A chaos flower is an investment of any type. The heart is to rearrange the rules of chaos so that life grows in your favor. It could be planting a plant, investing in a stock, or skill, or acquiring a service. But at the heart of it, you rewrite the laws of statistics and chance, so you benefit from what could happen instead of suffer.
Instead of fighting randomness, you're positioning yourself to catch the upside when it swings your way.
At first you're going to want to plant as many of them as possible, just to get good at knowing what will bear fruit. But eventually, you get to a point where you reap a lot of benefit. It takes the resilience mindset to keep looking at things as what they can be and not what they are. Training your eye to see options where others just see noise.
In day to day life, habits and small routines build up to be a great power and a force to be reckoned with. Anything you do for the future is something like this. I put sodas in my fridge, I buy sodas, I go to work. I Look up investments. Today, I added some to my stock investments. There's so many different ways to make a chaos flower.
Even stocking sodas is a tiny example of future self benefiting from a small action today. I don’t distinguish between everyday maintenance and big investments, unless it is to say that everyday maintenance and small wins pave the way for being able to dream big with your investments. It's not really different in substance, but more scale and time.
Same logic, different scale. There’s a time to scale up and a time to just observe.
First, spot a possibility. Second, plant something small, like a little commitment you can afford. Third, give it time and tolerate the uncertainty. Fourth, feed the winners and learn from the ones that didn't work. All the while, never betting so big you can't survive if it wilts.
You want to change the personality and reaction to what happens and not what happens in the statistics of it happening, it’s not yours to decide fate but yours to respond to it.
The event is neutral. Where it's a bruise or a bloomer depending on chance and your ability to manipulate conditions.
A book is a huge chaos flower. It takes twenty dollars, you take it home, you read it and it upgrades you noticeably. In some cases that's purely what you're paying for.
Small, certain cost, potentially large, unpredictable upside. You don't know which book will be great for you until after you read it.
When you add to your knowledge by reading books, you add questions and you add trails to go down and answers to find. It's like giving a mouse a cookie. You give yourself a book, for example, “The Success Principles” and it tells you how to do this, how to do that, different habits that you should have. But then it has mentions this artist or author and you look them up. And you see that they have three books and two of them you’re interested in. So you'll download them and read them and then while you’re reading that, you hear maybe about Flow by Mihaly…
One book blooms into a trail.
Each investment profits you but some degree of scatter and chaos is just part of the method. Like accepting a messy garden as part of the renovation.
One chaos flower I planted years ago that's still surprising me now is investing heavily in learning philosophies and occult works. I always treated it as a hobby, but now I'm at the point where I can organize people around my skill in the occult.
Here’s an example. I bought Red Mage an iPad Pro and sent it to him. But he could never log into it or figure it out. It took me $1500 and I shipped him a laptop in the same batch. He was going to draw a web comic for me in exchange. He never figured out how to get into the iPad. I'm having him ship it back so that I can ship it to Green Mage! So I bought the iPad, that was planting the chaos flower. I sent it to Red Mage, I negotiated the contract. But the other person didn't hold up to their bargain and that happens. Because I'm gardening a garden, just because the tomatoes fail doesn't mean the rest of the garden does.
I took a bounded risk on a person, it didn't pan out, and now I’m reallocating the asset. The whole garden didn’t fail in my life. One investment did.
Don’t abandon the idea of the garden, just because a plant variety didn’t come in.
I learned in E-Sports, you try something and it fucks up, you try it again to make sure it wasn't a fluke. If it fucks up twice, then you're clear to try something new, but I was able to send a 3D printer to Green Mage and he was able to get work done with it so there’s a working example.
In all things, constantly building up and growing things will leave you with a harvest.