You Can't Choose What You Can't Imagine

You will never feel certain enough to make the big decision.

The certainty you are waiting for does not arrive before you act. Most of the time, it does not arrive at all. I know because I spent seven years in biomedical engineering, five studying and two working as a service engineer, before I admitted the work did not fit me.

Some days I traveled six to eight hours and then worked another three or four, and I hated it.

The thought of living like that for the rest of my life made no sense to me.

I decided to change my whole environment: move abroad, do a master's degree, and start fresh. Every time I sat down to plan it, I froze. I told myself I would burn through my savings, fail my courses, embarrass myself in front of my family, and end up stranded in a foreign country with nothing to show for it. Most people stay in jobs they dislike out of that same fear, and they call it being practical.

I moved anyway.

Later I turned down an offer from one of the best companies in France, and today I work full time in a role that gives me the freedom I was looking for.

It is the same type of work I did before, in a completely different environment, and that changed everything. Back then I could not have imagined that environment, because I only knew the one I was in. Waiting for certainty means choosing between the options you can see, and the best one may not be visible from where you stand.

If you are in a stable job that no longer fits, this note will help you choose which regret you can live with, and move while you are still afraid.

Every choice carries a regret

I believed one of my options was safe.

Staying felt safe, and leaving felt risky. That was the mistake. Both options carry a regret. I could regret leaving if it went badly, or I could regret staying and spend years wondering what would have happened. The question changed once I saw it that way: Which regret can I live with?

I pictured both regrets in plain words.

If I left and failed, I would lose money, feel embarrassed, and have to rebuild. That would hurt, but it would end. I would know what happened, and I could learn from it. If I stayed and never tried, there would be no ending, and the guilt of not knowing would get heavier with every year.

Psychologists have found the same split.

In 1995, Thomas Gilovich and Victoria Medvec reviewed the research and reported that regret over things you did tends to hurt most right away and then fade, while regret over things you did not do tends to last. A later replication found the pattern weaker than first reported, so treat it as a tendency. It matched the choice I was about to make.

I decided that failing abroad was better than never trying and living with that guilt.

Make peace with the worst case

Before you decide, make peace with the worst case.

The worst case almost never happens, yet your mind treats it as certain, and that is what freezes you. Write it down in plain words and ask whether you could live with it. If the answer is yes, the fear loses most of its grip. A fear you have already faced on paper is easier to move through.

Your picture of the worst case is probably also too dark.

Psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert call this the impact bias: people tend to overestimate how strongly and how long they will feel about future events, partly because they forget how much else will fill their lives in the meantime. Later research showed that some overestimation comes from how researchers ask the question, so the size of the bias needs care. Looking at the worst case directly makes it smaller.

My worst case was losing my savings and failing, and I knew I could live with that.

Judge the choice by what you knew

A hard decision feels unfair because you have to make it without the information you need.

You cannot know whether the move will work. Life is chaotic, and things can go wrong in a second or right in a second. Some of what happens to you will have nothing to do with how good your choice was. A good decision is one you made carefully with what you knew at the time. If it works you were partly lucky, and if it fails you were partly unlucky.

The fair question is whether you chose well with the information you had.

Poker players have a word for judging a decision by its result: resulting.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player, built her book Thinking in Bets around the idea. You can play the best possible hand and still lose, and a weak hand can win. The same is true of a life decision.

The same idea protects you from other people's advice.

When you say you want to leave a stable path, some people will tell you it is a bad idea, and they will speak from their own experience and fears. Listen, and then ask yourself whether what they said applies to your life. Do not hand your decision to someone who has never lived your life.

Everyone is different.

Twenty years of experience can be one year, repeated

There is an old saying: some people have twenty years of experience, and some have one year repeated twenty times.

From the outside, twenty years in one job looks like deep experience. From the inside, it can be the same year again and again, with the same problems, the same routines and the same people. I did not want that. I would rather explore new things than stay in one thing for the rest of my life.

I wanted each experience to lead to a new one.

My internship was at one of the best companies in France.

I worked at a scale I had never imagined, and I did things I did not think I was capable of. I built tools and wrote highly technical documents, and hundreds of people now use that work to do their jobs. I am proud of it. It was a good experience, and it also meant eight hours a day in a cubicle and another two commuting.

I said no to the offer because I wanted freedom and a different way of working.

The environment you could not imagine

After I turned down the offer, I started my own project, and then I accepted an offer from another company.

Today I work remotely and full time, with people I trust and respect. My work has a real impact in the world. I am responsible for how I do my work and how I spend my day. It is the same type of work I did before, in a completely different environment. For a long time I thought that environment did not exist.

You cannot choose what you cannot imagine.

Biologist Stuart Kauffman called it the adjacent possible: the set of next steps you can reach from where you stand. Writer Steven Johnson later applied the idea to how new ideas appear. You can only see one step ahead, and each step you take opens steps you could not see before.

The only way I found that environment was by moving.

Build a floor before you jump

A floor is whatever stops a failure from becoming a disaster: close friends, some savings, a place to stay.

You build it before the jump, and the part that takes longest is the friends. When you move far from your family, you lose the people who would normally catch you. That is why you should always have close friends and keep investing time in them, long before any big decision shows up. Build a circle: people you can talk to honestly, who want you to grow, and who make the hard parts a little easier, both financially and emotionally.

Close friends are the part of the floor you cannot build in a hurry.

Close friendship takes more hours than most people expect.

In 2018, researcher Jeffrey Hall estimated that it takes about 50 hours together to go from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 hours to become a friend, and more than 200 hours to become a close friend. These are estimates from the people he studied, rather than deadlines for every friendship. One group he studied was adults who had recently moved to a new city. Leisure time together counted most, and time spent working side by side counted less. At school those hours add up by themselves, because you share classes, breaks and afternoons for years.

As an adult, nobody schedules those hours for you, so you have to spend them on purpose.

The rest of the floor is practical.

Before you jump, ask how long you could last if the first plan fails. If the answer is "not long", build more floor first. If other people depend on you, make the jump smaller and slower.

A floor makes the risk survivable, and a survivable risk is one you can take more than once.

Give it time

After you decide, the hard part is waiting.

Nothing arrives quickly, and you will want to check every week whether you were right. Do the work instead. Be honest with yourself and with the people around you about what is working and what is not. Trust the process, and let time do its part.

Looking back, it was the best decision I have made for my life, and I could not have said that on the day I made it.

Choose the regret you can live with

You will regret something, whether you stay or leave.

Choose the regret that can end. Make peace with the worst case, judge your choice by what you knew, and build a floor of close friends and savings under it. Then give it time.

The best option may be one you cannot see yet, and you will only find it by moving.