The Magic Of Chaos Days: Destroy Everything (And Then Rebuild It Into A Successful Career)
You can cause a lot of trouble in 24 hours — and you don’t need anybody’s permission to do it.
All in all, chaos gets a pretty bad rep.
It’s messy, it’s “not productive,” and it certainly doesn’t follow anyone’s well-thought-out rules or carefully researched strategy templates. Thank goodness for that, am I right?
For all the warnings about the importance of scheduling, planning, and processing your way to victory, I think it’s time to take another look at our old frenemy, Chaos.
In my case, Chaos has been one of my greatest allies on the path toward happiness — not to mention a pretty awesome career. You just have to give her a chance.
Here’s what I mean.
Who Says Success Is Linear? Take A Few Detours Before You “Make It”
We like to think of success as a neat, packaged — dare I say branded?— thing. As dependable as the sunrise, if only you follow x, y, z steps and stick with them for the long haul.
Maybe success is like that, sometimes. But I think the image leaves a lot of the details out to dry.
The messy details. The chaotic details. See where I’m going, here?
Success of any kind, like most of life, is something of a crapshoot. Between the routines and systems and strategies lie uncharted waters, vague and unpredictable grey areas where you’ll find hurdles, curveballs, and more.
As frustrating as this wilderness can be for the starry-eyed professional, it also tends to be the place where our best, most creative ideas live…if we choose to dive in and look for them.
Enter the Chaos Day, a scheduled, unregulated, preposterous field of possibilities occupying a neat 24-hour block and a gleefully large label in your weekly planner. Chaos Days are more than a measurement of time, however.
In essence, they are the physical manifestation of that ungoverned mental wilderness — in your road to success, they are the wonderful, inevitable detours. They’re going to happen…
