Testing and experimenting are some of your most significant responsibilities as an entrepreneur, especially when your business environment is so uncertain.

So, you make assumptions, build the hypothesis, test them, and avoid possible traps because they are still only assumptions, not the facts. I would like to cover some important things about your business environment here.

The Concept of Uncertainty

Uncertainty is a reality that every entrepreneur must face sooner or later. When absolute certainty is absent, it refers to the unknown or unpredictable factors that affect your company and its success.

Uncertainty plays a crucial role in decision-making, influencing how entrepreneurs approach unknown factors. These uncertainties can range from market conditions, technological developments, market trends, political and economic changes, and even natural disasters.

As you can see, the uncertainty is the state of being uncertain. This state is characterized by doubt, hesitation, and unpredictability. Uncertainty can also be defined as the state or condition of being uncertain, with synonyms including ambivalence, indecision, irresolution, and hesitation. This state affects the outcome of various business decisions.

Remember that uncertainty and risk are not the same thing. Yes, uncertainty is something that can bring risk to your company, but it is not the risk.

While resisting or ignoring uncertainty may be logical because you can not control uncertainty, I have seen many successful entrepreneurs understand the importance of adopting it. If you recognize and accept the changing nature of your company’s environment, you can better prepare yourself for potential challenges and adapt quickly when necessary.

This mindset allows you to stay ahead of competitors who are resistant to change. Managing uncertainty often involves making calculated bets to mitigate potential risks.

How People Take Actions Based on Success and Failures in the Decision-Making Process

Now, I would like to discuss a study conducted at Stanford University by Dr. Carol Dweck. The study shows how people think about their actions and how they are associated with success and failure in an uncertain world in one of two ways.

According to the research, one group is aimed at activities that will surely succeed. All these activities are based on group members’ intelligence, knowledge, and skills. This group requires security for themselves.

The second group is the opposite. The members of the second group are directed more towards uncertain situations. They are open to things that would challenge them. They understand that mistakes are the facts in their lives and the opportunity to increase their knowledge, skills, and value. Understanding the true value of each experience, whether a success or a failure, is essential for growth. Also, they simply work without fear of making mistakes on their journey.

According to Dr. Dweck, the first group is called a “fixed” mindset, while the second group is called a “growth” mindset.

Entrepreneurs With “Fixed” Mindset

Entrepreneurs with a “fixed” mindset try to make plans that outline their road in advance. These plans give them a final direction to get to where they want to be quickly.

Another question that often stays unanswered is how much these plans help them achieve real entrepreneurial success.

Entrepreneurs With “Growth” Mindset

Unlike these people, entrepreneurs with the “growth” mindset create plans to only get a clearer picture. Once they understand what they want to achieve, they use these plans only as a guide. At any moment, they can reject their plans. They allow their path to success to be closer to them, and because of that, they achieve success.

How You Can Achieve the Success

Steven Pressfield, in his revolutionary book “Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way,” wrote:

The three dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous were the tasks they had set themselves would have pulled the plug before he even began.

Ignorance and arrogance are the artist and entrepreneur’s indispensable allies. She must be clueless enough to have no idea how difficult her enterprise is going to be—and cocky enough to believe she can pull it off anyway. How do we achieve this state of mind? By staying stupid. By not allowing ourselves to think. A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

Through the research mentioned and Steven Pressfield’s words, you can see what is crucial about success. Success doesn’t have a clear and secure path you can simply pass. This is true mainly when your environment is characterized by uncertainty.

In times of uncertainty, seeking expert advice can provide valuable insights and help you navigate complex challenges. Reaching success is much more complex; you cannot describe it with simple plans.

Are You an Entrepreneur With a “Fixed” or “Growth” Mindset Is Important When it Comes to Uncertainty

Let’s put some questions that you can answer at this point. These questions can tell you what kind of entrepreneur you are. Are you an entrepreneur with a “fixed” or “growth” mindset?

• What are you usually doing when you come to an opportunity where success or failure is uncertain?
• How do you treat the plans related to your business? Are they static or dynamic things?
• Are you just stopping and starting with research, analysis, and consideration of every possible angle for every challenge you see?
• Or are you spending days or weeks thinking about whether to catch the challenge in front of you?

Confusion is Your Biggest Enemy, Especially When Uncertainties Characterize Your Working Environment

You have, or better said, you think you have a great idea you want to convert into a successful business. The idea itself is something that you believe will succeed. You will earn money. You will enjoy working on it. Simply put, building such a business would be fun and interesting and would improve your life and the lives of your potential customers.

So, what are you doing after that initial euphoria about your idea?

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you start researching, buying books, or searching the Internet. You simply want to increase your knowledge about the idea. But as you increase your knowledge, your ideas will also change. It will have a different look, shape, or form.

As you learn more, you will come to more questions because you feel that you need more knowledge as you learn. Therefore, you continue with your research. In such a way, you come to totally different information that conflicts with other information you previously had. Such conflicting information will make you insecure or have doubts about what to do next, or in the future. This will lead you to confusion. On the other side, confusion is one of the biggest enemies of all entrepreneurs.

One example of how conflicting information can lead to confusion is when entrepreneurs receive differing advice from various sources.

In most cases, confusion and insecurity about what you need to do will lead you to procrastination. So, you will postpone taking the first steps related to your business idea.

In this way, you lose two valuable resources for your business: your time and money.

You are wasting your time. That is one of the scarcest resources for all entrepreneurs. You cannot increase your time because you have only 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 12 months a year. So, you think that the market will wait for your brilliant idea.

However, the market will not wait for you and doesn’t care about the uncertainties you are coping with. The market will put pressure on you because it wants something new, something useful, something that will improve the lives of the people there. Or, worse, it doesn’t know what will want in the future.

With such an approach, money is the second significant resource that you will waste. You can easily convert your time into money. Calculate how much you make daily and multiply it by days lost during your research, learning, analysis, and planning.

Such entrepreneurs think that successful entrepreneurs are smarter than them and have more knowledge and more experience. They think they have some secret information on which they are basing their success.

But this is far from the truth.

Learn by Doing, Instead of Learning First and Then Doing

Successful entrepreneurs are people just like you. Regardless of the uncertainty you face, no matter the knowledge you have, they are just like you, or at least all of them start to develop, grow, and mature in the same way.

The entrepreneurial journey is to do something. To do something that you did not have done before. Or something that, even if it was done before, would be better now.

Entrepreneurship is an act of creation. Remember this and have it in your mind during your entrepreneurial journey.

So, when you find yourself in a position to create, and you know that no one else was before in the areas you want to create, you must be aware that you will never find all the possible information you think you will need. Mistakes are unavoidable. You need to pass through them.

It is enough to look at successful entrepreneurs. You can not find anyone who succeeded from the first time. Behind most successes stand not one but tens or hundreds of failures.

Henry Ford succeeds in realizing his vision in his forties after many failures. His previous attempts to produce and sell the car to the masses have been unsuccessful. What if Henry Ford had abandoned his vision?

Today, you don’t know anything, or your knowledge is not certain. Why? Because in today’s world, it is impossible to know everything. It was in the past, and yet our educational systems, in most cases, are focused on the past, not on the future.

Thus, I come to the crucial thing: Today, learning and taking action is not a valid way to succeed! We live in a world that operates in a mode of learning by taking action.

Assumptions and Hypothesis Are the Basis for Your Success

In this changing world and environment in which we live, today’s true things will be inaccurate tomorrow. Therefore, you can not be sure about the real needs of your business. To survive this, you must learn to suspend your judgment and test the counter-arguments rather than simply criticizing new ideas based on outdated market assumptions.

However, one thing is certain and it is that uncertainty gave impetus to many groundbreaking innovations and entrepreneurial ventures.

Today, everything operates based on a hypothesis.

• Who will buy your products or services?
• What are the real needs of people who will buy them?
• How much will they pay you?
• Where will you find them?
• Will your products or services solve their problem?
• Do they have possible replacements for your solution?
• Is it worth to solve this type of problem?

You need uncertainty to ensure a big success.

Johnathan Fields, in his book “Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt into Fuel for Brilliance,” says:

Creators need data. They need judgment, feedback, and criticism. Without them, there’s no way to know whether what you’re creating is working or not. When you base your actions on random guesses, rather than on relevant information, growth and movement toward brilliance slow dramatically or grind to a halt. Kill constructive judgment and you retard growth, adaptation, and evolution.

Some of the greatest innovation and success comes from taking the endeavor a step beyond embracing and downright bum-rushing uncertainty, risk, and criticism.

Your Creativity Will Push You Forward, First Remove Your Fear of Mistakes for a Better Future

In the new age, creativity is a quality above everything else. On the one hand, creativity is achieved by asking questions. So, entrepreneurs will be creative enough only if they ask the right questions.

One senior partner in a company where I worked as a consultant often encourages creative thinking through questions and calculated risk-taking to drive success.

Why are young kids creative? Because they constantly ask questions in the style of why this, why that, and so on. If you go into today’s schools with the younger kids and ask challenging questions, all of them will try to answer. It doesn’t matter if the answer is true or not. They will think and try to give you the answer.

But after several years, when you ask the same students a difficult question, you will notice how everyone hides behind other students. They did not try to answer your question because they were afraid of a mistake. Our systems today are installing fear of a mistake inside all of us.

In the business, this fear will simply kill you.

So you know you will need knowledge that you will own. But in many specific situations, you will create it as you go. Now, you will need a process to ensure that you will succeed.

The basis of such a process lies in always having guesses, assumptions, and hypotheses that you will test. For example, customers want a 20-megapixel camera integrated into your product. But this is only the hypothesis. You need to test it to determine if it is 20, 18, or 15, or if customers don’t want such a feature.

The critical question is how to test the hypothesis. You will quickly get to them, but in this process, your hypothesis needs to be tested or adapted if it is not validated.

There are many surprises when you are in a learning mode. You must be aware of them because this process will not succeed if you are under their influence.

You must remember that you will never have enough knowledge to help you in this world based on uncertainty. This means that you must base your actions on your assumptions but learn from the validation of those assumptions. In such a way, you will enter into the cycle of continuous improvement. It is the only formula for success today.