Pick which one to give up: easy or certain
A path that is easy is rarely sure, and a sure one is rarely easy. Knowing which trade is being made helps more than hoping to avoid it.
Most people are searching for a path to success that is both easy and certain. Most paths are neither.
The sentence closes a short post Seth Godin published in May 2011. The post sets up two familiar extremes, one path that asks almost nothing and promises little, another that is demanding and nearly guaranteed, and then lands on the observation that the real options lie somewhere else.
Put in founder’s terms, the two qualities trade against each other. Buying an established franchise is closer to certain, because the brand and the playbook already exist. It is not easy, because it takes capital up front and years of fees to the franchisor. Launching an app in a popular store is easy by comparison, since anyone can publish one in a weekend, and correspondingly uncertain, because thousands of others did the same thing that week.
The trouble starts when someone looks for both at once. That search tends to end in one of two places. Some people keep waiting for a path that feels safe and simple, which means they never start. Others are sold one by someone who profits from the belief, in the form of courses and schemes that promise quick, guaranteed income. The promise itself is the warning sign.
The more useful move is to pick deliberately. A founder who accepts that the path will be hard can plan for the effort and stop treating each difficulty as evidence of a mistake. A founder who accepts uncertainty can size bets so that a miss is survivable and keep several going at once.
Most early companies need to make both trades at different moments. The first year is usually uncertain, because nobody yet knows whether customers want the product. Once a few customers are paying, the uncertainty narrows and the work turns hard in a different way: the same thing has to be delivered reliably, week after week.
The line is not a reason to admire hardship for its own sake. A path that is both difficult and uncertain is not automatically the right one; it may simply be a bad idea. Godin’s point is narrower: the absence of ease or certainty is normal, not a sign that something has gone wrong.