LSW#23 ⭕️How's your Negative Capability?
Why certainty is the enemy, and the antidote for it
Reaching for ever-elusive certainty
Literature and philosophy can teach a lot more about leadership than any CEO’s self-referential autobiography. I’ve found the English poet John Keats’ notion of Negative Capability an especially useful construct for life and careers:
…that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.
Keats died young at 25. The epitaph on his gravestone does not bear his name. Instead, it reads:
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Just like water, our lives and careers are fluid, ever-changing, and sometimes even absurdly flippant. Instead of rushing to figure out the latest trend, or learn a new technique, a more effective way to prepare for changing times is to develop negative capability.
One manifestation of this “irritable reaching”, is our need for certainty. It often stands in our way without us even realizing. Consider the following common scenarios:
We haven’t started our new venture yet, because we are not sure if it will work.
You didn’t go for that VP role because you didn’t want to get rejected or look naive.
You find it difficult to take on projects that are vague or lack definition.
We are “not ready” just yet.
The common explanation for our hesitation is a lack of courage or bravado. But reality is subtler than that. What usually lies behind our hesitancy, is our need for certainty. Or rather, a lack of negative capability.
Beyond a certain career level, intelligence becomes less of a factor, while others like your ability to cope with ambiguity and uncertainty become pivotal. Negative capability is an essential if you want to push your own limits.
The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.
—Robert Greene
Negative capability and mastery
Negative capability essentially is:
A capacity to tolerate anxiety and doubt
Courage as a different relationship with incertitude
Recognizing the upside of not-knowing
A proactive open-mindedness
Treating doubt as a positive
Responding “appropriately”, in contrast to the extremes of denial or panic
Building a back-bone in an organizational and career context
Thriving in uncertainty
In his magnum-opus Mastery, Robert Greene, who studied several masters in-depth, put it this way:
Truly creative people in all fields can temporarily suspend their ego and simply experience what they are seeing, without the need to assert a judgment, for as long as possible. They are more than ready to find their most cherished opinions contradicted by reality. This ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties is what Keats called negative capability.
All Masters possess this Negative Capability, and it is the source of their creative power. This quality allows them to entertain a broader range of ideas and experiment with them, which in turn makes their work richer and more inventive.
Throughout his career, Mozart never asserted any particular opinions about music. Instead, he absorbed the styles he heard around himself and incorporated them into his own voice. Late in his career, he encountered for the first time the music of Johann Sebastian Bach—a kind of music very different from his own, and in some ways more complex.
Most artists would grow defensive and dismissive of something that challenged their own principles. Instead, Mozart opened his mind up to new possibilities, studying Bach’s use of counterpoint for nearly a year and absorbing it into his own vocabulary. This gave his music a new and surprising quality.
He gives the example of Einstein as well:
At a young age, Albert Einstein found himself fascinated by the apparent paradox of two people observing the same beam of light—one pursuing it at the speed of light, the other at rest, on Earth—and how it would appear the same to both of them. Instead of using available theories to gloss this over or explain it away, for ten long years he contemplated this paradox, in a state of Negative Capability. Operating in this way, he was able to consider almost every possible solution, until finally he hit upon the one that led to his theory of relativity.
Greene advises:
To put Negative Capability into practice, you must develop the habit of suspending the need to judge everything that crosses your path. You consider and even momentarily entertain viewpoints opposite to your own, seeing how they feel. You observe a person or event for a length of time, deliberately holding yourself back from forming an opinion.
You seek out what is unfamiliar—for instance, reading books from unfamiliar writers in unrelated fields or from different schools of thought. You do anything to break up your normal train of thinking and your sense that you already know the truth.…
This desire for what is simple and easy infects all of us, often in ways we are mostly unaware of. The only solution is the following: We must learn how to quiet the anxiety we feel whenever we are confronted with anything that seems complex or chaotic.
…In moments of perceived crisis, we must develop the habit of maintaining our cool and never overreacting. If the situation is complex and others are reaching for simple black-and-white answers, or for the usual conventional responses, we must make a point of resisting such a temptation. We maintain our Negative Capability and a degree of detachment.
What we are doing is gaining a tolerance and even a taste for chaotic moments, training ourselves to entertain several possibilities or solutions. We are learning to manage our anxiety, a key skill in these chaotic times.
Leader’s Library
The perspective of creativity and innovation, that Greene mentions, is only one aspect of Negative Capability. You don’t have to be a genius like Einstein or Mozart to use it on a daily basis.
There are many other mundane aspects and applications of negative capability, including why it’s hard to cultivate it. I explored this and other ideas in my full-length article —click the button to access it:
The questionnaire below is taken from the main article. Use it to check how well-developed your negative capability is, and where you might need more work.
During the week, pay attention to where your need for certainty might be influencing your decision-making and behavior. How can you develop more negative capability?
That’s it for this edition. Have a great week!