How Netflix’s Chaos Monkey Shows Us a Path to Inner Strength and Resiliency
By: Michael J. Mehlberg
Tags: Strength, Failure, Self Improvement, Resilience, Life Lessons

How Netflix’s Chaos Monkey Shows Us a Path to Inner Strength and Resiliency

Photo by Lewis Roberts on Unsplash

This is Chaos Monkey.

He’s a malicious, angry, out-of-control primate devised by Netflix to “rip apart” the very core of its business — the video delivery data center — one server at a time.

“Imagine a monkey entering a ‘data center’, these ‘farms’ of servers that host all the critical functions of our online activities. The monkey randomly rips cables, destroys devices and returns everything that passes by the hand [i.e. flings excrement]. The challenge for IT managers is to design the information system they are responsible for so that it can work despite these monkeys, which no one ever knows when they arrive and what they will destroy.” — Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Of course, Netflix doesn’t release an actual monkey into its data centers to do real physical damage. Rather, it simulates this crazed beast for one purpose: to force its developers to build resiliency into its networks such that, should a real outage occur, its 182 million customers continue to receive the content they pay for without a hiccup.

Netflix knows that failure is inevitable. They understand that of the thousands of machines they have running 24/7, one or more of them could fail at any given time, and all of them will fail eventually.

So they planned for failure. Nay, they built failure right into their systems. They created a simulated creature, the Chaos Monkey, to actively introduce problems into their product, increasing their systems’ quality by stressing the absolute hell out them.

Stress is Not a Bad Word

In 1908, psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson set out to test the effects of stress on rats in a maze by, get this, shocking the shit out of them.

When the rats were left to find their way out of the maze on their own, they managed, though it wasn’t an inspired performance. When the rats were given a mild shock, low enough to stimulate and motivate them, they performed better yet. When the shock was too strong, the rats panicked. They dodged around randomly trying anything and everything to escape.

In short, a certain level of stress increased their performance while too much destroyed it and eventually resulted in a panic-induced breakdown (Cherry, 2020).

In short, these two slightly devious researchers showed that stress is not a bad word. Stress, in measured doses, is actually good for you.

We often think of stress in a bad light. And with good reason. Too much stress on a bridge can cause it to collapse. Too much stress on a baseball bat can cause it to shatter. Too much stress on a human can cause them to get really fucking grumpy.

On the flip side, too little stress results in an inactive lifestyle. You might recognize such a person as lacking drive or being too laid back; they just don’t seem to care about getting anything done and are under no pressure to produce results.

In reality, stress sits on a continuum starting with too little (where you are an inactive couch-sloth) and ending with too much (where you burnout). The right balance is managing your stress level to an optimum amount, right up to when you feel fatigue, but before exhaustion sets in. This is best illustrated in the Yerkes-Dodson law chart below:

Photo by Author, Michael J. Mehlberg

Back to the hairy beast at hand, Chaos Monkey is creating just the right amount of stress on Netflix data centers. The simulated monkey isn’t crashing every one of them. It’s not preventing customers from being able to watch the next episode of Kingdom (the best damn show since Breaking Bad). It’s stressing the system just enough to make sure it doesn’t go down. It’s creating strength and resiliency across the board.

Like Netflix, our life is a web of relationships and feelings — a highly-interactive, ridiculously complicated network of interconnected nodes. And, like any complex system, failures will happen whether we want them to or not.

What we don’t want to happen is for a single failure in one aspect of our lives to spill over. We don’t want a failure to destroy our confidence or ruin our motivation for the future.

We need strength. We need resiliency. And one good way to build both is by introducing a Chaos Monkey into our lives.

Adding Chaos Monkey to Our Lives

I started lifting weights six years ago. Motivated by the book Evolution by Joe Manganiello, I set out on a course to transform my body into a hulking beast of a man; tiger skin stretched over steel.

Though I ate crappy foods and generally gave my workouts minimal effort, I saw tremendous growth in my first year. What little work I did was causing big changes. Granted, I was still tall and lanky, but at least I was no longer as skinny as a twig.

Years two through five, though, were far less gratifying. My effort remained the same, but my results were almost exponentially slower. For four whole years, I wasn’t making much progress. In retrospect, I was going through the motions, which led to a severe lack of results. The Chaos Monkey in my exercise routine was taking a nap.

Waking him up meant leaning into the stress. It meant pushing myself to failure. After all, it’s only through stress that we grow. And only by failing do we learn how to (more intelligently) try again and succeed.

The moment I recognized that is the moment I also realized Chaos Monkey’s importance for every other aspect of my life. Yes, my body required stress through exercise to strengthen. But my mind required stress through journaling and meditation to learn. My business required stress through persistent sales to grow. My writing required stress through daily, vigilant practice to expand. My marriage required stress by giving more than I received to deepen.

Not enough stress to fry a rat in a maze. Just enough to build resilience into every major aspect of my life.

“Failure is not the opposite of success; it’s part of success.” — Arianna Huffington

Do you have a Chaos Monkey mindset? Are you introducing the right stressors into your life to fail and learn and grow? Are you actively working to find and replace your weaknesses with strengths?

The answers to these questions indicate just how strong and resilient you will become.

For failure is inevitable, and only by embracing it can we prevent it from destroying us. Strength and resiliency don’t come from failure alone. They come from how we respond to it when it hits us out of nowhere.

Find your inner Chaos Monkey. Embrace controlled stress and failure in all aspects of your life so you can learn, grow, and find that next level of inner strength and resilience.