Start by Leading “You”

engineering who analyzed and built systems and now supports transformational development of humans, I am sharing my thought process on WHY we see this amount of tension around us and what role YOU play.

You have a big role in how you feel. You can not expect to sit, do nothing, and expect to feel good or calm or normal or whatever you want to feel just based on the world around you at this point.

Do you want to FEEL different?

Do you want to know WHY you need to take action?

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If you said yes, read on.

If you said no, that is fine. If these questions don’t intrigue you, you are probably happy with how you feel or too burntout to think.

All things trend toward disorder.

The second law of thermodynamics states that “as one goes forward in time, the net amount of disorder of any isolated or closed system will always increase (or at least stay the same).”

Because things naturally move to disorder over time, we can position ourselves to create stability. There are two types of stability: active and passive.

With active stability, you’re applying energy to a system in order to bring about some advantage (keeping the plane from crashing, your relationship going, the house clean, etc.)

We’ve had moments of quiet, albeit uneasy quiet, but never peace in the US. How can a nation with history of genocide, built on slavery, and sustained by a system which places minorities behind their white counterparts in significant socioeconomic measurement by a considerable margin have peace? Remember this is a nation that has embraced immigrants. Add to this entropy, a leader who is adding to the unstability of the system.

The higher the entropy in the system, the less efficient the energy you apply will be. The same person applying 20 units of energy in a large scale organization is going to see less impact than someone applying the same 20 units in a small startup.

Add to this mix, the shadow of corona virus, the divide between conspiracy theory, nutritionists believing vitamin C saves people from ending on ventilators, and an economy that is not passively stable.

We have a pretty good chaos.

But how do we decrease the entropy towards building either passive or active stability?

For a change to occur, you must apply more energy to the system than is extracted by the system.

And who is in the system?

You and me.

We make up the system.

That is WHY and HOW we can position ourselves to create stability.

The question is not whether we can prevent entropy (we can’t), but how we can curb, control, work with, and understand it.

Think about failure at work. Now, it’s probably time to fix whatever mistake a coworker just made, clear up the mess on your desk, and reheat your cold coffee.

Let’s start by understanding entropy.

Truly understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures.

We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. Everything needs maintenance.

To maintain our relationships, careers, health, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is a default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

Without this cycle of disorder, life would be boring. It is the birth and death that we see in life.

But how can we lower the entropy?

Each of us need to make our own efforts to reduce disorder. The existence of entropy is what keeps us on our toes. But we need the mental power to make sense of disorder and not get lost.

Personal development is key. You get to know the turbulence inside you. It can provide us with a shortcut to understanding a chaotic world and exercising some control over it.

It all starts with you. Don’t forget your piece of the puzzle of reducing chaos. Are you feeling any kind of passive or active stability? If not, you need to build that inner peace.

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Sitting and expecting the world to get back to “normal” is futile. The world you lived in might never have been this turbulent but it was never calm to begin with. Start with your own sense of feeling stability.

“Everything that comes together falls apart. Everything. The chair I’m sitting on. It was built, and so it will fall apart. I’m going to fall apart, probably before this chair. And you’re going to fall apart. The cells and organs and systems that make you—they came together, grew together, and so must fall apart. The Buddha knew one thing science didn’t prove for millennia after his death: Entropy increases. Things fall apart.”

— John Green, Looking for