Chaos Chaser

We gain an inherent understanding about risk when momentous things happen.  We are mindful of that understanding in the moments surrounding catastrophic events, such as in the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001 and in the 2008 global stock market crash.  We are also mindful of that understanding when we observe the sudden fortunes of massive new business enterprises like Facebook and Google.  During these episodes, we become acutely aware of randomness and enormous consequences; and quite frankly, this realization is more than a little scary.  The seemingly steady earth drops away from our feet and we feel unsure of how to react or how to get back to our lives, especially when bad things happen.  Our feelings are driven by the scale of the changes, the suddenness of the changes, and how closely we feel the changes affect us personally (we shall delve further into these factors later).

However, beyond those moments we usually don’t think about risk and randomness at all, other than as a nagging feeling at the back our minds; and often times we learn even that can be silenced.  But the risk is still there, shaping our world, regardless of whether we are conscious of it.  We are profoundly terrible at understanding risk.  It is not in our nature to intuitively understand risk, let alone embrace it.  Despite our tendency to avoid coping with risk, we must learn how to think about it.  Learning how to think about risk then leads us to incorporating it into our everyday practices.  Incorporating risk in to our everyday practices leads us to making better decisions.  Even better, we can learn how to use our new knowledge to our advantage to avoid catastrophic risks (as much as is possible) and to benefit from run-away successes, though as we shall see, most of life is organized around simply avoiding the negative.  To navigate the world successfully we must construct a pair of Reality Goggles that allow us to see the world as it actually is.

Let me take the point a bit further.  Virtually all of us recoil from the idea of randomness and chaos largely controlling our lives.  But we should not fear randomness and chaos.  The only way to not be overcome by large scale negative events is to embrace the chaos.  You cannot control floods or earthquakes or financial crashes; and therefore the negative aspects of chaos will still find you no matter how ingenious you are, but you can rob yourself of the opportunities that come from chaos.  If you don’t embrace those opportunities your competitors will.  You will be tomorrow’s dinosaur.  Instead, you’ve got to grab the shooting star, hold on for dear life, and ride it to glory.  Become a Chaos Chaser.  I will show you how.