Dusting Ourselves Off...
đĽWelcome to volume 000013!đĽ
Iâm Christian Champ. This is the âŻď¸Middleway Newsletter âŻď¸. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
đ˛ Dust Ourselves Off đ˛
Last Tuesday night at 6 oâclock 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 couldnât 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.
đArticles to ReadđÂ
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 âunless its usefulâ 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 weâve asked clients what problems they are trying to solve, we didnât 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: âCan it also do x?â
We track the list of these questions carefully, and they have heavily influenced our product roadmap. Critically, we arenât just asking customers what they want and building itânot at all. Instead we are combining our distinct understanding of systematic investing strategies and software and laying it alongside our First 10âs deep understanding of their clients to arrive at the most valuable new additions or refinements to the Canvas platform.
Weâve also learned that ease and efficiency of use is criticalâa mindset which bleeds into other non-software work. Hereâs 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 customerâs job. Your customer has an end goal. If theyâre in sales, theyâre trying to sell more. If theyâre in marketing, theyâre trying to market more. If theyâre in financial services, perhaps theyâre trying to lend more. If theyâre in manufacturing, theyâre 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 customerâs 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. Whatâs 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."
Itâs helpful to remember no one wants to adopt your thing...unless itâs extremely useful to help them achieve their end goal. Take the above paragraph and substitute your area of work (software building or otherwise) for âwriting/reading,â and you have a powerful business lessonâone we are trying to follow at OSAM.
The Case for Low Tech Dumb Cities
Copenhagen, too, has opted for a dumb â or, as local planners call it, âa green and blueâ â 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 â 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
đď¸Â Listen / Watch đşÂ
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 potentialÂ
Help people find greatness have to believe people have greatnessÂ
People arenât stupid, lazy and badÂ
Unchallenged beliefs are all not trueÂ
Get beyond rational experience to physical. Note how you feel - irritated happy etc.Â
See how you show up in different situations and try to decode how you respondÂ
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 selfÂ
Confusion can kill you or drive you to greatness. You want confusion to then make sense of why you were confused.Â
Confusion leads us to tell storiesÂ
Bad stupid lazy... BSL narrative. Not helpfulÂ
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)Â
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 childâs 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.Â
But the sidewalk isnât 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.Â
đ Books to Read đÂ
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 didnât say hi, thanks, acknowledge you or look you in the eye. His mom taught him to âtake their heartâ.
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 didnât.
Tigerâs mom said âold man is soft, he forgives people. Not me.â
Jimmy Roberts from ESPN noted there was more F U in Tiger than any other athlete he had ever seen.
â¨Pics and Chartsâ¨
Appreciating Luck from the Behavior Gap
đŁWords of WisdomđŁÂ
Malcom Gladwell - âThe weird thing about people who become successful is that they donât understand that they now have the freedom to let their guard down: you know â itâs fine.â
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?
đThanks for reading.đ
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Let me know if youâve fallen down lately and how youâve gotten up!
Namaste,Â
Christian