The Unpredictable Freedom and Sweetness of Chaos

‘You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.’ ~Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m going to share a productivity, planning and organizational hack that will change your life. It will yield some unpredictable results, but if you approach it the right way, it could bring some of the most amazing work of your life, along with freedom, joy, exhilaration.

What’s this miraculous hack?

It’s a simple one: let go. Let go of control and allow yourself to be swept away by the powerful currents of life. Let go of planning and embrace not know what will happen. Let go of productivity and be open to new ideas, new opportunities, spontaneous creativity.

Consider what we’re doing when we plan our day, our week, our year: we are trying to exert control over life, and predict with our plans the course our lives will take today, this week, this year.

We are saying: this is what I’m going to do today. This is how things will go. If I get these things done, life will be good. This is my idea of what this day will hold.

Now consider this: we have absolutely no idea if any of this is true. We cannot predict the future with any kind of certainty, and the idea that we can plan based on these shaky predictions is a nice fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. We do not know what will happen today, much less the rest of the week or month. Knowing what will happen this year? What a crock!

And consider: what if we could know? What if we could accurately predict every single day, and plan each day exactly? Would this be a great thing? I submit that it would suck infinitely more than not knowing. Having foreknowledge of the future means we know what will happen each day, which means not only will our days be ridiculously boring, but we’re stuck on one unshakable path. Foreknowledge means a crazy lack of freedom.

So we don’t know what will happen, nor should we want to. We can try to plan, but those plans are not based on real knowledge and probably won’t happen, so planning is a waste of time.

What can we do instead of trying to predict what will happen, instead of planning? Learn to embrace uncertainty, and be open to change. Learn to let go of control, and surf the ever-changing wave. Let unpredictability rule, let randomness be the force of our life, let spontaneity be the rule.

Some random thoughts based on my experiments with letting go:

Work is better with chaos. While the idea of having peaceful order to our workday is a nice one, it’s an illusion. And it’s frankly boring. Work based on fun, play, and spontaneity is more interesting. Imagine a project that is started with a spontaneous idea, and then changes course as you do it, embraces the ideas of strangers, ends up in a fantastic new place you could not have possibly foreseen when you started. This is how I did my last book, The Effortless Life, and it was one of the most fun I’ve ever had on a project. It’s how I’m doing all my projects now, actually.A year that isn’t planned. When I started Zen Habits in 2007, I had my year planned out in detail, with goals, actions and weekly plans. That, of course, was tossed out the door as soon as I started writing Zen Habits and meeting my first readers, who changed my life with their feedback and kind attention. My life was turned upside down, my plans became meaningless, and I learned that while life is unpredictable, that unpredictability can bring some amazing things.Be open to new possibilities. I learned, that first year of Zen Habits, to be open to new opportunities. Time and time again, new doors opened for me that I didn’t know — couldn’t know — would even be there. I saw the new door opening, considered it, and went in. That happened repeatedly, and taught me that there is no way to plan a path when you don’t know what each step will bring, what changes will happen to that path as you walk along it.Be open to strangers. Let’s say you plan your day rigidly. You’ve got your productivity system honed, you’re cranking out the tasks. You are a productivity machine! But now you randomly happen upon a stranger who says hi. You say hi back, and now you have a new opportunity: you can talk to this stranger, get to know him. But then you’d deviate from the plan! Do you stick to the plan, or talk to the stranger? Well, sticking to the plan would be more productive, and give you more control over your life. But if you talk to the stranger, you might make a new friend. You might learn something you’d never have learned otherwise. I’ve made some of my best friends like this, because I was willing to deviate from my plans and talk to a stranger.Chaos is creativity, and creativity is chaos. They are the same thing. Creative work doesn’t happen by plan and control. Sure, some of the worlds creative geniuses were detail freaks, but they didn’t make a plan to come up with a creative genius idea — it came to them because they were open to random thoughts, explored paths no one else had thought to look down, took an idea they saw from someone else and twisted it in a new way. Creativity comes from a place of chaos, and it’s only when you open yourself to this lack of control that you can come up with your best creativity.Some things to read: Two of the best books I’ve read recently embrace the idea of uncertainty, and they also happened to come at me from two of my best friends — both of whom I met almost randomly on the Internet. My friend Jonathan Fields wrote Uncertainty, and it’s a great exploration of some of these ideas. My friend Mary Jaksch sent me a book the other day called Bring Me the Rhinoceros that is an excellent use of Zen koans to explore similar ideas. Both books highly recommended.When we let go of our expectations that others will make us happy, we enjoy them more. We get angry and frustrated at people because they don’t act the way we want them to. We expect others to try to make us happy, to go out of their way to give us what we want. This is not why other people exist. When we let go of these expectations, we accept people for who they are, and learn to appreciate this uniqueness.If you don’t expect things to go as planned, you are open to the unplanned. Something might arise that is unexpected, and if you go with it, you’ll have to let go of your previous plans. This can be a wonderful thing. Many people (including the old me) get frustrated when new things come up that were unplanned, when plans go awry, but it doesn’t have to be frustrating. Just expect plans to change, or don’t really plan at all. Expect unplanned things to happen, and when they do, smile.Embrace not knowing what will happen. This is the ultimate freedom. You don’t know what you’re going to do today, nor what will come up. You are locked into nothing. You are completely free to do anything, to pursue any creative pursuit, to try new things as they come up, to be open to meeting new people. It can be scary at first, but if you smile when you think of not knowing, you’ll soon realize it’s a joyous thing.When you’re not focused on one outcome, you open the possibility for many outcomes. Most people are focused on specific goals (outcomes), and relentlessly pursue that outcome. They then dismiss other possibilities as distractions. But what if you have no predetermined outcome? What if you say that anywhere you end up could be good? You now open an infinite amount of possibilities, and you’re much more likely to learn something than if you only try to do the things and learn the things that support your predetermined outcome.

‘It’s a cruel and random world, but the chaos is all so beautiful.’ ~Hiromu Arakawa

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Creating Silence from Chaos

We are often afraid of silence, because its emptiness feels idle, boring, unproductive, and scary. And so we fill our lives with chaos, noise, clutter.

But silence can be lovely, and therapeutic, and powerful.

It can be the remedy for our stress and the habits that crush us.

If we want quiet in our lives, how do we create it?

I’ve been exploring this myself. As a father of six kids, I have to admit that I don’t always have silence in my life. That’s not a complaint — I love the messy noise that my family brings — but silence can be a welcome refuge from that noise at times.

I create silence by subtracting, and not filling the resulting emptiness withe noise or clutter.

And so my life is a constant experimentation with subtracting. When I’ve subtracted, and learn to love the empty silence, I subtract some more. Subtraction is a beautiful process.

Prefer subtraction over addition.

Learn to be content with little, or nothing.

Realize that silence is beautiful.

Find yourself in the empty space that results.

Empty a room, and put almost nothing back except that which produces quiet.

Speak less, listen more, contemplate even more.

Walk in silence. Watch the leaves quiver, fall in silence, whisper in the wind.

Sit and do nothing. Listen to your mind make noise in the silence, allow it to subside.

Eschew video, iPods, books, the Internet, mobile devices, social networks, and other purveyors of noise.

Be quiet, so that life may speak.

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Living With Chaos

‘In chaos, there is fertility.’ ~Anaïs Nin

Recently I wrote about the illusion of control, and living with no goals.

What I’m still figuring out is what you do if you let go of the illusion of control, and plan as little as possible.

What’s life like without goals or plans? How do we deal with the chaos?

I don’t have all the answers, but I’m learning a lot.

I went to the World Domination Summit in Portland earlier this month with few plans. I had a speech to give, a couple smaller sessions to hold, a bike tour scheduled, a plane ticket and a hotel room. But the large majority of the weekend I left open, with no plans.

It was liberating. I didn’t mind giving the talks, and I loved the tour, but meeting unexpected strangers, hanging out with people I’d never met, going with the flow of the crowd — it was fun. I never really knew what was going to happen next, and that’s scary … but strangely freeing.

As I write this, I’m on a plane to Guam for a month, and I have tons of friends and family to see — they all want to hang out with Eva, me and the kids (and vice versa — we’re excited to see them). But other than a place to stay for two of the four weeks we’ll be there, we have no set plans. We don’t know what we’re doing for transportation, we don’t know what we’ll do each day, and I don’t know where we’ll be living the last couple of weeks. It’s scary, but I know we’ll be fine.

How do you live with the chaos?

You learn to embrace it.

I try to schedule as little as possible, and I have no goals for each day. I wake up and ask myself, “What excites me today?” And each day that’s different.

Sure, there are obligations that I have to meet, but mostly those are things I’m excited about. The ones I’m not so excited about, I’ll still do — unless I can avoid them.

But each moment I try to live consciously, in the moment, and ask myself … “What am I passionate about? And how can I handle each moment while being true to my values?”

I’ve been having an ongoing discussion about this with my friend Suraj, who lives in London and practices the Jain religion. He has clearly identified his values: friendship, appreciation, compassion, and equanimity. I love those values.

My value is compassion, which comes in various manifestations: love, kindness, empathy, gratitude. And every time a situation comes up, I ask myself, “How can I deal with this compassionately?”

I’m still learning how to do this. I don’t claim to have mastered it, and will probably be exploring this for years to come.

Living without plans might seem foolish, or unrealistic to most people. That’s fine. But if you want to be realistic, you should understand that the plans you make are pure illusions of control.

Let’s take a simple example. You have plans to write a report (or a blog post or a book chapter) and meet with a colleague or business partner today. The writing is supposed to happen at 9 a.m. and the meeting is at 11 a.m.

Let’s assume those things actually happen according to plan. Many days, other things will come up and the illusion of control is easily shattered. But some days we get lucky and the plans actually happen as we hoped.

So you sit down to write, as planned. Perhaps you’ve outlined your writing. But as you write, you think of things you hadn’t planned. You face problems as you think the writing through that you couldn’t have foreseen before you started writing. In fact, if you pay close attention, it becomes clear that there’s no way you could have planned the writing ahead of time — it has to unfold as you do it, because only as you do it do you fully think things through, and there’s no way to predict our own thinking (let alone the thinking of others).

And so things emerge from our writing that could never have been planned, and in fact if we’re open to it, we might write something entirely brilliant that we never could have predicted. Or if we try to stick to the outline, we might ignore the brilliant possibilities that come up.

So now it’s 11 a.m. and it’s time for your meeting. You meet your colleague or partner, as planned, and start talking. Of course, conversations can’t be planned, and there’s no way to predict what will come up as you talk. You might even have an agenda, but as you talk about things on the agenda, new ideas emerge, and when one of you suggests a new idea, that sparks another idea in the other person, and so on — ideas are sparked, back and forth, that couldn’t have been planned.

And so new ideas and projects and collaborations emerge from this meeting that never could have been planned. And that’s a great thing.

The two planned events, even though they happened as planned, were totally unpredictable and uncontrollable. The more we embrace this chaos, the more we embrace the brilliant possibilities that might emerge. The more we try to control our day and actions with plans, the more we limit ourselves.

We try to hold onto the illusion of control, but what if we instead embraced the chaos? What if we left ourselves open to the changing, unfolding moment, and the possibilities we could never have planned for?

It’s beautiful.

Try it. Throw out your plans for the next hour. See what happens, moment to moment. Think about what excites you, what’s in line with your values.

And as you start doing things that excite you, that are in line with your values … see what new things emerge. Talk with people with no fixed intentions, and see what ideas come up from that interaction. See what new opportunities come up as you interact with people, with ideas, with your own thoughts.

It sounds nebulous, but in fact it’s as concrete as anything else. As I’ve shown, when we make plans, we think we’re setting things in concrete, but it’s always fluid — we just try to make ourselves think it’s solidly concrete.

When we acknowledge the fluidity of our lives, we learn to use that fluidity to our advantage. We flow. We are open to changing currents. We see things with open eyes, instead of trying to make the world fit to our plans and goals.

I don’t have all the answers, and in fact I’d be a hypocrite if I claimed to be able to predict what will happen when I live like this … or if anyone else lives like this.

I don’t know what will happen. Think of the limitless possibilities of that simple statement.

‘Chaos is a friend of mine.’ ~Bob Dylan

More discussion on this topic: 5 Reasons Leo Babauta is Wrong About Goals
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