🚗 Getting Out of Our Lanes 🚗
🔥Welcome to volume #00041!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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🚗Getting Out of Our Lanes🚗
Wait, my partner is going to stand on me where?
Thus begin the internal questions about why I was doing Acro Yoga. When I heard the next session involved Acro Yoga, my first thought was I don't do Acro Yoga. It's funny when you believe you live with a growth mindset and then watch yourself do the exact opposite.
We all love the idea that people like us don't do things like that. This idea works when it comes to ethically or morally bankrupt ideas. It doesn't work as well when it involves getting out of our lanes, trying something new, and growing.
It was February pre-covid stateside, and I was at 1440 Multiversity next to redwoods with a group of amazing people. We all love flow and want to help others unlock flow in their lives. Yet here I am pushing back against the flow and trying something because of my preconceived notions.
The instructors were the pros, Ninja Travis and Little Beastmode, who made it easy for even the newbies. Instead of focusing, my mind went to future injuries and thinking about how I don't do acro or yoga. I did try, but I only dipped my foot in the water, refusing to jump. I missed an opportunity to learn how to swim. I didn't want to get out of my lane.
Fast forward to today, and both of my sons want to do some acro yoga every night (along with lots of wrestling). This lead the four-year-old and I to start training with a handstand and Acro Yoga coach in Chicago.
Opportunities show up, and we only need to act. It can be as large as trying out a new career or starting a business. It can be as small as starting a new hobby or reading a book that you think doesn’t fit you.
It's all there for us to try and the beauty is always in the struggle.
We need to remember to get out of our lanes, step into the uncertainty, keep going, and see what happens next.
📓Articles to Read📓
The Strength of Being Misunderstood by Sam Altman
Sam notes there are two ways to think about people’s opinions and how much you care about them. Either you overweight certain people related to certain subjects where you care about their opinions or you care about an opinion but you care over a longer time frame. The second one is the old, I’m doing this, you might not get it but let’s chat about it in the future. Most people use the former approach but use the longer timescale.
The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn’t value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people’s opinions on a very long time horizon—as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.
Ben Thompson’s Stratechery offering Five Lessons from Dave Chapelle
Dave Chapelle’s latest comedy special on Instagram
This is the most important lesson of the Internet: the consumer is the ultimate boss. In markets without any sort of additional friction, like website or social media, this means that power accrues almost completely to Aggregators, with creators able to connect with consumers as secondary beneficiaries. Look no further than the fact that this special was posted on Instagram: Chappelle has the platform to appeal directly to his fans that his predecessors, all of whom despised the networks and labels and their contracts just as much if not more than he does, lacked. That Chappelle’s Instagram post is no different in format from one posted by you or me is a feature, not a bug.
School from Bad to Worse
This article hammers on the additional destruction being wrecked by COVID on the school system exposing how bad it was before COVID.
More PLAY especially outside and peers, passion, and projects like the book Life Long Kindergarten exposes.
Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always working so great before COVID-19 either. Like a tsunami that pulls away from the coast, leaving an exposed stretch of land, the pandemic has revealed long-standing inattention to children’s developmental needs—needs as basic as exercise, outdoor time, conversation, play, even sleep. All of the challenges of educating young children that we have minimized for years have suddenly appeared like flotsam on a beach at low tide, reeking and impossible to ignore. Parents are not only seeing how flawed and glitch-riddled remote teaching is—they’re discovering that many of the problems of remote schooling are merely exacerbations of problems with in-person schooling.
A good start would be to include a broader and deeper curriculum with more chances for children to explore, play, and build relationships with peers and teachers. Schools should also be in the business of fostering curiosity and a love of learning in all children, or at a minimum not impeding the development of those traits. This is a low educational bar but one that is too often not cleared, as the millions of American adults who are functionally illiterate might suggest.
But the most obvious demand should be for more time outside. In a pandemic, the reasons for doing this are clear: Outdoor transmission of COVID‑19 has been shown to be far less likely than indoor spread. But outdoor learning has myriad benefits even without a public-health emergency. Years of accumulating evidence reveal concretely measurable benefits of nature-based learning and outdoor time for young children. For instance, multiple studies have shown that providing children with nature-based experiences reduces the frequency of ADHD symptoms in both the immediate and longer terms. Another study found that children who received science instruction outdoors learned more than those who received it only in a classroom. Yet despite what we know about nature’s positive impact on mental health, attention span, academic outcomes, physical fitness, and self-regulation, outdoor time is too often seen as a quirky and marginal add‑on, rather than as central to the learning process itself.
Beginner’s mind is something that we can all get better at harnessing. In addition to this idea, Suzuki also left us with “You’re all perfect exactly how you are. And you all could use a little improvement”.
Or as the Zen Buddhist monk Shunryu Suzuki put it in his 1970 book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”
Paradoxical as it may sometimes seem, though, this concept makes perfect sense in the context of heuristics.
The more we learn about a particular topic, and the deeper we dive into the theoretical and practical realities of it, the more heuristics we consciously and unconsciously generate about it.
An electrician who’s just starting out will be able to imagine a huge number of solutions to many of the problems they encounter—many that wouldn’t work, a few that would—while a electrician who’s been working at their craft for 40-years will be more likely to have tried-and-true approaches to many of the issues they might face; fewer ideas, but more of them tending to work.
Such experience will serve a veteran electrician well in most cases, according to most metrics. But in the face of the unfamiliar, or a paradigm shift in their technological, economic, or social environment, the more novice electrician may have some advantages: like fewer expectations about what will be true, and as a result, fewer biases about where a solution might be found.
History is filled with examples of incredibly intelligent, capable, seasoned experts failing to perceive or believe in vital discoveries or ideas: germ theory, tectonics, and democratic governmental structures were all thought to be inane hogwash by some of the most renowned minds of the relevant era, before eventually being proved true or possible by newbie or outsider thinkers.
Interestingly, it’s been shown that even believing we know more about something than most people can push us out of a beginner’s mindset into a more rigid line of thinking, blinding us to the full range of potential possibilities.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Not Overthinking it podcast hosted by Ali and Tamuir Abdaal talk with Austin Kleon (Spotify)
How I do something vs. how to do something - Ali has 1m youtube followers and his best videos are how I not how to
Share what you are learning. No matter how good or bad, someone can learn from it and it makes you better.
Write every day, blog every day... You figure out what you have to say and you get somewhere. The writing tells you what you have to say.
Like the line that Stewart Brand told Brian Eno "why don't you assume you've already written your book and all you have to do is find it"
Andy Warhol said it best, be artful in your business
When Austin steps on stage to speak he never feels like it, but then learns so much from his audience and enjoys the talking and connecting with people
Keep things in your life that you love and are passionate about in your life. Find ways to connect them and have them talk to each other.
You don't have to pick from the things you love. You have to figure out how to keep them in your life. It doesn't matter if you have kids and demands, you have to figure that out. You have to do it or it’s going to die and you are going to die.
Find the right models for what you want to do. Finds famous women writers so instructive to what he wants to do because they many times had to deal with family needs too. Ursula K. Le Gwynn used to say "babies eat books, but they spit them out in bits and pieces and then you can put them together later on".
Austin writes his books to himself - "Steal like an Artist" and "Keep Going"
Art is something that provides meaning to you and it might not mean making a living from it.
He is currently really interested in finding ways for people to find out what they are interested in. Can think back to when you were younger and moments in your life you were inspired by something. Austin believes you should think in terms of verbs vs. nouns and try to be the verb version.
Life has a tragic mode (you are going to be this great person which sets you up for a tragedy) or a comic mode (Bill Murray style and you deal with things as they come up)
Austin works in seasons and cycles not linear. Thinks linear is a trap. Know thyself like Thoreau (and Eastern philosophy)
Choose your metaphors wisely. Problems of today because of the wrong metaphors. Do you see timelines or loops? A metaphor is an entire structure that you build your life on.
Kid Cudi’s latest Man on the Moon III, which was played during the creation of this newsletter.
John Vervaeke talks with Jordan Hall and Gregg Henriques about Coherence, Chi and Wisdom-Energy
Orient with wonder and awe to even attempt to walk the path
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Three Ring Circus - Kobe, Shaq, Phil and the Crazy Years of the Lakers Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman (Goodreads)
This book reminds us that teams are hard and winning is hard. Even when you are winning and your team is loaded, it gets even harder to keep it togehter.
Kobe wanted to be the man when he was younger (well maybe always, but the book stops after Shaq leaves). Shaq wanted to win a bit more and also be the man, but maybe less so than Kobe. Even winning three championships in a row, they struggled to co-exist until the Lakers traded Shaq, and then stunk the following season.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Dorthy Parker - “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”
Further, my characterization of a loser is someone who, after making a mistake, doesn’t introspect, doesn’t exploit it, feels embarrassed and defensive rather than enriched with a new piece of information, and tries to explain why he made the mistake rather than moving on. These types often consider themselves the “victims” of some large plot, a bad boss, or bad weather.
Flow - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
To overcome the anxieties and depressions of contemporary life, individuals must become independent of the social environment to the degree that they no longer respond exclusively in terms of its rewards and punishments. To achieve such autonomy, a person has to learn to provide rewards to herself. She has to develop the ability to find enjoyment and purpose regardless of external circumstances.
The Second Mountain - David Brooks
As the Augustinian scholar James K. A. Smith writes, “To be human is to be on the move, pursuing something, after something. We are like existential sharks: we have to move to live.” There is some deep part of ourselves from where desires flow. We’re defined by what we desire, not what we know.
And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.
How to Take Smart Notes - Sönke Ahrens
It is not so important who you are, but what you do. Doing the work required and doing it in a smart way leads, somehow unsurprisingly, to success. At first glance, this is both good and bad news. The good news is that we wouldn’t be able to do much about our IQ anyway, while it seems to be within our control to have more self-discipline with a little bit of willpower. The bad news is that we do not have this kind of control over ourselves. Self-discipline or self-control is not that easy to achieve with willpower alone.
Here Is Real Magic - Nate Staniforth
Wonder, astonishment, magic—that sense of waking up and seeing things the way you saw them before they became ordinary.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you get out of your lane and surprise yourself?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
acroman and wrassleboi 💪🏽😃