The script was already written for me. Tech entrepreneur in Los Angeles, visualizing Maseratis while pitching investors on nothing but charisma and slide decks. I’d raised nearly two million dollars for a business that existed primarily in my imagination, fueled by manifestation workshops and the kind of positive thinking that Silicon Valley mistakes for strategy. Looking back, I can see how perfectly I’d cast myself in the role everyone expected me to play.
It’s a peculiar thing, realizing you’ve been reading from someone else’s screenplay. The lines come so naturally—be ambitious, chase success, manifest your dreams—that you forget to ask who wrote them. I’d spent years perfecting my performance, hitting every mark, delivering every line with conviction. The applause was real. The exhaustion was realer.
The unraveling began, as these things often do, with a single question that refused to stay buried: Whose life am I actually living?
I’d been working with Rudá Iandê for over a decade, though “working with” doesn’t quite capture it. More like slowly dismantling everything I thought I knew about myself, one comfortable illusion at a time. He’s just released Laughing in the Face of Chaos, and reading it felt like watching him distill years of conversations, ceremonies, and revelations into something both more accessible and more radical than anything he’d created before. The book doesn’t just challenge spiritual bypassing—it dynamites the entire foundation we build our performed lives upon.
There’s a moment Rudá describes that mirrors my own journey with uncanny precision: the recognition that what we call “truth” might just be the most elaborate fiction we’ve ever swallowed. For me, that fiction starred a version of myself who needed external validation like oxygen, who measured worth in funding rounds and feature mentions, who believed that if I just visualized hard enough, the universe would deliver success to my doorstep like cosmic takeout.
The shift didn’t happen in Brazil, though I’ve had my share of ceremonies in caves that left me shaking with recognition. It happened in smaller moments—choosing to slow down when every fiber screamed to be productive, learning to tell if someone forms their own opinions rather than parroting collective wisdom, discovering that modern life tricks us into needing things that actively make us miserable.
The book talks about becoming authors of our own narrative, but not in the LinkedIn-optimized way I once understood it. This isn’t about crafting a personal brand or curating an image. It’s about the terrifying, exhilarating work of examining every belief you hold and asking: Did I choose this, or was it chosen for me?
I remember the exact moment I stopped trying to manifest that Maserati. Not because I’d given up on success, but because I’d finally understood what Rudá had been saying all along: the car was never the point. The visualization was just another costume in my endless wardrobe of borrowed identities. What I actually wanted—connection, purpose, the feeling of being fully alive—couldn’t be ordered from a vision board.
These days, from my home in Singapore, I run companies that actually exist, create content that challenges rather than placates, and I travel via modest cars that get me where I need to go. The difference is that I’m no longer performing success; I’m living it on terms I’ve consciously chosen. The metrics have changed. Instead of funding rounds, I measure moments of genuine connection. Instead of viral content, I seek truth that disturbs comfortable assumptions.
Rudá writes about the body being the portal to transformation, not an obstacle to transcend. After years of living entirely in my head—strategizing, visualizing, overthinking—I’ve learned to trust the wisdom of discomfort, the intelligence of anxiety when it’s listened to rather than numbed, the way anger can point toward boundaries that need restoration. This isn’t the kind of insight you can download from a TED talk. It’s earned through the messy work of feeling everything you’ve taught yourself not to feel.
The book’s title itself carries a profound teaching. We’re not meant to conquer chaos or rise above it in some state of perpetual zen. We’re meant to find the cosmic humor in our very human attempts to control the uncontrollable. Some days I nail it—catching myself mid-performance, choosing presence over perfection, laughing when old patterns resurface like actors who missed their cue to exit. Other days I forget every lesson and find myself back in the theater, reciting lines I thought I’d retired.
But here’s what a decade of unlearning has taught me: the goal isn’t to stop playing roles entirely. We all need our masks for different occasions—parent, professional, partner. The liberation comes from recognizing them as masks, choosing them consciously, and knowing how to set them down. It’s the difference between being an actor who’s forgotten they’re on stage and a playwright who’s writing their own material.
When I trace the trajectory from that entrepreneur in LA, desperately trying to manifest his way to meaning, to where I sit now, the distance feels both enormous and surprisingly small. The external changes matter less than the internal revolution—the shift from performing life to living it, from following inherited scripts to writing my own lines, from chasing enlightenment to embracing the beautiful mess of being human.
The paradox is that by giving up the exhausting performance of having it all together, life actually came together in ways I couldn’t have visualized. Not perfect, not Instagram-worthy every moment, but real in a way that no amount of positive thinking could have manufactured. Rudá’s book captures this with a precision that only comes from lived experience: the recognition that our wounds aren’t obstacles to overcome but the very material from which authentic lives are built.
I think about readers encountering Laughing in the Face of Chaos for the first time, perhaps seeing themselves in its pages the way I’ve seen myself. The ones who’ve been told to just think positive, to manifest harder, to rise above their humanity into some sanitized spiritual state. The book offers something far more radical: permission to be whole, shadows and all, to find the sacred in the messy, to discover that the author you’ve been seeking has been holding the pen all along.
The real transformation isn’t in the Maserati that never materialized or the startup that found its footing only after I stopped performing my way through pitch decks. It’s in the quiet moment when you realize you’re no longer reading from someone else’s script. You’re writing your own story, one conscious choice at a time, with all the beautiful imperfection that comes from finally being the author of your own life.
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Just launched: Laughing in the Face of Chaos by Rudá Iandê
Exhausted from trying to hold it all together?
You show up. You smile. You say the right things. But under the surface, something’s tightening. Maybe you don’t want to “stay positive” anymore. Maybe you’re done pretending everything’s fine.
This book is your permission slip to stop performing. To understand chaos at its root and all of your emotional layers.
In Laughing in the Face of Chaos, Brazilian shaman Rudá Iandê brings over 30 years of deep, one-on-one work helping people untangle from the roles they’ve been stuck in—so they can return to something real. He exposes the quiet pressure to be good, be successful, be spiritual—and shows how freedom often lives on the other side of that pressure.
This isn’t a book about becoming your best self. It’s about becoming your real self.
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