“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt,” said British philosopher, Bertrand Russell. Being humble may sound inconsistent with the need to exude an image of confidence and authority. Yet there has always been a very weak relationship between confidence and actual competence, such that true experts are often more humble than individuals with very little or no expertise!

In my catch-up reading last weekend, I came across this Harvard Business Review quote and paragraph in my McKinsey weekly feed. It had me laughing and reflecting at the same time. It resonated. I have, on several occasions, had my facts 100% correct, and yet I doubted myself when challenged by untruth. It was done with such confidence and rigour that I was unseated from my confidence by doubt. Making me revisit my facts. A destabilising feeling.

So, doubt got me thinking. After all, the McKinsey feed also states that, “Intelligent leaders know that doubt is a good thing. They understand the importance of balancing confidence with humility—an attribute that will be on the rise as AI transforms the nature of leadership”. I decided to research doubt a bit further. My quick research took me back to pre-Socrates times.

This interpretation of doubt has its origins in religion based on the book, Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht. And it all started with an inquiry. The pre-Socrates philosophers’ inquiry into the world and the place of humans in it. They questioned every faith’s conception of life, rationalising mysticism and divinity by challenging people’s knowledge using doubt to seek the truth. Bringing science to the forefront in the process. As you can imagine these philosophers, some of who turned scientists (Aristotle), were considered sceptics and cynics.   

I can’t do justice to the excerpt here. It is a fascinating read. But what I gathered from it was that doubt was originally used to rationalise or gain freedom from our deepest erroneous assumptions. Doubt then reversed, after the Roman empire collapsed, to become a test of our ability to believe (to have faith, in God, by keeping doubt at bay) and progressed to even become a means to establish the terms of democracy! Doubt’s main role was/is to seek the truth.

So, where does that leave us in the present time?

Doubt is good. As an emotion, doubt’s purpose is to tell us we are in new territory and to pay closer attention. It has a future orientation. Our forefathers used doubt to seek the truth. History shows that doubters used questioning to look for other possibilities. And it is doubt that led to modern thinking, innovations, and the fall of the old.

Doubt as an emotion invites us to reflect, gather more information and choose. The problem comes when there is no more information to get or more information will not help us be sure of what choice to make.

This week I find myself unsure of how to conclude this article. I am in doubt.

I wrote about fear last week. This week I managed to read 2 of the 7 books I bought in early December. One of them is Turning Pro by Steven Pressfield. Turning pro, rather than remaining an amateur, is about doing the work that we are meant to do. Pressfield says that resistance is what stops us from turning pro. And that resistance shows up in 3 ways: fear, self-doubt, self-sabotage. The 3 main ways we hold ourselves back.

Doubt has its respectful place in our repository of emotions. It is our seeker of truth. “Doubters in every century have made use of that which came before,” explains Jennifer Hecht. “Patterns of questioning have mirrored certain types of social change”.

So, the dance with doubt shall continue. It is our growth tool to cross new boundaries as individuals and make a collective social change that will become content for the future history of doubt.

As always, you can reach me at yoga@yoganesadurai.com