# The Comfort of Certainty August 26, 2025 Most consultants get decision-making backwards. They see it as choosing between options. But that misses the deeper insight where real work happens between doubt and belief. > "To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection." Poincaré understood what most technical consultants never grasp, that certainty is seductive precisely because it's lazy. The consultant who doubts everything becomes paralyzed by analysis. Every solution has flaws, every vendor has limitations, every architecture has trade-offs. They deliver comprehensive risk assessments that change nothing. The consultant who believes everything becomes reckless with confidence. They push the latest framework, the trending platform, the vendor they used last time. They deliver decisive recommendations that optimize for their comfort and not their client's outcomes. Both approaches feel professional. Both avoid the uncomfortable work of actually thinking. The real work happens in reflection where the space allows you to hold multiple possibilities without collapsing into certainty. When a client asks about cloud migrations, the lazy response is either 'definitely migrate' or 'definately stay put'. The reflective response examines the patterns in their workloads, their team capabilities, their risk tolerance, their actual constraints. Clients hire consultants to think for them, but get packaged certainty instead. Standard security frameworks applied without context. Migration strategies copied from the last engagement. Monitoring solutions sold because they're what the consultant knows, not what the client needs. The discomfort of reflection is the signal that real work is happening. When you find yourself wanting to default to 'best practice' or 'industry standard', that's intellectual convenience talking. When you catch yourself dismissing an option because it feels unfamiliar, that's cognitive laziness. Pay attention to your certainty. It's usually protecting you from the harder questions. Why does this client actually need this solution? What are they really optimizing for? What constraints haven't they articulated? What assumptions am I making about their context? Reflection scales differently than certainty. Certainty can be templated, documented, systematized. Reflection requires engagement with each unique context. It's more expensive to deliver, harder to scale, impossible to fully automate. But reflection is where differentiation lives. Anyone can deliver industry best practices. Anyone can implement standard frameworks. The value emerges when you can navigate the space between blind skepticism and convenient belief, something that most consultants avoid. As [Paul Graham](https://paulgraham.com/bio.html) gets quoted for often, "[Do Things That Don't Scale](https://paulgraham.com/ds.html)".