📬Delivering Our Message: More Magic and Less Poop 📬
🔥Welcome to volume #0050!🔥
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.
📬Delivering Our Messages: Less Poop and More Magic 📬
Did they follow me?
Did I convey that clearly and concisely?
Did I use the right metaphors and stories?
I think back on my first couple of investor meetings early in my career, and it makes me belch. Using a shotgunning of information approach to "prove" my point resonated perhaps with the deep investor types. Everyone else likely found themselves confused. Leaving someone feeling like we knew a lot hits the target but leaves us far from a bulls-eye.
If our presentation feels like an Adderall infused voice vomit, we did it wrong. Machine gunning a message is creating noise not signal. Information overload fails as a strategy.
Simple, concise, and relatable takes the trophy.
Communicating well is magic. Communicating poorly is dog poop on our shoes. We know something happened, but it's a little off. We want to scrap it away when it ends.
When it works, we steer less and float more when we communicate. It flows.
We hit the high notes, and we let them sing versus playing more. We pause and let the power of those notes ring.
We need to know the tune before we start playing. Preparation is always a must. It’s insulting if we don’t prepare. We invite the listener in on the game by keeping it tight. If they ask for an encore, then we jam deeper and flow on.
Communication is a dance, and losing our dance partner is selfish. That same dance plays out when we send an email, talk to our friends, or interact with family.
If our message misses, then we failed. If we lose the receiver, then the connection breaks.
We want more magic and less feeling of poop on the sneakers when we communicate.
📓Articles to Read📓
Ryan offers an interesting list of things to make our lives better. My favorites are below.
12. Get up when you fall/fail.
18. Every situation has two handles—choose to grab the “smooth handle.”
28. Do the verb, rather than being the noun.
30. The present is enough.
39. When evaluating an opportunity, ask yourself: What will teach me the most?
48. Cut toxic people out of your life—life is too short.
56. Always stay a student.
67. A successful marriage is worth more than a successful career.
85. Try to see opportunities where others see obstacles.
91. Think progress, not perfection.
96. Live an interesting life.
Justin Mikolay, a former speechwriter for Jim Mattis, offers up some tips to write better and compress more. These ideas fit in nicely with delivering our messages.
Helping others write this way taught me how to help myself write. The challenge is to inhabit my own brain and channel myself, to look at the ceiling and ask, “What am I trying to say?”
I remind myself that reading, thinking, and writing aren’t separate acts. They’re three parts of one act (the act of creation) and three processes within a larger creative process:
Reading is filling myself with ideas. It’s a process of “knowing again” what someone else has already learned and passed along.
Thinking is clarifying and ordering ideas. It’s a process of expressing ideas in deliberate sequence.
Writing is reflecting ideas back to myself in written form. It’s a process of knowing … so others may know again (including my future self!).
🎙️ Things to Listen to / Watch 📺
Tyler Cowen interviews scientist Patricia Fara (Transcript / Spotify)
Issac Newton’s crazy life
The history of scientific discoveries including pre-European discoveries
Scientific progress
The large role of women in science throughout history
Patricia’s history in science and exploring the history of science
COWEN: In one of your interviews, you said the following. This is a quotation: “For example, when I first finished reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch in my early 20s, I resolved to live by her concluding insight that even unhistoric acts, small ones that seemed within my grasp, could have cumulative beneficial effects.” How has that decision shaped your life?
FARA: Oh, I still try to abide by that. For example, I was what’s called the senior tutor of a college, which is like a dean in America, I believe. I was responsible for the pastoral well-being and the educational welfare of about 700 students — something like that — each year.
The aspect of that work that gave me the most pleasure and most gratification was when a student was in deep distress for some reason or another, and I managed to help that individual student and help them regain their life and get back to work and become a happy student again.
I think that’s the sort of thing that George Eliot was talking about — that I had hope that I had a big influence on individual lives. That was the most rewarding aspect of my career.
The Futures Thinkers Podcast (Euvie Ivanova and Mike Gilliland) featuring Michael Meade (Spotify)
No rite of passage leads to a diminished culture
Rites of passage include two things: 1. awakening you to your calling and 2. indentifying the wounds you are carrying
Rites of passage awaken people to themselves and awaken to their cutlure
Culture’s without these don’t know the trama of its participants
We need to surrender to something bigger than us and let go to the process. We need someone else to run the heat so we don’t burn ourselves. We can’t do it ourselves because we won’t turn the heat up enough
The people that lead us through this process become our mentors
MindRolling Podcast (Ragu Marcus) featuring Anne Lamott (Spotify)
Anne is one of my favorite authors and her book Bird by Bird is an inspirational tome on how to be a writer and how to live our lives. It’s just like building house, brick by brick.
Laughter is carbonated holiness. When we laugh, we are halfway home, especially when we laugh at our own BS
Dusk to Dawn… The sun always comes up (Anne’s new book is called Dusk to Dawn)
When you have enough, you help others
Awarness, Acceptance, Action
We lighten up when we get ride of stories that weigh us down
In your 40s do the work of listening and figure out what you are meant to do in life
We need to go out and try new things. Don’t stay small.
Fear, grief and anger is what we run away from
Heaven is a new pair of glasses. Changing how we see the world or a bad moment with our new glasses
Grace is spiritual WD40
Marc Koenig offers 100 fantastic Roam Research Tips
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
The Mind Parasites by Colin Wilson (Goodreads)
What if your mind gets infected by parasites. We’ve clearly seen some terrible ideas hijack people’s minds with big effects on culture and the actions society takes.
We share minds with each other and these minds get molded and changed from ideas, people, culture, the internet, books and podcasts.
Like Colin writes, our minds are a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.
“Human intelligence is a function of man’s evolutionary urge; the scientist and the philosopher hunger for truth because they are tired of being merely human.”
“One of man's deepest habits is keeping alert for dangers and difficulties, refusing to allow himself to explore his own mind because he daren't take his eyes off the world around him.”
“A tired man is already in the grip of death and insanity ... A sane man is a man who is fully awake. As he grows tired, he loses his ability to rise above dreams and delusions, and life becomes steadily more chaotic.”
“Mind is not really 'inside' us in the same sense that our intestines are. Our individuality is a kind of eddy in the sea of mind, a reflection of the total identity of the universal humanity.”
“With the use of a map, I could walk from Paris to Calcutta; without a map, I might find myself in Odessa. Well, if we had a similar 'map' of the human mind, a man could explore all the territory that lies between death and mystical vision, between catatonia and genius.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Antifragile- Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility.
Do the Work - Steven Pressfield
Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle, and end. Fill in the gaps; then fill in the gaps between the gaps.
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
Love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
The Lathe of Heaven - Ursula K. Le Guin
Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.
Exit West - Mohsin Hamid
Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you make sure your messages get delivered?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Trying to deliver a message during Zoom times.
