A few years ago, when someone suggested my life needed some serious disruption, I didn’t like the word “disruption.” I was reading a lot about getting my life in order, and the word “disruption” seemed to imply chaos, rebellion, and negative uncertainty to me.
However, the more I thought about it, disruption is, neutrally speaking, a major change. By definition, this includes positive things like becoming wealthy or getting an amazing new partner.
So, within a few months of being scared of the term, I made a complete 180, and I was seeking disruption. Let me explain why. Before I explain why I decided to embrace it, let me provide an illustration.
My parents bought a very old house in 1988. It was all we could afford at that moment. It was neglected beyond belief. The siding and shutters were falling apart. The porch was painted a bright green and it was chipping a lot. The house smelled like cigarette smoke. Many of the original fireplaces and hardwood floors were covered with gaudy mantles and cheap linoleum.
In order for that house to be livable it had to be gutted and completely renovated, i.e. disrupted. My grandpa was a carpenter, and we spent hours and hours making the place beautiful.
We spent hours stripping wallpaper in every room. In most rooms, there were seven layers of tacky wallpapers. My grandpa had to build a complete staircase inside the house because it only had a ricketty outside staircase. He tore out walls, updated the electricity, updated the plumbing, and exposed the old fireplaces. We planted trees and totally landscaped the yard. By 1990 the place looked great.
It took a lot of time, energy, and change to renovate the house into something that was not only livable, but also beautiful. And, if you look at it from the standpoint of life, you can definitely say that the house was totally disrupted, because anything short of disruption wouldn’t have done the job. It would have been impossible to slowly “ease” the house into being a great place to live.
So, here is why I realized my life needed disrupted. Like that old house, I had gotten into many unhelpful habits and mindsets. I was negative, angry, judgmental, and working hours at a job that was driving me crazy. I was overpaying for rent, waking up exhausted, and making way less money than I needed to even survive basically. I was also struggling to get any exposure with my business ventures.
I realized that the change I wanted required huge disruption. How in the world could I go from struggling in virtually every area of my life to being where I wanted to be unless I embraced total disruption. It was only my negative ego that assumed that disruption meant something horrible.
The same is likely true of your life. If you want to be an actress, but right now have no training, no gigs, and no money, and you’re working a minimum wage job for 40 hours a week, then it is 100% true that if you want to be a successful actress your life will have to be majorly disrupted. How else can you go from spending 40 hours a week working a crap job to working that same amount of time on a movie or TV show? Your life would look very different.
This is why we mention “positive disruption” a lot. Because if something is off track, getting it back on track will be amazingly and positively disruptive, which is exactly what many people need and want in 2020.
