Hi,
We talk about lucky entrepreneurs as though something landed on them that didn’t land on the rest of us, but watch closely and you’ll notice that the entrepreneurs who build lasting companies aren’t just the ones who caught a break. They’re the ones who were ready for the break when it arrived, and who knew what to do with it.
Quantum Capitalism produces possibilities constantly, and those possibilities are what we traditionally call luck.
There are collisions, connections, and unexpected doors opening in hallways you didn’t know existed. The randomness is always there, always generating, and always throwing fuel into the air around you.
The question is what happens next.
Without intention, luck has no purpose. It lands on you, catches fire, and burns itself out. Good luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but raw luck is coming at us all the time.
The entrepreneur who gets a glowing introduction to an investor and has nothing ready to show is luck burning itself up in real time. The entrepreneur who stumbles onto a market insight that could reshape their entire business, but dismisses it because it doesn’t fit the roadmap is holding the same fuel as somebody who uses it to change the direction of their business entirely.
If you get doused with fuel, you might burn and definitely need a shower, but if you put that fuel into an engine, it can get you across the world.
To succeed in Quantum Capitalism, you need to become an expert at taking random possibilities and running them through something that produces forward motion instead of wreckage.
That’s the Good Chaos Engine.
Think of it this way. At the other end of a forest is everything you want; your dream life, your dream career, your dream business. We call this your win condition.
The impediments in the way between where you are and your win condition are your blocks.
The path of least friction is how you identify your route through that forest, clear the brush, and lay down the road. It’s essential work. Do it wrong and you’re hacking through dense undergrowth your whole career...
…but the road doesn’t move you.
You can build the most beautiful path through the forest in the history of paths and still be standing at the entrance.
The Good Chaos Engine is the mechanism that actually propels you down the path. The better the engine, the faster you move. You can certainly walk the path, but it will take forever. It has a great view, though.
What the engine is actually made of
First and foremost, the Good Chaos Engine only runs as well as the person operating it. You can have the most sophisticated conversion system in the world and it will sit idle if you’re depleted.
You can’t attune to the universe when you’re running on empty.
You can’t read a room when you’re exhausted.
You can’t stay open to the best possible outcome when you’re in pure survival mode.
You might know Profit First, which is when you take 10% of revenue out of your business before you do anything. Similarly, I subscribe to an Energy First mentality, where you keep 10% of your energy in reserve before you do anything else.
When deciding whether to take on an opportunity thinking, “Will I be able to run an energy profit after taking it on?” seems like a good enough place to start as any.
You can use this energy first mindset to analyze what you can do with ease and use that as a waypoint.
One of the things that changed my outlook on running a creative business was transitioning from overleveraging myself to being underleveraged, leaving huge gaps in my day for just thinking. This time allows me to find my most highly leveraged activities and double down on them.
Okay, now that we’ve talked about the energy bit, let’s get to the engine itself.
