In Platonic, Marisa G. Franco PhD writes:
Much of friendship is defined by ambiguity; it’s rare that people straight up tell us whether they like us or not. Thus, our projections end up playing a greater role in our understanding of how others feel about us than how others actually feel. Our attachment determines how we relate to ambiguity. When we don’t have all the information, we fill in the gaps based on our security or lack thereof. Security leads us to navigate ambiguity with optimism. We value ourselves, so when we have limited data, we assume others value us too.
Overall, this research reveals one of the most important secrets to taking initiative in friendship. Assume people like you. Want to invite a friend on a coffee date? Assume they’re interested. Tempted to ask a gym friend if they want to become a happy hour friend? Assume they do. Want to reconnect with a friend you’re sad to have fallen out of touch with? Assume they’re in. When we make this assumption, initiative isn’t scary anymore. And this assumption not only makes us more likely to take initiative, but to navigate the friendship-making process, and life, with more peace, levity, and pleasure.
There are many things defined by ambiguity. It’s not just friendship; everything involving relationships—including romance, clients and customers, and collaborators and coworkers—all involve a sense of ambiguity.
In the professional world, the higher your position in a company, the more you also have to deal with ambiguity. A person working as a junior copywriter might be tasked with writing a blog post—a very clear, concrete, deliverable—whereas a CMO might be tasked with improving the business’s brand—a very ambiguous deliverable.
There’s a parable in Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander’s The Art of Possibility:
A shoe factory sends two marketing scouts to a region of Africa to study the prospects for expanding business. One sends back a telegram saying,
SITUATION HOPELESS STOP NO ONE WEARS SHOES
The other writes back triumphantly,
GLORIOUS BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY STOP THEY HAVE NO SHOES
Charlie Munger identifies over two dozen biases in his talk The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, and one of them is the “Doubt-Avoidance Tendency.” He describes it like this:
The brain of man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision. It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do.
Nowadays, you’re probably not actually worried about a lion making you their lunch; you still feel the same though when you’re dealing with ambiguity and uncertainty. Your past experiences and personality might incline you to anticipate disappointment, humiliation, and rejection.
You may wish those things didn’t happen to you, or that your life turned out differently. You may even wish your personality was different—that you could be the happy-go-lucky person you know, the one with a naturally open mind and irritating lucky streak.
What’s past has passed, and now you have a choice. You can choose to give in to the thoughts, or to take a breath.
But now you have a choice. You can choose to give in to the thoughts, or to take a breath.
As long as you’re mindful of your reaction, you can change it. You have a choice to make: will you choose a path of possibility? Or will you choose a path of fear? Which thoughts will you feed?