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How Breaking Free of the Certainty Illusion Will Help You Grow Your Career
Certainty comes at a cost
“I just want to know what’s expected of me.”
It’s a common and understandable refrain I hear in my day-to-day job. In product management, it’s easy to forget what your job really is. You accumulate so many responsibilities outside the core role and can mistake “number of tasks completed” for good job performance.
If only it were so.
It’s the paradox of professional life — we spend more time looking for pre-determined to-do lists to guide us, and neat little boxes to tick off, than we do experimenting with new methods.
It’s a fascinating contradiction, especially among those of us steering a ship through uncharted waters — leaders, product managers, and creatives alike.
The Mirage of Certainty
We live in an era where the chase for certainty is relentless.
Job descriptions are crafted into neatly packaged roles, performance metrics are quantified to the decimal, and career trajectories laid out like well-trodden paths. Yet, the truth remains — in the context of innovative roles, the certainty around “what is expected of us” is often fake.
