Summary
Meaning is the felt signal that you’re at the productive edge between order (what you’ve mastered) and chaos (what you haven’t). A good life is built by deliberately working on that edge using small repeated actions. The other option is to retreat into tyranny, martyrdom, or paralysis.
Someone is going to govern your life. Make sure it’s you and your vision that’s guiding it.
Order and Chaos
The world is made up of chaos and order in its most fundamental breakdown. It’s Yin-Yang.
You can categorise the ability to understand the world as order. The potential of the world would be categorised as chaos. We generally seek to move from chaos to order.
But there are people, maybe even you, who have a tyrannical mindset that rejects that transformation. They don’t want to confront what they don’t understand. It’s a form of self-oppression, hence the tyranny label.
What’s the antidote to tyranny? It’s play. And play is the ability to master situations with joy rather than control. You see things as opportunities when you play rather than obligations.
We can think of chaos and order as conceptual territories, just like animals have physical territories. For my dog, the garden is a familiar territory. But take him outside on a walk in the opposite direction than usual and his behaviour changes. He’s excited but also on edge. He’s on the edge of exploring and watching out for danger.
Order happens when your actions align with your intentions and result in expected outcomes.
Finding Meaning
Occasionally you’ll come across a talk or a book that will grab your attention. You’re not sure why but you’re pulled into it and can become almost obsessed.
That’s your instinct of meaning kicking in. It’s signalling that you’re on the border of what you know and what you don’t know. It’s why I can read The Lord of the Rings multiple times because I’m always finding something new in it.
That instinct and feeling of transformation and shouldn’t be brushed aside. It’s the deepest signal you have that you’re in the place you should be. You can use it to transform into the next best version of yourself.
“Meaning is a manifestation of the instinct that signals optimal transformation.” – Jordan Peterson
Music is an example something a lot of people find meaningful. You can listen to a masterpiece and it will move you to become someone better than who you currently are.
Music is a reflection of the balance between chaos and order. It’s modelling the way the world actually works.
Unintegrated Chaos
We have an instinctual warning system that acts as a psychological protection mechanism. Our brains recall past dangers to motivate our growth. It signals that there are still potential threats out there that we haven’t learned to handle yet.
An example of this would if you fell into a deep hole one day and you couldn’t figure out why or how you’d managed that. Your brain will keep bringing that situation up in your thoughts, dreams, daydreams, until you work out why you fell into that hole.
This is a sign you haven’t learnt from the chaos yet. You haven’t integrated it into your world view and turned it into order.
An example of that for me was the anxiety I got last year when I got ill. I didn’t know why I kept getting dizzy, rundown and tired. It’s only when I connected the dots and realised that I’d given myself mould poisoning from old Huel powder that I started to calm down. I learned that mould could throw your vagus nerve out of whack and cause all sorts of issues. I even learned to enjoy the dizzy spells and ride them out. Almost as a form of play.
Growth
Life has hidden mathematics. It’s called the 2 percent solution. 20 minutes a day adds up to 2% of your life. If you can get 20 things like that right, that’s a large majority of your life organised and oriented in the right direction. So find the things that repeat and master them.
“For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.” – Matthew 25:29
In simpler words, to those who have everything, more will be given. To those who have nothing, everything will be taken. It’s the Pareto distribution. Progress isn’t linear. Once you start getting money, the probability you get more money goes up. This is true for every domain of accomplishment, not just money.
This is success acceleration. You start slow and it will improve exponentially if you’re going in the right direction. Like for me that means more ClickUp clients will come my way as I serve more clients and share my work.
Remember that effective individuals face the same obstacles as everyone else but refuse to let challenges prevent them from delivering results.
Practical Steps
You’ll do things stupidly and badly when you first do them. Allow yourself space for play and for error.
If there’s a task that you’ve been putting off, shrink it into smaller tasks until you find a step forward that you will take. And take happily. The good thing is, change accelerates. So those first tiny steps will soon be big.
“The fool is the precursor to the saviour.” – Carl Jung
Pay attention to the things that repeat. They’re your life. Master them so you look forward to them.
Like bedtime with your child. On a school day, maybe you only interact with your daughter 1:1 for 30 minutes. I’m talking about real 1:1 attention. And that could be bedtime. If bedtime is a struggle and a battle every night, then that’s your whole relationship defined around this struggle. So you better sort it out.
Another example would be updating your CV because you hate your job and want to get a new one. Your computer file system is a mess, and every time you open it to find your CV, you can’t see it and shut the whole thing down. You keep putting off the task. Then you’re in a job that you hate for 30 years.
So it’s not an exaggeration to say that the simple act of tidying up the files on your PC could vastly improve your life.