The next time you’re hedging on whether or not to do something, rather than framing it as a yes or no question, try breaking it down into a scale.
In Annie Duke’s “Thinking in Bets” one of the strategies she encourages is to think of confidence not as binary, but as a scale of percentages (or a scale of 1 to 10, whichever is easier).
She’s talking about confidence in decision making outcomes, but I think it applies just as well to our confidence for creative projects.
For example, instead of asking, should I submit this story or not, you might reframe it as, “How confident am I that my story, as it exists now, would be accepted?”
Let’s say you give yourself a 15% chance of acceptance. That’s low, but it’s not zero. Seeing that it’s not actually zero could be enough to allow you to move ahead. Alternatively, you might ask yourself what you could do to bring that number up.
To be clear, this quantifying of our confidence is purely subjective. We aren’t saying that we objectively have a 15% chance of success, we don’t really know. Don’t stress about whether or not that number is right, just go with what feels right.
Often, we get stuck because of the way we’re looking at a problem. A different frame can help us see it in ways that help us make smarter decisions and move forward.
