As I wrote in my book, The Achievement Code, “Almost everyone wants to be clear, but not many people are looking for clarity. It’s not something they type into a search engine.”
And yet we do want to be clear. We want clarity as to what we want, why we want it and how to get it. We want to be clear on our beliefs and values, what’s true and what isn’t. We want clear communication, clear understanding and clear positions.
Francois Gautier wrote, “More important than certainty is the quest for clarity.”
There are many things we can do to gain that clarity. Research, reflection, soul searching, asking people we trust, experimentation and more. But whatever path to clarity we may use, we first have to acknowledge that we are UNclear—or at least want to be MORE clear.
And that’s where I think people get hung up or hang their hat on false beliefs and less than stellular thinking and conclusions.
We are sometimes so invested in being clear or being right that we grasp at incomplete or inexact data to get to what we hope is clarity. But real clarity—profound clarity—is many times only achievable by living in that uncomfortable and oftentimes painful place of being unclear.
What I’m advocating is that you embrace your lack of clarity and see it as a process to become clear. It’s not something to be rushed or forced. Doing so almost always results in false premises, erroneous beliefs and less than excellent results.
Don’t make yourself wrong for your lack of clarity. Instead, look at being unclear as standing in the place of discovery as to what will become clear.
And rest in the wisdom of George Washington Carver, the African-American botanist who discovered hundreds of uses for peanuts, who wrote, “If you love something enough, it will reveal all its secrets to you.”
This article was previously published on SuccessNet.org in 2015.
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