How to Thrive in Uncertainty: 3 Lessons from a Young CEO

The unknown: to many, it's intimidating at best and terrifying at worst. To Voiceflow co-founder and CEO Braden Ream, it's home.

Unafraid of uncertainty, Ream left Ivey Business School in his final year of study. "When it came to dropping out of school, there was actually not much of a downside," says the 22 year old, cool as a cucumber. (Two of his three co-founders – Andrew Lawrence, Michael Hood and Tyler Han – also left similar prestigious programs.) "The downside was protected in that we could always go back. Inversely, the potential upside was unlimited."

Unlimited is a good way of putting it. Voiceflow, a collaborative design platform for making voice apps, has raised more than $5 million in investments to date, and powers over 10 million conversations per month for users such as the New York Times.

We recently had the pleasure of chatting with Ream and he shared three lessons for thriving in uncertainty, which are applicable now more than ever.

1. Remember: you are only human

Regardless of what's going on in his day, Ream is attuned to his limits, both physical and emotional. "You have a three- to four-hour window in the day when you're at peak mental acuity. That's when you're going to get things done at a dramatically faster rate. What you spend that time on is going to dramatically change the trajectory of your career," he says, but adds that after that period, everything deteriorates. "You want to socialize. You want to do other things. You want to procrastinate."

In a similar vein, Ream tries not to make important decisions past certain times of the day. "For example, I avoid sending high-value e-mails past 8 p.m., just in case I accidentally say something stupid because I'm tired," says Ream, who also prioritizes getting at least seven hours of sleep a night.

Ream also pays close attention to how he's feeling, catching himself when his emotions peak. "If you're in an emotionally heightened state, then it's just a matter of self-control. Maybe you shouldn't go make that big decision or go have that one-on-one meeting or go take that interview. You should probably just go for a walk or go cool down or whatever works for you. I think catching yourself in that state is the most important part."

2. Persist in effort, not ideas

"In my experience, the common denominator for entrepreneurs is persistence – everything else is a secondary trait," he says, adding that he thinks of luck as persistence meeting opportunity. "But entrepreneurship is about the persistence of effort, not persistence of ideas." Here's Ream's own real-life example: "At first, we were trying to build an entertainment app, but it was really expensive and we were running out of money. We needed to scale the business, so we opened the tools that we had built internally to allow other people to build entertainment. But they weren't just building entertainment; these tools proved powerful enough for people to build anything they wanted. The light bulb went off: This business doesn't just have to be about entertainment. That shifted our whole mindset, allowing us to broaden our scope."

3. Lean into the unexpected

"I love not knowing what's going to happen in three years. It's just the way that my brain's wired," admits Ream. "I want to know that if I walk into the office on Monday, I might get an email that's life-changing – like the closing around an investment or an inquiry that ends up landing us a huge client. These things are material and life-changing, and that's what I'm after." Ream is happy to pursue the upside, because his downside is protected: "As an entrepreneur, you can't fail unless you quit. You either keep going or you stop."

Read more of what Ream and other innovative thinkers have to say about failure, problem-solving and more in Inside Six Innovative Minds.