Chaos is always a bad thing.
I've heard amazing athletes talk about their success via the ability to slow everything down, alleviate the chaos, so they can make rational decisions inside the mess.
Great army generals have the ability to step out of the sheer madness that is battle and understand tactics and strategy when everybody else is just trying to stay alive.
I hate chaos probably the same as everybody else, but I hate it so personally it feels like it's just me and it. I think when you've dealt with poverty it makes your hatred of chaos worse because there is nothing more out of control than the life poverty foists upon you. Violence and chaos often go hand in hand just like violence and poverty.
We lose a little bit of our humanity when there is chaos. We call it animal instinct or mob mentality or just reacting but we never call it human.
When we think about emotions there is always a foil for any emotion, two sides of a coin. Many people believe the opposite of happiness is sadness, but its not. The next time you lose somebody close to you go to an amusement park and see if you feel better. No the opposite of happiness is boredom, that's why strapping yourself into a fake car crash called a roller coaster makes you happy, it cures the boredom. The opposite of sadness is stability. You lose somebody and you need to be near somebody you know and love, you need to feel safe and in control.
Chaos breads fear and sadness.
God uses chaos all the time and when spent some time with us a person he was totally untouched emotionally and physically by chaos.
Once there was a storm so bad that everybody on a ship thought they were going to die, Jesus just napped.
Once there was a mob that wanted to kill Jesus and so he just walked through their thronging midst and left.
Once there was a guy who ran around screaming and cutting himself and hurting anybody near him, Jesus just sat down with him and they had a conversation.
An army general was once leaning on God's advice on how to win a battle where he had thirty thousand troops but was facing an army of a hundred and fifty thousand. God told him to send everybody home but three hundred soldiers. Then in the middle of the night those three hundred solders took torches and covered them with jars to hide the light. The spread out late one night around the enemy camp. In unison they all uncovered their torches and smashed the jars on rocks. The enemy had five thousand troops for each of the one soldiers fighting against them, but in the chaos they all resorted to their instincts and turned and killed the person closest to them. The entire enemy routed itself.
God uses chaos.
Out of the darkness comes light, out of the sound comes silence, out of death comes life.
Friday, November 25, 2016
Monday, November 7, 2016
But those guys suck
I was speaking with someone who was starting a new business. It was in a field where there is a very defined market leader. I brought up the market leader and his response was "Those guys suck". Outside of the fact that we have lost our eloquence I was moved by multiple different feelings.
1) When you go negative you make people feel negative. There are very few times in life where you should goal to make the person you are talking to feel negative.
2) When somebody a company is better than your's in every respect (size, profitability, offerings) you should probably keep your mouth shut about them until you do something. Let people know you want to provide better service, price, anything. Just don't say the way they are doing it isn't working because guess what, it is, until somebody breaks it.
Be eloquent and be thoughtful. Google is better than Yahoo, we now know this. Back in the early day's of Google though the founders used to say that they were not really concerned with growth because every day later you found Google you found them a day better. They probably didn't say Yahoo sucks, they just worked to better and let customers decide.
A great current example of this is Microsoft. They are not making commercials hating on Apple, they are just quietly trying to do things better than Apple and people are starting to notice. It turns out the only way to dethrone the leader in any industry isn't to tear them down but to build yourself up.
1) When you go negative you make people feel negative. There are very few times in life where you should goal to make the person you are talking to feel negative.
2) When somebody a company is better than your's in every respect (size, profitability, offerings) you should probably keep your mouth shut about them until you do something. Let people know you want to provide better service, price, anything. Just don't say the way they are doing it isn't working because guess what, it is, until somebody breaks it.
Be eloquent and be thoughtful. Google is better than Yahoo, we now know this. Back in the early day's of Google though the founders used to say that they were not really concerned with growth because every day later you found Google you found them a day better. They probably didn't say Yahoo sucks, they just worked to better and let customers decide.
A great current example of this is Microsoft. They are not making commercials hating on Apple, they are just quietly trying to do things better than Apple and people are starting to notice. It turns out the only way to dethrone the leader in any industry isn't to tear them down but to build yourself up.
Saturday, November 5, 2016
Chaos
Story telling and story listening are who we are. It is fundamentally human. You can talk about needs, pain, relationships but even penguins have life long relationships and feel bad when an egg rolls off their feet. Story telling is what makes us human. Every major religion is built around a story that is thousands of years old. Even young religions like Mormonism needed a story teller to get up and off the ground. We are humans and we need stories.
The thing is, what makes a good story?
The most important book written on the subject is "Story" by Robert Mckee, the famed Hollywood writing coach. Read it, love it, become better at telling stories.
The backbone of every story ever told is the inciting incident. Eve bites the apple. ET meets the boy. Grendel kills Beowulf's friends. Every story has an inciting incident. Sometimes they are quiet, more often they are loud, but they always exist.
The best inciting incidents are one that don't directly affect you, your just listening to a story, but that matter to you personally so you get pulled into the story. I feel like God is trying to control me sometimes too Eve.
In the world, day to day, we are rewarded internally by our emotions and externally by our peers for inciting incidents because they give us new stories to spend time on.
This is why saying something crazy on Facebook gets things moving. The issue is, are you just inciting a riot?
People too often get hooked on inciting and forget what they are inciting. Even the best stories warn us of this peril. You shouldn't have made Samson angry, he is going to tie foxes together and light them on fire in your grain fields. You shouldn't have made John McClane angry by taking a high rise hostage, he's going to lose his shoes and then kill all the bad guys.
Be very careful of people who just walk around inciting in their lives, there is literally not a single animal in all of nature that does that. Every story needs an inciting incident, but not every incident needs to be incited.
The thing is, what makes a good story?
The most important book written on the subject is "Story" by Robert Mckee, the famed Hollywood writing coach. Read it, love it, become better at telling stories.
The backbone of every story ever told is the inciting incident. Eve bites the apple. ET meets the boy. Grendel kills Beowulf's friends. Every story has an inciting incident. Sometimes they are quiet, more often they are loud, but they always exist.
The best inciting incidents are one that don't directly affect you, your just listening to a story, but that matter to you personally so you get pulled into the story. I feel like God is trying to control me sometimes too Eve.
In the world, day to day, we are rewarded internally by our emotions and externally by our peers for inciting incidents because they give us new stories to spend time on.
This is why saying something crazy on Facebook gets things moving. The issue is, are you just inciting a riot?
People too often get hooked on inciting and forget what they are inciting. Even the best stories warn us of this peril. You shouldn't have made Samson angry, he is going to tie foxes together and light them on fire in your grain fields. You shouldn't have made John McClane angry by taking a high rise hostage, he's going to lose his shoes and then kill all the bad guys.
Be very careful of people who just walk around inciting in their lives, there is literally not a single animal in all of nature that does that. Every story needs an inciting incident, but not every incident needs to be incited.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)