Here are 13 things that every skilled chaos-surfer understands:

How something appears to you may not be how it is.

What is said or shown may not be all there is.

What is true for me may not be true for you.

The same words may mean different things to different people.

What people say may not be what they mean. Because comms is lossy and language is messy, people's intentions are murky even to themselves.

People often don't even read what is there. They often see a few words and assume what they thought they saw. You can ask them to repeat things back to you and they'll sometimes make up something completely different.

What is salient to me about some scenario may not be what is salient to you. Each of us have had a lifetime of experience that the other doesn't have a lot of information about, and that experience informs what each of us identifies as important.

Essentially all entities are internally conflicted. This goes all the way up to nation-states and all the way down to families, friend groups and even within individuals. Anything that looks like a monolith with no internal conflict is almost definitely putting on a show.

Things change. Just because something was true yesterday and is true right now, doesn’t mean that it will be true tomorrow. Some things change much slower than others, but a rainbow, a person and a mountain are all temporary things. No status quo has ever lasted indefinitely.

Target fixation is real. People will miss something right in front of their face if they're too focused on looking for something else. This gets 10x, 100x more intense when the thing is embarrassing or shameful in some way.

People can't learn anything if they aren't free to make mistakes. If you create even a small, temporary context where people can feel safe to make mistakes, that's where a lot of magic can happen.

Misunderstanding is the default state. Acknowledging this means giving people grace, time and space to adjust their positions.

As long as you're still alive, nothing you say ever has to be your final word on anything.