If nobody knows anything, then why can’t your idea change everything?

Nobody knows anything. They’re just guessing.

That’s the thing about everyone. They’re wrong all the time.

Think about this. Human beings have falsely predicted armageddon over two hundred times. Two hundred times. Combine that with the fun fact that the average person stores between five and ten pounds of fecal matter in their colon, and it’s clear that our species is literally and figuratively full of shit.

And to make matters worse, the internet has totally distorted our collective grasp on the truth. It started out as a platform of creative expression and human connection, but now it’s devolved into a digital sea of deceit and denial that monetizes human attention.

Of course, all of us are complicit in this crime. Myself included. We’re filtering the evidence through our own biases and narratives, hence the lack of objective truth.

But here’s the silver lining. The fact that nobody knows anything, the fact that everybody is just guessing, that doesn’t have to make us cynical and nihilistic. It buoys our hopes during tough times.

Netflix’s founder talks about this in his startup memoir. Mark explains that if nobody knows anything, if it’s truly impossible to know in advance which ideas are the good ones and which aren’t, and if it’s impossible to know who is going to succeed and who isn’t, then any idea could be the one to succeed.

But you have to trust yourself. You have to test yourself. And you have to be willing to fail.

Holy smokes, if that doesn’t inspire you, then maybe entrepreneurship isn’t the best career choice.

Personally, the chance to flourish in the harsh soil of extreme uncertainty is compelling to me. After graduating college, most of my friends darted right for the corporate world or graduate school, whereas my dream was to launch my own publishing company.

Having already started an indie record label in college to sell and perform my own music, writing books was the logical next step. It was worth a shot.

Ask my parents, and they’ll tell you how excited and proud they were of me at that time. Although I imagine deep down there was a pang of fear in their guts. Because there was almost nothing about it that was certain.

Marquis, the eighteen century writer, put it best:

Publishing is like dropping a rose petal down a canyon and waiting for the echo.

Thankfully, back in the early two thousands, the publishing industry hadn’t died a bloody death yet. My book still had some ghost of a chance of getting air time. At least more so than today, where there are over a million books published each year.

Anyway, the fact that my first book went viral was pure luck. It was the product of perfect timing. Hell, the book wasn’t even that good. When was the last time you said to your spouse in bed, hey honey, you know what we need to read? A book about a guy who wears a nametag all the time.

Point being, it was just a guess. A wink in the dark. And for some reason, the publishing gods smiled down upon me and poof, what started out as a crazy idea suddenly wasn’t so crazy anymore.

It does happen. Despite the fact that nobody knows anything, including you, sometimes your thing becomes the one that sticks.

When the whole world is full of shit, how will you learn to trust yourself?