When do you know it’s time? When do you know it’s really time to start the business, shut the business, expand the business, invest in the business, quit your job, end the job search and take the offer on the table, leave your spouse, marry your girl/boyfriend, move to Australia, come home from Australia? When do you know?
“A warrior accepts,” writes Pema Chodron in Comfortable with Uncertainty, “that we can never know what will happen to us next. We can try to control the uncontrollable by looking for security and predictability, always hoping to be comfortable and safe. But the truth is that we can never avoid uncertainty. This not-knowing is part of the adventure. It’s also what makes us afraid.”
I think the only answer to the plaintive poignant question of “When do you know?” is embedded in the bit of Buddhist wisdom: You can’t know–not really, anyway.
Maybe the hardest part of leadership—be it leading a company, a family, a relationship or simply your own life—is that often times you don’t know and you still have to act. Leadership in some ways is built on learning to be comfortable with not knowing, with imperfect knowledge, with the inherent uncertainty of it all
-from an awesome new blog, The Monster in Your Head.