🙌Being Intentional🙌
🔥Welcome to volume #00044!🔥
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.
🙌Being Intentional🙌
My Tai Chi teacher, Timothy Suh, ended class yesterday, reminding us that we can accomplish what we set out to do when we are intentional.
As 2020 moves into the rearview mirror, we get a chance to reflect, re-aim, replenish, and double down on our intentions.
We reflect on what happened, what we learned, and how we grew We re-aim by making sure our intentions are on target and to adjust our aim when they aren’t. We get to replenish with the long weekend and the new starting line.
Our intention remains our guiding light. What we need to do is the work. We need to make the intention a reality by chopping the wood and carrying the water. Each year we get to do one to three important things. That is where we get to focus our intentions.
Then we great to wake up and embody them each and every day. We create the habits to be the change we seek to create.
What’s your intention for the new year? What’s your plan to implement it?
Let’s all start together right now.
📓Articles to Read📓
Seth Godin offers us some wisdom as we hopefully move toward better…
And one reason we invented the calendar was to keep the outside world at bay as we reclaim agency over how we’ll choose to act–to respond instead of to react.
For those of you keeping track, 2021 is the product of the prime numbers 43 and 47. If you were looking for a reason to be optimistic, that’s as good as any.
Erasmus preaching the Middle Way in the Economist
As Michael Massing shows vividly in “Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther and the Fight for the Western Mind” (2018), the growing religious battle destroyed Erasmianism as a movement. Princes had no choice but to choose sides in the 16th-century equivalent of the cold war. Some of Erasmus’s followers reinvented themselves as champions of orthodoxy. The “citizen of the world” could no longer roam across Europe, pouring honeyed words into the ears of kings. He spent his final years holed up in the free city of Basel. The champion of the Middle Way looked like a ditherer who was incapable of making up his mind, or a coward who was unwilling to stand up to Luther (if you were Catholic) or the pope (if you were Protestant).
Yet the next hundred years of European history bloodily confirmed Erasmus’s warnings about the dangers of religious extremism. Luther denounced the pope as the Antichrist while comparing Rome to Sodom and Gomorrah; the pope called Luther a “roaring sow”. Then came the book-burning and the statue-smashing. Finally, the fanatics graduated to burning their fellow human beings at the stake. The cycle of intolerance was matched by a cycle of self-righteousness. Protestants competed with their fellow Protestants, and Catholics with their fellow Catholics, to see who possessed the purest heart and the fiercest faith. The test of being a good Christian ceased to be decent behaviour. It became fanaticism: who could shout most loudly? Or persecute heresy most vigorously? Or apply fuel to the flames most enthusiastically?
And today, once again the Middle Way seems like the right outcome, but it’s not embraced by all.
The spirit of the Middle Way has not conquered all—far from it. The West is now in the grip of rival extremisms that mock every principle that the great man held dear. Everywhere ideologues are breaking eggs and murdering chicks. In Britain, Brexiteers denounce “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere” and cast out moderate politicians with more talent than they possess, while anti-Brexiteers are blind to the excesses of establishment liberalism. In America “woke” extremists try to get people sacked for slips of the tongue or campaign against the thought crimes of “unconscious bias”. Intellectuals who refuse to join one camp or another must stand by, as mediocrities are rewarded with university chairs and editorial thrones.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Changing our Past and our Present
Jason Silva gives us this beautiful rift about how we can change the past in our present. “The story we choose to tell about what happened can change what happened.” We get to “choose the story that we tell,” and by ontological design, by changing our past, we change our present and our future. Gurdjieff shared a similar thought noting that the “past creates the future, but the present creates the past.”
Ontological Desgin
Jason Silva on Ontological Design including this wonderful Anne-Marie Willis quote “Everything we design in turn designs us back”.
Infinite Loops podcast featuring technology voice expert Brain Roemmele (Spotify)
We are here to learn our big brains convey this
The big invention for homo sapiens was language. Chimps have short term memory that is multiples more powerful than and can remember up to 300 random numbers (average is around 75 vs. 20 for homo sapiens
Changing people’s inner monologue will make them insane like Robert Antwon Wilson talked about. Also why we can’t just upload all this information in someone’s brain
The people that truly move the world are the first movers. The Prometheans who steal the fire from the gods. They see a world that the rest can’t envision
Humans are about inventing technologies and love (meaning the universal love)
There is the observing self and then the self we don’t control that runs all these processes
We aren’t optimized for all the information we have today
“The fact is, our sense organs take in a magnitude of information again based on bits. If you wanted to use that technology of understanding it, it's the easiest way to explain this. It's about 100 million bits per second, yet the consciousness of the brain is the maximum burst limit of 41 bits per second.”
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Words of Radiance (Book 2 of the Stormlight Archieve) by Brandon Sanderson (Goodreads)
Words of Radiance is Game of Throne like and captivating from the first page. Read The Way of the Kings first and then follow up with Words of Radiance. Both are fantastic.
Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey (Goodreads) and The Actor's Life: A Survival Guide by Jenna Fischer (Goodreads)
Two very different books with stories of time spent being an actor and livin life (McConaughey doesn't like to use the g). Greenlights is an "approach" to life book interspersed with stories from Matthew's life. Jenna's is a how-to guide to acting interspersed with stories from her road to acting.
Matthew falls into Dazed and Confused while still in college, and shortly after that, his career is a series of green lights.
Greenlight, in this context, means go, advance, and carry-on. They say proceed. They can show up as yellow or red lights, which eventually turn green. Catching greenlights is all about skill: intent, context, consideration, endurance, anticipation, resilience, speed, and discipline.
The metaphor game is strong in this book and works well. Two ideas stood out for me. "It's no risk unless you can lose," and the book ending with "Live Your Legacy Now." Two simple yet profound ideas we can use.
Jenna lives in an alternative reality from Matthew. Her career starts off with a series of red and yellow lights. She grinds for eight years, barely getting any roles and spending most of her time working odd jobs. Her book is the typical career, while Matthew's is speeding through green lights. Eventually, she lands Pam and the Office.
This book reminded me of all the wonderful folks I met playing improv who live the actor's life. It's a tough road, and they deserve respect for pursuing it and perservering.
Key take aways from Jenna that we can learn from:
Show up and do stuff —> This reminded me of my improv days and toastmasters, and what I try to do by writing every day. Creativity comes from reps, reps, reps, and doing stuff. The more you do, the more you get, and the better you become
Know what you are selling —> your headshot, resume, and roles you apply for should tell a story that makes people want to hire you
Create your own work —> see show up and do stuff
Take Risks —> Without taking a risk, you can’t get anywhere. Put it out there and see what happens
Live an artistic life and surround yourself with artists, then luck will find you —> as always find the others, and good things happen
Be inspiring to others when you can (she remembered each person that encouraged her when she had lesser roles: Molly Shannon, Michael Douglas (who randomly went to my high school in Pittsburgh), Topher Grace, John C Riley, Peter Boyle, Robert Forster, and Matthew Lillard —which feels like a shortlist) —> Be the change we seek to create
Get comfortable with rejection because it never goes away (even in Greenlights, Matthew went 22 months without a gig after he stopped doing RomComs) —> all of life is ups and downs. Enjoy the ride
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor
Lastly, in a sense this is a religious course: I am preaching the message that, with apparently only one life to live on this earth, you ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably—that the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal for your life. It has often been observed the true gain is in the struggle and not in the achievement—a life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living.
How to Take Smart Notes - Sönke Ahrens
Deliberate practice is the only serious way of becoming better at what we are doing (cf. Anders Ericsson, 2008).
Stone teaches us that we should be strong no matter what tries to crack us or wear us down, keeping an unbreakable core through your culture and your beliefs. The majority of this earth is rock, and while water and plants make up its surface, the body of the earth, the part that keeps it all together, is rock. You can have life and creation, but it will all crumble without a solid base. Same with society, companies, relationships, identities, knowledge—almost anything both tangible and intangible. Like those forests and trees sitting as a skin over the rocks of the earth: without that strength inside, without that stone, it would crumble.
If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to. “We give things meaning by paying attention to them,” Jessa Crispin writes, “and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your future.”
Sacred Cows - Danielle Teller and Astro Teller
...words of Socrates, “True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life, ourselves, and the world around us.”
The Second Mountain - David Brooks
Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.
Tweets From Lex Fridman@lexfridman on Twitter
There are 30 trillion cells in the human body. That means 30 trillion living organisms were involved in the writing of this tweet. Each of us humans think of ourselves as one individual, but we are a bustling civilization of life.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What do you want to be intentional about in 2021? How do you plan to implement that intention?
My theme for 2020 was movement. My theme for 2021 is writing, which includes longer form pieces and one on my 2020 theme.
What’s your theme for 2021?
Happy New Year!
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
And the four-year-old is now a five-year-old as the other guy gets ready to turn two!
