Today is July 30 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “When you are in the depth of winter, how often do you remind yourself that within you lay an invincible summer?”
In Return to Tipasa, 20th century French author and philosopher Albert Camus wrote “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
People who navigate the chaos understand that even during their darkest times they have the potential to be extraordinary and to do anything.
This may be difficult to remember during times of depression, anxiety, or hopelessness but believing in yourself is a common trait found among those who successfully navigate the chaos.
Albert Camus was born on November 7, 1913, in Mondavi, French Algeria. Camus became known for his political journalism, novels and essays during the 1940s. His best-known works, including The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), are exemplars of absurdism. Camus won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957 and died on January 4, 1960, in Burgundy, France.
Best-selling author and Dilbert creator Scott Adams navigated the chaos by understanding that you can be anything you want to learn.
“If all you know is how to be a gang member, that’s what you’ll be, at least until you learn something else. If you become a marine, you’ll learn to control fear. If you go to law school, you’ll see the world as a competition. If you study engineering, you’ll start to see the world as a complicated machine that needs tweaking.”
Adams wrote that “It’s easy to feel trapped in your own life. Circumstances can sometimes feel as if they form a jail around you. But there’s almost nothing you can’t learn your way out of. If you don’t like who you are, you have the option of learning until you become someone else. Life is like a jail with an unlocked, heavy door. You’re free the minute you realize the door will open if you simply lean into it.”
Adams should know as he himself learned how to be a cartoonist; something he wanted to do since his childhood. For six years, Adams learned how to balance his day job with the publication of his Dilbert cartoon.
From 1989 until 1995, he created Dilbert during mornings, evenings, and weekends while maintaining his full-time job.
In his 2013 book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, Adams highlights two important aspects of his success: “Good ideas have no value because the world already has too many of them. The market rewards execution, not ideas;” and “Goals are for losers. Focus on the process.”
How often do you remind yourself that you can become whatever you decide to be?