Certainty Is a Product, And You Shouldn't Buy It

Photo courtesy of Gareth Ellis

One of the most consistent things I’ve seen in all of my adult life is that people cannot stand uncertainty.

We will buy any product, pay for any service, and believe any idea that eliminates uncertainty. This includes anything from religion (the ultimate certainty story — because it’s about life after death, which is the hardest question of all to deal with) all the way down to something like stock market news. People read whatever makes us feel like we understand what’s going on in the stock market. Whatever makes it, for even a moment, make sense.

If you can build a product that makes people feel less uncertain, you’re going to have an intimate relationship with a lot of people’s wallets. And they’re going to let you. In fact they’re going to beg you for more.

Even though, time after time, we wake up surprised the next day because yesterday’s predictions were stupid and wrong and came from people who were merely selling magazines.

And yet we crave it, because people have the sort of amnesia that allows us to continue searching for certainty even when we’ve just found out for the 600th time that we can’t find it and that no product can provide it.

There is an entire economy (the “creator economy” on the internet, but it’s also much older than that) of people giving writing advice, workout advice, business advice, and every other kind of advice you can imagine. If you’re trying to do a thing in life, you can be sure that there are one hundred thousand Instagram accounts offering short videos about how to do that thing. How to do that thing better. How to hack it, how to solve it.

But they’re largely useless. Not because most content creators suck or because they’re misleading (although they do and they are), but because that simply isn’t how life works. You can’t learn how to be a great coder from reading a single book about programming in Python, just like you can’t learn how to be a master armorer by watching your local blacksmith for one single work day. And you certainly can’t learn how to be great at business by watching a few dopamine-inducing, perfectly-edited videos.

Because those videos aren’t selling solutions. They’re selling the feeling that whatever they’re presenting will work for you. Most of the internet is selling you one thing and one thing alone: certainty. A path. A solution.

A feeling.

I’ve been writing for more than 3 years now. Which, in the grand scheme of things, makes me a mere baby. I still have no idea what I’m doing.

But I have learned a whole arsenal of things about writing. I’m miles ahead of where I once were. And almost everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned through the pain of bad writing. Not through workshops, not through books, and certainly not through “writing gurus” who try to sell me the status of being a good writer without ever being a bad writer first.

Here’s an example. I learned what kind of writer I don’t want to be. I did this by paying attention to what makes me cringe, which is almost everything I’ve ever written. If I type out a sentence, a paragraph, or an essay that makes me cringe, I simply do not post it. And then I can learn what about that piece of writing made me cringe, and then never do it again.

Here’s another example: nobody can teach me what kinds of sentences feel right, to me. That’s up to me. My number one job as a writer is to figure out what feels right, and that’s a matter of taste. To figure out what is the best way to deliver my message, with my voice, and my very specific vocabulary. No Instagram video, and no book, can teach me that. It’s my job to figure it out by playing. It’s my job to develop my taste to a point where I can say yes and no to things and mean it. That’s a skill that is earned.

I’ve seen hundreds and hundreds of videos on social media about working out. They always have captions like:

“HERE’S why your tricep workout sucks!”

“3 tips to correct your bench press!”

“HOW TO BUILD LATS AND GET JACKED FAST”

Most of these videos, without any surprise at all, are bullshit. They’re clickbait; they’re basic instructional videos for one very particular person’s form, and are not to be used as instruction manuals across the board. Because everyone’s body is different, everybody’s joints can handle different loads at different angles, and working out when you’re 240 pounds and developed is vastly different from working out when you’re 150 pounds and weak. It’s not even the same activity.

I’ve watched videos that made me excited to go try a thing in the gym, and then tried it and found that it just didn’t stimulate my muscles the way I needed it to. There’s nothing more disappointing than having the discipline to show up to the gym and then waking up the next day without sore muscles anyway. But that’s what it’s like to train. You have to do the work of figuring out what works for you, and that includes, unfortunately, wasting your time on things that don’t work sometimes. There is no shortcut through the “wasting your time” part of the routine.

Nor is there for a writer. You have to dig through the bad ideas to get to the good ones, and no Instagram account can save you from that. From that pain or that effort.

When I used to invest in micro cap stocks, I took suggestions from friends. We would share all of the companies we had looked into, and share all of our research with each other, and give each other the confidence to invest in these tiny, unproven companies. We borrowed conviction from each other.

Almost every single company my friends shared with me either went bankrupt or otherwise failed magnificently. Look at me, I’m shocked.

And that includes my own ideas. Some of mine failed too, despite how hard I worked on the research. But do you know what else happened? The only big winners were companies that I did the research on myself. Not borrowed ideas, but my own ideas. If I’d have invested all of my net worth into the few stocks I had chosen myself, I’d be a wealthier man today.

But I didn’t, because I trusted my colleagues more than I trusted myself. And now I have far less money than I should, in my opinion.

What I’ve learned from years of reading books about stocks and finance and writing, and from about 9 months of watching workout videos, and from receiving a lifetime of advice from my elders, is this: other people can’t give you solutions. They can only give you ideas. You have to then go try those ideas.

Which is why, although most workout videos and most writing advice totally suck, I’m glad I’ve read and watched and tried so many. Or, even if not glad, I’m okay with it. Because the larger my surface area for ideas to strike me, the faster I can try them out and figure out which ones I’m keeping.

I’ve watched fitness influencers tear apart tricep exercises that are actually getting me great results. I’ve heard great writers give advice that makes me howl and cringe at myself. And I’ve received advice from wise old people that just does not work in my life.

And that’s fine. Because I’ve learned something else important about the very concept of advice: advice is relative. Most advice is simply meant to yank you away from your own excesses and blind spots, and make you try something else. Most advice is not “Here’s what’s going to fix this for you full stop”; it’s more like “Have you tried this? Might this work in your particular situation?”

As much as finance journals, creative gurus, and your own parents want to give you the luxury of certainty, there is no certainty in life. There is only experimentation. If someone is selling you solutions, distrust them. If someone is selling you the feeling of certainty, ignore them. But if someone is offering you ideas, listen and try them.

And if you’re not the kind of person who wants to do the work of trying things, distrust yourself.

Drink some water.

JR

“There are three ways to make a living:
1) Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.
2) Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.
3) Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.” - Jason Zweig