Creating Order Out of Chaos

The skill of turning confusion into clarity

Brandon Gustafson
SkillUp Ed
6 min readJan 19, 2021

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Photo by Gabriel Crismariu on Unsplash

Writing is chaotic. First, you start with a blank page — the void. You need to find a way to fill the blank document with words and meaning out of nothing.

So you start researching and taking notes. You begin to gather information, but you are still left with an amorphous collection of ideas — the mess.

Taming chaos consists of structuring the void and organizing the mess into an orderly form. You might use a mind map to connect the dots of the ideas and an outline to provide an easy to follow flow to your writing. Creating order helps you make things easier to understand and follow.

Chaos is everywhere in our lives. It is up to us to learn how to live with it and transform it into something meaningful.

What is Chaos?

Chaos is defined as disorder and confusion and is derived from the Greek word khaos, meaning chasm or void.

Chaos can take various forms in our lives, including messiness, uncertainty, confusion, a lack of understanding. This might look like a poorly structured company that lacks clear roles, responsibilities, and processes. Chaos could show up as uncertainty from a lack of planning in your day. It may be that you don’t understand how to get started with a new habit like going to the gym or taking a new class when you have no prior knowledge.

When life becomes too chaotic, things get overwhelming and it becomes difficult to effectively get things done. Things just don’t work well. You need some sense of stability and calmness to function at your best.

You may have haphazardly been able to create some order from chaos in the past, while not fully understanding it. Learning how to create order is a skill you’ll use forever.

M.C. Escher, a famous Dutch graphic artist, said:

“We adore chaos because we love to produce order… Simplicity and order are, if not the principal, then certainly the most important guidelines for human beings in general.”

Making Sense of Chaos

You will encounter different forms of chaos in life. Let’s focus on two that I call the void and the mess.

The Void — The void shows up where there is a lack of structure. This may take the form of an empty calendar. Without a clearly defined schedule and plan, you’ll likely drift through the day without direction and won’t get much done. This is fine while you’re on vacation, it is not useful when you are trying to achieve a goal.

The solution to filling the void is to create structure where nothing previously existed. You can use structures to create clarity any time you feel yourself wasting time or just drifting along through life. If you feel lost, building a structure to fill the void can help.

The Mess — The mess aligns more with the modern definition of chaos: disorder. Picture a messy room or think of jumbled thoughts bouncing around in your head. You can’t make sense of things when they are in disarray.

The solution to the mess is to create order through arrangement and organization. This helps you connect the dots, breakthrough confusion, and see things more clearly.

Think about your financial situation. You likely have multiple pieces of information to think about, including your salary, monthly expenses, taxes, savings accounts, checking accounts, credit card debt, student loans, a car loan, mortgage, stock brokerage accounts, retirement accounts, and more. It doesn’t matter how many pieces there are, the point is that your finances will remain a mess until you take the time to organize them.

When you bring order to your finances you can look at your financial health holistically. You can see your income and expenses, your assets, liabilities, and equity, and your cash flows. When you pull everything together into organized financial statements you can more clearly see areas of strength and weakness in your finances. This enables you to better manage and more effectively plan for your future.

Creating Order

Creating order is a form of power. It helps you achieve more by creating certainty, clarity, and freedom in your life.

Certainty — helps you feel more confident, in control, calm, and stable.

Clarity — saves you time by helping you see things clearly and to know what to do.

Freedom — enables you to focus your attention on what matters and build a life of your choosing.

Chaos is inherently uncertain, messy, and disorderly. We like to create order because we crave certainty, clarity, and freedom.

Whenever you create more certainty in your world your brain gets a little rush and reward sensation. It is like fulfilling a craving you have. By increasing your perception of certainty you experience emotional rewards of satisfaction, calmness, confidence, safety, and stability.

Clarity provides direction and reduces feelings of overwhelm. One everyday example is lists. Lists create order out of chaos by helping you clearly see everything you need to do. David Wallechinksy, co-author of Book of Lists, explained, “People are attracted to lists because we live in an era of overstimulation, especially in terms of information… Lists help us in organizing what is otherwise overwhelming.”

Paradoxically, if you want more freedom, more order could be the solution. Organizing things ensures they are accessible when you need them while freeing up valuable headspace. Creating structure and building self-discipline in your life is the key to achieving real, lasting freedom.

Winston Churchill said:

“For the first 25 years of my life, I wanted freedom. For the next 25 years, I wanted order. For the next 25 years, I realized that order is freedom.”

Controlling Chaos

There are a lot of benefits that come from creating order out of chaos, but this isn’t always possible. There are some things you can’t control in your life. If you try to force order on a situation you can’t control, you will only feel frustrated. Control what you can control.

“The battlefield is a scene of constant chaos. The winner will be the one who controls that chaos, both his own and the enemy’s.” — Napoléon Bonaparte

Learning how to control chaos is an ongoing process. Organizing things once is a step in the right direction, but it isn’t a permanent solution. You need to get to the root of the issue if you want a long term solution. Achieving and maintaining order is not an act, but a habit.

These steps can help you create order when the chaos is within your ability to control.

  1. Recognize — Ignorance is bliss, but if you want to create order you have to first recognize that there is disorder.
  2. Clarify — Take inventory of what you need to organize. What are the pieces? The goal isn’t to create just any order, the goal is to put things in an order that makes sense.
  3. Ideate — Think through a structure or organization that will appropriately address your needs. Ask yourself, “How can I structure this in a way that will improve my certainty, clarity, and freedom?”
  4. Act — Take action to put your new structure into place. Test it out and see if it works. Make adjustments as needed and continue to revise over time.

The Duality of Chaos and Order

You may think of chaos and order as distinct states. Either you are in chaos or you are in order.

However, these seemingly contrary forces of order and chaos are actually interconnected. They are fluid states, forever at odds with one another. They are each present within the other as well. Order exists within chaos, as chaos exists within order.

You create order through a never-ending struggle to find balance with chaos.

You cannot completely remove chaos from your life so don’t waste time trying. Rather, aim for the middle path of balance between order and chaos. Strive to create order out of chaos for stability, while at the same time using chaos as a driver for continual challenge and growth.

Embrace chaos as a worthy adversary, as you will be challenged by it every day. The only way to bring balance between chaos and order is to rise to the challenge. Look for chaos and use it as an opportunity to grow and practice the skill of creating order out of chaos.

Footnotes

  1. The principle of the duality of order and chaos comes from Daoist philosophy.

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Brandon Gustafson
SkillUp Ed

Hi I’m Brandon! I am the author of Hard Wired: A Practical Guide to Training Your Mind and a startup founder. I love reading, movies, gaming, startups, & more!