⚔️Fighting Judgment⚔️
🔥Welcome to volume #000051!🔥
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.
⚔️Fighting Judgment⚔️
“Why did I say that? Come on, Christian, you play better than this,” echoes through my head.
When I started improvising, I needed to turn off my self-judgment. When you are on stage with another person making it all up, you need to stay present, committed, and listening.
Once that question arises, I trip up because I get lost in admonishing myself. Instead of moving along the performance, I start to self-sabotage by getting stuck in my own head.
IT IS ALL HAPPENING NOW.
I lost the moment because I wanted to beat myself up for my choices. The buddha mindset takes a long time to manifest in the improv arena and remains a work in progress.
Once we trip into judgment, regaining our footing becomes a challenge. This shows up in all our endeavors. When we judge ourselves, we show up worse. When we start judging others, we show up worse and hinder their progression.
Judging is playing Mike Tyson’s punchout against ourselves. When we judge, we light M-80s and hold them while they explode in our hands.
Because of fear, ego, or envy, we hide behind our judgments. When we do this, we put ourselves in a mental prison. We beat ourselves up, hoping for a fake perfect.
When we stumble, we need to shrug it off and keep going.
What we want is less judging and more loving. Loving ourselves and loving those around us.
📓Articles to Read📓
The American Dream as a Service
Antonio Garcia-Martinez interviews Austin Allerd about Lambda school and where does education go from here. The bottom 1,000 or maybe more colleges need to go and how to replace them.
Lambda recently introduced a Fellows’ program that does away with interviews and lands people in jobs.
There's no tech charm school that teaches you how to do all that stuff.
Totally. And I'm sure there's more stuff. When one of our first students got hired at Uber, he showed up with his laptop. They tell him: you're a mobile developer. And he's like, I can't be a mobile developer, I don't have a phone. He didn't have a smartphone. So he called me freaking out: What am I gonna do!? Uber wants to hire me. I don't have a smartphone. I told him: Uber does not care about that, Uber’s gonna have a thousand phones, that's the least of Uber’s worries. They're gonna give you a laptop too.
Then he shows up to work on day one and they tell him: Alright, you know, put in your bank account information here to get direct deposit. He's like, no just cut me a check and I’ll run to the check-cashing store.
The Uber people reached out to me and said: We don’t know if this is going to work. I was like, he's a smart guy, it’s just that he doesn't have a bank account. So now we set up bank accounts for every student that doesn't have a bank account. The best way I think to describe Lambda School is the American-Dream-as-a-service.
A16Z on NFT’s and 1,000 True Fans
A16z breaks down the recent NFT growth and how that plays into Kevin Kelly’s original idea of a 1,000 true fans supporting an artist.
Kelly’s vision was that the internet was the ultimate matchmaker, enabling 21st century patronage. Creators, no matter how seemingly niche, could now discover their true fans, who would in turn demonstrate their enthusiasm through direct financial suppor
NFTs or non-fungible tokens are being sold as anything and everything right now include clips of basketball plays (see NBA Top Shot which has over $200m in sales).
Crypto, and specifically NFTs (non-fungible tokens), can accelerate the trend of creators monetizing directly with their fans. Social platforms will continue to be useful for building audiences (although these too should probably be replaced with superior decentralized alternatives), but creators can increasingly rely on other methods including NFTs and crypto-enabled economies to make money.
NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. The media can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code. NFTs contain highly trustworthy documentation of their history and origin, and can have code attached to do almost anything programmers dream up (one popular feature is code that ensures that the original creator receives royalties from secondary sales). NFTs are secured by the same technology that enabled Bitcoin to be owned by hundreds of millions of people around the world and represent hundreds of billions of dollars of value
Being Good Ancestors for Future Generations
How do we live and leave the Earth as good ancestors would do? It’s not a YOLO play and it involves longer-term planning.
How would your day-to-day expectations and experiences change if we took a longer-term view of everything?
Their target is the tyranny of the now. The politicians who see only as far as the next election. The businesses fixated on their quarterly report. The nations bickering away in international negotiations while the planet burns and species disappear.
Japan’s Future Design movement, drawing on the principle of “seventh-generation decision-making” practised by many Native American communities, takes citizens’ assemblies a leap forward in time. Future Design gathers citizens to discuss and draw up plans for the towns and cities where they live. Typically, half the group participate as residents from the present day, while the other half are given ceremonial robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from 2060.
It turns out that the residents from 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative city plans, from long-term healthcare investments to climate change action. This innovative form of future citizens’ assembly is now being used in major cities like Kyoto and Japan’s ministry of finance, and is starting to be spread worldwide to countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh and Holland.
🎙️ Things to Listen to / Watch 📺
Invest Like the Best interviews Cal Rugby Coach Jack Clark (spotify)
Jack enters his 34th year of coaching and has won 27 National Championships making even Tom Brady jealous.
Key Take-Aways:
The first lens is always team first and individual second, but if you stumble or need help they pick you up
His mantra is grateful for everything and entitled to nothing. This gives you more resilience and you remember how many people made whatever you do possible
High-performance teams get work done right now. It’s not about potential
Sports or business, you are either getting better or worse. Put all your focus on your performance
Can you do the routine stuff under pressure?
You need mental toughness when things aren’t going well. Can you focus on doing the next most important thing?
Non-cognitive grit is who loves it, who has the ability to care about things that are important to them, the people they are doing it with and the entity they’re doing it with
Team and culture are the most important but hard to teach and hard to scale
In sports, if you miss on a player they can only beat you 1-2x a year, but if you put the wrong player on your team they can beat you every day
Was late to focusing on joy, love, and caring, which matter because if someone knows you authentically care about them then you can coach them hard and they respond to it
Fence post your values and celebrate them daily. Needs to be in front of everyone at all times
The Stoa exploring Body and Soul: Giving Birth to an Emergent Wisdom Commons featuring Greg Thomas, Gregg Henriques, Jordan Hall, Zak Stein, and Jaime Wheal
Jamie Wheal’s riff from his new book Recapture the Rapture at the 11:00 mark is highly recommended
The Stoa exploring Body and Soul: An Ecology of Communication featuring Nora Bateson and Diane Musho Hamilton
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Upstream - Mary Oliver
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
10 Networking Tips That Will Make You A Success - Eric Barker
And then there’s curiosity. Actively showing interest in other people is powerful — and kind.
Difficult Conversations - Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Shelia Heen
This tendency to develop unconsciously biased perceptions is very human, and can be dangerous. It calls for a dose of humility about the “rightness” of our story, especially when we have something important at stake.
Barking Up the Wrong Tree - Eric Barker
Shawn Achor’s research at Harvard shows that college grades aren’t any more predictive of subsequent life success than rolling dice. A study of over seven hundred American millionaires showed their average college GPA was 2.9.
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
“Violence,” came the retort, “is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Distrust That Particular Flavor - William Gibson
I wish that I could tell you what it’s about, but I haven’t yet discovered my best likely story, about that. That will come with reviews, audience and bookseller feedback (and booksellers are especially helpful, in that way). Along with however many interviews, these things will serve as a sort of oracle, suggesting to me what it is I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.
Stealing Fire - Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
The late poet and musician Leonard Cohen may have been our greatest contemporary commentator on this theme. In his song “Anthem,” he sings: “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. It’s where the light gets in.”
Moneyball - Michael Lewis
“No matter how successful you are, change is always good. There can never be a status quo. When you have no money you can’t afford long-term solutions, only short-term ones. You have to always be upgrading. Otherwise, you’re fucked.”
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you make stop judging yourself and others, and find more compassion?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Moving on from the snow to some spring this week!
