# It's Just a Way By Peter Plötner (https://www.towardsjoyandpeace.com/about/) · Published 2026-07-07 Canonical: https://www.towardsjoyandpeace.com/essays/its-just-a-way/ There are two ways to bring a crew home from space: the Americans splash into the ocean, the Soviets land on dirt in Kazakhstan. Neither is the clever way and the other the workaround. Each side just used what it had. On unknown unknowns, the assumptions you cannot see until you stand somewhere else, and what raising kids across five countries taught an aerospace engineer about the laws that are only constraints he stopped noticing. --- Two ways to bring a crew home. NASA/Bill Ingalls (Soyuz) and NASA (Apollo 12 recovery), public domain. What raising kids across five countries taught me about the assumptions I couldn't see. By Peter Plötner. Aerospace engineer and Wayfinder Life Coach. More about Peter → > “Beware of the assumption that the way you work is the best way simply because it's the way you've done it before.”Rick Rubin, The Creative Act There are two ways to bring people home from space, and each country was sure its way was the only sensible one. The Americans dropped their capsules into the ocean. A parachute, a splash, a Navy ship waiting to lift the crew out of the water. The Soviets brought theirs down on land, onto the flat dirt of Kazakhstan, with small rockets that fire in the last second before touchdown to soften the blow. Same goal. Come home alive. Opposite ways. For a long time I assumed one had to be the clever way and the other the workaround. Then you look at why. The Americans had oceans on both coasts and the largest navy on earth. The Soviets had neither. What they had was land, endless empty land, and no warm water to aim for. Nobody sat down and chose the best method. Each side took what it already had and called it obvious. That is the quiet trick of a constraint. Give it enough time and it stops looking like a limit. It starts looking like a law. ## What is an unknown unknown? Someone wrote a joke on a bathroom wall at my university in Munich, and I never forgot it. When you finish high school, you think you know everything. When you finish university, you know that you know nothing. And when you finish a PhD, you learn that nobody else knows anything either. It is funny because it is the real shape of learning. You do not go from wrong to right. You go from wrong to a little less wrong, and mostly what grows is your sense of how much you cannot see. Engineers have a name for the worst region of that map. The unknown unknowns. Not the risks you know you are missing. The ones you do not know are risks at all. You cannot plan around them, because you cannot name them. You can only walk into them. And sitting still does not protect you. Staying comfortable does not shrink your unknown unknowns. It only hides them better. ## How did my kids reveal an assumption I could not see? I found this out by having kids and then carrying them around the world. In Germany, where we lived, most children start daycare around their first birthday. That was simply the water I swam in. I knew, in a far-off way, that the US and Japan and Honduras did it differently. But knowing it as a fact changed nothing. It still felt like Germany had found the normal age and everyone else was slightly off. Then we moved to French Guiana, where I work near the launch site. Here it is common to hand a baby to a nounou, a nanny, at four months old, sometimes for ten hours a day. The first time I truly understood that, something in me refused. My body said no before my head had an opinion. That no is the signal I pay attention to now. It is the same one I listen for in my coaching work, the reaction that arrives before the reasoning. And the loud one did something I did not expect. It re-tuned my ears. Once I could feel it, I could finally hear the quieter no I had been talking myself out of for years. The one about a baby starting daycare at a year. The one about a child in school from morning to night. Same signal, just softer, and I had trained myself not to feel it. Once I could hear all of it, I finally saw the whole thing. None of these systems were built around the child. They were built around the adult. Around getting parents back to work, on the schedule the economy needs. I looked and looked and could not find the part that was actually better for the kid. I had assumed the whole design was about children. It was about labor. That was an unknown unknown, hiding in plain sight, in a country I had lived in for years and never thought to question. Germany drops its kids at daycare at one. Russia lands its spaceships on dirt. Neither is the way. It is just a way. ## Why does every new field look easy from the outside? If you build things, you know this feeling even if you have never left your hometown. Years ago I started a company, a search engine to help non-profits find funding. Clean idea. Obvious need. Non-profits burn something like a third of their time chasing money instead of doing the work they exist to do. I was sure of it. Then I got into the details, the way you only can from the inside, and I found the thing I could not have seen from outside. The funding bodies liked the process being painful. A hard, messy application let them quietly pick who they wanted to win. The non-profits with money did not need me. The ones that needed me had no money to pay me. The economic engine I had assumed was there simply was not. I had built a beautiful answer to a question nobody could pay to solve. That is the pattern under all of it. Every new field looks easy from the outside. You think the idea is the treasure, the thing to guard. First-time founders protect the idea like a secret. Second-time founders know the idea is the cheap part. The expensive part is the year you spend learning the hundred details that were invisible on day one. I watch people meet this now, people leaving a good, safe job to build something. The job was comfortable, and comfort felt like safety. But the comfort was not protecting them from the unknowns of the new thing. It was only keeping them from meeting those unknowns while there was still time to plan. ## What does leaving your comfort zone actually give you? Here is the part I did not expect. Seeing all those systems did not hand me the right answer. There is no country that solved childcare, no correct age, no clean formula. What it handed me was something better and heavier. A choice. I do not get to raise my kids on autopilot anymore. I cannot just do what the country around me does and call it normal. Now my wife and I have to actually decide what is good for a child. That is more work. But it comes with something I did not have before. Not the confidence of knowing the answer. The confidence of having seen enough ways to know it is a choice, and that making it consciously is ours. That is what leaving your comfort zone actually gives you. Not safety. Not certainty. It takes something you were treating as a law, fixed and settled and just how things are, and it hands it back to you as a choice. So here is what I am sitting with, for my kids and for the corners of my own life I have been running on autopilot. Which of my laws are only constraints I stopped noticing? And what would it take to stand somewhere far enough away to finally see them? ## Frequently asked questions ### What are “unknown unknowns”? They are the risks or options you do not know exist, so you cannot plan for them or even name them. Known unknowns are questions you know to ask. Unknown unknowns are the ones you do not know are there, which is what makes them both dangerous and, sometimes, freeing. ### Does leaving your comfort zone actually help, or is that just a cliche? It helps in a specific way. It does not hand you the right answer. It shows you that something you treated as a fixed law was only a choice shaped by your circumstances. A new place or a new field makes invisible assumptions visible, and you cannot choose or fix what you cannot see. ### How does moving between countries change how you see everyday choices? When you watch another culture do a basic thing completely differently, and do fine, your own default stops looking like the only normal. The essay uses childcare: a one-year-old starting daycare in Germany versus a four-month-old with a nanny in French Guiana. Neither is the right way. Each is a choice shaped by what that society needs. ### What does this have to do with founders and leaders? The same blindness runs a company. “That is just how you hire, how you lead, what success looks like” usually feels like a law, but it is almost always a choice you have stopped seeing as one. First-time founders guard the idea; second-time founders know the hard part is the invisible details you only meet from the inside. ### How do you find your own unknown unknowns on purpose? You change your vantage point. Spend real time in a different field, country, or kind of work, and watch for the moments when your gut says “no” or “that is strange.” Those reactions often mark an assumption you did not know you were carrying. --- The comfort that keeps you from meeting the unknowns is the same quiet safety I write about in The Safest Rocket Never Launches. If you want a place to start, the Essential Self Diagnostic is fifteen questions that take about sixty seconds, a quick read on which parts of your life are still carrying their weight.