Knowing Your Nature Is The Key To Happiness

Everyone in life has a nature that tends toward either chaos or order… knowing which one is your nature is essential to happiness and success.

What do the terms chaos and order mean in regards to your life? They are opposite ends of the same spectrum, just as they are in other things.

Order is a force of preservation, of structuring… order is all about maintaining what already exists, about keeping the status quo. Its impact is easily recognized in things like planning and scheduling.

Chaos is a force of both creation and destruction. Often the creation actually comes from the destruction… something gets taken apart, and the pieces get put back together in a new way to create something that didn’t exist before. Its impact is usually most easily detected in things associated with creativity… art, design, writing, etc.

Both of these forces are present in everyone’s life, and both are important in everyone’s life, as well. The key is to finding the balance between them in your life.

If you are like most people, your first thought about balancing order and chaos in your life is wrong.

Unless you’re a very unusual person, you can’t balance chaos and order by having equal amounts of both. That’s because your fulcrum, your center of balance, is highly unlikely to be in the center. Instead, you will, by your very nature, have more affinity for one side than the other.

If you are the kind of person who gets nervous at the first sign that something unexpected is happening, your nature is pretty far to the side of order. That means that you need considerably more order than chaos in your life to find balance.

If you are the kind of person who never plans unless they have to, who does nearly everything on a wing and a prayer, then your quite chaotic. Balance for you requires keeping the order to a quiet murmur.

It really isn’t hard to figure out which side you lean toward. If, when looking at a task, you see all of the pieces and then assemble them into the whole (like following a recipe when cooking), your nature is orderly. If, when looking at the same task, you naturally look at the whole and see where the pieces fit, your nature is chaotic.

Where you, personally, fall can be anywhere from nearly at one of the poles (pure chaos or pure order), to somewhere very near the center. As with most things that involve people, though, it tends to be somewhat of a bell curve, meaning that the farther toward the edges you get, the fewer people you find, though in my experience, the center of that curve, where you find the most people, tends to be more on the side of order than chaos.

Anyone who actually knows me can tell you which source my energy tends to come from… I am definitely chaotic. I love to dig in, tear things apart, and build new things… but I don’t like doing the detail work.

My writing and my programming both reflect this… I jump in, build the structure, the skeleton, and make it work, and I generally do this very rapidly. Then I have to go back and fix or add all of the little details I missed. I love the first part… it definitely is my passion. I can do the detailed part, but I mostly do it without the passion, meaning that someone who is passionate about the details could likely do it better than I.

There is nothing better or worse about either way, any more than there is between brown and blue eyes. You may very well have a preference for one or the other, but neither is actually objectively better.

That being said, the there are things in life that align better with one side or the other, one of the most important being your work. Artists, for example, tend to see the things they are creating first, then shape the pieces to fit, whether those pieces be brush strokes, stone, or words. Managers and money people, on the other hand, tend to see the pieces and try to assemble them into a whole. Nearly every type of work, however, has some sort of role for those of the opposite nature… technical writers, for instance, are usually very orderly, while sales managers may tend to be chaotic (at least, if promoted from within the sales department).

True happiness is nearly impossible to find when you try to force yourself into roles and paths that originate, or mostly stay, on the other side. It is like the mental equivalent of wearing clothes that are too small for you… you can do it, but it is uncomfortable short term and can cause serious damage long term.

Take me, for example… In my last job, I was moved from a role that consisted mostly of creation to a role that was mostly organizing. I went from enjoying my job, and being very good at it, to intense dislike of my job and overwhelming stress, and doing average at best. In the beginning I was following my nature, and after the change I was fighting it. The move, even though it came with a higher title and more money, was a poor one on my part.

Happiness, and success, in life nearly always comes from following your heart, your passions… and your passions will always reflect your nature, be it chaos or order. When you follow your passion, you do things with your whole heart, your whole mind, and that is how great things come to be.

Your passion doesn’t have to be something the world admires, it just has to be yours.

Find your nature, find your passion, and find a way to follow it.

Follow-up article: 7 Signs You Are A Creative Destruction Kind Of Person And How To Excel If You Are

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