Chaos

It's a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.

-Hiromu Arakawa

I thrive in chaos. Something about everyone else freaking out, makes me calm. When people are angry, panicked, worried, or even despondent, I gain confidence. It’s weird. I think it’s because I know they’re acting irrationally, and I naturally compartmentalize and go into the core of the problem. I’m addicted to problem solving, and when there’s chaos, there are problems.

I listen to a lot of podcasts and audiobooks, while exercising or commuting. I tried a few Tim Ferris podcasts, but I wasn’t a fan of a lot of his questions. My least favorite was his “what is your morning routine” question. It ignores circadian rhythms assuming everyone is a morning person, and it subtextually assumes structure in the morning is a good thing. Sans typical grooming and hygiene, my morning routine is different day to day. Structure can be helpful for some, but it’s not a one size fits all.

Some people crave structure. They need it to learn and make sense of the world. I’m the opposite, and I used it to my advantage from an early age. When playing chess as a child, I hated the rote memorization of openings. Openings are the first one to fifteen moves that are “book moves”, which a lot of players follow. It was common for mediocre teachers to have their students memorize a large number of these openings because if the opponent didn’t know the correct response, it leads to an easy win. Students would memorize openings and get a lot of easy wins. A typical student would keep doing the same openings over and over again without really learning strategy or tactics. It’s similar to Starcraft players who learn a few different timing attacks (openings) and win that way, but never improve their fundamental skills. These opening players would only be good at playing very specific positions.

I hated memorization, so I learned atypical early counters to “book openings”. By move 3 or 4, my opponent would be out of their book opening. My counters always involved opening the board up, which led to hundreds of new possibilities. There were no common “book moves” to my counters because of the increased number of permutations. My counters destroyed the structure of their openings and created chaos. We played the game I wanted to play. A game of chaos.

It always takes me out of movies when characters go into shock about a new paradigm. It’s the most un-relatable thing to me. I hate watching someone freeze when their life is in danger. If it wasn’t for their ally who moves them, they would have died. This is common in action movies. I can’t recall any moments in real life where I froze or became hysterical to my own detriment. I’ve seen it happen to many friends though. I feel when you have perspective, it’s silly to act that way. It’s fun to give into your emotions at times… I mean, I don’t think we should be robots, but when giving into your emotions leads directly to you harming yourself or others, it’s stupid.

One of the biggest payoffs of not panicking happened when my cousin was driving on the 405 in LA. We were going 70mph, and in the middle of a conversation, I noticed that a car 10 car lengths in front of us was completely stopped. If he hit the brakes, we would have slammed into the car in front of us. We were in the right hand lane, and there were no cars to our left. I calmly said “change lanes”. He looked forward, noticed the car we were about to hit, and changed lanes. We immediately had an omfg moment then we broke down what happened. If I yelled “stop!” or “watch out!” or said pretty much anything else, we would have gotten into a horrible car accident. It was one of my proudest moments in thinking fast.

I do my best work when things unexpectedly break. I don’t do well in structure. I get bored. I strive to never be stuck in a singular structure. If I do something enough, I get really good at it, e.g. after pitching our company ten times, I got really good at it. But when there aren’t new challenges, I get bored. 

I want to constantly replace myself when I’m not learning, which is, luckily, the correct way to lead a company. If I’m not constantly replacing myself, then the company doesn’t scale. I should learn each part of the business until it bores me, and then replace myself. Maybe it’s good that I embrace chaos… I just need to be careful to not actively create it.