“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
As you leave the world of perfectly constrained environments that have been artificially created by society and enter the world of creativity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, the rules we’ve been taught for so many years no longer apply. Nature itself is raw, unpredictable, constantly changing and evolving. So why do you believe the human experience is any different? It’s not.
Our deep need for safety, order, and certainty is artificially constructed by what we call society. If you ask anyone who dares to change the world to any degree, you will learn that the sense of certainty is an illusion. At any given moment, a seemingly stable field of work can get eroded through technological change. The way society is constructed, it tries to soft-land change and leave us with the false belief that such a thing as certainty exists. And people gain influence because of the appeal of such a world. But it doesn’t correspond to the realities of life and nature. So whenever someone promises you certainty, you should be skeptical and carefully scrutinize the words and arguments they use against the first-order truths you know to be true.
Only a fool takes the word of others at face value. When you start to go down the infinite loop of questioning the things we were taught to be true, you start realizing how many of those are based on premature assumptions that will eventually be proven wrong. This doesn’t mean that you can apply such scrutiny and care to every endeavor in life — your time and energy are limited. But it does underline the importance of questioning your perceived truth.
Moving from the nature of the world — and its certainty of uncertainty — to the world of creativity and ideas, the world we’ve entered decades ago, you start to notice that to give birth to new ideas, a component of chaos is inevitable. And it contributes to the quality of your ideas. Great ideas don’t happen in a perfectly controlled environment; the measure of their quality reveals itself only as they come in contact with nature. Rather, great ideas happen when you combine things that weren’t meant to be combined. The greatest inventions of our time — the ones that most meaningfully accelerated the human species — were often random, unplanned accidents, born of tinkering, which is unconstrained by nature. Whether it’s the invention of the light bulb, the steam engine, computers, or artificial intelligence, there were thousands of collective attempts at invention from our species, most remaining unknown and undiscovered. Even if some weren’t classified as accidents, nonlinearity in discovery — and a component of randomness and chaos — certainly played their role.
When operating on the plane of ideas, remove the assumption that the work will be linear, controlled, and structured. A component of not knowing where to go — of self-doubt, tinkering, persistence, chaos, and randomness — is always present. Neither of the extremes work in isolation. But the balance between them is what allows for the polarity that gives rise to ideas that move us forward — ideas that are an expression of your unique purpose in this world. Let chaos be. Let structure be. The right breakthroughs will appear if you consistently show up and do the work. And this belief is worth trusting in.