CERTAIN OF UNCERTAINTY

You know, but you don't know. You are sure, deeply sure, really? absolutely sure, but not really sure.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, you are screaming underwater. (At least I am… sometimes)

Should I go this way? Or that way might be better? Back to the drawing board? And suddenly, it's no longer the drawing board. It's the "I'm figuring out" painful zone. Let’s iterate one more time because you f#$%^&* don't know.

And the more you look for the answer, the more the quicksand pulls.

I actually think you do know.

THE PATTERN

We have two fundamental needs pulling in opposite directions.

Certainty, the need to know, to remove cognitive load, to function.

And uncertainty, the tension, the chaos that makes us get out of bed and do something with the day.

We've always needed both to function properly, but something has shifted. Now the proportion is off: the relentless flow of information, looking at someone always doing it slightly better than you, or the never-ending colorful framework contradicting the last one, it's not motivating anymore.

It's keeping us inside inertia. We're consuming more than ever and moving less than ever.

THE FILM

I went back to No Country For Old Men this week. A film from 2007 by the Coen Brothers. And I kept seeing the same thing that resonates with this, in every scene.

Three characters: Three relationships with uncertainty.

Moss is certain. He knows how to survive, how to move, how to stay ahead. He is so ahead of the curve that he dies off-screen. He doesn’t even deserve a showdown, he is just gone.

Then you have Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, one of the greatest villains in cinema history. He uses a coin to decide outcomes. We think he is crazy, but he does so because he understood something the other characters didn't. Most of the time, there is no real reason for the chain of events. There is only the reason you chose to attach to what happened.

Finally, there is the sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones. The old man from the title. He is trying to impose order on a situation that has absolutely no interest in order. Trying to find the logic in something that was never logical to begin with.

He is all (most) of us.

In business, in sales, in the daily grind of building something: We are the sheriff going around looking for the pattern that explains why that deal went quiet, why that content landed, and the next one didn't, why some months work, and others don't.

We need the reason so badly, we'll invent one if we have to.

THE CONCEPT

Kahneman called it the narrative fallacy. The mind's need to build a story with a logical chain of cause and effect, even when no such chain exists.

Think about the last time something didn't go the way you planned.

What did you do immediately after?

You found the reason it failed.

But Kahneman would tell you that most of the time, you don't find the real reason. You found a plausible cause your brain could attach to the effect. Something that made the randomness feel like information.

And so we build these stories to manage the uncertainty.

Except that the story is slightly false, and the uncertainty doesn't go away. It never does, just goes quiet for a while before it comes back louder.

THE TAKE

The situation has no interest in order. Asking for order it doesn't have is why you're screaming underwater.

Here's what I keep coming back to. The only thing that has ever actually worked is to stop looking for the explanation and go back to what you know. The thing that was true before the noise started, the narrative that worked before someone on LinkedIn told you it shouldn't.

Not every outcome has a lesson, some of it is just randomness wearing a suit.

Think about New York for a second.

Nobody choreographed that city, designing the way eight million people move through it every day, the cabs and the cyclists and the man power-walking through Union Square at 7 am with a coffee the size of his head.

By every rational measure, it shouldn’t work and be complete chaos.

And yet.

There is a beautiful, loud, slightly insane symphony that somehow holds together because enough people showed up every day and did their thing, trusted what they knew, and stopped waiting for the chaos to make sense before they moved.

That's the whole game.

Just you, doing your thing, inside the beautiful mess of it all.

You want to build something real? Find what you know, stick to your narrative, and stop asking the chaos for explanations, it was never going to give.

We probably can't make it less chaotic, but we can make it ours.

And honestly, a little less scrolling and a little more trusting of what you already know wouldn't hurt anyone

—Théo.

A note before I sign off.

I'm making a short film series this year. One founder per episode. I spend a day with you, we work through one thing you've been avoiding: a decision, a story, a conversation, and we cross it together on camera. The episode closes with a letter from me to you.

I'm casting five founders for the first season. If that's you, reply to this email with one sentence about what you'd want to work through. I'll write back to the ones I want to meet.

‍