2026-02-07

On My Understanding of Uncertainty

Since February 2026, I have officially become a free agent. This week, I clearly felt a huge amount of uncertainty and fear. It feels completely different from building products and experimenting with startups in my spare time before. Now I am truly stepping into the unknown, and I am facing my fear of it much more directly.

After a few days of adjustment, I became even more certain about one thing. The biggest opportunities are often hidden in uncertainty. Once everything becomes fully certain, the opportunity is usually already priced in. Whether in the stock market or in startups, the core is the same: finding your own position inside uncertainty.

I have repeatedly thought about another path. If I take a job in Germany or Europe now, life would be stable, with almost no uncertainty. But as I wrote in my January 31 blog, if I settle here, I will most likely lose competitiveness over time. The tech industries in Germany and Europe have already been marginalized in the global tech wave. In that environment, personal competitiveness usually keeps declining. Outdated industries get replaced by more advanced ones, and many jobs are being restructured or replaced by AI. By then, people may lose not only competitiveness, but also the freedom to choose.

For where I am now, if I cannot join a top-tier team, taking an ordinary job is the frog in warm water. It looks safe in the short term, but keeps weakening my capability boundary and my optionality in the long term. The issue is that top-tier tech teams in Germany and Europe are already rare, and across the past twenty years and the current tech wave, Germany and Europe are already out. After deep research and reflection, I do not believe there will be a meaningful structural change.

So my judgment is this. I am in a window period right now, and it will not last long, maybe about one year. Within this year, I can push my personal competitiveness to a new level, keep advancing in the next technology wave, and preserve my freedom and ability to choose.

If I simply take a stable job to reduce anxiety, I would be actively wasting this window. That future would have almost no variation. I can already imagine what I would look like thirty years from now. To me, that kind of life is too boring. So now, I choose to embrace uncertainty, enjoy uncertainty, ride its wind, and keep moving step by step toward my ideal.