What happens when you embrace chaos, welcoming it eagerly into your life? Here’s the inspiring Tara Hunt version (from her archives, scroll down to read it):
1. It will prepare you for anything….
2. It will prevent you from making assumptions….
3. It will reduce your stress levels….
4. It will open new doors….
5. It will allow you to fail gracefully….
6. It will allow you to be utterly agile….
Now I’ll give you the cynical and neurotic Anne Z. version.
I’ve had my arms around chaos for a couple months now, pretty much ever since starting my Web Worker Daily and RedMonk gigs right before entering the holiday and blizzard season as a mother of three poorly disciplined children. I can confirm that there are good reasons people look skeptically at chaos–it’s not all spring flowers and sunny days like you might think from reading some marketing blogs.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen when you let chaos into your life:
You will be more stressed, not less. At least initially, while you get used to the new challenges. But once the new challenges become old challenges, do they really qualify as chaos? Probably not. Chaos = stress. Stress is not all bad. Without a bit of challenge, why bother getting up? But too much stress can keep you up at night and screw up your brain.
You may fail spectacularly and publicly. No, I’m not referring to something I did online recently, so don’t go searching around my various blogosphere haunts in an attempt to find a big public failure–though wouldn’t that be fun? There wasn’t a private failure either, not any really big ones anyway, though every time I put out an idea or step up to a new connection I feel that I’m risking my very soul.
You do not become immune to embarrassing failure just because you’ve allowed chaos into your life. You don’t suddenly become more graceful at the very moment you take on small or medium or enormous risks. No, chaos makes it MORE likely that you’ll do something dumb, more likely that you’ll look awkward and not graceful. Is that reason not to take on new challenges? Not at all. But don’t be surprised if you feel totally exposed as an idiot at some point in your chaos-loving life.
You might want to puke when you see what’s behind the new doors that chaos opens. It’s easy to say yes to new challenges… but then you actually have to make good on what you said you’d do. That’s not always fun. Mashup Camp sounded like a whole lot of fun in December, when I didn’t face the reality of getting to Boston and hanging out with 200 men and a handful of women for two days, when I didn’t know I’d get stuck in a snowdrift on the way to the airport because I left my cell phone at home, when I hadn’t taken on so many other tasks at the same time. There were so many things on my calendar last week that made me want to puke… I got through it all, barely, only to face more barf-worthy stuff in the future.
Sometimes you’ll feel utterly paralyzed, the opposite of agile. It’d be great if by taking on new challenges, scary challenges, chaotic challenges, you suddenly became more powerful and flexible. But that’s not in fact what happens, at least not in my experience. I decided in December that I wanted to go to Mashup Camp. Then in January, I was convinced I didn’t want to go. I was ready to call the whole thing off. I did it anyway, but probably less gracefully than I generally manage my life–because doing new things makes me feel like the tin man when he hasn’t had enough oil.
You might realize that all your cherished beliefs were wrong. Tara says that embracing chaos will prevent you from making assumptions, but believe me, you’ve already made them. When you embrace chaos, you are forced to question them–they don’t just evaporate into the air. It’s easy enough to stick with the same beliefs when you’re doing the same thing. I kind of like the things I believe. It’s not easy to let go of them.
So… to embrace chaos or not? A question left for the reader to answer.
11 Comments
I am absolutely useless with chaos. Being in magazine publishing, once a month I’m in complete chaos (right now as a matter of fact). If I try to live in it as it presents itself, I’m screwed. I almost always fail and that’s not a happy feeling. I finally decided that I’m much more productive and my work is better when I ignore the chaos and just move at my own pace.
On another note, I wish I would have read this post earlier today. I wrote on my blog in a hasty manner (mostly because of the mayhem at the magazine) and I’m not 100% satisfied with it. The format you used here is probably what I should have used instead. I’ll keep this in mind for next time.
I think of it like surfing and try to ride the wave as best as possible. Sometimes I fail miserably. Sometimes it’s tubular. More than anything, embracing chaos in this case means letting go of those cherished beliefs. And you’re right, that’s the hard part. But if you can let go of those beliefs, it’s amazing how free you feel.
The flaw I see in the embracing chaos school is that you can’t let go of all your beliefs. I can’t anyway. And when your belief and reality don’t match, the symptoms you describe take charge. It’s called cognitive dissonance and, at its worst, can make you want to puke in your shoes. Your beliefs create boundaries and trying to cross those boundaries while simultaneously holding on to the belief creates stress. One thing I’ve done is write down things I believe as opposed to things I want to gain (emotional as well as physical) to see where they don’t align. Then the question is less about whether to embrace chaos and more about which beliefs I am willing to give up.
Anne, you are delightfully frank. Thanks for being that way.
Chaos is disorder, not a creative platform. Saying things like “embrace chaos” is pure marketing, meant to make people feel that if they run around in circles and flap their arms madly, eventually they’ll fly. They won’t fly: they’ll just hurt their arms, and convince everyone around them that they’re either insane or drunk.
Challenging oneself has nothing to do with chaos, and everything to do with one’s strength of purpose and determination to push our limits in order to be or do better. It is totally incompatible with chaos, which we assume means that the person is supposed to just leap into life and hope to hell it works out.
Actually, Shelley, I think chaos and challenge are more related than what you are allowing. It is chaotic to do things differently and to try new things. You can certainly have pure chaos without challenge, but it’d be hard to really challenge yourself while keeping everything ordered.
Tim, surfing the wave–I like that metaphor. And sometimes you wipe out really bad or even “pearl your board” (my husband did that once, I think it means breaking your board in half).
Dave, sometimes I like the way I organize my blog posts and sometimes I don’t. This one came out pretty well but I’ve had many that don’t. So don’t beat yourself up about it, the great thing about blogging is that each post is relatively transient
Thanks, amyloo, I’ve been told I’m too frank sometimes. In fact, if there’s any minor mishap that happened recently, it was because of that.
Anne, I would say then that the challenge isn’t to one’s ability.
When a marathon runner works to go faster, longer, she or he doesn’t do so by running around in circles. It’s a disciplined effort to continue to push to be a little better. There is no chaos in it.
I think that if challenge generates chaos, perhaps the challenge isn’t so much to make one better, as to make one different. The chaos is reflected in that there’s a conflict between what you really want, and what life has given you, or is forcing on you.
I think the chaos thing comes from the realization that most things we consider to be well organized is merely luck and random stumbling.
I think most people these days have not seen real chaos, if they did, they’d crap their pants. Think war zone only worse.
Instead of embrace the chaos, I propose, embrace late binding and flexibility. Of course not all personality types can handle that.
I believe one should embrace change not chaos. If change is not embraced and understood then the results may seem to be chaos. But chaos shouldn’t be something we strive for. Challenge is a result of change and does not directly lead to chaos. Anytime there are changes in our lives we are challenged to adapt and understand them. If we don’t, then we may seem to be dealing with chaos. These changes may be ones we’ve created or they may be from outside influences.
To me, chaos implies a lack of understanding of those things that are happening around and to us. Notice I didn’t say control. You don’t have to have control to prevent a feeling of chaos (and who really has control anyway).
My two cents..
Hey Anne,
I’m late in the game here…way behind on my blog reading, etc.
Okay…so…I totally understand where you are coming from.
Now, contrary to Shelley’s very hilarious characterization of what ‘embrace the chaos’ is about, I don’t actually feel like anyone should forget about ‘embracing responsibility’ (pure Shelley genius).
When I say, embrace the chaos and take risks, I don’t mean that you should forget stuff like “Man, I’ve got to pay my mortgage”, etc. I don’t even mean to let go metaphorically and just roll with the punches the universe throws at you. Sometimes you have to be proactive and smart and plan and fight back. Yes.
I’m mostly instructing a very long history of people holding onto their ‘10 Steps to Success’ with blue-knuckles and ‘indisputable formulas’ who just cannot understand why people don’t act the way they want them to act.
When I say embrace the chaos, I mean like a Mom just ‘lets go’ and lets her kids be kids: messy, germ-y and all. Talk about chaos. I figured out the hard way. My son was going to be absolutely perfect and I read every book known to motherkind and I was going to do everything right. It made it that much harder for me to understand why he was still screaming at 4 a.m. after I fed him, changed him, bounced him, etc.
When I let go of my need to be perfect, things got so much better. And I even started to understand what his needs were.
I don’t know. Lots of people, even in this comment section, want to water it down. Not chaos, change. Not chaos, flexibility. Not chaos, challenge. Etc. Whatever you want to call it (and that is a bit of an issue of control itself, having squabbles over semantics), it’s chaos to me. It’s what I cannot control so the more I embrace that fact, the more I can face it when it happens. And when stuff turns out perfect? I can enjoy it even more.
In physics, chaos is described as: behavior so unpredictable as to appear random, owing to great sensitivity to small changes in conditions. Sounds like alot like life to me.
Absolutely, think skeptically about chaos. Absolute chaos isn’t the answer (and I never said, “live chaotically”, I said, “embrace the chaos”, which just means you are prepared for anything, not that you run naked through fields of flowers - ugh, I can’t even bear the thought of going to Burning Man lest I am compelled to bare skin).
Sure I market. I’m in marketing. But embracing the chaos isn’t about marketing TO. It’s about letting go of rules and ‘conventional wisdom’ and understanding the world within a single ideological framework.
Okay…I’ve blathered enough. Sorry my chaotic ramblings are making you feel insecure. I hate that feeling, too. Yikes.
Anne and Tara
Thank you for the post and comments about embracing chaos. They are pertinent to my life at the moment and well received!
Chaos, to me, seems unavoidable for anyone wanting to maximize the experiences they have in life. Other people may not perceive that our lives are chaotic, but our own interpretation of what is happening to us results in us believing that we are in the middle of chaos (to use Tara’s example, children, I am told regularly keep their parents up all night when they are first born, but knowing that doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to accept). As you say, chaos, or the feeling that we are living in chaos, teaches us to stop trying to control situations that are beyond our control.
BTW, I’ve been to Burning Man, and despite what popular opinion would suggest, it is not at all chaotic, although, being somewhat of a prude by conventional standards, it did teach me about not getting freaked out about things over which I have no control ;0)