The harder the problem, the less certain the outcome, and the less confident you may feel about achieving your goal…

Making it MUCH harder to stay motivated to keep chipping away at the problem.

This presents a bit of a dilemma:

• The less confident you feel about the outcome, the less likely you’ll want to keep putting in the work.
• If you don’t put in the work, you’re unlikely to overcome the obstacles standing between you and your desired outcome.

In other words, your lack of confidence leads to lack of action, which leads to lack of good outcomes, which leads to—even lower confidence (AKA “the downward spiral”)

The key variable here is uncertainty.

Problems that feel familiar and straightforward have a higher degree of certainty, leading to higher confidence in your ability to solve them.

On the flip side, ambiguous, unfamiliar, and complex problems have a much lower degree of certainty, potentially draining your sense of confidence.

So how do you tap into the confidence needed to overcome your most challenging obstacles? By shifting your focus from “certainty” to “probability.”

You stop asking unanswerable “Will I or won’t I get what I want?” questions about the outcome, and instead start asking yourself, “What actions can I take right now to maximize the probability of success?”

When your confidence is based on your control over probabilities, it’s much easier to consistently take the actions needed to boost your chances of success.

That could include things like:

• Spending time to understand the problem more deeply before jumping into “solution mode.”
• Coming up with multiple hypotheses about a problem’s root causes.
• Designing “little bets” to test different solutions, then doubling down on the winners.

What will you do today to start focusing more on boosting probability and less on trying to guarantee certainty?

Will you consider the fact that you have 100% control over the actions you can take to impact your probability of success, and start focusing more of your attention there?