[23] Einstein's Fish
Change requires new measurement systems
Dear Readers,
Hope you had a great weekend! We are rounding the corner in June!
It’s been a few weeks since we published “The First Trough” and… the world is still filled with uncertainty. We are in a deeper bear market, and it just feels like everything is crumbling.
So today, we wanted to explore certainty versus uncertainty a little more deeply.
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We are living in very turbulent times, and there are a lot of things going on in the world.
In the wake of the Pandemic, markets crashing, global conflicts, etc… keeping our spirits high has become a very important thing.
Of course, this is easier said than done because our resistance to change and our natural desire to keep things as they were causes a lot of angst. We want the world to go back to where it was… to simpler times and often better times.
But deep down, we know that the world has changed and we cannot simply go back to the way things were. The tension and angst doesn’t come from us knowing that the world has changed, but rather us accepting that the world indeed has changed. The former is easy, but the latter is challenging.
We know we have to accept this new reality, but we don’t want to.
But why don’t we want to?
Because if we accept the reality of this new world, we have to let go of the stable world of yesterday we’ve come to enjoy. Then there is also a fear of loss involved and we question: Will we ever get back to where we were?
Will things ever go back to normal?
When comparing the unknown to the known, we often think that the unknown has the potential to cause more harm than the known.
But this isn’t always true.
The Uncertainty Path 🛣 🚧
Oftentimes, in situations of vast uncertainty, there is a huge opportunity to do the things that bring the most value, joy and purpose to our lives.
And at some point, most of us push ourselves toward uncertainty.
Take our careers, for example. For many of us, doing the easy things, over and over, at some point reveals a fork in the road. On one hand, we accept the reality of doing the easy thing and the thing you know (certainty). On the other hand, we choose to walk the path that is filled with uncertainty (where the only thing certain is you know what you’re leaving behind).
You don’t know what you will get at the other side, and nothing is guaranteed. There is no such thing as guaranteed success, and because it is a risk (purely because it’s unknown), there is a chance that it might not work out or that you will be better off on your status quo path.
For some, this choice is easier, but the nuance here is that this choice can be easier or harder depending on where you are in life. We often romanticize this kind of decision, because it allows us to paint the picture that we are the heroes of our journey. Making a decision rooted in uncertainty feels like something a hero would do.
But this again is missing the point, because in our current situation, you don’t have a choice… none of us can avoid the vast amounts of uncertainty in the world today.
We were simply thrown into it!
Changing our expectations 😇
However, what we can do on the Uncertainty Path is decide how to rationalize and measure results with the Uncertainty Path in mind.
Allow me to explain…
On the Uncertainty Path, you cannot really have expectations of outcomes defined so rigidly because by definition, you don’t know what will happen.
If you begin measuring your actions and outcomes against a framework that is rooted in (greater) certainty, then you are still trying to live in the Certainty Path, i.e. the Past.
That ship has sailed. 🚢
This causes tension because the life and day-to-day you experience in the Uncertainty Path will obviously look very different than the Certainty Path…
So you cannot apply old frameworks to this new world we are in… if you do, you will be let down.
Things like “whatever I invest in will go up X%… or I want to purchase a house for cheap”… all of these things that were realistic and logical in the old framework (e.g bull market 🐂) no longer apply (e.g. bear market 🧸).
In this new world / new part of the cycle, you have to create a new measurement system on what you define as success.
You have to set new expectations.
Remember which world you want to live in (old versus new, certain versus uncertain) is NOT the choice. The only choice you have is how you measure success in the world you are in and how you set your expectations.
You aren’t just defining new goals, you are choosing an entirely different measurement framework altogether. This is important to accept because oftentimes people can accept that we are indeed in a new world… but we don’t update our measurement system, so we put ourselves between a rock and a hard place.
We create this handicap system where the elements of the new world constantly have to go against the old framework we are holding onto. We’ve structured a life where we are set up for failure…
So… it becomes a lot of “everything sucks…”
And our tendency is to assume we have failed or the world is ending… because we can’t check the boxes we are used to back in the Certainty World.
What’s really curious about this is, why do we never think to change the measuring system?
Einstein’s Fish 🐟 🎣 🧠
Let’s unpack the above with a few examples of where and why change is needed:
1️⃣ Being a student versus being an employee. In the working world, you don’t get constant feedback / validation from periodic exam results anymore. And in the real world, there is no multiple choice exam where you can score a 100 from simply just studying.
2️⃣ Being an employee versus being an entrepreneur. Working for someone else means you’re responsible for showing up and doing your job; working for yourself means you’re responsible for everything. What made you successful as an employee won’t necessarily make you successful as an entrepreneur. This means, you have to redefine what success looks like when you jump into entrepreneurship.
3️⃣ Being in a bull market versus a bear market. How you deploy capital in a bull market should be very different than how you deploy capital in a bear market. If you apply a bull market’s risk management techniques to a bear market, you are going to be let down.
4️⃣ Building in Web 2 versus building in Web 3. Web 2 meant seeking user feedback after the fact (e.g., beta testing). Web 3 means seeking user feedback at every step of the product journey because users actively evangelize your product. If you build a Web 3 project under a Web 2 framework, it’s a non-starter.
We highlight these examples because we’ve faced these transitions before, and many of us have had to adapt to new measurement systems. And oftentimes, it feels reactive. But what would it look like to change your measurement system proactively?
“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” - Albert Einstein
We are Einstein’s fish and the old framework and values system expects us to climb trees.
That makes no sense, yet most of us subscribe to it.