The Gray Area: Avoiding Predictability

When you see the world in black and white, you become predictable.

Predictability makes you easy to forget, easy to manipulate, and limited in perspective. It keeps you stuck—blending in with the crowd, overlooked, and unable to grow. Ultimately, it leads to missed opportunities and a lower quality of life.

Here are some examples of black-and-white thinking:

• Vegan or meat eater

• Conservative or liberal

• Pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine

• Trump lover or Trump hater

• Fitness enthusiast or body positivity advocate

• Believes in two genders or believes in gender fluidity

This is just the surface, but you already know how people categorize these viewpoints. You can probably even picture the kind of person who aligns with each side.

But to be a truly unique individual, you need opinions that evolve with time, knowledge, and experience. You need to operate in the grey area.

Operating in the Grey:

1. Stay Curious, Not Certain

Ask more questions than you answer. Curiosity leads to wisdom, while certainty often leads to stagnation. Life is more interesting when you are constantly coming to new realizations.

Challenge your own beliefs. If you’ve never questioned an idea, do you truly understand it? We are often too quick to adopt viewpoints without actually understanding them or testing the validity of those viewpoints.

Seek out opposing viewpoints. Read, watch, or listen to perspectives that make you uncomfortable. You don’t have to agree with those other viewpoints, but at least give them a chance. If you truly seek to understand the opposing viewpoint, you will at a minimum have a deeper understanding related to the topic and a stronger argument for why you hold the beliefs you hold.

2. Embrace Change as a Strength

Let go of the fear of being wrong. Changing your mind isn’t weakness; it’s a sign of learning. Don’t let that big ego get in the way. This in my opinion is what holds people back in so many areas of their lives.

Give yourself permission to evolve. Who you are today isn’t who you have to be forever. By allowing yourself to change and your opinions to evolve, you are becoming a more refined and unique individual. You are moving closer to your best version.

Adopt a long-term perspective. The world is constantly shifting—adaptability will always serve you better than rigid thinking. Adapting is necessary.

3. Think for Yourself, Not for Validation

Base your beliefs on your own research and experience, not groupthink. Just because something is popular doesn’t mean it’s true. Who cares what your peers think. By coming to your own conclusion, you will challenge the beliefs of others. If people cut you off for holding an opposing opinion—they were never meant to be in your life in the first place.

Avoid labeling yourself too quickly. Political, social, and personal identities are complex—don’t reduce yourself to a single box. Be a liberal that loves guns, be a conservative that’s gay. Fuck it. Break the norms, please. Life is way more interesting that way.

Hold your opinions loosely. Stand by what you believe, but remain open to new information that could refine or reshape your views. If you have real reasons for your beliefs, be unapologetic in those beliefs. When you find your opinion beginning to change. Let it change freely. Or just say “I don’t know”. You don’t even need to have an opinion about everything anyways.

In short. Lose your ego, be wrong, invite change.

Thinking in grey doesn’t mean having no opinions at all—it means having informed opinions about the things important to you. It means being adaptable, thoughtful, and ultimately, free.

That’s it,

Jackson.