13. Embracing Uncertainty

The author of The Black Swan Effect, Nassim, once proposed a concept: things that seem completely impossible can happen at unexpected moments, and most of the time we cannot predict them, yet they can have an enormous impact.

The best example is COVID-19 in 2020. Under the influence of the pandemic, people’s lives and work patterns were completely changed, and many shops shut down or went bankrupt because they could not hold on; it was not until 2023 that things began to improve.

As I was approaching my first month after resigning, I felt an unparalleled sense of freedom and happiness.

At the same time, in order to move toward the next milestone, almost every day was spent working and coding.

After being kept in captivity for so long, stepping out of my comfort zone made me realize that I was actually capable of doing many things. I also gradually came to understand how many of the worries and murmurings I had in the company were so insignificant compared with the anxiety and uncertainty of not having a fixed salary.

Because of this, I started chatting and collaborating with many new and old friends, and I also encountered some topics that I found very interesting. Even if a company’s name is not well known, I’m still very happy to have the chance to get to know it and offer help.

If I had stayed at the company, maybe I would never have had such an opportunity.

When I was working as a developer, I often got to work with new technologies. Because the tasks I was assigned spanned both front-end and back-end development as well as the SRE team, I learned a lot about software development best practices. In addition to front-end development, I also learned a great deal about server setup, high-traffic system design, and related knowledge points, and so on. (The secret of the trade is actually just to read DDIA thoroughly and put it into practice.)

At first glance, it may not seem like much, but recent freelance work has made me realize that this is actually something quite valuable. Some outsourcing teams are unable to plan a proper architecture, resulting in code that is long-winded and extremely difficult to maintain, adding unnecessary complexity; or deployment processes that are inefficient, or choosing a cloud provider that is unsuitable at the time and driving costs up significantly.

Later, the author also released another book, Antifragile, which echoes the theme of The Black Swan Effect and explains how we can withstand uncertainty. One way is to be extremely bold in some areas and extremely conservative in others, so that risk can be kept within a certain range.

Just like I mentioned in the first article, even though work also has those challenging and exciting things, it’s still hard to avoid the problems that arise in large companies. (Well, that’s also a kind of uncertainty.)

1. Quitting at Thirty Without a Safety Net

Writing articles here and producing output is also a form of antifragility, I suppose.

Warning

Whatever you do, do not quit impulsively! Quitting without a backup plan sounds cool and very true to yourself, but not having a salary is a serious matter. Without money, you may act impulsively, which in turn indirectly affects the quality of your decisions.

But if you also have similar thoughts, you might as well start with the following questions:

• How long can my current savings support my living expenses?
• If I no longer had a full-time job, what services or products could I sell?
• What skills do I have that I can do well with ease, but others cannot? What do my coworkers usually praise me for?
• If I launched a service or product, would I dare promote it to the friends around me?
• Can I try it first using the spare time I have after work?

Do you have any antifragility tips as well? Feel free to email me at me@kalan.dev and let me know!