3,280,000,000 results Google showed me when I searched for the word ‘uncertainty’.
Many searches, much ink flowed, many keystrokes were chopped up searching, writing about how to deal with uncertainty.
In management parlance, the word became a star around 2007-2008, when Harvard wrote about VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity). It’s not as if we were living in a predictable scenario we’d lived through before, I don’t know how many times. Rather, what we experienced, in the years after the revolution, in Romania, is a roller coaster ride: some up, some down, and the moments of straight line were the ones that always prepared the fall into the void.
It’s a type of journey that describes my experience with owning a business in Romania. You live with the precarious state, with the uncertainty, and when you have more straight periods, it’s like you become suspicious, like there’s something wrong. The uncertain environment has become natural, and the naturalness, which would be, for me, a certain settling, predictability, has become the exception.
Uncertainty is like an old lover. We’ve known each other for over twenty years, we frequent each other, we have a love-hate relationship, but I can’t even imagine how it would be otherwise.
But uncertainty can be accompanied, in many people, by high stress, anxiety, hyper-reactivity. We become much too sensitive, much more attentive to everything around us, we are in an almost constant state of alarm.
My car has parking sensors that sometimes activate even when there is another car 2 meters away. It amuses me and I think it’s like humans: they become hyper-sensitive, hyper-reactive when the stress level, the insecurity reaches its peak.
What I can say is that if you want to be an entrepreneur, it’s good to get used to sleeping even if you feel like you’re on the biggest roller coaster, to learn to fall down and get up, like Hopa-Mitică, to contain many anxieties, to get a mentor, coach, psychologist. There, in your little car on the Valravn circuit in the United States (supposedly the highest, fastest and longest in the world) you are alone! And this state requires, as the poet John Keats said: ‘to be able to live in uncertainty, mystery, doubt, without the irritating need of facts, concreteness, reason’.
Beyond all this, however, let us not forget to enjoy every journey!