This post isn’t about how the French people thrive in the art of being on strike, not that we couldn’t write an interesting story about it, but this thing is like an old song playing in a loop.
Why Chaos? Because Chaos is beautiful, it’s a free form without boundaries. It’s ambition with no horizon. It’s velocity with a lack of structure. It’s taking risks knowing the odds are against you. It’s that pinch of salt, that intuition, that optimism in the worst moments.
This post isn’t bound to be structured, I’ve tried to for the past hour, but I can’t find its rhythm, its tone, the right words, with a chain of thoughts that flows. Maybe because it’s about Chaos.
Why Chaos? Not just because the world has been embracing it those days, nor because I feel bad about lagging behind with too many tasks and emails over the past two weeks, nor because the fact that I feel like the relationship between founders and investors is more and more losing its high touch that seemed to have made Venture Capital so special in the past.
This post is about too much chaos and too little chaos.
Bring Chaos In Action.
Sometimes I meet with entrepreneurs who have set a culture, rules, and first principles that are just too impressive, to the point where it defines how every single person in the company should be working, including their agenda and their behavior in every possible situation. Chaos is almost absent. Those entrepreneurs justify that level of mastery, which often comes with extreme transparency, by having set rules to deal with uncertainty, novelty, and the unknown, which to me doesn’t sound like it. I wish they would bring more chaos into the organization, space for excess, free-form, stupid moves, crazy ideas, and even rebellion. Why not…
How could you fail epically and splendidly if you fail through a framework perfectly set by the organization, for instance? It’s like you’ve been allowed to swim right beyond the limit but not too far cause the world stops after that line. Companies are set like the Truman Show.
It’s like having a recruiting process that leaves no room for intuition, for actually breaking the process sometimes, for giving a candidate a try because they might just bring something new that we actually need. And yes, they didn’t fit perfectly into our fucking matrix, but hey, what if they could expand the matrix? What if they could amend our culture a bit? Wouldn’t we evolve through more diversity, whether we like their style or not?
Give chaos a chance. It might just expand your horizon and save you from how you see and operate the world.
Obviously, this doesn’t apply if chaos is your default mode. In this particular case, I would just invite you to gain more discipline, consistency, and awareness on top of first principles, work ethic, and a bunch of rules.
Kill Chaos In Your Mind.
Chaos can be really amazing in action. It’s creative, risky, tempting, and opening new doors. It reveals new perspectives. It sometimes unlocks things even.
But don’t be blind by it. Chaos is also the worst thing that can happen to your mind. The worst thing for an entrepreneur is their inability to express clearly their thinking, to draw a vision that connects with the present, to bridge the genius with the obvious…
Sorry, talking about Chaos, I received a text this afternoon from Alexis (BeReal Founder) to catch up in person later today… This Sunday post is therefore coming late as I stopped my Sunday routine to grab dinner with him. Couldn’t be more real. We went to an all-you-can-eat restaurant close to my place.
Back to it… Oh wait, it’s 10.15 pm, and I’ve got a bunch of emails to sort out as well. Not sure there is much to add to this post today except maybe to insist on the critical importance of thinking straight, arranging your thoughts in order, and talking intelligibly about your company and your product.
Even though Friedrich Nietzsche said that one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star, you can’t allow chaos in action with chaos in mind. Or at least pick one or the other, not both.
And watch the Truman Show, it’s so good :)
