🔥Welcome to volume #00068!🔥
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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🏃♀️Chasing Mastery 🏃
I felt exhausted, annihilated, and exhilarated. Sweat poured from every crevice of my body. The endorphins got released, giving me that beautiful hit from hard work. I laid on the mat and crawled up to standing with a grin on my face.
I started jiu-jitsu two months ago. The beginner class is an hour, and while intense, I always leave with gas in the tank. I follow that up with an hour and a half of capoeira (yes, back-to-back... my sparing might be suspect, but my conditioning is not).
Like a typical Tuesday, I planned to take a capoeira class after jiu-jitsu, but it ended up getting canceled. As we thought about biking home (my 5.5-year-old does the double classes, too), the skies opened, and water drenched the streets.
The weather pushed me to stick around for the advanced jiu-jitsu class. It is open for white belts but rarely attended. The session culminates in multiple five-minute sparing sessions. I ended the first class with three sparing sessions and my first submission, choking someone out.
The "advanced" sparing sessions involved me getting smashed, smashed some more, and smashed even more. It was brown, purple, and blue belts, bringing the pain. No success stories came from this endeavor.
I loved almost every minute of it.
Dan Pink notes the critical drivers for happiness include mastery, autonomy, and purpose. The beauty about anything we chase is that we get to make sure it intersects with all three. When we miss any one of them, the road gets tougher.
MAP (mastery, autonomy, and purpose) involves us trying to get better at something that we care about while self-directing our aim.
A simple way to weigh what we need to focus on is to see where we find ourselves on the MAP. When we reach for mastery, we need to continue to dial up the challenge and our focus. When we lose autonomy in a job or a situation when need to find it or move on. When we lose our purpose, we need to rediscover it, reimagine it, or look for something new.
Jiu-jitsu currently hits on all three for me. Yes, finding mastery feels like a long journey from here.
When we care about the journey and it offers us the MAP, we can’t be stopped.
How to Find More Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose?
We want to find more mastery, autonomy, and purpose, but how do we actually do that? How do we approach these three key needs for finding happiness and contentment?
If we can master the MAP, we see the sunshine pop out from behind the clouds. We live with the wind behind our backs.
Mastery
Mastery is the brick by brick process of us becoming better and better at a task. The growth likely is non-linear and correlates to practice, repetition, and loosely being strategic in our approach.
The easiest way to find mastery is using coaches, copying the greats, and aiming for our 10,000 hours aka doing the work. We want to find flow states by challenging ourselves (just 4% above our current level), creating environments to harness flow, and training with others and a community to push us along.
John Danaher, one of the best jiu-jitsu coaches offers this idea to master jiu-jitsu.
I'm going to give you a piece of advice here. Watch what the best people do. Okay, That's how you get superior athletic performance. I'm going to say that again. Don't listen to what people say, Watch what they do, particularly under the stress of high level competition because that's when you see their real game, what they really do under pressure again, if you can emulate that you're going to be very successful.
Autonomy
Scott Berry Kaufman describes autonomy as feeling independent, free to make one's own choices in life, and able to resist social pressures.
Thinking about something deeply and asking questions increases our autonomy. Thinking about connections and the groups we participate in increases our autonomy.
The Passion Paradox calls it authenticity and acting in harmony with our inner being. We connect with ourselves and our work reflects our core beliefs and values. We find internal fulfillment. The challenge is most of the economy and our jobs are focused on external rewards. We need to act to reframe our work to our internal flame.
Here is a study of money vs. autonomy on well-being (spoiler: money loses).
One of the paradoxes of autonomy is that the greater the connection to our work, teams, and group leads to more autonomy.
When we mix autonomy with serendipity we create transcendent moments in our lives. We need to live with eyes wide open for those moments.
Purpose
Our purpose is the point of why we do the things we do. Purpose keeps us going because what we do changes the future.
Channeling Scott Berry Kaufman again, he writes this about purpose:
Psychologists have identified three different forms of meaning: coherence, purpose, and mattering. Purpose involves a motivation to realize future oriented and valued life goals. Mattering consists of the extent to which people feel that their existence and actions in the world are significant, important, and valuable.
Naval Ravikant leaves us this gem on Twitter.
When looking for a purpose to life, notice that most things are stepping stones, done for ulterior motives. True art, love, and play stand apart, as they are done for their own sakes.
What do we want to do for its own sake? When we strip out money, cultural pressure, and other outside influences, we find it. We hear our beat because it calls us and draws us in.
When we find the beat we get to play and dance putting together mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
📓Things to Think About📓
Be the Butterfly by Tom Morgan
Tom offers a view on how we can thrive in a complex system. The idea of complexity means that we can’t take something apart and put it back together. The explanations for why things happened, can’t be proven or disproven. The butterfly moved its wings and then things happened.
We can’t control the system or the outcomes, but we can learn the best way to play and advance in a complex system.
You can either be the butterfly or the static system it disrupts.
He sites Donella Meadows, who guides us to “dance with the systems”. It reminds me of Tai Chi and connecting, merging, and following vs. trying to force an event that then leads us to failure.
The late complex systems expert Donella Meadows wrote a wonderful article called “Dancing with Systems”. After a lifetime of study, she outlines all the ways to think about interacting and merging with systems, rather than trying to dominate and control them. There is no prediction and control, but there’s adaptation and flexibility.
The idea of dancing with the system is totally antithetical to a lot of Western orthodoxy about the inherent controllability of the world. Science and technology promises inevitable dominion over nature
What does this mean for us? How can we dance with the system?
But on a personal level, it’s about finding your own unique capacity for “genius,” then co-creating with the environment. It might be the most optimistic idea I’ve ever encountered.
Metaverse by Arthur Hayes
We all live in the metaverse, we just need to notice it. The mobile devices that we can’t live without made us cyborgs, but perhaps no different than the books, gas-fired burners, and packaging of food at the grocery.
The power of the metaverse is going in one direction and the jumps won’t be linear. Digital goods are going to keep creating meaning, autonomy, and purpose and are only going to continue to grow.
The metaverse will be anything the human mind can dream up and it won’t be held back by the traditional physical laws we take for granted in meatspace. Entire new economies and occupations we cannot imagine will come to be in these worlds. Hopefully these jobs create the same sort of self-satisfaction as traditional employment such that the population feels content with their lot in life. The alternative is billions of restless souls that will lash out at perceived and real inequalities especially as capital is further concentrated amongst our tech overlords.
Right now, the metaverse is re-drawing lines on the map. Our community and places of origin get stretched in cyberspace. Where do we spend most of our time? What do we relate to?
What does it all mean?
According to Statista, in 2020 2.55 billion people played some sort of video game. On average, gamers spend 54 minutes per day, or 6.33 hours per week, doing their thang.
At 2.55 billion people, gamers represent the largest affiliated population cohort. They span traditional nationalities and religions. An interesting data point – which I don’t possess – would be whether gamers feel a stronger affiliation to the in-game community or their country of birth / practiced religion. I am willing to bet that as gamers spend more time in their virtual worlds, affinity to a nation state or religion wanes in favour of in-game communities.
What does it all mean? The digital “flex” is here and is only going to get bigger.
As social beings, the sole purpose of many activities and purchases is to publicly display how much energy you can waste. The nightclub economy is extremely a propos to this concept. Individuals walk into a dark room, listen to loud music (art), dance (a waste of energy akin to a mating call), and pay exorbitant amounts of money to drink liquid. Everyone gets dressed up real nice in articles of clothing that serve no useful purpose other than to demonstrate that the wearer spent a lot of money to display their social status to the rest of the clubbers present.
If you think nightclubs are too gauche, then how about a global art exhibit? The rich and famous art lovers, creators, and curators waste energy travelling to one place. They congregate to “collect” useless paintings, sculptures, and other installations. There is a definite social pecking order based on the gallery you represent and/or how many pieces of useless stuff you hoard. Food and drink are provided to socialise with other like-minded enlightened art aficionados, and when finished, everyone packs up and wastes more energy returning to their homes.
Pixar Ed-isms (from Ed Catmull)
- Hire People Smarter than you
- Fail early and often
- Listen to everyone's ideas
- Face toward the problem
- B-Level work is bad for your soul
- It's more important to invest in good people than good ideas
🎧Things to Listen to 🎧
Posted multiple rackets this week with my buddy DJ
📚Books to Read 📚
Obliquity by John Kay (Goodreads)
My Twitter thread breaks down key takeaways from the book.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Jordan Peele
The best moments I’ve ever seen in improv are funnier than the best stand-up bits that I’ve ever seen. There’s something that can only happen between two people collaborating, and I just think that two people with the same vision is better than one.
Emily Dickinson
Tell the truth, but tell it slant. Success in circuit lies
Anything You Want - Derek Sivers
There’s a benefit to being naive about the norms of the world—deciding from scratch what seems like the right thing to do, instead of just doing what others do.
Brian Eno
This piece you are listening to right now is the latest sentence in lifelong conversation you’ve been having.
The magic is in our alertness to novelty, our attraction to familiarity, and the alchemy between the two.
Creativity - Mihaly Csikzzentmihalyi
The neuropsychologist Brenda Milner describes herself as follows: The thing that has driven me my whole life, and I have always maintained this, is curiosity. I am incredibly curious about things, little things I see around me. My mother used to think that I was just very inquisitive about other people’s business. But it was not just people, it is things around me. I am a noticer.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What are you trying to master? How do autonomy and purpose show up for you?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Dreaming about Costa Rica and catching waves as the Chicago summer winds down
🏃♀️Chasing Mastery 🏃