Not knowing is part of the path

I’ve noticed an interesting trend recently: everyone wants answers.

No matter where you look, people just want to know the answer: to life, to business, to love, to friendship. But the more I live, the more I tend to gravitate towards the idea that not having the answer is part of the path: and it’s the most important part.

I will frame the rest of the post from a view-point of a successful¹ business, but it can apply to anything else: successful life/love/friendship/etc.

I often see Reddit posts that read like: “I now make $X per month, here what would I do if I started with $0 again”. And sure, it sounds like a valuable piece of content. Follow the steps, and you too, will make $X per month. But there are two problems with this.

The first problem is people’s tendency to justify their success in a logical sense. For some obscure reason beyond my understanding, people seem to be very repulsed towards the word luck, despite that fact that luck plays a major role in success. So most people who are successful, tend to find logical explanation to their success in a form of morning rituals, daily habits, and reflection on past events. It’s because Bezos wakes up at 3AM, he is successful. I see the same bucket list of reflections on past events: build a product in market that has something missing; invest in marketing; etc. It’s good all, but you also need shit tons of luck. On the other hand, if you build a framework for success, you can always find customers. There is a reason why people who sell courses on Entrepreneurship, make most of their money from the courses and not their entrepreneurship endeavors (which in best case scenario are average SMBs², and worst case scenario never made any money).

The second problem is that even if one could come up with a bucket list of step-by-step instructions for building a successful business, the chance to replicate it is close to zero. People are not machines, despite the fact that AI evangelists wants you to believe that we are, and hence they can replicate our brain with “the most likely next character in sequence” type of algorithm. I digress. People are unpredictable, they have cultural differences, moral values (or lack thereof), and world views (which nowadays mostly influenced by TikTok, rather than critical thinking). And so when you see a “plan to succeed in business” and you try to replicate it, you will, inevitably, encounter humans (unless you found a way to sell to machines — in that case, kudos to you). Hence, your success rate is mostly random.

All this “guessing” game is equal to me having a good run in the casino, so I decide to come up with a “Here are the top 5 things I did in order to break the bank: number 5 will shock you!” article. I can go back and say that you need to gamble invest your money in roulette, put everything on 13th 3 times in a row, then skip one session, drink a cocktail and pass out. Because hey! It worked for me! Despite the fact that roulette has a 48% success rate no matter what you do.

I’m not saying that luck is the only predicting factor for success. Far from it. Acquiring skills, and putting these skills to work is important as well, but it’s only when preparation meets opportunity we usually achieve something, but you still need to prepare. And as sad is it might sound, reading the “5 steps to succeed in business” is not preparation — it’s entertainment. I’d even say it’s not even entertainment, but a counterproductive and damaging activity. It gives you a false feeling of skill and mastery, without doing the actual work. It provides with the feeling of reward, without actually achieving anything. And moreover, it makes you addictive to wanting to know everything, therefor you keep reading more and more without actually doing the work, because no matter how much you read, you don’t know enough so you need to read more.

The more I know, the more I realize I know nothing. — Socrates

But success usually lies in not knowing.

Just like ads, reading these type of article about success is beneficial in one use-case: when you ask the right questions. A book about marketing will be helpful when you try to do marketing and fail, and you ask the question of “how do I do marketing”? It’s only then you should resort to reading these books and articles. Mindlessly consuming “knowledge” does not move you forward. But it’s only when you tried to move forward, but instead moved sideways, you need to consume “knowledge”. And it all starts with a question. You need to be curious and know what questions to ask.

But asking questions is hard, it’s way easier to just read the “5 things YOU need to do in order to make $X per month”.