The Normalisation Of Uncertainty
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Packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes
For most of the last century, the deal on offer was simple: study hard, get into a good college, land a job, earn well. Industry demanded it, parents prodded their children towards it, schools were built around it, and it gave millions a safe and stable life.
This paradigm reminds me of the drudgery of the daily grind that the Police sang about in Synchronicity II (1983): “contestants in a suicidal race”. We were trained to treat uncertainty as a danger to be engineered out of life, rather than a challenge to embrace, and we were made to fear even contemplating deviation from the path thrust upon us.
But for those wanting more than to live someone else’s dream, this was not a way to thrive. The straight line is predictable by design, and predictable lines rarely lead anywhere new. If the safe path produces safe outcomes, where do the breakthroughs come from? And what does it cost the people who go looking for them?
Where the wild things are
New ideas rarely live in the middle of a discipline. They live at the fringes, where one way of seeing collides with another. Imagine a student who wants to study music and chemistry, or physics and painting. Most systems would ask them to choose, yet these are exactly the combinations where magic happens. Put a musician’s ear and a chemist’s grasp of how structures bond in one mind, and you may get a person who can hear a molecule and see a symphony. Leonardo da Vinci did not think of anatomy and art as separate subjects. Steve Jobs credited a calligraphy class, taken with no practical purpose in mind, for the attention to typography that shaped the first Macintosh.
The problems humanity now faces, from digital saturation and AI dislocations to climate and mental health, do not respect subject boundaries. Their solutions will come from people who refuse to. But that path has no syllabus and no guaranteed job at the end. It is, by definition, uncertain.
The long odds
If you want to see uncertainty lived every day, look at what it takes to produce a great sportsperson, musician, actor or artist. Thousands of children play competitive sport; a handful make a national side. For almost everyone, the honest calculus is failure, at least by the narrow measure of fame or fortune. There is no promotion ladder, no pension, only the next practice, the next match, the next attempt.
So why do they persist? Not because they believe they will be the exception. The work itself is the reward: a cricketer who has timed a cover drive perfectly has felt something no salary can replicate. The pursuit becomes identity, so stopping would be a loss of self. And the path changes you even if it never pays out. The uncertainty was not wasted. It was the training.
If you never try you will never know
They say life begins at the edge of your comfort zone. It may not go far enough. Life begins past the event horizon. The usual advice is to take calculated risks: stretch, but keep a safety net. Yet a person who always knows the net is there may never fully commit. The batsman already worried about getting out plays the shot half-heartedly. Total commitment is not recklessness; it is the condition for excellence.
I have watched young cricketers from loving, supportive homes keep one foot in a college application, giving the game “one more year” to see how it goes. Many stalled. I know one who refused to build that back-up at all. Whether he reaches the top is still unwritten, but he is giving it his all. And many sportspeople achieved greatness with little family backing, on commitment and courage alone.
Chris Martin contemplates in the song Fix You: “When you try your best, but you don’t succeed”. Most who leap will fall short, and survivorship bias means we mostly hear from those who made it. But the honest comparison is not between the leap and success. It is between a life fully committed to something uncertain and a life spent hedging against a failure that may never come. And if it does, failure in pursuit of something you love is rarely wasted. Even those who fall short land somewhere they could never have reached by standing still. For those who commit, giving up the safe path is not a price but the only path that makes sense.
Normalising uncertainty and trusting the timing of your life
The task, then, is not to eliminate uncertainty but to make it normal: something we prepare children for, rather than protect them from.
How can we predict what failure will teach a child? Would you shield your child from a harsh yet critical lesson if you knew it was precisely the medicine they needed?
Making uncertainty normal means rewarding good questions as much as right answers, letting children combine subjects the timetable keeps apart, and treating a failed experiment as information, not a mark against them. It means measuring success by capacity, the ability to learn, adapt and create, rather than by a title that a recession or AI can take away.
It also means trusting the timing of your life and running your own race. My friend who stumbled from college to banking finally discovered his latent artistic talent in his mid-40s. My co-founder at Rangeet, the education social enterprise we started together, found her calling in developing magical worlds and teaching resources for her 13-year-old self, who hated school, as a means to help children become the best versions of themselves. Passion and purpose can be discovered “late” and still be total.
Commitment is a choice no one can make for someone else. But we can shape the conditions in which that choice is made. For a child, that means emotional security: a secure base that makes explorations and flirtations with uncertainty possible. Children who feel safe at home and in their learning environments are the ones most likely to venture furthest. Their wellbeing, strong family bonds and a fairer society form the foundation that gives them the wings to fly.
For an adult, it may mean enough financial stability to make the leap at all. Neither guarantees success, and neither replaces commitment. They simply make the leap possible.
Everything has its place
The straight line will always have its place, and there is no shame in choosing certainty. But if every young person is funnelled down that one line, tomorrow will look a lot like today. The athlete at dawn practice, the painter in an unheated studio, the student who insists on studying music and chemistry together are not reckless. They are living with not knowing, and continuing anyway.
Uncertainty is not the absence of a path. It is the path for anyone who wants to create a new one.
Views are personal
The author, Simran Mulchandani, is Co-Founder and CEO, Rangeet
