This week's idea
From Simon Sinek:
"These are not unprecedented times."
Everyone said it during COVID, and I feel like I'm hearing it all over again in the context of AI.
I don't think we've ever lived in 'precedented times'.
The truth is, we don't know what's coming next, but we can control how we respond to it.
Useful takeaways
Uncertainty is not a sign you've made the wrong call. It's the standard condition for any decision worth making.
The people who navigate change best aren't the ones with a better map. They're the ones who've learned to move without one.
How you read a moment matters more than the moment itself. The same three words can be a warning or a permission slip depending on which way you're facing.
Where people get this wrong
Most people treat uncertainty as a problem to be solved before they act. They wait for more information, more certainty, a clearer sign. Meanwhile, life passes them by.
But uncertainty isn't the obstacle. It's the terrain.
The goal isn't to eliminate uncertainty before you move. It's to get comfortable enough with it that you can move anyway.
The people who wait for the fog to clear are still waiting. The people who walked into it are already on the other side.
How I've applied it
I work with clients who are navigating genuine disruption - markets shifting, business models under pressure, categories seemingly being rewritten by AI.
The ones who struggle most aren't the ones facing the hardest problems. They're the ones who've convinced themselves that this particular moment is uniquely dangerous. That the uncertainty they're feeling is a signal to wait.
The reframe I keep coming back to is "This has surely happened before, and so how do we adapt?" This is not new for your industry, not for business broadly, and certainly not for the humans who've been making decisions under uncertainty since long before any of us showed up.
What looks like an impossible situation is usually just an unfamiliar one.
Storytime
I was twenty-something, working at Saatchi & Saatchi on Charlotte Street in London.
Solid agency. Great account. The kind of job that, on paper, you don't walk away from.
However, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to work on the same account, but on the other side of the world, in Sydney, Australia, and I took it. I only knew a handful of people there and had a job lined up, that was it - and just thought I'd figure it out from there.
A senior Client Partner at Saatchis told me that within a year, I'd get bored and come back home. And when that does happen, I should call them and go from there. That was my send-off.
On my last day, I walked out of 80 Charlotte Street for the final time. And I looked down. There, carved into the stone at the entrance, were three words:
I stopped.
In that moment, I had every flavour of doubt available to a human being. I was leaving one of the best agencies in the world, working on one of the best accounts, for what? A punt on a country I barely knew, based on not much more than instinct and a low tolerance for staying still.
The carving could have read as a rebuke. Nothing is impossible - so why are you walking away from something real?
But I stood there for a moment and chose to read it differently.
Nothing is impossible. Including this.
I've been in Australia for nearly ten years now. I'm a citizen. I own a home here. My wife is Australian. The career that was supposed to die of boredom is very much alive.
And every time I've stood at a threshold since (every time I've felt that specific cocktail of doubt and momentum), I've gone back to that step. That stone. That choice about which way to read the words in front of me.
Uncertainty never goes away; I've just got used to its company, and whatever you want is always on the other side of uncertainty.
Murph