Dusting Ourselves Off...
🔥Welcome to volume 000013!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middleway Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
🚲 Dust Ourselves Off 🚲
Last Tuesday night at 6 o’clock I found myself on the ground while my bike was upside down.
My helmet was lit up. My bike's front and rear lights were on. You couldn’t miss me! Then the door from the black Beemer SUV made contact with my handle bar.
My breaks screeching.
My heart racing.
My bike airbone, upside down and me laid out on the concrete.
It felt like a lot happened, but other than some scratches, nothing happened. As far as crashes go, it was a perfect ten. Everything still worked! The Beemer guy apologized. I biked on home. I'm sure he didn't mean to hit me.
Last week was one of those weeks. I got hit by a couple doors that I wasn't expecting. Most of the time people don't mean to jam us. They probably didn't even look, just like the Beemer guy.
We can get angry, we can quit or we can dust ourselves off and try again.
📓Articles to Read📓
Putting time in perspective along with how quickly it passes.
The entire read is good, but the part on building software (what is the job to do for the client) and that no one wants to adopt your things “unless its useful” is the gold.
He ends with acts of kindness, which is one of key questions we can all ask ourselves. Who have you been kind to? Who are you thankful and grateful for?
Which reminds me to thank JR for sending this link over to me and OSAM for their great podcasts and letters!
Lessons from Building Software
I think everyone would benefit from building client facing software. Doing so helps you understand your clients in the deepest way possible. In the past, when we’ve asked clients what problems they are trying to solve, we didn’t get actionable answers. In sharp contrast, when we demo a flexible software chassis like Canvas to prospects, they project their real problems onto the software in the form of the question: “Can it also do x?”
We track the list of these questions carefully, and they have heavily influenced our product roadmap. Critically, we aren’t just asking customers what they want and building it—not at all. Instead we are combining our distinct understanding of systematic investing strategies and software and laying it alongside our First 10’s deep understanding of their clients to arrive at the most valuable new additions or refinements to the Canvas platform.
We’ve also learned that ease and efficiency of use is critical—a mindset which bleeds into other non-software work. Here’s Chetan describing how a business user thinks about whether to adopt a new software system:
"This [new software] is yet another system that your prospective client has to interact with. Ultimately, what you deliver from your software is not actually your customer’s job. Your customer has an end goal. If they’re in sales, they’re trying to sell more. If they’re in marketing, they’re trying to market more. If they’re in financial services, perhaps they’re trying to lend more. If they’re in manufacturing, they’re trying to manufacture more. There is some end goal that your customer is trying to achieve and becoming proficient in your software system is *not*the end goal of your customer, so aligning proficiency of your software solution to your customer’s end goal is critical."
This makes me think of one of my favorite books, by Steven Pressfield called Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t. As Pressfield writes,
"Nobody wants to read your sh*t. What’s the answer? 1) Streamline your message. Focus it and pare it down to its simplest, clearest, easiest-to-understand form. When you understand that nobody wants to read your sh*t, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated. You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction. The reader donates his time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities. In return, you the writer must give him something worthy of his gift to you."
It’s helpful to remember no one wants to adopt your thing...unless it’s extremely useful to help them achieve their end goal. Take the above paragraph and substitute your area of work (software building or otherwise) for “writing/reading,” and you have a powerful business lesson—one we are trying to follow at OSAM.
The Case for Low Tech Dumb Cities
Copenhagen, too, has opted for a dumb – or, as local planners call it, “a green and blue” – solution to their increasing flood risks: namely, a series of parks that can become lakes during storms. The city estimated they would cost a third less than building levees and new sewers, and come with the added ecological benefits of rewilding. An abandoned military site was cleaned up in 2010 and rewilded into a nature reserve and common for grazing animals, the Amager Nature Centre – a vast park with not only happy people meandering and cycling around but insects, protected amphibians, rare birds and deer.
You cannot predict the course of a culture war by trying to understand it as a military conflict. You can only predict it by trying to understand it as the deliberate perpetuation of a culture of conflict by those with an interest in keeping it alive.
Unfortunately, unlike the worlds of art and sport, where beefing is traditionally part of the game, and central to the production of culture that enriches the life of the spectator, the Internet of Beefs produces neither great works of art, nor enthralling spectacles. It is beefing for the sake of bee
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Embracing Confusion with Jeff Hunter on The Knowledge Project
Managing is harder than hiring
We see the world incorrectly and need to be aware of that
Confusion is a gift. We need to know where our mental models might be flawed.
Create a system and find people that flourish in that system
Beliefs fall down for unlocking potential
Help people find greatness have to believe people have greatness
People aren’t stupid, lazy and bad
Unchallenged beliefs are all not true
Get beyond rational experience to physical. Note how you feel - irritated happy etc.
See how you show up in different situations and try to decode how you respond
Operate at the level of design
Goal has to be to get better. Put yourself in situations to get better. Unleash greatness
Experiment when you find the contexts that help you be your best self
Confusion can kill you or drive you to greatness. You want confusion to then make sense of why you were confused.
Confusion leads us to tell stories
Bad stupid lazy... BSL narrative. Not helpful
Humans doing things better than BSL. Saying things sucks or this person sucks
Own your own experience. Ask questions and try to understand others (Ladder of inference) or if someone says you do this (unpack it and attempt to understand it)
Micheal Pollan with Jason Silva on Flow Sessions
Awe to change our view of life. Expands what is possible. Makes you small.
Try to find the child’s mind and open windows in our lives that have been closed. Shake up the snow globe.
Habits help us get stuff done but can also cover pain and assuage wounds. Habits are useful but dull pain. Need to examine our habits and shake them up at times.
Bertrand Russel expand story of your self to over come fear of death. Self expansion. Do more stuff. Feel more beauty and awe. Expand your world.
But the sidewalk isn’t the only place where LA has a shade problem. The public parks also provide very little refuge from the hot sun. Pershing Square, for example, used to be full of shade trees. But after a new underground parking structure destroyed the root system, the thick, dense tree canopy was replaced.
📚 Books to Read 📚
This is a book on greatness and tragedy. Tiger might be the most dominate athlete we will ever see but the greatness included a lot of pain.
His motto the mind is a power thing was honed by doing visualization and meditation as a youth. Along with his dad putting him through a mind boot camp (the first part is recommended, the second part not so much).
He viewed himself as a cold blooded assassin. He didn’t say hi, thanks, acknowledge you or look you in the eye. His mom taught him to “take their heart”.
He had a huge imagination and would try anything. If you told him something is impossible, it would drive him to prove you wrong.
His practice regiment was insane and one of the best ever.
He changed his swing 5x in his career! Four of those changes took place when we was at the top, but he still wanted to get better. One time was due to health issues.
Beyond cheating on his wife, he most likely used steriods and HGH post his ACL surgery (his doc got caught supplying other folks) along with PRP injections.
He broke the rules on the course a couple times too and got caught on video, but was adamant he didn’t.
Tiger’s mom said “old man is soft, he forgives people. Not me.”
Jimmy Roberts from ESPN noted there was more F U in Tiger than any other athlete he had ever seen.
✨Pics and Charts✨
Appreciating Luck from the Behavior Gap
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Malcom Gladwell - “The weird thing about people who become successful is that they don’t understand that they now have the freedom to let their guard down: you know – it’s fine.”
One of the most startling challenges I will put to a client comes from my bastardization of a Zen aphorism: This being so, so what? Things being as they are, what will you do about it?
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Let me know if you’ve fallen down lately and how you’ve gotten up!
Namaste,
Christian
