Today is October 25 and the Navigate the Chaos question to consider is “How often do you care what others say?”
Navigating the chaos requires one to have a strong sense of self. This is especially true when others are criticizing you.
Jane Goodall navigated the chaos of being the first woman to closely monitor wild chimpanzees by sitting amongst them in the wild. Born on April 3, 1934, in London, England, Goodall set out to Tanzania to study wild chimpanzees by sitting amongst them, bypassing more rigid procedures and uncovering discoveries about primate behavior that have continued to shape scientific discourse.
Upon a chance meeting with Goodall, the famed anthropologist Louis Leakey, hired her as a secretary and sent her to study the vervet monkey, which lives on an island in Lake Victoria. Leakey believed that a long-term study of the behavior of higher primates would yield important evolutionary information.
While Leakey searched for financial support for the proposed Gombe Reserve project, Goodall returned to England to work on an animal documentary for Granada Television.
On July 16, 1960, accompanied by her mother and an African cook, she returned to Africa and established a camp on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in the Gombe Stream Reserve.
Her first attempts to observe closely a group of chimpanzees failed; she could get no nearer than 500 yards before the chimps fled. After finding another suitable group of chimpanzees to follow, she established a nonthreatening pattern of observation, appearing at the same time every morning on the high ground near a feeding area along the Kakaombe Stream valley. The chimpanzees soon tolerated her presence and, within a year, allowed her to move as close as 30 feet to their feeding area. After two years of seeing her every day, they showed no fear and often came to her in search of bananas.
Many experts objected to Leakey's selection of Goodall because she had no formal scientific education and lacked even a general college degree.
But as Goodall noted “There were some who would try to discredit my observations because I was a young untrained girl. I didn’t care what anybody said.”
Goodall didn’t care what anyone said. Do you?