Beautiful Chaos

Even if you are micro-ambitious, you want to be able to keep momentum in the stuff you do. To be building on what you have done before. Constantly taking iterative steps. Trial and error. Learning, unlearning, relearning. 

We don’t know how the world and our path is going to play out. The information is not there. It is not that there is stuff you don’t know or that someone else knows and they need to tell you. You get to the point where you realise we are all experiencing the world in a different way. That is great. That is something to celebrate. It is okay. 

To empower others, we don’t have to go out and convince everyone to see the world in the way that we do. We do not have the capacity to understand the world. It is too complex. We don’t even experience the whole world. 

We experience a sliver of it. We get different information through touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. It is fun to imagine yourself as tiny or huge, and how the laws of physics would change. Not in their essence, but in how they relate to you... and how you experience and interpret the beautiful chaos.

Turbulence

 

Bold because Secure

We see based on the experiences we have had. We build an interpretation of the world. We filter the noise and interact with it as best we can. Which makes a feedback cycle essential. We can not help but constantly make mistakes unless we either don’t do anything, or don’t venture very far from what we know we can hold onto. Boldness is built on nurtured insecurities. Boldness is built on a capacity to not only confirm what you already know. With security and a feedback loop, we can act in micro-ambitious ways. Have a go. See what happens. If you have confidence that you have the capacity to unwind mistakes, depending on the unintended consequences, you can be more adventurous. If you are wrapped in fear, you will seek perfection that doesn’t exist, before you act. You will seek the correct way. If you accept that your way is just an interpretation, you can move. Embrace a sense of wildness, and diversity of attempts in which beauty exists. Where we can be open to the chaos of noise, silent periods, bright colours, dull colours, contrast, light, dark, and in all of that find the bits that resonate with us. 

Bold

(because you are secure)

 

See What Happens

In the study of machine learning, they started to see that you can simplify quite complex decisions down to a string of ones and zeros. The computer is not sentient. It has just learnt through multiple repetitions of trial and error, with adjustments. Feedback loops added to complicated processes. It does not understand its own behaviour. Given the ones and zeroes, you can’t extract the knowledge they contain. You can only apply it and see what happens. We are sentient, but even we do not understand ourselves completely. And we have to accept that we can not understand ourselves fully. A lot of our behaviour carries deep knowledge that we can try to interrogate but we might not be able to come to the bottom of. We can constantly be on the path of understanding ourselves through self-awareness, self-search, and self-reflection. That includes recognition of limits, and creating an environment that can cope with lack of understanding and regularly being wrong. That can cope with lack of control.  

Binary Counter

Finding Others

Find others whose paths resonate with yours. There are lots of people who are generous and willing to talk about the challenges that they have had. Listen to their stories. They are not going to be the same as yours. They are going to be giving younger versions of themselves advice. No one can know your context as well as you. But the more stories you listen to, the more capable you are going to be in various new situations. The more able to avoid mistakes other people have made. That is where the real juice is. Where we learn the most. Through mistakes. Trial and error. Success is less interesting, because success just means there weren't strong enough obstacles in the way. But we don't know why. Admitting that we don't know why is important. Our learning is path dependent. We know what we know, because of the information that has come up on our path. There is too much complexity for anyone to wrap their head around. Particularly if you do it alone. 

A Grave Man

“Science progresses one funeral at a time,” pointed out Max Planck. One way of looking at science is formalised trial and error. Bold statements followed by rigorous testing. Knowledge progresses not by confirming what we thought we knew, but by finding out ways we were wrong. Through surprising results. Death of an idea becomes a feature rather than something to overcome. Our bodies largely replace themselves every 7-10 years. We quite literally, are what we eat. The way we interpret the world depends on what we know, and that changes as we learn. We are what we think. But even these “are”s are temporary. If we eat tomorrow. If we think tomorrow. The reason I think of Finance in Yogic terms is money is not about you. You are something deeper. You cannot base your identity on temporary things. Money is about problem solving, and if you are genuinely interested in actually solving the problem rather than making yourself irreplaceable… then you don’t want to define yourself by your job. You are not your job.

Max Planck's Grave

Left or Right

Step one is to become aware of the decisions you have the option of making. To get a sense of your left and right. A Galton Board is a demonstration of the law of large numbers. When things can go left or right randomly, most will “regress to mediocrity”. Some will, through luck (good or bad), go to the extremes. Some of those extremes will take the credit or blame for the “merit” of decisions taken by chance. Those extremes will get most of our attention. This is called the “normal Distribution” because it is such a common way that the random noise we deal with plays out. When nature doesn’t know, its answer is to do lots of small things. Three lessons from a Galton Board are (1) take stories of success (and failure) with a pinch of salt, (2) try be aware of your left and right, and (3) reduce the size of your trial and error when you are acting in the dark.

Galton Box

Complex Web

What you see is not all there is. Even if you know more than the average bear. No one understands. No one can. We live in a complex web of relationships, where every action has knock-on effects and unintended consequences. In a pass-the-parcel economy where we live hand-to-mouth, there is reduced capacity to pause. The strength of a business to survive isn’t evident in the size of their offices, and the image of success presented by their sales staff. You have to look at the Balance Sheet. The Cash Reserves. The Cash Flows. The Pipeline of Sales. The endurance and resilience of their suppliers, customers, competitors, and regulators. The laws can change. The technology can change. The people involved can change. Sustainable Creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It starts by shifting from a consumer mindset to a custodial one. How do you maintain awareness of a complex environment? Gentle trial and error with fire breaks and retreats for when you misstep. A balance of conserving what you love and chipping away at obstacles that aren’t completely understood.