# Uncertainty Wednesday: A New Tack By [Continuations](https://continuations.com) · 2018-09-05 uncertainty wednesday --- After a six week hiatus I am resuming [Uncertainty Wednesday](https://continuations.com/tagged/uncertainty-wednesday). Much as I have done at varying points with my prior [Tech Tuesday](https://continuations.com/tagged/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](https://twitter.com/susandanziger), my now wife of 21 years and mother of our three children (and co-founder and CEO of [Ziggeo](https://ziggeo.com/) 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! My third example is how I wound up at Union Square Ventures. My now partner [Brad](https://twitter.com/BradUSV) had been an investor in and board member of an accelerator I had co-founded in 1999. Following the implosion of the dotcom bubble, Brad and I tried to raise a fund (together with another friend) but nobody wanted to invest in Venture Capital in the “nuclear winter” that ensued. I went off to work on another project, which also failed about two years later. By that time Brad and [Fred](https://twitter.com/fredwilson) had raised the first Union Square Ventures fund. They asked me to take a look at [del.icio.us](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Del.icio.us) with them and after the purchase of that company I wound up joining USV as a venture partner. All three of these events had a massive impact on my life. And yet in each case it is quite clear that there was a huge amount of uncertainty involved, meaning each of these events might also not have happened and my life would be quite different today. --- *Originally published on [Continuations](https://continuations.com/uncertainty-wednesday-a-new-tack)*