After a six week hiatus I am resuming Uncertainty Wednesday. Much as I have done at varying points with my prior Tech Tuesday series, I have decided to head off in a different direction, at least for some time. Instead of the theoretical approach so far, I will focus more on the philosophy of living in a world full of uncertainty. How should we live our lives, make business and personal decisions, judge performance, etc. given pervasive uncertainty?

My plan is roughly as follows, but I am open to suggestions. First, I intend to write a bit about just how much of our lives is impacted by uncertainty (hint: all of it) despite us largely not acknowledging this reality. Then I plan to look at examples that illustrate how poor our intuitions are when it comes to dealing with uncertainty. With that in place, I will share the answers I have arrived at for myself for how to live with uncertainty.

An interesting exercise is to look back at one’s life and think about how events that had a big impact came about. Here are three examples from my life: the first was my father mentioning rather off-handedly when I was young that a year abroad might be a good idea. Without his comment I might not have applied for a 1-year stay in the United States – none of my childhood friends did anything remotely similar. Yet living with a wonderful host family in Rochester Minnesota when I was sixteen years old was a crucial formative experience in my life.

The second example is meeting Susan, my now wife of 21 years and mother of our three children (and co-founder and CEO of Ziggeo and so much more). I was sitting in a cafe in Paris in the Carrefour Odeon when I heard two non-native French speakers conversing diagonally behind me. As I was in Paris to practice French myself, I decided to turn around and say hello. That’s how I met Susan, who herself was there by chance having abandoned a trip to Belgium to visit a relative of hers in Paris!