The jellyfish is included

What do you do when faced with a difficult choice, not knowing what the future holds? Sometimes the tendency is strong to wait, avoid discomfort, or choose the most comfortable option. But that’s where an important lesson can lie.

Somewhere halfway through my 17.5-hour swim from England to France, I feel something slide into my swimsuit. It’s a jellyfish. Alive, stinging like nettles, and completely unexpected. I’m swimming without a wetsuit to comply with the official channel swimming rules, so there’s nothing between my skin and the creature.

I now have two options: stop, lie on my back, fish it out, deal with the hassle of the boat. Or keep swimming for the upcoming hours and let the thing stay. Time is precious, and jellyfish wrangling was never part of my training. I don’t know if this will take 30 seconds or a minute, and whether the tentacles will touch my forearms while I still have so far to swim. The consequence of arriving late is that the tidal current increases, meaning I can’t reach the shore in France. Then I would have to swim an extra five hours until I can try again at the next tidal change from ebb to flow.

And so I swim on, with jellyfish and all.

I do this because, at that moment, I determine that my chance of making it across significantly decreases with five extra hours of swimming. So I choose to endure the short-term pain of a burning stomach over the risks that are further away but weigh more heavily.

The human mind is programmed to avoid discomfort, usually the discomfort that’s closest. But sometimes the gold lies in the short-term discomfort. And becoming comfortable while you’re uncomfortable is the only way forward, so you avoid more significant consequences down the line.

Uncertainty doesn’t make people lazy; it makes them hesitant and complaining

I encounter organisations where the course is changing, and no one yet knows exactly what that entails. People need to learn new AI tools or join new teams and are afraid their work will be taken over. Or that they can’t keep up with the others.

What I see then is almost always the same. People sit back. There is grumbling at the coffee machine, waiting for clarity from above, and meanwhile, everything stands still, and a negative atmosphere arises.

By the way, this is not a character flaw. In uncertainty, the fire under your brain pan lights up, your amygdala cries danger, and your prefrontal cortex, the part with which you look ahead and weigh choices, gets less space. Complaining is a form of control, an outlet for not knowing how it can be different.

But with a bit of knowledge and inspiration, you can choose to swap complaining for ownership. You learn to look at what is possible. Result: your stress hormone cortisol decreases, productivity and (self) confidence increase, and the atmosphere improves.