On any given day we will have some amount of chaos.
And someday the chaos is just looking outside the door, but other days it forces its way through with an intensity that's hard to control.
It seems like we are always juggling too many things, but there is a method where we can manage chaos in a less frustrating manner.
Let's find out how we can look at chaos differently so that, in general, we have mostly wonderful days.
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Most mornings, at around 6 a.m. I have a Spanish lesson.
At the end of 2023, I decided that I wanted to get reasonably proficient in Spanish, so I started listening to a Spanish-based story daily. I'd been flirting with the language since my teens but couldn't read more than a paragraph—if that.
I also couldn't understand spoken Spanish. If you started talking to me at a reasonable pace, I'd appreciate bits and pieces but still be nodding my head, saying, “¡sí, sí, sí!
However, I had zero problems with English—or Hindi, Marathi or any other language I knew. Not only could I read them at high speed, but if I watched a YouTube video at twice the speed, it wouldn't faze me at all. I'd understand and assimilate it all without a drop out of any kind.
The reason for this seemingly magical act is a concept called “bandwidth,” which is illustrated well by the story of this violin teacher and his students. The violin teacher gives the students a new piece to learn. As you'd expect, they start playing the piece but must stop repeatedly.
This is a typical learning sequence – the brain can only parse a fixed amount of information before stopping and taking a break. The teacher would allow the students to progress in a staged manner and then ask them to play the new piece.
However, in the middle of the recital, he would approach them and ask them a few questions.
If the student put the violin down and started speaking to the teacher, he knew they were not ready. However, once the students could do both simultaneously: play the piece and hold the conversation, it demonstrated that they were using very little bandwidth for either activity.
Bandwidth is within our control.
When we walk, we don't say to ourselves, “left foot, right foot, left foot, balance, balance, balance”. We do so without having to think about it. It's the same when we converse in a very familiar language.
We don't stop at every word to check back on what we say. However, the moment you have to do something that is out of your comfort zone, the struggle becomes very real.
In our personal life and our business, we have specific tasks that recur regularly.
Let's say you take about an hour to write a good story for an article. If you continue to take the same amount of time a year or five years from now, then there has been no improvement in your skill. In other words, the bandwidth usage has stayed the same, and you can't take on other tasks.
This clogging of bandwidth sets you up for a perfect storm.
When chaos appears, as it no doubt will, you have already used up all your bandwidth. And now chaos demands even more from you; this is where the brain refuses to cooperate. You feel an enormous amount of ongoing stress.
The way we deal with this problem is to pay attention to the wrong thing. We focus almost solely on chaos and not bandwidth. We try to eliminate the issues that keep popping up, but that is mostly a bad strategy.
If we are constantly stressed, it's not because of the chaos. It's almost always because we can't cope with speaking to the violin teacher and playing the music simultaneously. There are exceptions to this chaos rule, however.
Sometimes, the chaos is at an exceptionally high level.
In the early stages of our business, the membership site 5000bc had a once-in-a-lifetime problem. The Internet was relatively brand-new.
Google and Amazon were on the scene, but there was no sign of Facebook, YouTube or Instagram. Blogs were just barely starting to make their mark. At this point, we decided to start the membership site at 5000bc.
Membership site software was not readily available and suddenly not customisable, so we hosted 5000bc on a site called Vision Gate. One day, while we were on holiday, we got an email telling us the site was down.
This email was from a client, and while we weren't happy with the site going down, it was a common occurrence back then. We were sure it would be back later in the day.
However, a day passed, then two, and the website was still dead as a dodo.
When I contacted the hosting company, they said they had a backup and would restore it immediately. However, they replied with a second email saying somebody had deleted the backup.
As you can tell, this was a situation that involved extreme chaos. We were fortunate because we had our patchy backup.
Nonetheless, I struggled to sleep for almost a month. I'd wake up at 3 am – which is early even for me – and work on restoring the site. You could say that I was using up all of my capacity then.
In most cases, we can become better “violin players.”
The benchmark for us must be the time we take to complete a specific task. If we continue to take the same amount of time, there is almost a guarantee that the quality will stay stagnant.
However, if we do the same task in a much shorter space, then not only do we create more bandwidth, but over time, we can ramp up the quality.
Most importantly, when mild bouts of chaos show up, it doesn't affect us as much. We can handle such irritations and occasionally cope with larger doses of madness.
What are we to do with this information?
Bandwidth is the part that we can control. Chaos is the part that is primarily out of our control. Hence, it makes sense to make time to improve our skills.
We need to look at what we are doing on Any Given Day and figure out how to do at least one of those things faster. As we move through the set of skills, we will learn to speed up almost everything we do now.
If you want to get better at spending time – and have lots of time to waste – then the only way around it is to increase your bandwidth.
Are you ready to become a superior “violin player”? You'd have to, because chaos is just around the corner today, tomorrow and next week as well!
Footnote:
How am I doing with my Spanish? I've just started about four 30-minute sessions per week. In the session, we have a conversation for about 15 minutes, and then we tackle one very, very very, very small point of grammar.
When you look at the amount of progress, it almost seems non-existent. Yet, if you check back in a few months, it's likely that my speaking will improve by at least 30 to 40%. In about a year or so, I should be fairly fluent and using very little or no bandwidth at all.
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