spend time getting to know people, building relationships without certainty that it will lead to close friendships.

I write more about delayed gratification (and how the gym taught me it) in this article: The gym makes you stronger, but not just for lifting.

It's important to note that in The Marshmallow Test there were other factors that determined whether a child took the cookie before the researcher returned with a second one, for example if they were brought up in unreliable environments, where promises were made but not kept, the child would be more likely to take the cookie as soon as it was offered for they had no evidence to suggest that waiting provided any benefit. It's also important to note that "willpower" alone does not suggest someone's potential success and the children's socioeconomic background also played a role in their later life outcomes.