Let Go of Certainty, Break Free from Stress, Unlock Your Creativity, and Thrive
How I trained myself to not just tolerate but even leverage uncertainty and became a better content creator.
🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.
Our need for certainty creates stress, eats up energy, and complicates decision-making. I see it in every chat with creators, and I've lived it myself.
We crave knowledge and guarantees at every step:
we want to pick a platform that wont’ stop driving readers our way,
we want to write only viral articles,
we want to immediately find a niche that doesn't feel restrictive, yet still makes us stand out.
I wasted god knows how many hours at the design stage, eaten by doubt, trying to predict the future. It's unsustainable and unrealistic. There are always too many factors beyond our control, and surprises are inevitable.
Fortunately, after 14 years as a content creator, I've learned to live with uncertainty. I haven't banished fear, but my decisions are quicker, I experience less stress, and I'm able to seize more opportunities.
Here's how you can train yourself to embrace uncertainty.
The failure that pushed me over the edge
My parents dedicated their lives to chase certainty. They held safe jobs, lived in a quiet town, and always considered the worst-case scenario while making purchases.
Following their footsteps, I chose a safe dream job. I wanted to become a university researcher and professor.
In the Italian system, it takes years and luck to get tenure. But you stay forever employed hopping from grant to grant. So, I joined a PhD program, the prerequisite for starting an academic career.
Then the unexpected happened. I hated it. Midway through the program I considered quitting. Only sunk cost bias kept me going.
As in the best stories, this terrible failure fortunately taught me a vital lesson: I can’t stand working under someone else. This led me to discovering entrepreneurship and starting my first blog.
Since then, I've exposed myself to uncertainty daily and gradually learned to live with it, even benefit from it.
How you can make the jump to
Moving from the world of certainty to the world of uncertainty is like launching a spaceship.
You need extra thrust to reach escape velocity. In my case, the trauma and disappointment from my PhD experience provided the necessary energy.
Maybe you can find something equally powerful in your life:
are you fed up with your job?
Do you feel like life is slipping through your fingers?
Are you afraid you'll never realize your dreams?
Realizing things can’t improve without embracing uncertainty increases your risk-tolerance.
If this doesn’t provide enough motivation, you can still create the right conditions.
Reduce risk
I started my first blog, the foundation of my first business, before finishing my PhD. By the time I needed an income, traffic growth was already promising.
Also, my wife was working, our expenses were low, and I had a few thousand euros saved. I knew I could spend over a year earning very little.
Can you cut down on your expenses (which, by the way, is always a good idea)?
Can you start gradually?
Can someone in your life help you for some time?
Weaken mental obstacles
Too often fears control our mind. The best exercise I found to reduce them is the fear-setting exercise created by Tim Ferriss. I've used it many times, when doubt stirred the butterflies in my stomach. It never fails.
Usually, our fears loom over us like the bogeyman. They’re undefined, but scary and big. When we define them, we conquer them, and usually shrink them.
The fear-setting exercise achieves this through 7 questions:
What is the worst that could happen?
What steps can you take to prevent these outcomes?
If the worst happens, what can you do to repair the damage?
What are the benefits of an attempt or partial success?
What is the cost of inaction?
What are you putting off out of fear?
What is the positive impact of taking this action?
Just the first couple of questions are enough to defuse most fears.
Remember: it's just an experiment
You're not burning bridges. Every time you make a choice, you can go back and choose a safer path.
For example, I know that if my online businesses fail, I can repurpose the skills I learned as a freelancer. And if that fails, too, I can always get a job as a substitute Math teacher.
Every time you make an uncertain choice, you can try it for a few weeks or months until you have enough data to know if it's a success or a failure. It won’t bomb overnight. You’ll have time to evaluate and adjust.
And it's never a complete failure. Often, you can use the data you collected to make another attempt and get better results.
For example, before launching my Substsack newsletter, I had been writing on Medium for a while. The platform changed and killed my views.
I saw positive reports about Substack, but I didn’t want to succumb to the shiny object syndrome. I mulled over the switch for a few months. Too long.
But I took the plunge because I knew I could keep an eye on my analytics and update my decision every month. (You can see how the first 6 months went in this article: How I Gained 700+ Subscribers on Substack in 6 Months)
Gradually train your tolerance
Once you make the jump, you can leverage the momentum. When I became self-employed, I gained control over my entire day and the motivation to keep innovating. I HAD to make it work.
My business and blog became my playground. I kept experimenting with topics, formats, content types, platforms, designs, calls to action, products, services, and so on.
I exposed myself to uncertainty almost daily. When something worked, it became like a brick I could use to build a stable platform supporting my new adventures.
The constant self-imposed challenges had many benefits:
They numbed the fear, like a doctor overcoming the fear of blood after seeing dozens of patients.
They proved I had the skills to recover after failures.
They showed no failure is permanent.
They demonstrated the worst never happens.
They created many precedents. Now, when I face a hard decision, I can see it’s similar to something I already experienced. I already have more elements guiding my decision.
As you start venturing into content creation and entrepreneurship, you can keep a decision journal. Record all the hard decisions you have to make, the related fears, and the outcomes. You’ll accumulate tangible proof that your fear of uncertainty has no right to speak.
Now go, realize what you’re missing out and make that decision. If you need help, ask in the comments.
Good luck!
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