How to deal with the chaos you feel at work and at home.
For the past year, I’ve heard one business and cultural figure after another talk about the “unprecedented uncertainty” in our business and political climates. Investments in any given sector grind to a halt, and then surge again; threats of tariffs, political retaliation, and even war rise and fall on a weekly basis; and amidst it all, no one will stop talking about “the impact of AI.” Heck, no one can even agree whether it’s a bubble, a real transformation to society, or both.
If there’s one thing I’ve decided, however, it’s that all this “uncertainty” isn’t new or unprecedented. In fact, the world isn’t even uncertain at all; people are. What we’re missing is consistent, bold and decisive leadership across our business, cultural, and political spheres.
When audiences first watched the motion picture of a train race across screens, they ducked out of the way, thinking it would crash right into them. When electricity spread across the United States, we created significant leisure for the everyday worker for the first time in human history, leaving vast amounts of idle time to be filled. When the Wright brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, churches preached of the devil’s work. When Vanderbilt used a single steam engine route from Staten Island to Manhattan to build his fortune, he eventually controlled one out of every seven dollars in circulation (giving him a fortune of ~$3.5 trillion in today’s dollars, sorry Elon Musk). When Galileo discovered how our solar system works, the Catholic Church went to every length to silence him. These developments were huge, world-changing shifts in our society. The uncertainty they created was profound—and, most importantly, no less than what we face today. In other words, uncertainty is not new.
So what’s different today is not societal change. Could it be the rate of change? There, too, the facts tell us the truth. Fewer than 15% of Americans pay for a ChatGPT subscription; conversations about AI’s impact are largely relegated to corporate and policy echo chambers while everyday Americans figure out how to pay rent and buy groceries at the same time. Laws are stuck in deliberations for years, if not decades. Over 99% of businesses in America, generating 50% of economic activity, are still running on Excel spreadsheets, paper and pen, and, if you’re lucky, Squarespace.
So if uncertainty is not new, nor is the pace with which it arrives or is adopted by society (comparatively speaking), what is the source of our collective anxiety?
You. Well – you and your echo chamber. Over the last ten years, what has changed is the speed and saturation of communication about new developments in our economy, technology, and society, and the manner and method of dissemination of information. In other words, because you see more content about change, you believe there is more change. Social media algorithms create echo chambers that amplify the noise you hear to a deafening roar. News media sites that rely on clicks for ad dollars chase trends and switch topics faster than a teenager’s attention span, replete with breathless headlines that distort reality in the name of an extra few thousand ad dollars. The reality is very different, but how would we know, trapped in our own “Severance”-style hell of repetition and confirmation bias?
What to do? The smartest business leaders of today are leading not by reacting but with a steady hand. They are setting the terms of the conversation, staying the course, and driving stability, not uncertainty. Yes, they react wisely and quickly to changes like tariffs, but they also game plan every scenario to make what I call the “boldest, safest move:” the leadership you want, optimized for balance between minimized risk and maximum impact.
Jamie Dimon and J.P. Morgan have stayed the course, even on DEI, while thousands of other companies run and hid – and lost customers and credibility in the process.
Bob Iger is churning out massive profits at Disney as people seek in-person connection and joy, and the box office is doing as well or better than its ever been for most film studios, in spite of a decade’s worth of industry prognosticators preaching the death knell of theatrical film.
The NFL is renegotiating its broadcast rights deals almost five years early in what will be a massive payday, all the while ignoring naysayers about hosting a fifth-generation American, who also happens to be a Latino superstar, at halftime.
Anthropic is driving forward deliberately (albeit with speed, innovation, and competitiveness) while on the other side, Sam Altman’s constant “red alert” rhetoric isn’t sending a note of confidence to employees, investors, or the market.
Nvidia continues its trillion-dollar laser-focus while letting DeepSeek serve (for now) as nothing more than a whisper in the wind.
What do all of these businesses and leaders have in common? They not only project stability and confidence, they are stability and confidence. They have a focus; they know who they are. They embrace change, but on their terms; they have a plan. They are neither rigid nor reactive; they simply are smart, effective businesses and leaders who understand that the sky is not falling, and what we’re experiencing in our business, social, and political sectors is not new. (I’ll spare you the comparisons that indicate Trump is simply a “rinse and repeat” redux of at least five U.S. political personality cults that preceded him.)
So you have to ask yourself, today, in your work, is the world uncertain, or is it just you? Because the world has always changed. The question is, what are you going to do about it?
I, for one, am going to do what I’ve always done. Define the goals, execute the mission, react and adapt nimbly, but without a knee-jerk approach. And most importantly, set the terms of the conversation instead of waiting for the world to do it for me. Every business leader would do well to do the same. Tune out the distraction, turn up the focus, and stop worrying about “uncertainty” that isn’t just not new; it’s as old as human civilization itself.