How to Move Forward When Nobody Knows What They're Doing

The legendary two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter William Goldman put it plainly: "Nobody knows anything. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one."

Goldman was talking about Hollywood. But he could have been talking about life.

Existential philosophy has been making this same observation for over a century, that when we arrive in this world, nobody hands us a set of instructions. No guidebook. No map. No guarantee that the choices we make will lead anywhere in particular. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger called this thrownness: the unsettling realization that we appeared on the scene as infants, thrown into a world we didn't create, and have been navigating ever since without a clear sense of what we're doing or why.

That can feel overwhelming. It can also, if you're willing to sit with it long enough, feel strangely liberating.

Because if nobody truly knows what they're doing, not the executives greenlit the movies that flopped, not the philosophers who spent lifetimes thinking about meaning, not the therapist sitting across from you, then the pressure to have it all figured out begins to loosen its grip. You're not behind. You're not broken. You're human. And humans have always been making it up as they go.

The question isn't how to eliminate uncertainty. It's how to move forward anyway.

Start with Beginner's Mind

I'll be honest about something: I struggle with uncertainty too, especially as a therapist. There's a voice in me that says if you're paying me money I should be some kind of expert on your problems, someone with answers, with clarity, with a roadmap for your life.

But I've learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that the more I push myself into the role of expert on your life, the worse the therapy goes. The more I think I know what you need, the less I actually see you.

The concept that saved me — and that I return to constantly — comes from Zen Buddhism. It's called beginner's mind: approaching each situation with openness, curiosity, and the willingness to not already know. In therapy this means honoring you as the expert on your own life while I stay in the much more useful lane of genuine curiosity. Outside of therapy it means approaching your own uncertainty not as a problem to be solved but as a space to be explored.

Beginner's mind doesn't eliminate not-knowing. It changes your relationship to it.

Take Smaller Steps Than You Think You Need To

When the path ahead is unclear, the instinct is often to wait, for more certainty, more information, more confidence, before moving. But waiting for certainty in an uncertain world is a way of not moving at all.

I love a Japanese concept called Kaizen: the practice of making small, incremental, consistent changes rather than waiting for the perfect conditions to make a large one. The idea is deceptively simple: you don't need to know where you're going to take the next step. You just need the next step to be small enough that you can take it without certainty.

When Goldman's nobody knows anything lands as truth rather than cynicism, it actually frees you to start smaller. You're not waiting to know the right answer. You're making the best educated guess you can and moving, incrementally, consistently, in the general direction of what matters to you.

Over time, those small movements accumulate into something that looks, from a distance, like a life with direction. But it was never the direction that came first. It was the moving.

Takeaway

Heidegger's thrownness isn't a problem to be solved. It's the condition of being alive. We were all thrown into this thing, into bodies, into families, into historical moments we didn't choose, into a world that was already in progress when we arrived.

What we do with that, the meaning we make, the steps we take, the guidebook we write as we go, that's ours.

Goldman was right. Nobody knows anything for certain. But somehow, out of that uncertainty, people make films that move us, lives that matter, and selves that are unmistakably their own.

You can too. Start with the next small step. The path has a way of clarifying as you walk it.