25 Apr 2025 · 35 min
In this episode of The Art of Accomplishment, hosts Brett Kistler and guest Joe Hudson explore how to thrive amid pervasive uncertainty. They begin by defining uncertainty as an ever‑present condition, noting that true certainty is an illusion and that our nervous system evolved for more stable environments. The conversation identifies three common pitfalls people fall into when confronting uncertainty: pessimism (doom‑focused thinking), blind optimism/hope (false, overly positive certainty), and false realism (pretending to be a neutral realist while still collapsing reality into a preferred outcome). They introduce the concept of the "window of tolerance," describing how short‑term uncertainty can be dopamine‑driven, but prolonged exposure raises cortisol, leading to rigidity, panic, or disengagement. Strategies to expand this window include intentional exposure, emotional titration, and reframing uncertainty as adventure. A central theme is the "ownership mindset" – choosing to "fly through the crash" by deciding how you want to be in the moment rather than seeking external certainty. They contrast this with the "optimist," "pessimist," and a silent "realist" who still collapses reality. The hosts illustrate their points with vivid anecdotes: a BASE‑jumping friend who quit a corporate job after a moment of panic, Joe’s upbringing with an alcoholic parent shaping adaptive versus controlling responses, Brett’s brother’s cancer diagnosis, and business pivots during COVID. They outline a practical three‑step approach: (1) face reality (acknowledge facts without blame), (2) feel emotions (allow grief, fear, anger without suppression), and (3) own the certainties you do have (focus on present‑moment values and how you want to act). Finally, they discuss the role of wonder and awe as a neurological antidote to fear, encouraging listeners to anchor certainty in the present self‑definition rather than future predictions. The episode closes with gratitude to listeners and a brief production credit.
Chapters
Your plane is crashing, you're going to just continue to assume you're going to find somewhere to land, and you're just going to fly all the way through the crash. And sometimes you'll be surprised that you're still alive at the end of it, right?
So there's this thing about it, which is, how do I want to be in this moment? And because that's the certainty that you're actually getting in a weird way, it's like, how do I want to be? I want to be like I'm flying through the crash. How do I want to be? I want to be like I can create something better, and that's going to be my reference point.
Welcome back to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore living the life you want with enjoyment and ease. I'm here today with Joe Hudson. My name is Brett Kistler. Today we're going to talk about uncertainty. We're going to talk about how to make the most of uncertainty. We're going to give you some tools and tips and tricks that you can use to navigate uncertainty in your life. And we're going to talk about 3 common pitfalls that people experience when they are navigating uncertainty in their lives. Joe, we live in really uncertain times. Uncertain.
Holy shit, we do.
Yeah, you know, we're living in times of geopolitical uncertainty, we're living in times of market uncertainty, we're living in times of AI rising and eating seemingly everything right now. Yeah, and people are scared. And so a lot of people have been asking us about how to navigate uncertainty and to really thrive and move forward in their lives with conviction in the midst of all this uncertainty.
Yeah.
So I'd love to talk about that today.
Yeah, sounds great. I'd love that.
Awesome. So let's just get started. What is uncertainty?
Uncertainty is what's happening now. Like right now, we are not certain about how this podcast is going to go. We are not certain about if it's going to be a good podcast. We're not certain really ever of anything. Our brain creates a trick on us where we are predicting and we're saying, oh, I wake up and I get breakfast and I go to work, whatever it is that I do. So I can pretty much predict that. And therefore, since I can predict it with pretty good accuracy, I call that certainty. But in reality, there is no such thing as certainty. You might wake up and your house might fall on you. You might wake up and your kid's sick that day. You might wake up and, you know, we've entered World War III. There's just no such thing as certainty. There are times that are more predictable and less predictable, but there's no really such thing as a certain time. Nobody sat down in 2010 and said, I'm certain that 2020 would look the way 2020 looked. Nobody.
Nobody.
Yeah. And if they did, they were wrong.
Yeah, which is why I imagine out of all the people listening to this podcast right now, probably most of them are like, how can I find some more certainty in this world? And there's maybe some subset that are like, woo, uncertainty, this is awesome.
Right, right. Yeah.
But we evolved, our nervous systems developed in much more stable times.
Yeah.
Over a very long time.
Yeah.
Our bodies, our biology has never seen times like this.
Yeah.
We've seen other kinds of times, you know, meteors, definitely some periods of rapid change.
Yeah.
But nothing quite like this on an environmental level, a social level.
Yeah.
On all these levels of complexity that didn't even exist.
Yeah. I think the thing is that we have cycles, nature has cycles. If you look in Redwood's historic record, there was big fires every 50 years, small fires every 5. There's these moments of not enough food, moments of too much food. Humans have this 80-year cycle that we have where we redefine our institutions every 80-ish years. And so there's these cycles. And in those moments of transformation, that moments of like rapid change, it's actually when you get the biggest opportunity to change something for the better. In our business, you see it all the time. I got divorced and I got into this work and now my whole life is better. I lost my job, my son got sick. Like those moments of rapid holy shit, everything's changing are the moments where you start questioning, where you see yourself in a different light, where you are forced to be put into a position that you haven't been put in before. And so you have to see yourself differently.
Yeah.
And so when we find ourselves in a different position than we're normally in, whether we're just like, oh, we're going to go travel through Southeast Asia or whether somebody gets elected and it changes the entire landscape of the markets, that is the time of the most opportunity. That is the time where massive transformation within yourself, positive transformation and negative transformation, can happen in yourself or can happen in a culture. And you can consistently look through companies, you can look through empires, you can look through marriages. Those moments of like, oh, shit, I don't know what's going on, is when the most change happens. The question is, How do you take advantage of those moments to have positive change, have a change where you feel better in your life rather than negative in your life?
Yeah, it's interesting. That makes me want to upend an assumption that I made earlier.
Yeah.
Which is that we live in the most uncertain times when in reality I am the most certain that I've ever been that I'm not going to be eaten by a wild animal.
Correct. Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Yeah. We as a species there's a form of rapid change that we have always been dealing with. And that's what makes me say at the beginning, everything is uncertain. I think that frame of saying, oh, this, this is uncertainty. All it's doing is saying this time is only bringing a mirror to the reality of our situation, which is, yeah, transformation. You are not the same person you were a decade ago, a year ago. Nobody who's listening to this podcast is. They might wanna convince themselves that they are. So we're all changing. It's all changing all the time.
Yeah. So we can't deny that uncertainty is ever present.
Yeah.
And there's ways it's increasing. There's ways it's decreasing. It's always changing. And what I also can't deny is that there is a tendency, there is a desire, an instinct to create a sense of certainty.
Yes.
It seems to be, innate in us.
There's a desire to both create a sense of certainty and to get lack of certainty. I'll give you some examples. Could you imagine you're like, I am going to marry this person, and I'm told from on high with no uncertainty that this is the way the marriage is going to be, this is how you're going to feel for the entire marriage. Or even more, say, any retreat that we run, we don't tell people what's going to happen every step of the way before it occurs because we don't even know what's going to happen.
Yeah, often we have a sense of the arc.
Yeah. Yeah, but if we did, there'd be less transformation. And so there's part of us, and neurologically speaking, there's uncertainty creates some dopamine if it's in the short term. What that all means is that there's a part of us that likes uncertainty. We know we thrive off of uncertainty on some level. We want the adventure. We want the movie. We want the song to be a little different than every other pop song. We want that, like, uncertain twist. And then there's some window of tolerance where we're either living with uncertainty for so long that it starts neurologically making us have more cortisol, and therefore we start thinking more negatively, we start doomsdaying, or we go out of that window of tolerance and we start trying to exact control and we get rigid, or we get to the point where we're just not as effective. And so oftentimes what humans are looking for is to be in this perfect window of tolerance. Yeah, but massive transformation doesn't happen in that window of tolerance. Window of tolerance very often. It's very rare.
Well, it's a much broader window of tolerance. It's the window of comfort, I would say.
Correct. Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And there's things you can do to expand that window of tolerance for yourself. Yes. And one of the things that I'm reminded of right now is, you know, when I was in BASE jumping, in the outdoors lifestyle, there was always this, like, slow trickle of people who were coming into the sport from corporate America, for example. And there's one particular friend I remember. Lived in San Francisco. She became a researcher, she got her PhD, she landed a big job at the big company, she moved into her house. And she said that literally the specific moment that she finished picking out the drapes, she realized she could predict the next couple decades of her life and immediately panicked, left her job, left everything, bought a van, and then drove off into the mountains and did adventuring.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, just look at teenage girls. It's like, oh, everything's stable. Nope, now we've got some drama. Yeah, like there's some level of uncertainty that makes us feel alive and we want it.
It's like we want it on our terms.
Yeah, we want it on—
when uncertainty hits us in the face. Yeah, that can be really challenging to navigate. And I think that's the kind of thing people are asking. Yeah, when they're asking these questions. But also there's the other side of it, which is that we're not able to hold the uncertainty and we're avoiding it, trying to control it, and it's futile. But also, if we're succeeding—
yeah—
in reducing uncertainty in our lives, that's also equally unhealthy.
Yeah, it sure can be. So I have a high tolerance for uncertainty. I love uncertainty. Now, part of that is because I've lived with a volatile alcoholic in my childhood, and what I noticed is that typically when people lived in that kind of experience, they went one of two ways. They became very adaptive to the uncertainty, or they became very controlling, very rigid. And you can see this in alcoholic, like, lineage. Oftentimes there's the alcoholic that creates this chaos. Then there's this Al-Anon person who creates a lot of, of rigidity, a lot of control, structure, structure that makes their offspring feel super controlled and the more alcoholism, which makes enough chaos where the next generation does control. And both Tara and I can like look back on our lineage and we can see that lineage reproducing itself over 2, 3, 4 generations. So there is this interesting balance. I was bred to be an alcoholic. I was bred to have the chaos and then continue the chaos. My sister probably more was bred to be in control and But because I was raised the way I was, I got to see how much goodness can come from getting hit over the head with chaos, how much uncertainty when it slaps you in the face can actually be this really beautiful thing. And I think one of the things that you spoke to is that when somebody owns it, like, oh, I'm going out on an adventure, then there's this different way in which you approach the uncertainty. And oftentimes in the back of your head, you can think, oh, I'm owning it because I know I can go back to that apartment, I can go back to that corporate job, I can go back and like relive— you can't, but you think you can. Yeah, you did. Like, if you try— I've never seen anyone successfully go back into the corporate office and like live that same kind of lifestyle.
I even had the same thing going back to living in the BASE jumping lifestyle. I was like, I came out here and started doing this work and you continuously grow to become larger than your previous container. And if you go back into it, you can't, the thing has to break, has to change. You might be able to go back to doing something you were doing before, but you're a different person and it's— there's a bigger space. On some level, it seemed for me like a bigger requirement for uncertainty even.
Yes, absolutely. But if you can take that ownership to whatever's happening, Right. And then that's the thing that you see in corporate America all the time and people building their businesses and the creative types. Something comes in like a forest fire, something comes in like a new political scheme or AI, and someone's like, this is an adventure. I'm taking ownership. I see this as not being done to me, but as the forest changing. And now I'm going to go be in the forest in a different way. Those people are the most successful. The people who are, this is being done to me, I can't control it, what am I gonna do? Oh my gosh, it's gonna go bad. Those people are often the least successful, close to those people who are in this chronic feeling of, oh, this is all bad, I'm scared, I'm scared, and then negative thinking, negative thinking. There's this other one that they don't do quite as bad, but they also don't do great, is the optimist. It's all going to be okay. Or the positive thinking, like, oh, hope. I have hope that things will change. Those folks don't do as well either. And I see that the reality in it is you have to face what's true.
Even if you don't know.
Even if you don't know, you can face what's true. So you can. Not face what's true with negativity. Oh my God, we're fucked. This is never going to go well. That's not true. This is going to be great. It's going to be awesome. We're going to do fantastic. That's not true.
So the optimist and the pessimist are both seeking certainty artificially, artificially collapsing the uncertainty into something that feels comfortable.
Yeah.
Short term.
Short term.
But ultimately is not connecting them to—
Yeah, a great, a great example of this is there's a guy, he was an admiral. I can't remember his name, unfortunately. In Vietnam, he got put into a prison camp and lasted years, got out, and he was asked, who survived and made it out and who died? He said, oh, that's easy. The people who made it out are the people who knew they would make it out. The people who died were the optimists. And I know—
and that's fascinating nuance there, because they knew they would make it out. There's a sense of certainty created in that. But you could also call that conviction or faith, right?
Yeah. In his mind, optimism meant I'll be out by Christmas.
Mm-hmm.
Optimism meant hope that it was going to happen soon, that I wasn't going to have to endure this thing. Whereas the ones who knew they were gonna get out were the people who were like, I am not gonna pretend that this isn't gonna be a complete shithole. This isn't gonna be hell on earth. And I know that I will make it to the end of that.
Right.
And so it's a way in which they're owning the adventure. There's an ownership of it. There's like almost a false conviction. They don't know, obviously none of them knew if they were gonna die.
It's not that they even know they're gonna get out, but they're just living into the reality that they're gonna get out. So no matter what happens, they're looking for the data that points towards them getting out.
Yes.
They're looking towards the options that point toward them getting out.
Yes.
They're not looking for the options that give them the false hope that they're gonna be out by Christmas and they get to avoid feeling the fear that they're in there forever.
Exactly. And so that's the thing is like, I see people in the world today and they're just like, oh, with this and this, we're all fucked. And I'm just like, whoa, you are creating that reality. Or I think it's gonna be wonderful, it's gonna be fine. Those folks, they're literally just trying to convince themselves. What you're basically saying to yourself is you can't handle it.
Mm-hmm.
You're basically saying you're not going to be able to handle this change.
Yeah.
Whereas this other one is this ownership. Oh, I know that there's an opportunity here. I know that I can create that change. And the thing that you just said, I think that makes it even more clear about the ownership. It's I see a reality that I am going to live into today. I see a reality where we as human beings are better, more equipped, more heartfelt, more open-hearted in 20 years. And I'm going to take this forest fire that's happening and I'm going to use it to plant the next generation of seeds. And I'm going to live like that. Or I'm going to live like I'm scared to death and that everything is going to go to shit. Yeah, I see this in companies where there's a massive pivot that's required. And you see this in startups all the time where a company goes, oh, there's something not working. This is bad. We're going to pivot and we're going to be successful. And there's this way in which everybody in that company is, oh yeah, This is where we come together as a team and we pivot and we feel like, oh wow, we've done something amazing. And if you talk to CEOs and you ask CEOs generally, what was your favorite time being a CEO? It's a time just like that where it was hard. There was some external force, but we were going to figure out how to pivot and do this thing. And we did.
You ask the team to look back on that moment or their most formative moment, and they'll generally point to those moments as well. Exactly. The whole organism.
The whole organism does, right? And then the companies that seem to fail are the companies that are so big or structured in such a bureaucratic manner that they're just hopeful thinking. They're worried about, oh my God, AI is going to take us over, we're fucked, instead of, oh, how do we pivot to incorporate this new AI thing that's happening, right? And so there's either too much fear or too much rigidity or too much hope. That basically makes it so that they're not reacting to the reality that's there and they're not taking ownership of it.
Yeah. We've got the optimist and the pessimist, and there's like a kind of silent third one that sort of masquerades sometimes as facing the uncertainty. And this is the realist, the person who says, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist, I'm a realist. And yet they're still collapsing reality to a certain outcome that they end up recreating. It's not the outcome that they want. They're not living into, as we would say in air sports, like flying through the crash. This is also an aviation Yeah, your plane is crashing, you're going to just continue to assume you're going to find somewhere to land, or if you have no way to bail out, and you're just going to fly all the way through the crash. And sometimes you'll be surprised that you're still alive at the end of it, right?
That's amazing thought process.
Whereas you're like, oh, I'm a realist, I'm out of engines, I don't have a landing area, one runway, I might as well just nose in, like, right, right.
Yeah, that would not work. Interesting. So If I think about this, you're, you're seeing reality for what it is, but there's also an ownership of, oh, this is how I am going to be in it. I don't notice that I want to be really hopeful and optimistic in uncertainty. Like, that's like sugar.
Yeah.
Like, I want it for a short period of time, but I don't like it for a long period of time.
Well, you do that for enough times and you get burned by it enough that even the feeling of optimism— luckily we have this capacity to start detecting Yes. Like, we learn where that goes. If I feel a certain kind of optimism in my system, there's a part of me that's like, uh-oh, something's gonna go wrong, literally, because I'm doing the thing that last time I did it brought about something I didn't want.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's this thing about it, which is, how do I want to be in this moment? And because that's the certainty that you're actually getting in a weird way, it's like, how do I want to be? I want to be like I'm flying through the crash. How do I want to be? I want to be like I can create something better. This is how I want to be in it. It's uncertain. I'm not going to pretend that it's not uncertain. I'm not going to be unrealistic in the uncertainty. But I'm also going to say, how do I want to be in this time? And that's going to be my reference point. It's not going to be a reference point of the markets are down, the markets are up. You're fucked if that's your reference point, right? Your reference point has to be how do you want to be in this moment? How do you want to be in this time of change? And if you look at the people who have done that, say, this is how I want to be in this time of change, whether it's Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King or Gandhi, as far as leadership goes, that's what congeals humans. That's what creates movements. That's the thing that drives companies, is that level of this is how I want to be in this situation.
Yeah, I'm hearing the collective voice in the head of a lot of the audience being like, okay, great. Now you just got to be like this. Be like the way that Joe just talked about right now.
Right.
I'm going to be the person who flies through the crash.
Yeah.
How can somebody who heard what we were just saying about how do you want to be through the uncertainty and feels completely frozen? Or completely dysregulated, what can that person do?
The first one is most likely in that incapacity is not facing a reality. So part of the reality you're probably making up is things are going to go horribly wrong. And if you've been in it for years, you've been making that up for quite a long period of time. So you might want to notice that things have not gone horribly wrong. The other one is that there's almost guaranteed an emotional experience that you are resisting in this. Right. So there's a— I don't want to be so out of control or uncertainty so much that I have to feel that grief or that fear or that anger. So there's also that component of it typically that's at play. So that level that often can create depression, and we have a whole episode on this, on anger, can also often be the anger that you're not allowing yourself to feel. Like we said before, there is that facing into what's actually real that's important, including what's real in your emotional experience. And what's real just by looking around and saying, oh, look, I've been thinking this for a decade, but here I still am. The third piece is there is some certainty that you do have and you're not noticing it. Let's look at what's certain. What's certain is right here, right now.
Yeah.
Like, you're here, you're safe in this moment. You're with somebody who loves you at this moment. So the brain catastrophizes because we've got too much cortisol going on. Our capacity to problem solve goes away. But if you can focus on the certainty, that often can relieve the system enough so that you can get into regulation.
I want to run back through these 3 points. Yeah, like a real-world example. I'm going to pick a tricky one.
Okay. Where you are.
So we're going to use my brother getting cancer.
Yes.
So definitely there's no way that my worrying about cancer caused my brother to get cancer.
Correct.
So I could, you know, over the course of my life, I've seen newspapers talk about increasing cancer rates, and I might have some concerns, some worry, and then boom, a family member gets cancer.
Yes.
Uncontrollable, uncertain, total chaos. Definitely didn't bring it about. Yes, but let's like decompose that a little bit.
Well, let's start with that first one. Yeah. Facing reality. Facing reality is don't blame yourself. A lot of people in the face of uncertainty, their first move is to blame themselves. Why didn't I support so-and-so more? Why didn't I do this? Why didn't I do that? First form of certainty is facing the truth of the situation, which is I'm not to blame for this scenario. No one's to blame for this scenario. There's just movements that create chaos and non-chaos in the world. Do we all play a part in all of them? Yes, we all play a part in all of them. So yes, you can always find some way that you are to blame, but, you know, cancer happens with or without you.
Which points to the subtlety between taking the responsibility for what you can take responsibility for and taking it personal that you are wrong, bad.
Yeah.
Flawed.
Yeah. Taking responsibility for the adventure. I am in this adventure. Not that I've chosen to be here, but I am choosing to take this as an adventure. I'm not choosing to take this as an oppression.
Yeah. Yeah. That brings me back to the conversation where Scott told me he had cancer and I was like, one of the first things that I said was like, well, there's a way that we could have a deeper relationship by the end of your life because of this than otherwise. And that's a moment where I can recall making it an adventure.
Yeah.
I didn't want to face that. I didn't want that reality. I didn't cause it. There's ways that I already was going into guilt and blame about not already having as close as possible of a relationship with him over the decades that we've been living in different states, countries.
My God, it's such a beautiful example of exactly this thing of— I'm not optimistically saying we're going to cure your cancer. I might hope that, it's like, blah blah blah, but I'm not acting from that. I'm not acting from, well, we're fucked, you're fucked, your family's fucked. We're saying this is what's happening, and what is the institution, the reality that we can change through this moment of transformation?
Yeah. Okay, so that was part 1. Part 2, yeah, facing the emotional Yes, peace.
Yeah, yeah. Like, with your brother, I don't mean to call you out here, but what I noticed is that the longer you were in it with him, the more you faced your emotional peace. There was moments of, like all of us going through an adventure, there was moments of, I'm not going to face it because it's going to be fine. There was moments of, okay, I gotta hold it together. Like, the more you just went into your deep fucking grief and pain and being with other people's pain and grief of this process and joy and fear and anger and all of it, the more intimacy that I saw you got with yourself, with your brother, with your wife, with your mother, And so, yeah, that's a perfect example. And also, which was really cool, is you just— you have patience with yourself in that process. It wasn't like, I have to feel it all right fucking now. You know, it doesn't work like that.
Yeah, I think that sums it up well because there was a titration in my system throughout the entire process.
Yeah.
The moment that I found out, we were running a week-long retreat. Yeah. And so I totally was like, here we are running an emotional retreat about how to like fluidly feel your emotions. And I've got this bombshell of news. And I'm balancing that with my desire to hold this process for other people. And I remember when the retreat finally finished and we all gathered at the end, that was when I like broke down and just cried for an hour.
And yeah, yeah.
Made that an adventure too. I was like, okay, Alexa, I want you to hold me. Everyone else continue to do your like work stuff. And I'm just gonna take like an hour and just go ball in the corner. Did that.
Yeah. And you had like little moments of crying. You were like letting the steam out of the kettle. Like, if I recall correctly, we had that grief process and there's some other places, but you were compartmentalizing enough and then boom, you totally—
yeah. So the compartmentalizing was adaptive. It was adaptive. Sometimes people listen to our podcast and they're like, I need to feel my emotions all the time, and if I'm not, then that means I'm fucking up. And then here comes the self-blame.
Yeah, exactly. The next thing I have to do to be good enough.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So let's move on to the third piece you mentioned, owning the certainty that is available, the certainty that you do have.
Yeah. Well, in a weird way, you can see different ways that you did that already. Like, it was certain that you could become closer.
Hmm.
It was certain.
Oh, that's true. I didn't, I didn't start with a story of like, I'll never be close because now he's dying, right?
I'm certain that I can spend more time with you was another thing you were certain about. I'm certain that I love you. I'm certain that I want to be close to you. I'm certain that this could mean your death. I mean, there was never a moment where you were pretending that he was not going to die. You were hopeful. There was these moments, oh, this thing could have worked, or blah blah blah, but it was always there. Like, I'm not pretending that he couldn't pass.
Yeah, I'm just now like recognizing all of what might have been lost. Yeah. In my connection with him if, if I had approached that differently.
Yeah.
And there's also what was lost in the ways that I was necessarily titrating my exposure to that reality. Yeah.
Yeah. Right. That is all of us. Yeah, all of us. But if I think about this process through COVID for so many people, I remember sitting down with a whole bunch of CEOs and COVID just hit. And this is all these CEOs that were in one of my groups and running big organizations. And one of them said, wow, I feel like we might have to be stuck inside for a month. And the other person said, think for years. This could be years. And if I look at the two businesses, the one who was like, think for years, just went up, up, up during that COVID session. And the one who was like, out of this for months, no, I couldn't do this for more than— their business went down.
Yeah.
One was introverted, one was extroverted. So it was easier to accept that reality for the introverted person, harder for the extroverted person. And so there is this natural thing where we're positioned or not positioned naturally to be able to lean into it. And so the thing is to do the titration that's necessary to just lean more and more into the uncertainty. And leaning in is another way to say take ownership of, face the reality. And we're never going to be perfect at it, but if we're doing it, then we don't get that long-term effect of uncertainty, which is, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, and then negative thinking and then lack of problem solving and the dopamine goes away. It's just a whole different deal. It's all cortisol.
Yeah, which is, there's something fascinating in that as well, where looking years in advance, because you can't predict as much years in advance, you have to ask questions that are more from wonder. And like wonder is a state of high uncertainty and it's like voluntary to some extent uncertainty. It's to some extent on your terms, to some extent it's just happening and it's grace when it happens.
Happens.
But it's also like, there's a dopamine reward in that and just being in awe. And right now we're at an offsite for AOA. We've been here for a couple of days. And in some of our sessions, we've been talking about what does this company look like? What does this movement look like in 300 years? And none of us can make even the slimmest prediction of what that looks like. But what that does to the mindset, what that does to the questions we ask, Yeah. And the awe is a very different story than like, what is our P&L 3 months from now?
Yeah. And I think that that wonder is such a beautiful thing to bring to uncertainty because wonder and fear don't coexist well together in the brain. The thing about maladaptive behavior in uncertainty is that you are assuming certainty where it doesn't exist. And wonder allows you to see the certainty where it does exist. Like, I think we spoke about a little earlier, but there's like, oh, there's certainty, and then I'm gonna get out by Christmas— false certainty. There's certainty that I'm fucked— false certainty, right? And it doesn't see the actual real certainty. Which is in how you want to be, in what is available for you in the moment. That's where the certainty almost always lies. It's not going to be in the future. It's not going to be in the past. It is in the— I am certain I want connection with you right now. I am certain that this is how I want to be in this moment. These are the things that propel us through these uncertain times to create a better future instead of a worse one for either ourselves or for our companies. And it doesn't require optimism or hope. It requires being with what is in the moment.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Points to the, the most important certainty to have is around how we want to be, not even what that looks like, but the principles.
Yeah. If I look at COVID and the people who were successful in COVID, it was the people who focused on How did they want to be? I remember when we were stuck in the house, I'm like, what I want to do is I want to be close with my family. What I want to do is be creative. Like, this is how I want to be in this time. It's when AOA online courses were born. Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
The depth of intimacy I got with my kids during that time was amazing. I had all this time and space to create MasterClass.
We started this podcast.
We started this podcast. All this happened because we knew how we wanted to be in this situation, and it wouldn't have happened without COVID. And whatever transformation slaps you in the face, there is that much of an opportunity there. But it doesn't come with thinking you're fucked or thinking everything's going to be great. It comes with what is it that I want to be? What is real? What is the thing that I, I can be certain about? That feels good.
Yeah, I'm certain that I enjoyed the shit out of this conversation.
So did I. It was a good one. What a pleasure, Brett.
Yeah, thank you, Joe. Thanks everybody for listening to The Art of Accomplishment. Especially thank you right now, we just got on the charts this week. We were number 9 in Australia for the education category and number 19 in the in the US for the education category on Spotify. And that's all because of you. That's because of people listening, sharing, loving our work, and spreading it. So thank you so much to everybody. The Art of Accomplishment was produced and hosted by myself, Brett Kistler, and Joe Hudson. Munyi Kelly is our production coordinator, and Reasonable Volume edited this episode. See you next time.
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