🔥Welcome to volume #00066!🔥
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 enjoy the newsletter please share it with your friends.
👐Embracing Our Neurodiversity👐
"Christian, can we chat after class," asked my Spanish professor as I entered the classroom.
The question caught me off guard and left me wondering why she wanted to talk.
After class, she picked up her question shotgun and blasted me.
"Christian, are you dyslexic?"
The shells exploded in my chest as I've always wondered if this was the case. Give me a phone number, and I'll remember it, but often flip the last two digits. Oh yeah, and my spelling is atrocious. My spelling in Spanish led to the question about dyslexia.
I signed up at the Learning Center to get tested. My excitement level for the test came in at zero. Finding out our deficiencies never inspires us, though we do get to learn to overcome them.
I forgot about the positives of learning about myself and my operating system. In retrospect, this sounds obvious.
At the time, it felt like, getting an x-ray for damages.
Test day came and went. I patiently waited for the results. Then bam... Positive! The trick was what I tested positive for.
ADHD...
Now ADHD made sense. My ability to get hype hype hyper was off the charts. The HD came from the Reb Bull in my veins. The AD shows up in my ability to start a million projects without worrying about finishing one. I constantly play starting pitcher but need a closer to help finish the game. I do strategy, but not always final implementation.
It's not all dirty dishes. Plenty of projects get the rabbit hole treatment from multiyear to lifelong periods. The AD shows up when I need to listen to someone talk me through an activity. I need to do it while you show me, or it leads to nowhere. Learning for me takes reps, practice, and getting my hands dirty, not listening and watching.
The test results included a booby prize of extra time to take tests and the option to take tests by myself. This prize did nothing for me, as I'm one of the first to walk out of the classroom on test days.
The weirdest part was a test telling me I had “ADHD”. I never dwelled on this point until hearing people talking about having ADHD during an online course this spring. After I took the test, I forgot all about the ADHD prognosis*.
We all learn and operate differently, which sheds light on how we need to approach things. We get to play the hand we are dealt, but we get to play the game in a way that advantages us. We can set up guard rails and use forcing functions to start, continue, or complete projects.
Each one of us contains a unique code to learn and grow. The better we understand that, the easier it is to hit our targets. Instead of being concerned about a label or some letters from a test, we can use it to find our pathway to success.
Neurodiversity is a superpower, not a limitation. We only need the proper set and setting for our unique code.
*Not everyone is lucky enough to just ignore this prognosis.
♟️Ways to Learn ♟️
How I Learn with My Operating System
Grinding Everyday —> Do the things we are focused on leveling up every single day or on specific days throughout the week. This keeps us focused and on the path. It makes it automatic vs. causing us to think about what to do next (or maybe not do next).
Listing Out 3 Most Important Tasks —> Stay tight and focused on the three most important tasks for each day. Get them done!
Finding Our Flow —> Follow the flow. Find the activities, environments, times of day, and rituals that unlock our flow states. When in flow we work as our best selves.
Pumping Our Breaks, Breaks, Breaks —> Given the above, remembering to take breaks along with focusing on rest and recovery. (Flow states need focus, doing the thing at a level just outside of our comfort zone and then resting/recovering to do it again). Stress + Rest = Growth
Do the Reps, Reps, Reps —> We learn by doing it. Make doing the thing a key part of our path.
Find Our People —> Coaches, Experts, Friends, and Co-Conspirators both online, offline, at the office, and at the gym (or wherever we train) help bring out the best in us and guide us. Find the people that bring out the best in us and unlock our greatness. We all know when we unlock levels for other people and how amazing it is when people unlock levels for us. Life is a single-player game wrapped into a multi-player game. We are better with others. Find them and bring them along. Find people like us.
Harness the Power of Beliefs and Stories —> We surround ourselves with the stories and beliefs that help us become who we want to become. We need to avoid the stories and beliefs that hold us back. Our words matter!
Refining Yo’ Self —> Keep getting to know ourselves better and appreciate that we change over time. Keep experimenting and playing. Track what works and discard what doesn’t.
📓Things to Think About📓
Why is the English Spelling System So Weird and Inconsistent by Arika Okrent
Maybe this is a better answer for my poor spelling, maybe.
The history of the English language is interesting and random. Technology eats everything always.
The answer to the weirdness of English has to do with the timing of technology. The rise of printing caught English at a moment when the norms linking spoken and written language were up for grabs, and so could be hijacked by diverse forces and imperatives that didn’t coordinate with each other, or cohere, or even have any distinct goals at all. If the printing press has arrived earlier in the life of English, or later, after some of the upheaval had settled, things might have ended up differently.
The business reason for pushing out product helped shape the words and spellings we use today.
Moveable type was a wonderful invention: once the type had been set, you could print off as many copies as you wanted. But setting the letters, or pieces of type, into lines, and then pages, was intense, specialised labour. You had to spend years learning the trade. For his new press, Caxton brought typesetters back with him from the Continent, and some didn’t even speak English all that well. They set type working from manuscripts that already had quite a bit of variation, and the overriding priority was getting them set quickly.
Some standards did spread and crystallise over time, as more books were printed and literacy rates climbed. The printing profession played a key role in these emergent norms. Printing houses developed habits for spelling frequent words, often based on what made setting type more efficient. In a manuscript, hadde might be replaced with had; thankefull with thankful. When it came to spelling, the primary objective wasn’t to faithfully represent the author’s spelling, nor to uphold some standard idea of ‘correct’ English – it was to produce texts that people could read and, more importantly, that they would buy. Habits and tricks became standards, as typesetters learned their trade by apprenticing to other typesetters. They then often moved around as journeymen workers, which entailed dispersing their own habits or picking up those of the printing houses they worked in.
The End of the Native Tongues Era by Julian Kimble
This piece from The Ringer chronicles the 1996 releases from De La Soul and a Tribe Called Quest, which marked an end of an era for hip-hop.
It’s a reminder that even when things are going well, they can change quickly. The seeds of the movement continued on but in vastly different forms.
“In that heaviness is maturity. In that heaviness is spirituality, complete life change,” Muhammad says. “You go from this world of partying, while taking this responsibility of being true to the culture and wanting to put good into the music. Wanting to unite people and wanting to talk about the challenges people from our community are facing. Life is changing and you’re connecting on a religious plane that doesn’t wholly align with all of the actions that take place when you’re not. Then, you’re doing that while trying to navigate the difficult changes happening within relationships that really matter to you.”
How to Zoom better!
Build connections, build connections and build connections. The morning zoom and using mute when not talking is gold, gold, and gold. Seeing someone go off mute when they went to speak always feels like a blessing.
📺Things to Watch 📺
John Verveake on Serious Play
This one hits home on many levels. When I was younger, I remember playing video games and going to the same techniques and strategies every single time to beat a game. I went to the 2000 EA Sports NCAA College Football video game championship in Las Vegas using that strategy and I lost. I needed more resilience and the ability to adjust.
The challenge becomes when we get locked into approaching life in the same manner. When lock into the idea of work and forget about play (this newsletter is serious play!). When we approach life with serious play, we discover new possibilities and potentials.
We need a process of evolving our serious play.
Serious Play
Community enables this and allows us to play with identities
Helps us evolve new solutions and varieties of solutions
Keeps us going
Allows us to experiment, grow and change
Five Ways to Ask Better Questions by Anne-Larue Le Cunff
Questions unlock the best in us and what we are trying to do. Anne-Larue walks us through some ways to ask better questions.
The List that she dives into in detail in the video:
Know Your Purpose
Start by Listening
Interrupt Wisely
Open-Ended Questions
Build a Hierarchy - General Question to Specific and Use Answers to Frame the Follow-Ups
Steeler great Troy Polamalu’s Hall of Fame speech mimicked his play on the field
His inspiration came from Beethoven and Dickens work ethics to exceed what people believe is possible and curate a life of possibilities
His culture’s foundation and a necessity for survival is discipline, humility, and respect - American Samoan Culture
Coach Cower (born and raised in Pittsburgh, 15mins ) taught the team to embrace misery and practice in any weather and enjoy it
Coach Cower taught them to embrace the “Yinzer Spirit” of hard work, humility, toughness, and loyalty to accurately represent the culture of Pittsburgh (yes this speaks to me as a born and raised Burgher)
Steeler culture is selflessness, putting others before yourself, protecting your brother even from themselves, and giving support even at your own expense. It is above money, business, and winning. You look to honor the greats that came before you
The Steeler Way is at its core based on the success of a family including humility, passion, resilience, and service
My buddy Andrew and I break the speech down on this racket.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Anne Lamott
“Haters want us to hate them, because hate is incapacitating. When we hate, we can’t operate from our real selves, which is our strength. Now that I think of it, this is such a great reason to give up our hate—as revenge, to deprive the haters of what they want."
Venkatesh Rao
"A successful joke suggests that other things may be jokes. Living life as a joke aggressively imposes meaning on the meaningless, instead of complaining that no meaning can be found."
Muhammad Ali
“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.”
Robert Anton Wilson
“I think cheerfulness is one of the most important and least appreciated virtues in the world. Anybody can bring the room down by sitting around bitching and griping, but it takes real creativity to bring the whole room up.”
Peak Performance - Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness
"When it comes to increasing motivation, a wide body of research suggests doing something for others is far more effective than traditional incentives like money or reputation."
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How do you optimize for your operating system? Are there any changes you need to undertake to better align your unique code with your desired outcomes?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Practicing a lot and getting in some serious play, but waiting for Isaac (who is in the picture) to pass me up quickly once he jumps on a board.
👐Embracing Our Neurodiversity👐