Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to achieve a breakthrough at work — and build a career or company you love.

Today’s edition is sponsored by Riverside. Plan, stream, edit, and repurpose your webinar, all in one platform. All in top quality. Learn more below.

Something feels really, really important right now.

Maybe you’re waiting for something, or you’re facing a big decision. You’re anxious and frustrated, and you keep telling yourself the same thing:

“Everything is riding on this,” you say. “This is the big moment.”

But I have to tell you: That’s probably not true. And those thoughts are hurting you.

Today, I’ll help you gain patience and clarity — by building what I call a low-stakes mindset. You’ll make better choices with less anxiety, and end up with better results.

To show you how it works, let’s start with a recent situation from my home…

The dangers of high stakes

Last summer, my oldest son went to sleepaway camp for the first time.

He was nervous. So the camp made him a great offer: He could go for just two weeks — and if he liked it, he could extend for a third week.

He agreed, and left in late June. Then my wife, Jen, became obsessed with whether he’d stay that third week. She thought about it constantly, and sent letters nudging him toward staying.

Her reasoning: “If he comes home after two weeks, he’s never going to go back to camp,” she told me.

Camp takes time to adjust to, she thought. If our son only gave it two weeks, he’d miss that feeling of belonging. But if he stayed for three weeks, he’d feel it — and want to return in the future.

That’s why so much was riding on that final week.

What’s really happening here

When Jen said that about camp, a pattern clicked in my head:

I’d heard this kind of thinking before, from her and others.

Examples:

Jen has written five books. At some point while writing every book, she’s told me: “If this doesn’t go well, I’ll never be able to write another book.”
A friend applied for a job and told me: “If I don’t get it, my career will be derailed.”
An entrepreneur I know was afraid to launch a new product, and said to me: “If people don’t like it, the whole business will fail.”

In essence, everyone’s saying the same thing: “What happens next will change everything.”

I’ve come to think of this as high-stakes thinking. And it does us no good.

How to lower the stakes

Jen was worried about our son’s camp decision. But I wasn’t.

So I started to wonder why. What was going on in my head, that wasn’t happening in hers? And was there something to learn from here?

Then I realized the answer: I had less certainty about the situation.

Humans love certainty and hate ambiguity. So we often lean into our assuredness, drawing clear lines between the things that matter to us. A leads to Z. A child’s decision today will dictate his actions tomorrow. A book’s success will dictate opportunities tomorrow.

This helps us make sense of the world. But there’s an ironic twist: So much of our “certainty” is actually false certainty, based on assumptions instead of knowledge. So when we embrace being less certain about a situation, we can actually feel calmer and see things clearer.

This is exactly what happened with the camp situation.

Jen felt certain that if our son stayed two weeks, he wouldn’t go back to camp again. That certainty drove her crazy.

But I had no idea what would happen. Maybe two weeks would be a perfect adjustment period. Maybe he’d hate camp, mature a lot in the next year, and change his mind. There was just no way to know the outcome. So I was living in uncertainty. And that meant I couldn’t get worked up by the situation.

This is what I mean by a low-stakes mindset. We must view situations with less certainty, and more ambiguity. That’s the only way to see the unknown clearly.

A quick and easy exercise

Next time you’re stuck in high-stakes thinking, try this:

Imagine the outcome you’re afraid of. For Jen, that was our son coming home after two weeks.
Now ask yourself: “What positive, realistic things could happen next anyway?” For example: Our son comes home after two weeks — but he made great friends at camp, the kids stay in touch, those friendships deepen over the year, and he’s excited to see them at camp next summer.

What’s the point of doing this? Simple: We are shaking our own sense of certainty.

We must prove to ourselves that, despite our worst fears, there are infinite outcomes to every scenario. Infinite ways that life might unfold. So if we cannot be certain of any one outcome, then what’s the point of worrying?

Instead, let’s just wait until we see what actually happens.

Here’s what happened with camp

It’s been a year since the story I just told you. So I can now tell you what happened after.

Our son did come home after two weeks, and he told us that he didn’t want to go back to camp. So my wife’s worries seemed justified.

But then something funny happened. As the year went on, the idea of camp grew on him anyway. Then he agreed to go again. And then, this past summer, he went for three weeks and had a blast.

Now there’s no more complaining. He’ll go back next year too. And happily so.

Life is unpredictable. That’s not a problem, though. That’s a reason to relax.

So lean into the uncertainty.

Let life unfold.

That’s how to do one thing better.

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