Creating Motion...
🔥Welcome to volume 005!🔥
🛹 Ramps and Mountains 🚵♂️
We’ve all learned Newton’s first law of motion, objects in motion stay in motion and objects at rest stay at rest. This weekend I took the little man to multiple skate parks to increase his prowess on his balance bike. He quickly picked up on the idea that movement and motion made it easier to keep going.
This reminded me of down hill mountain biking with my brother-in-laws at Chipnque Park in Monterrey, Mexico. Downhill mountain biking is all about speed and looking for what’s next. The faster you go the easier it is. Slowing down or stopping is the enemy of easy. Stopping is failing and falling (I broke a finger while we were riding playing the stopping game). It's all about movement.
The skate park plays the same way. There is an added bonus that you can level up faster by using the ramps and the mountains.
What do you need to start moving on? What ramps or mountains can you use to help you get that initial momentum?
📚 Articles 📚
Seth Godin is thinking about data like our mountains and ramps… “Forward motion is the best way to make things better.”
#3 DUMB Process + SMART Goals = Best
Middleway reader and super PT / Trainer, Bill Hartman, on why process (DUMB - Daily, Unemotional, Managed, Behaviors) beats SMART goals
#2 Airpods as an Alternate Reality Devices
“AirPods foster a different approach to detachment: Rather than mute the surrounding world altogether, they visually signal the wearer’s choice to perpetually relegate the immediate environment to the background.
#4 Middle Age and the Art of Self-Renewal by Maria Popova
“People wish to be settled; only as far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them.”
🎙️ Listen To 🎙️
Future Thinkers with Jamie Wheal - Sense-Making in Chaos
What is the operating system that we are running?
What are your scared cows? Our cognitive basis? Which cultural stories do you tell yourself? What are you holding on to? What are your narratives?
How can you handle the death of your sacred cows?
Be joyful though you’ve considered all the facts!
We need Samurai
Me generations all that is left. Service is the next level of Maslow
Boomers and millennials are the ME generations
Self realization, community and connection is the hope
The ability for us to accurately diagnose and act on what is happening in the world is constrained by three things: our capacity to understand complexity, our cognitive biases, and our ability to digest grief. - Jamie Wheal
Crazy Wisdom with Jim O’Shaughnessey - How do you talk about the unnamed Tao?
Non dualism - not “me” and “the” but “WE”. We are a sentient part of a sentient universe
Born w/ prepackaged systems/software aka belief systems and most people are unaware of that
What if you believe all your beliefs are wrong? All models wrong and some useful
Jim tells stories to investors about how you need to not pay attention to stories
We are all going to die. Most myths from that. Fear based myths.
Attachment to material items hobble you
We do have agency
Need knowledge + action. Either alone doesn’t work.
Envisions your paths. Manifestation
People don’t like nonlinear. Want narratives. Life is not that
Interactive universe. We get what we see and we determine how we respond
World is tragedy for those who feel and comedy for those who think
📖 Quotes 🔥
The Obstacle Is the Way - Ryan Holiday
Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he’d describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms—roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation.
Invisible Cities - Italo Calvino
Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.
The Rise of Superman - Steven Kotler
“You want to know how I did something like jump the Great Wall on a fractured ankle,” he says. “I can’t really answer that. All I can tell you is what I already told you: When I’m pushing the edge, skating beyond my abilities, it’s always a meditation in the zone.” This, then, is our answer. This is our mystery: a rare and radical state of consciousness where the impossible becomes possible.
In Search of the Miraculous - P. D. Ouspensky
It is possible to stop being a machine, but for that it is necessary first of all to know the machine. A machine, a real machine, does not know itself and cannot know itself. When a machine knows itself it is then no longer a machine, at least, not such a machine as it was before. It already begins to be responsible for its actions."
Joseph Campbell
“What will they think of me?” —must be put aside for bliss.
Wishing you all many peak experiences!
Thanks for reading. Please forward to anyone that you think will enjoy the newsletter.
Any thoughts or comments, reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
