🏀 The First Time 🏀
🔥Welcome to volume #0048!🔥
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.
🏀 The First Time 🏀
The first time happened in 9th grade.
It came as a surprise.
I wasn't ready, but I didn't have a choice.
It struck like lightning. I wanted to get out of the way, but it happened too quickly.
The other team full-court pressed us. I played point guard, but the inbound pass didn’t come to me. All of a sudden #55 barreled towards the basket as I stood there all alone.
A giant 8th grader, playing against high schoolers, stole the ball.
I stepped in front of him.
Then it happened for the first time.
8th grader Lavar Arrington took off into the air.
That was the first time…the first time I got dunked on.
I thought to myself, wow that just happened. It was electric and magical for everyone watching.
First times remind us how much is possible. They surprise us and magnetize us. They show up because we put ourselves out there. They can be things we want to happen or things that happen to us.
We do the dunking, and we get dunked on.
Either way, we learn and grow from every first time.
One of these guys is 8th grade Lavar and everyone else is already in high school.
📓Articles to Read📓
What we can learn from Steph Curry?
Do things differently and do them well
For Curry, a typical offseason workout looks something like this: Sporting a hilarious golfer's tan and usually some kind of colorful, prototype Under Armour sneaker, Curry flies through a nearly impossible, full-court version of the conventional star shooting drill. Designed by Payne, it consists of 10 shots -- from the corner, baseline and wing -- with full-court 94-foot sprints in between. And it must be done with a minimum 80% accuracy and in under 56 seconds or the drill repeats. Essentially it's the same drill run in nearly every basketball practice on earth, turbocharged to an absurd degree for Curry, whose year-round conditioning goal is to always be ready to take the floor within two weeks.
Make others around you better
"I have to feel out exactly how the defense wants to play us and what they want to take away," Curry says. "I've always played aggressive, but that's never meant taking every shot. It's about being a threat and creating for others if I have the ball in my hands or not."
Play, coach, and teach
"Not only do Draymond and I have to perform every night but, for lack of a better term, we also have to teach," Curry says. "We have to teach all the young guys. They are hungry to learn and perform and take advantage of all the opportunities, but there's a process to it. To know what the expectations have been over the last five to six years and then to ask that of guys who just haven't been in those positions before, that's [always] gonna be the challenge ... to find that balance and to put some miles on those minds in order to figure this offense out."
Learning to control our breath and our heart rate is a superpower we all can use
He stands still. Curry's second wind comes from his ability to rapidly lower his heart rate during short breaks, even in the middle of games. It's something he trains his body to do. Once he's out of breath at the end of most workouts, Curry lies on his back, and Payne, his trainer, places sandbag weights below his rib cage in order to overload, and train, Curry's diaphragm.
Learning a Day on our #1 Priority from Rohan
If you catch yourself saying “this is my #1 priority” from time to time, a good question to ask yourself – “Would you stop whatever you are doing at any point during the week to take a call about this?”
If the answer is yes, it is your #1 priority.
If it is no, do yourself and those around you a favor and stop calling it that.
Why parents deserve so much more when the media talks about video games by Anne Helen Peterson
There are so many tropes and old arguments in this particular article it’s hard to pick one! The one that sticks out most was the quote by the interviewed parent who said “What are you going to do when you’re married and stressed? Tell your wife that you need to play Xbox?” I’m not even sure what the parent is trying to imply here, but it is clearly something negative. However, we have known for years that games are fantastic tools for stress relief, social connection, and can have wide ranging, positive impact on mental well-being.
That said, the negative framing of escapism also stuck out as a particularly old, misused trope. We can escape into a good book or escape into the tales of Geralt of Riva in The Witcher on Netflix without a second thought. But for some reason it is suddenly a problem if we want to escape into Midgar in the Final Fantasy 7 (Square) remake? Escapism in and of itself is not inherently bad and it only ever seems to be framed that way when it comes to video games.
I think this is very much an issue of “clickable headlines.” Fear sells. Easy solutions to complex problems, they sell. This is why we still see headlines today linking violent video games to violent behaviours even though there are (literally) hundreds of studies pointing to the opposite conclusion. As a scholar in the field, it’s incredibly frustrating to see generalized headlines that continue to instill fear and misinformation.
Play is important throughout the lifespan: many people assume that it’s only critical for child development, but it’s actually critical to your mental well-being throughout your life. Games are particularly effective tools for mood management, because good games (well-designed games) engage players in a way that meets basic psychological needs as humans: they give you a sense of autonomy (you are free to make your own choices), competence (that you can achieve things, be successful), and relatedness (connecting with your friends via online play).
These three components — autonomy, competence, and relatedness — are thought to be essential for psychological health and well-being of an individual. Having these needs met, while also having the added element of playfulness, makes players feel good, happy and satisfied. All of this stems from Self Determination Theory, a theory of motivation from the 1970s that has been expanded upon to talk specifically about games and how well designed games can contribute to our well-being while offering a sense of happiness and satisfaction.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Michael Garfield’s Future Fossils On Play and Innovation featuring Michael Phillip (Spotify)
Eric Hoffer "In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."
Build-in play and noise into our lives. Inefficiencies like play and noise add concrete to our wood and paper homes.
The landscape is always changing and not static. each organism changes and the individual change changes the landscape. That is why life is infinitely dimensional. History is an impossibly complex massive parallel computation unfolding at multiple time scales simultaneously.
People view change as an opportunity or change as losing
Play and evolution are connected
We favor childlike behavior in animals
Questions are better than answers
We need more wonder and curiosity, not answers
Pete Holmes’ You Made It Weird featuring Sarah Cooper (Spotify)
Sarah left Google because she knew she had to do comedy
How do you answer the question of life?
We run into problems from wanting to be right and prove that we are right. That is the ego.
The only prayer you pray in your whole life is Thank You. That is enough
Watch bad TV pilots to learn what not to do. “I know what is funny is that true? Not really. Is that pitch someone gave bad? I don’t know maybe, but it can be fuel for what you end up creating.”
Humiliating is saying something is not funny and then Judd Appatow comes in and says he likes it.
Amanda Palmer reads “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Okayplayer releases guided meditations by artists and producers
Jason Silva on Everything and Everyone is a Mirror.
The world is not all accurate mirrors but mainly funhouse mirrors. Our mirrors are shaped by our distortions. We need to remember that most mirrors aren’t truly reflections. Be discerning in the mirrors that we let reflect us
We get to choose what gets mirrored back to us
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Small Arcs of Larger Circles - Nora Bateson
This is life itself, it is love, it is yes & no, order & chaos. And it is ringing us all into existence. Invite life as it is—as much grace as disaster.
The Storytelling Edge - Shane Snow, Joe Lazauskas
There's a Native American proverb on our office wall that says, “Those who tell the stories rule the world.”
Creativity - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The analogy to genes in the evolution of culture are memes, or units of information that we must learn if culture is to continue. Languages, numbers, theories, songs, recipes, laws, and values are all memes that we pass on to our children so that they will be remembered. It is these memes that a creative person changes, and if enough of the right people see the change as an improvement, it will become part of the culture.
The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik
We change our surroundings and our surroundings change us. We alter other people’s behavior, their behavior alters ours.
Strange RitesTara Isabella Burton
A religion of emotive intuition, of aestheticized and commodified experience, of self-creation and self-improvement and, yes, selfies. A religion for a new generation of Americans raised to think of themselves both as capitalist consumers and as content creators. A religion decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims about God or the universe or the Way Things Are, but that still seeks—in various and varying ways—to provide us with the pillars of what religion always has: meaning, purpose, community, ritual.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What do you need to do for the first time?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
