Embracing uncertainty
When I was in graduate school, I had a small notebook that I filled with my poetry. I titled it Experimental Artifacts since the poems I wrote in the book represented the flip side of the organized scientific experiments I was performing in my lab. One of the poems, called "Entropy", is about the process of constantly introducing uncertainty to my life, without knowing what would happen.
I wrote that poem when I was 25 years old. At the time, I had no idea how my life and career would unfold. I was both attracted to and afraid of uncertainty and often measured myself against those who seemed to know exactly where they were going.
Many of you might be feeling the same way, as you attempt to chart your path into the future. It often feels like jumping off a high diving board into a vast ocean, not sure which way to swim or whether you know how to swim at all.
Forty years after I wrote “Entropy,” my attitude about uncertainty has changed. I now understand that from the moment we are born, every day is filled with uncertainty. We are constantly performing experiments to learn what will happen next. The result of each experiment feeds into the next experiment, as we figure out how the world works. Whether learning to walk, talk, or to do quantum mechanics, we’re shifting our approach and observing what happens.
At KHS, our goal has been to provide you with a large space to experiment, honing your leadership skills in our multicultural community while gaining exposure to a vast swath of disciplines. With Storytelling, Curiosity Corner, KHeystone Projects, McMurtry lectures, local retreats, global trips, and all the Scholar-Driven Events, you have experimented with new people, new ideas, and new ways of being in the world, exercising your curiosity.
Once you leave school, your career will also be a series of experiments. You never know what will happen until you dive into that ocean. To quote Ursula Le Guin, one of our community-read authors this year, “The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” Understanding this, it behooves each of us to try lots of things and keep what works—swimming in one direction as far as it makes sense and switching directions when the currents change, until we each end up at a pace and in a place that feels right.
In parallel with all of your personal sea changes, the tides of the world keep on shifting too. Think about it—just 18 months ago ChatGPT was released. This powerful tool impacted so many of your fields, from art and literature to medicine, law, and engineering. Future technology will continue to upend the way we live and work, forcing each of you to rethink everything again and again. The question isn’t if, but what and how!
In addition, world events will continue to reshape your lives. Consider the pandemic, which shut down almost everything for nearly two years. Most of you were in school during the lockdown, as we kept our distance, wore masks, took endless COVID tests, and learned to both love and hate Zoom. And, of course, the war in the Middle East has ripped apart precious communities near and far.
In a world where uncertainty is a certainty, there is no recipe and we are all going to make mistakes. Sometimes we will fail because we are trying something big and bold that doesn’t work out as hoped. Sometimes we will fail because we are doing something challenging for the first time. And, sometimes we just mess up.
Of course, it’s best to avoid failure, but it is just as important to figure out how to recover from inevitable mistakes. Resilience comes from analyzing what went wrong and figuring out what we will do differently next time. I do this by keeping a failure resume that captures all my mistakes—personal, professional, and academic. I write down what I did, why I did it, what I learned, and what I will do differently in the future. It allows me to take stock in what happened and why, setting the stage for doing a better job the next time around. As the great philosopher, Michael Jordan, said, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
When you applied for Knight-Hennessy Scholars, you wrote an essay about connecting the dots, looking back over your life and influences, and what brought you to that specific moment. I invite you to think back to your essay and to all the trial and error experiments you performed in response to the obstacles and opportunities you had faced in your life. As you venture out into the vast ocean, you’ll get a chance to look back at your life again and again, connecting the dots as they reveal brand-new stories.
Looking back, I’ve found that each decade of my professional life has a different theme. My twenties were for gaining knowledge, my thirties were for building skills, my forties were for developing my own ideas, and so on. Those stories were only evident once each decade had passed. As Steve Jobs said, “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.”
Uncertainty leads to surprises, it creates opportunity, and it propels us into the future. Hopefully, the community you’ve built at KHS, the experiences you’ve had, and the lessons you’ve learned have set you up to embrace uncertainty with curiosity, courage, and resilience.
Here’s to each of you and to the waves of uncertainty and opportunity that will greet you every day.