Good chaos: Thriving inside Quantum Capitalism
A mind-bending exploration of why business, creativity, and meaning are built on invisible foundations, and how to succeed anyway.
Hi,
Mathematically, a point has no dimension, length, width, or depth. It doesn’t occupy space. I’m not a mathematician, but to me that means points don’t exist.
And yet, we see them, use them, and literally navigate to them. Your map says, “Turn left at this point,” and you do. Eventually, you arrive at the destination, but the destination never had substance in the first place.
We live in a world filled with nonsense, and yet people expect to make sense, even though every bit of it is a collection of made-up destinations we treat like real things.
We’re trying to find the point…in a world made of pointless points.
Points do have a point, though, insomuch as they give structure to things that exist. Lines exist. We can draw them, measure them, trace them with our fingers. Same thing with shapes. Triangles, polygons, perfect little geometries composed of lines, and built on points.
We build worlds out of them. We design software, sketch blueprints, draft stories, and plan our lives using lines and shapes and 3D models.
And yet, the structures, logic, and systems we rely on are scaffolding built atop something that isn’t even there. And somehow, it still works…
…except when it doesn’t…
…and then again when it does…
…until it doesn’t another time…
…and it’s all chaos.
How do you even? Well, the solution might be kind of odd. Let’s talk Gödel. Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems state that any system powerful enough to describe the world will contain truths that can’t be proven within it.
Gödel proved there is no way to explain everything while you’re inside that everything, which means there can never be a unifying theory of everything.
We would have to extract ourselves from the very everything we’re trying to define to have any hope of ever actually defining it…which would definitionally make it not everything.
Basically, you will never fully understand a system while you’re inside of it.
At some point, we believed that there were “immutable laws of physics” that fully explain the universe, but Einstein and Newton left the building long ago.
In the past 100 years, quantum physics blew up everything we thought we knew about reality, and in doing so created a much better explanation of building a business than anything else I’ve come across before or since.
I know you’re not a quantum physicist, and there’s a good chance I have already broken your brain, but this next part can be fun if you just let it wash over you.
For a long time, classical physics held that the basic building blocks of matter were stable, consistent, 'solid' units called atoms.
At the subatomic (or smaller than atom) quantum level, through, we found that these 'solid' particles are actually probabilities that are sometimes act as particles, sometimes act as waves, and maybe sometimes something else…you can’t know which is which without fundamentally altering it.
Until you do, they’re both and neither. You know what else behaves that way? Your business.
Your business only makes money or gets exposure when someone interacts with it. Your stories only really live when someone reads it, and even then it exists differently inside everyone who does. That course? That Kickstarter? That mailing list you’re obsessing over?
None of it has tangible economic value until somebody responds to it. And when they do? The act of them looking changes what you’ve built.
This whole time, we thought we’ve been living in a world of Newtonian Capitalism, but it turns out the reason nothing makes sense is because we’ve really been living in a world of Quantum Capitalism all along.
In Quantum Capitalism, there is no guaranteed structure or predictability. There are likely outcomes and less likely outcomes, but there is always a possibility of randomness and nonsense.
The chance that you will die from a whale falling out of the sky is very, very, very low, but it is never zero.
We were all taught that businesses (and the customers who frequent them) behave rationally, but I’ve never met a human who works rationally all the time.
People are consistent, yes, but only within their own moral frameworks. Multiply that by eight billion people in a world that actively rewards individuality, and the result is chaos.
On a small, local level, that consistency might look rational at first. Inside a single community, shared assumptions often smooth humanity’s chaotic edges.
Once systems grow large enough to include many communities, though, they stop behaving in ways that feel linear or explainable. The “rational” assumptions that feel obvious to one group smash headlong into another where those same norms feel like blasphemy.
At scale, systems that look rational at first reveal the chaos bubbling under the surface when you stress-test them even a little.
Early on, running a business is straightforward. You see a problem, fix it, and the business responds. If sales are slow, you change the offer. You can often call every customer in a single day and tell them about it.
When customers complain, you adjust the product almost immediately. When something breaks, you step in, make a decision, and things improve. There’s very little distance between noticing something is wrong and doing something about it. You’re the one making the calls…and largely the one executing them.
Over time, that distance grows, though.
You bring in partners. You hire people. Word spreads beyond your original circle. You work with agencies. You delegate execution. You lose control of the narrative.
Decisions start moving through other hands, other interpretations, other priorities. You still see problems and still try to fix them, but the response changes. The business has become too complex to manage alone, which means every fix now runs through other people before it hits the system.
You adjust pricing and sales don’t move the way you expect. You fix a bottleneck, and another one appears downstream. You make what feels like the right call, and the outcome shows up weeks later, diluted by a dozen other decisions you didn’t personally make.
The loop breaks as your business no longer responds to individual fixes.
Too many things are happening at once.
Too many people are touching the system.
Too many variables sit between the decision and the result.
You can’t just see a problem, fix it, and expect a clean response anymore. The work shifts from fixing outcomes to shaping behavior.
A lot of the tension here comes from how often cause and effect appear to work.
On a small scale, they do. In one market, with one customer, with one product, you can change something and see what happens next. Fix a problem, get a response. Push here, and something moves there. Day-to-day business rewards this way of thinking because it happens close enough for you to observe.
Zoom out, though, and the picture changes.
As systems grow, individual actions stop standing on their own. They overlap and interfere with each other. What felt predictable up close starts to look noisy from a distance.
Neither view is wrong. They coexist at the same time, at different scales.
At one level, the world looks orderly and responsive. At another, it looks chaotic and hard to explain. Trouble starts when we try to apply the same mental model everywhere.
For most of human history, we’ve understood the world through the lens of mechanical cause and effect. If you know the starting conditions and understand the rules, you can calculate what happens next.
Let’s bring this back to physics.
Newtonian physics is the fundamental structure we’ve built our entire society around for eons. For centuries, we believed the universe functioned like a perfect machine. If you knew the starting point, you could calculate exactly where an object would be at any moment in the future.
Success, according to this worldview, should work the same way.
Do the work → Get the result.
Follow the formula → Achieve the outcome.
Input = Output.
Cause → Effect
This is Newtonian thinking at its core. It’s linear, predictable, and comforting. If I check all the boxes, success should arrive right on schedule.
It would be so nice and convenient if the world worked that way.
Unfortunately, as we’ve already talked about, that model only holds in the observable world. When you drill down to the subatomic, we discover particles don’t move in neat, predictable lines. They exist in a cloud of possibilities.
It’s this unseen engine for unpredictability that actually guides the flow of our universe and we ignore it at our peril, or at least our annoyance.
Every conversation, every project, every risk you take creates possibilities that collide around in chaotic and unpredictable ways following the laws not of Newtonian physics, but quantum entanglement.
Quantum thinkers don’t just grind. They play in the field of possibility. They know:
One connection at a conference can change everything.
One launch can open ten unexpected doors.
One piece of content might flop, but another might go viral and rewrite your entire career.
It’s not about control. It’s about increasing your odds and staying open to the unexpected. It’s about being focused with what you want, not how you get it.
Most of us were trained in Newtonian thinking. We grew up with report cards, syllabi, and standardized tests. Work hard, get good grades. Follow the instructions, get the gold star. That’s how school works.
But success in life doesn’t follow that linear path anymore, if they ever did. The system is too complex to rely on Newtonian thinking.
The old career ladders no longer exist. There’s no linear climb to tenure, no clear pipeline from debut to bestseller. We live in an economy that punishes predictability. The safest path that everyone followed for generations is now the one most likely to collapse under you.
Quantum thinking matters because uncertainty isn’t the exception, it’s the rule. The people who thrive aren’t the ones who follow the formulas most perfectly. They’re the ones who stay adaptable, playful, and open to possibility when the formulas stop working.
Now, I’m not saying Newtonian thinking is bad. In fact, you need it for lots of things. Newton gives you discipline, consistency, and structure. You can’t write a novel, launch a product, or build a business by accident. You need routines. You need habits. You need gravity to keep you grounded.
But Newton alone won’t get you the breakthrough. It will keep you stable, but it won’t help you leap. By doing the same inputs, all you’ll get back are the same outputs.
That’s where quantum comes in. Quantum is the spark of wild collision you never saw coming.
Let’s break it down into a practical comparison:
Newtonian mindset:
“If I run X ads, I’ll get Y customers.”
“If I follow this playbook exactly, I’ll win.”
“I won’t move unless I can predict the outcome.”
Quantum mindset:
“Each campaign increases the probability of traction.”
“I’ll run multiple experiments, knowing most won’t hit, but the few that do will pay off disproportionately.”
“I’ll create conditions where luck can find me.”
Newtonian thinking seduces you with certainty. It whispers that if you just check the right boxes, if you just follow the rules a little tighter, the outcome is guaranteed. That illusion is comforting, but it’s also dangerous.
Life doesn’t reward people who play it safe.
That’s why you can’t afford to stay Newtonian. The world has changed. The formulas are broken. If you want to thrive, you’ve got to stop chasing guarantees and start chasing possibilities.
It’s not that you aren’t strategic. You are just strategic in a way that looks wholly different to anything you’ve done up until this point.
By intentionally entering situations and interacting with people that expand your probability field, you are inviting more of these agents to work in your favor. This is why conferences are so powerful.
It’s not just that there are lots of people there. You could go to a Dairy Queen for that.
It’s because they’re filled with people who are intentionally on the same journey as you. They’ve all been attracted by the location, the speakers, the organizers, and the vibe to go on this journey with you. Everyone there is highly activated and very likely to be able to help you break through your blocks and move you forward.
I have no idea who can help you, but it’s almost guaranteed that if you’re in the right rooms, somebody can help you move forward. You just have to hold loosely who that might be, and how it comes to you.
By walking through the door and being open to possibilities, you allow the universe to guide you into the right directions to put you in a position to win.
This is that good good good chaos. Those spontaneous meetings that end up being the best part of any conference? That’s good chaos, born from dropping that schedule and allowing probability to work in your favor.
You win, then, by putting yourself into as many situations as possible where good chaos can work in your favor.
It means being very strategic about what you want, but holding loosely how you get it or where it comes from.
Unfortunately, what people often do instead at conferences is try to block out every minute of every day, giving order to chaos and thus shutting themselves off to the chaotic good nature of an event like that.
This is exactly how Newtonian thinking can seriously impede your success. You miss out on serendipity to seek perfection, but the universe just doesn’t work like that.
This effect doesn’t just happen in person, either. The reason a mailing list is powerful is because it aggregates and focuses on the good chaos. The more people see your message, the more people get inspired by it.
I am constantly surprised which people I’ve met over the years have stayed on my mailing list, and which have fallen off of it. Many of my best friends have never subscribed, and yet I constantly meet people who have been on my list for years and I’ve never talked to before.
Some of the most powerful people in publishing read my work, while others couldn’t care less, or even have an active distaste for me. I have no control over that, but I do have control over what I put out into the world, the situations I enter, and how to walk through the world while I’m there to attract the right people to me.
After that, I have to trust that good chaos will work in my favor, and connect me with the people who resonate with what I have to say.
That doesn’t mean I’m passive. I actively ask people to join my mailing list when appropriate, host events to build my list consistently, and follow up with people after meeting them to stay in contact.
I am very intentional and strategic, just not in a Newtonian way. I have no idea what will come out of meeting good people. I just know that if you are good to good people, good things will happen.
It’s this kind of good chaos that people don’t understand at the beginning of their career, and it’s the secret to why any online community is successful. It’s the reason behind why you should focus on growth even if you don’t want to monetize. It’s why influence can compound over time. It’s the reason nobody is paying attention to you right now.
If you want people to pay attention, you need much, much, much more good chaos working in your favor.
Success isn’t a machine you can crank, it’s a probability field. Newtonian thinking will get you started. It teaches discipline, consistency, and structure. If you want true breakthroughs, you have to go quantum.
That means showing up, stacking experiments, nurturing connections, and letting go of the illusion of control. It means trusting that somewhere in the messy field of possibility, your big leap is waiting to collapse into reality.
Here’s what taking advantage of quantum capitalism looks like in real, actionable terms:
Stop looking for proof and start collecting patterns. There will never be a guaranteed path, but you can notice what tends to work for you, your people, your energy, your voice. Build from that.
Play with the math. If A = xylophone, then start asking better questions. What’s your xylophone? What weird, irrational, unexpected connection keeps showing up in your work? That’s your angle. Lean into it.
Use your voice as the constant. You don’t control algorithms or markets, but you do control your voice, your resonance and your vibe. Make that consistent, and your audience will follow even when the rules change.
Make meaning, even if it’s made up. Your whole job is creating meaning where there was none. Why would your business be any different?
Sell stories like they matter. In quantum capitalism, they’re the only thing that do.
Build your line, one imaginary point at a time. Because even if the system is nonsense, even if A = xylophone, even if we’re all faking it…
You’re still here, and that’s the realest thing there is.
If you don’t see the point in all this, that’s okay…because the point doesn’t exist anyway. It’s what you make of it that matters. If you want a good starting place, then maybe our Hapitalist Quick Start Workbook can help.
I love this reframing of how business actually works. I've been sitting with it for awhile now. I can feel the good chaos swarming around me. But I'm still looking for the pattern that helps me capitalize.
This really tickled my brain. Thank you.