⚔️Discipline is Freedom⚔️
🔥Welcome to volume #00032!🔥
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.
If you want to receive my readwise favorites from each week, click here and enter in your email. You will then receive a weekly email of any passages that I’ve added to my favorites.
⚔️Discipline is Freedom⚔️
Discipline is Freedom
Every morning I pour myself a coffee. My coffee mug says, "GET AFTER IT" in the middle of the cup. There is also a picture of Jocko Willinik under which appears the word "approved." I use this cup every darn day. It sets a tone.
Wake up, show up, and grow up.
It is time to do work.
Jocko is a Navy Seal turned consultant, author, and podcaster. He wrote a book titled, Discipline is Freedom. We need mantras to keep us on the path and keep us on our game. "Get After It" and "Discipline is Freedom" are two great ones.
It sounds like a paradox at first. Discipline, as a verb, is training to obey rules or a code of behavior (The Middle Way prefers verbs versus nouns). Freedom is the ability to act without restraint as one wants. When we come from a place of discipline, space to create follows. Until we walk the path of discipline, freedom alludes us.
The way we get somewhere is by discipline. That means showing up and putting in the practice. Doing the work. Freedom is the ability to go outside of the confines of what we thought possible and finding flow.
It's that process of learning a new skill. When we stick to it, a new world opens up, and we see the world in a new light. Discipline opens up to play. Freedom brings out the play.
When we want freedom, we need to start with discipline.
We need to find our routines and grind it out. We need to build the foundation and then unleash ourselves.
📓Articles to Read📓
The science of deliberate practice by Anne-Laure Le Cuniff
Deliberate practice requires three specific skills:
Measurement. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Deliberate practice requires to objectively track and measure your progress. You do not need complicated tools: a simple note-taking app or a spreadsheet can do the job.
Metacognition. Simply measuring your progress is not enough; it’s important to make space for self-reflection. Journaling can be a powerful metacognitive tool to understand and improve one’s performance.
Mentoring. Finally, having a coach or a teacher can vastly improve the impact of deliberate practice. The mentorship often consists in assisting with both the measurement and the metacognitive aspect of deliberate practice. For instance, an expert could keep track of your progress while you are practicing, and recommend improvements before you give the activity another go.
Taken together, measurement, metacognition, and mentoring form the basis of deliberate practice. Used consistently, they can help anyone learn anything better and faster.
Chip Conley offers a white paper on Embracing Life Long Learning.
How to create it, cultivate and what we are trying to accomplish with it. The focus is for folks in mid-life, which unfortunately I relate to way too much.
Life long learning is a key part of the Middle Way.
“Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young generations to a knowledge of a world and of life? No, there are none. [...] that is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death, and eternity?”
Carl Jung’s quote (1933, p. 108) highlights our need for a new kind of educational institution, an institution that allows mid-lifers to revisit their truths and ideals, and reflect on what it means to live a long life - which is what we will refer to as “long life learning.” As such, midlife education should not only focus on acquisition of knowledge, but it needs to be learner-centric in supporting the cultivation of wisdom and well-being.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Morgan Housel on the North Star Podcast talking about writing on the internet (Spotify)
The Knowledge Project with Lisa Feldman on Balance and the Brain (Spotify)
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Lose Well by Chris Gethard (goodreads)
I love books about comedians, actors and improvisers and the random roads they traveled. This one is no different with lots of twists and turns for Chris but a strong ethos of the journey is the thing.
Chris offers a super enjoyable read on how to keep going, get after it and deal with the loses that show up whenever we chase things.
TLDR: Most things involve a lot of failure and lose, so get good at that, keep going and good things will happen.
Half in and half out isn't the answer. Shit or get off the pot. Go for and do it 100 when you know you want to do it.
You can do a bunch of crappier jobs to build reps, build structure, build strategies and find a way through
Failure is the key to success. The road of your dreams is paved with asphalt that's composed of a combination of your fear, shame, desperation and misery.
The art of success is the art of survival.
The most underestimated source of power is losing. The goal isn't to avoid losing, but learning to lose well. So get good at losing.
You want to go out there and go for it. Failure is your friend. The worst place to be s in the sad middle, where you haven't failed or succeeded. When you did nothing to embarrass yourself, but you didn't do anything to distinguish yourself either. That's the difference between playing to win and playing not to lose. You want success. You want glory. You want to get over the hump and achieve what you set out to do. Knowing failure is the only true way to success. Lose. Lose proudly. Lose often. Lose well.
Life is order. You are the chaos. When you start to hear the routines, you need to shake it up or a piece of you is going to break.
When your decisions are guided by fear, complacency and insecurity, you need to disrupt things. You need to disrupt your routine.
Everyone struggles. Everyone fights through something.
WHY THIS? WHY HERE? WHY NOW? Are his three key questions for going after something. They are simple and to the point to keep him going after his goal.
All we get to do is put in the work. Success is about scraping it out
Only hard work brings stuff into existence. Falling in love with the melodrama of your own journey will get in the way of putting your head down and getting it done.
Bitterness is the enemy...99percent of the time the shit talkers don't work as hard as the shit talked
Gut checks are an important part of your routine --- install them
Find maniacs and get them involved in your projects
💣Words of Wisdom💣
To reach mastery requires some toughness and a constant connection to reality. As an apprentice, it can be hard for us to challenge ourselves on our own in the proper way, and to get a clear sense of our own weaknesses. The times that we live in make this even harder. Developing discipline through challenging situations and perhaps suffering along the way are no longer values that are promoted in our culture. People are increasingly reluctant to tell each other the truth about themselves—their weaknesses, their inadequacies, flaws in their work.
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others.
When, as the researchers put it, “life’s fragility is primed,” people’s goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It’s perspective, not age, that matters most.
My friend, the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, says, “To live well is to see wisely and to see wisely is to tell stories.” I’ll go further; telling stories helps us live well. Telling the stories of our lives, telling the stories of the lives around us, helps us make sense of the world and, in the end, be wise.
I laugh at my ten-year pilgrimage— Wilted robe, tattered hat, knocking at Zen gates. In reality, the Buddha’s Law is simple: Eat your rice, drink your tea, wear your clothes.
The Book of Five Rings - Miyamoto Musashi
Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand. You must bear this in mind.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
Where do you need to show more discipline to unlock some freedom?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
