The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect is not only an Ashton Kutcher movie for 2004, but it’s also a poetic mathematical theory you can live your life by.

Originally associated with mathematician and meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who was changed to test the association between a seemingly insignificant small event influencing a much larger nonlinear event. 

He discovered that a seagull battering its wings miles away can affect the formation, pathway and time of a tornado. Once he had proved this theory he was then instructed to make it more poetic as seagulls are sexy but that’s for another day.

But many life lessons can be taken from this now poetic theory. We never truly now the butterfly effect our seemingly insignificant meetings have with others. 

The passing smiles in the street, the thank you in a shop or letting cars out of a junction in traffic. Selling the Invisible talks of a staff member who goes out of his way to help a customer following an admin error. In the 5 minutes it takes to correct the error the customer instead browses the shops rails and lone behold sees a $500 jacket that he would look amazing in. (What are the chances i know), Of course he buys the jacket, and in that moment an admin error has turned into an additional $500 sale. 

 

Now is that realistic? No, but you get the jist. Could that smile and thank you, or spontaneous complement help to lift someone's mood on a crappy day? Course it could, Has letting a car out of a junction just saved them the extra 2 minutes they need to get to work and avoid being late again for the 4th time this month and being sacked? Maybe, maybe not. 

If nothing else the butterfly effect encourages us all to be nicer people, and a nation full of nicer people doing spontaneous things hoping for an extra $500 sale in return isn't a bad place to love surely.

 

Similarly to the Random acts of kindness that swept the US (no shock it didn't reach us in the UK), it encourages us all to be better people.