This post is an idea inspired by the Dr Pippa Malmgren interview over at the Infinite Loops Podcast #167.
According to Dr Malmgren, because certainty does not exist in business, a feeling of certainty should always be considered a red flag. i.e. A feeling of certainty is not an indication that things will go your way, it’s an indication that you have let your guard down.
The interesting question is, why do we have the need for certainty in the first place?
Some of it might be some kind of emotional antidote from our ever-pervasive survival instinct that makes us lean towards pessimism (“That rustle in the bushes is probably NOT just the wind, it’s probably a saber tooth tiger”). Or the “We live in the best of all possible worlds” bias.
According to the neurologist, Dr Robert Burton, a lot of this certainty bias can be explained by biology. We LIKE the feeling of certainty because it feeds our brain’s pleasure centers.
“The pleasure of a thought is what propels us forward; imagine trying to write a novel or engage in a long-term scientific experiment without getting such rewards. Fortunately, the brain has provided us with a wide variety of subjective feelings of reward ranging from hunches, gut feelings, intuitions, suspicions that we are on the right track to a profound sense of certainty and utter conviction. And yes, these feelings are qualitatively as powerful as those involved in sex and gambling. One need only look at the self-satisfied smugness of a ‘know it all’ to suspect that the feeling of certainty can approach the power of addiction.”
In other words, it’d be very hard for anyone to embark on a shared, long term useful endeavor like building up a business if the brain wasn’t constantly giving us little reward-snacks to chew on to keep us motivated.
While certainty is a futile mission, this is why it’s a good idea to create a culture inside your business where people are frequently encouraged to “Celebrate Wins.”
Yes, we have to keep our eyes on the long term goals, but our people will not be able to go the distance if they lose hope along the way. Even just a bit of hope in the future has been demonstrated to be very powerful.
In other words, celebrating our little victories today gives us hope that the big victories of tomorrow are more certain to happen, which makes it more likely to happen in reality. A nice self-fulfilling prophecy
