The illusion of control, clarity, and certainty
This month I’m revisiting a topic I explored in E125 of my podcast last year: the intertwined desires for control, clarity, and certainty.
These 3 C’s, if you will, have been present for me over the last several months, sparked by conversations (like in my latest podcast episode where I share my vulnerable, behind-the-scenes book experience in conversation with my friend Neha Mandhani) and readings that keep circling back to the same insight: how our clinging to these can actually work against us.
My intent in coming back to this topic is to offer thoughts that hopefully reduce the discomfort that can come with lacking control, clarity, and certainty and offer new ways to be with them. I thought it appropriate for this month of August, one where we try to hold onto the end of summer—creating space, slowing down, and resting before Fall really kicks in.
Now, I want to say that it’s completely natural for humans to seek control over our environment for predictability and security, to want clarity to reduce cognitive load, and to crave certainty to minimize stress. The irony is that these desires are at times an illusion—we can’t control everything, always see clearly, or predict outcomes with certainty.
That’s what I’ve taken away from the books I’ve been digging into in the last month, such as “The Uncontrollability of the World” by Hartmut Rosa, “Notes on Complexity” by Neil Theise, “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows, and “Unleash Your Complexity Genius” by Jennifer Garvey Berger and Carolyn Coughlin. These voices all point to this same understanding: that we seek outcomes that aren’t often possible given the systems we operate within in our complex world. Seeking control, clarity, and certainty amidst emergence can be futile.
Plus, should we want these outcomes anyway? Rosa puts it beautifully: “A world that is fully known, in which everything has been planned and mastered, would be a dead world.” Think about it—reading a book where you could control the narrative and already know the ending would be far less interesting and exciting, right? Well, imagine living your life knowing exactly how each day and year would unfold. Pretty dull and, dare I say, lifeless.
What If We Shifted Our Approach?
Instead of fighting this reality, what if we embraced a different way of being that would allow more peace, ease, and joy?
Instead of striving to control our external environment, perhaps we can find peace and grounding in what we can truly control—our own self-knowing and self-understanding.
When we root ourselves in what we can actually know—such as what we want for ourselves and who we want to be, our values, what we want to give, and what we love—we find a different kind of stability. (In our conversation, Neha talks about this concept calling them “certainty anchors,” where we can root ourselves.) As Viktor Frankl taught us, we can’t control what happens to us, but we can control how we show up moment to moment. In knowing ourselves, we can better make decisions that are aligned to us in each circumstance and context.
Instead of clawing for clarity, we can step into more ease by learning to sense and experience sparks amidst ambiguity.
As Rosa describes and defines, such moments of resonance—when we come alive when encountering the world—can’t be manufactured. They arise when we’re open and pay attention to what we’re experiencing in the moment. We can’t “control” these moments of resonance, when insight and knowing (clarity) will appear. We need to get comfortable living in the questions, as the poet Rainer Maria Rilke captured perfectly when he wrote: “Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” Liminal spaces, what I call inflection points, are times of ambiguity that offer us the most learning. We need to act and experience the world to learn into our knowing.
Instead of insisting on certainty, we can create space and step into the play and joy of exploration and experimentation.
Uncertainty isn’t the enemy—it’s actually possibility in disguise. It’s the fuzzy front end where creativity, innovation, and growth live. What if we stopped treating life and work decisions like high-stakes, one-shot deals and instead started treating them like a game we get to play, designing and redesigning, iterating the way that works best for us. Or, as Garvey and Coughlin counsel in “Complexity Genius,” what if we shift away from thinking about the outcome we desire and instead focus on what we want to learn. The exercise they suggest is to think about all the good things that would happen if our experiment “goes right” AND all the good things that would happen if it “goes wrong.” Embracing both “goods” allows us to step into play and experimentation.
Now to you
So, what if this month, instead of wrestling with the lack of control, clarity, and certainty, you practiced a different approach? What if you allowed yourself to not control, to not know, to not be certain—and found peace, ease, joy in that space instead?
The world will always be wonderfully, frustratingly uncontrollable. Our choice is whether we’ll fight that reality or learn to find adventure and aliveness within it. As Neil Theise reminds us in “Notes on Complexity”:
“New opportunities can’t be found if random things aren’t happening here and there, stumbling into new ways of being, new modes to be reconnoitered and exploited. A little randomness keeps the system alive.”
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