Our recommendation: the next time you’re working on something large, important, and very, very uncertain, don’t resist the occasional slide into despair. In fact, don’t even think of it as a “slide”—in our experience, it stops feeling like a slide as soon as you stop resisting it. Instead, recognize it for what it is—a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it’s time now to integrate it into your plans.
Startup founders, aspiring filmmakers, and would-be worldsavers “have to” be enthusiastic and positive. They have to sell their models—to skeptical investors, to potential hires, and oddly often to themselves—and many people struggle to hold both determined confidence and fundamental uncertainty in their minds at the same time. Instead, their brains use mood to encourage them to alternate. The euphoric half of the cycle is where assumptions are taken to their conclusion—where you collide your models with reality by building code, attempting to enroll customers, and so on. And the despair half is where those assumptions are challenged and questioned—where all of the fears and doubts and worrying bits of evidence that you’ve been holding off on looking at are allowed to come forward.