The Middle Way
This is the point between our Yin and our Yang. This newsletter helps keeps us there.
Welcome to the inaugural issue of my newsletter.
I’m in the A/B testing phase, but nothing better than shipping and seeing what works.
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Asking Ourselves Why...
My three year old tries to break my brain everyday! He is a walking version of the Toyota Five Why's approach*. In fact, he just asked why are you typing on your computer? Why do you want to write about asking why?
Why is a pesky question. Why is also an illuminating question. We ignore or forget how much we don't actually know and how much we take for granted. We go one or two levels deep. We decide we are going to do something and forget what was the point. We don't have that three year old to ask us why we are doing what we are doing in our life. We get stuck in our routines, habits, loops and cycles.
That is the beauty of coaching and working with someone that reminds you of the why questions. You have someone to help you dig into your whys and make sure you are progressing on the right path. If you end up where you didn't want to be, what is the point?
*The Toyota Five Whys is to ask why five times to get to the root of our understanding.
Best of the Week
Links
Live players can do things they haven’t done before. Dead players are playing off of a script.
Walking the key to productivity
Last week I took walk to catch up with one of my favorite people/former co-workers and was fully reminded of the beauty of the walk and talk.
The idea of choosing the more difficult option is so appealing. It’s like the quote that Tim Ferriss attributes to Jerzy Gregory “Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.” Life is the beautiful struggle.
From the article…
Are there ways you build that variation into your life?
You need to make your life more difficult than necessary. Throughout the day, you have to choose between the easiest option and more difficult options. And usually, of course, you always choose the easiest option. In my experience, that's quite often a mistake. I look at my own life and the happiest I’ve been is when I have chose the most difficult options. That's kind of the meaning of life: to feel your own potential. To do that, you have to get out of your comfort zone.
We can only variate from the norm to a point and then we start to confuse people and perhaps even ourselves. How do we spend this limited weirdness budget? Its very much like hit songs, they can be different but only slightly different. If they are too different then no one relates to them.
Its similar to the explore-exploit algorithm. If we spend all our time exploring, then we didn’t really build anything or get to any substantial levels of learning or mastery. This would also box us out from Flow States, which show up around 4% beyond our skill level. Though if we are always exploiting then we level up on very few things and get stuck in the hedgehog box.
We need some weirdness to stay fresh and alive, but not too much to lose everyone else.
Will there ever be another Charlie Munger? by Tren Griffin
A couple Mungerisms below:
“I try to get rid of people who always confidently answer questions about which they don’t have any real knowledge.”
“Avoid being a perfect idiot.” “The trouble with making all these pronouncements is people gradually begin to think they know something, it’s much better to think you are ignorant.”
Podcasts
Akimbo (Seth Godin) - Car Deals and Your Future
JP Sears w/ Paul Chek - Lessons from a Wise Man
Econ Talk - Mauricio Miller on Poverty, Social, Work and the Alternative
Books
Trillion Dollar Coach Playbook
This book breaks down the operating system and approach of Coach Bill Campbell. Bill advised Eric Schmidt, Google, Charlie Batch (Go Steelers), Steve Jobs and many others in Silicon Valley. The Coach was a Pittsburgh product that went from Coaching football at Columbia to a CEO in Silicon Valley to the #1 coach.
My favorite quote from the book is “to care about people is to care about people”.
This paragraph sums up Bill’s approach:
“How did Bill do it? First, he only coached the coachable. Then, if you passed that test, he listened intently, practiced complete candor, believed that his coachees could achieve remarkable things, and was intensely loyal.”
Bill made people better and then helped them make their co-workers better. He coached people and those people learned to coach people. Now that work is dominated by life long learning, we all need great coaches to make us better and make our teams better.
That’s a wrap
If you are interested in coaching, please reach out. It is something I’ve been spending more time coaching others and leveling up my coaching skills.
Let me know what you enjoyed, anything I should be checking out myself and what you’d like to see more or less of.
Christian
