Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos – Mary Shelley
In life you have billions of potential axes of improvement. Many people are just lost between all the options. We didn’t evolve for such a huge choice and it’s often paralyzing.
Here is what we can choose to improve:
A. Skills
If you learn to speak French, this skill is mostly good for… speaking French. Because of culture and the educational system, our right (intuitive, creative) hemisphere is the one more worth developing, so the broad benefits from French will be marginal.
B. Meta-Skills
Every skill that can be applied across different fields.
They are much more about experience and building intuition and there is no written recipe for this.
Chaos on the personal level is the path to Meta-skills!
When you do structured learning it lacks nuance and possible relations. Then why do we do structured learning in school? Because of our unhealthy obsession with order and because we aim way too low in education. Chaotic learning takes time.
With chaotic learning you may have nothing to show in a year. But in 3 years you’ll have a better intuitive understanding of the field not just compared to the structured learners. You’ll be better than most teachers. And deep intuitive understanding is the ultimate brain skill. It means you can solve any problem in the field.
Each meta-skill is like building a bridge between your personality and the skill itself. If you want to develop critical thinking, you need to love truth, which is a personal trait.
C. Ultimate Skills
There are 3 emotional and 2 intellectual ultimate skills that you use in almost every moment of your life.
- Handle the past better (Acceptance); You will be able to change most of the future if you accept all of the past plus the present you cannot change. You also need to accept yourself as who you are (the result of your genes, past choices and environment) – it’s about self-love.
- Handle the incoming flows better (Mindfulness). Mindfulness is the art of not reacting, labeling or even thinking. It is about understanding yourself and the world. It’s a flow state, as detached from structure as you can possibly be. This is why it’s so healthy. It’s basically being fine with your internal and external chaos.
- Make your actions better (Direction); Every action of yours can be in an outward direction (driven by love and energy, a “hunter” act). Hunter mode is about taking bold actions and facing fears if needed.
This is the basis of your emotional intelligence.
Logical (box-dominated, left brain) thinking is overrated. If you’re a scientist or engineer, by all means develop your logical thinking for the benefit or humanity. For the rest of us, we already have way too many boxes in our brains.
On a personal level two types of intuition are important:
- Intuition about structures – relations between objects, causes and effects, how everything evolves over time.
- Intuition about quantities and breaking points – how much is there of everything quantifiable – Space, Time, Value, Money, people’s tolerance, your tolerance, all limits, all critical masses needed to trigger change.
These two require a very different wiring of the brain. It’s a big challenge to develop them both.
So now we know what you need above all is Ultimate skills (constant personality and intuition improvement).
The two competing forces in your life are not good and evil – these are rather made-up human concepts. The actual forces whose dance creates the future are chaos and structure.
Paradoxically you need chaos to learn to feel structures and also to develop the other ultimate skills. Chaos will help you encounter many random structures in a given time and this is all your brain needs.
Structure can only preserve, Chaos is the Force of Creation
In developed countries we live in a relatively safe and stable world where preservation is outsourced to the government, police, military, scientists, engineers, doctors, first responders, etc.
The rest of us are more rewarded for creating. The current economy rewards new ideas and dynamic action. It rewards chaos as long as it doesn’t clash with the rule of law. Entrepreneurship needs chaos and it’s currently the best path to money and long-term freedom.
Chaos participates in the hunter/sheep dynamics as mentioned but is also a main actor in financial dynamics.
Virtuous organized chaos cycle:
- Chaos develops the Ultimate skills of a person and brings them personal growth and money.
- Money brings freedom because of its ability to fix small problems easily, sparing also your time.
- Freedom can bring more good chaos if you need it.
To help yourself get into the right mentality, we have more articles about what you need to understand to make chaos work for you financially.
On the other hand “organized chaos” is simply good for mental health as it guarantees that you go out of your comfort zone and face your fears on a regular basis. So even outside of the entrepreneurship/financial freedom plan, it’s still worth introducing in your life.
The Ultimate skills don’t just help you succeed. They also make you happier and a better person to be around.
Structure is very valuable for mankind. We owe much of the progress in our quality of life to its preserving qualities. Your personal life structure definitely has its place in the form of good habits. Humans need some supporting framework of consistency in their lives.
However we need chaos to grow and we need it to earn money while keeping a good amount of freedom in the current economy.
