🎯Finding the Helpers and Doing the Work 🎯
🔥Welcome to volume 000024!🔥
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.
🎯Finding the Helpers and Doing the Work 🎯
How do the connections we make end up radically changing our lives? How do we find the helpers to push us to do the right work at the right time?
Recently, my wife and I drove to Indianapolis to visit IFAST (Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training). I don’t like driving and taking a vacation day for a 7 hour round trip excursion, isn’t relaxing. This journey started over ten years ago. I wanted to get faster and jump higher while playing beach volleyball.
What do we do when we want to do something better? We reach out to coaches and folks who take us to the next level.
Enter Bill Hartman, a physical therapist, strength coach and author. His book, All Gain and No Pain, is highly recommended.
Thanks to the internet, I followed Bill Hartman and Mike Robertson. Two gentlemen at the forefront of prehab, rehab and improving one’s mobility. When I saw that they were opening a new facility in Indianapolis, I shot them an email to get some training programs. My main concern focused on playing better beach volleyball. Their main concern was my extensive injury history (knees, back, shoulders, ankles).
That first trip to visit, I cajoled my girlfriend, now wife, to go with me. Little did we know that Bill would change how we both trained, looked and moved. Lorena got sucked into an assessment the next trip down and IFAST ended up with two lifelong clients.
My first assessment showed a guy that had strength and power but a lot of limitations. Glutes, thoracic spine, hips and ankles all needed some love. My incorrect movement patterns led Bill to tell me to shut down beach volleyball until I moved better. This included a monthly trip to IFAST to adjust my program and show me how to do each movement. It meant taking some copious notes to understand the keys and cues for each movement. Lorena made almost every single trip with me.
The smart work got done thanks to Bill’s guidance. The trips to IFAST went from monthly to quarterly to on an as needed basis. Had that email not gone out in 2009, my volleyball career would have ended sooner. I wouldn’t be doing capoeira, skateboarding, practicing Tai Chi daily and moving iron 3-4x a week.
Doing the right work lets us stay on our path. Finding people to help us can radically change our game. We then get to pay it forward and help others find their footing. We get to introduce them to our helpers and to teach them what we know.
📓Articles to Read📓
Vaughn Tang on Planning for Risk vs. Planning for Uncertainty
Thinking of the future as risky—having a risk mindset—means planning for specific futures that are already imagined, and for which probabilities are already known, then taking action based on those assumptions. In contrast, having the uncertainty mindset means planning for the assumption that futures cannot be completely imagined in advance, and acting based on those assumptions.
The uncertainty mindset leads organizations to act in ways that allow them to carry on as normal when the future turns out to be uncertain. And being ready for the unexpected is likely to be really valuable right now.
Eric Barker on 4 Rituals to Keep Us Happy (Pandemic Edition)
Gratitude, Savouring, Protect our Health and Protect our Relationships
If gratitude is reflecting on the good things in life, savoring is appreciating those good things in the moment.
Now that the Earth is having an anaphylactic reaction to mankind and we’ve all been on a carousel of nightmarish deprivation, what are we going to deliberately pause and enjoy because we can’t take it for granted anymore?
Again, it’s about attention. We often think that it’s the world that makes us happy but it’s really how we respond to the world.
Wendell Berry reminds himself and us: How to be a Poet
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
Paper on Hedging - “We Might be Wrong, But We Don’t Think Hedging Protects your Reputation”
We gain much of our knowledge from other people. Because people are fallible—they lie, mislead, and are mistaken—it seems essential to monitor their claims and their reliability as sources of information. An intuitive way to do this is to draw on our expectations about claims and sources: to perform expectation-based updating (Hahn, Merdes, & von Sydow, 2018). But this updating can have damaging consequences, leading us into a kind of confirmation bias. An alternative is to keep track of outcomes and record whether a claim proves true or false: to perform outcome-based updating (Hahn et al., 2018). This form of updating does not have the negative repercussions on belief accuracy. But both forms of updating might undermine the trust and cooperation assumed to be necessary for successful communication. We explore a potential boundary condition on these types of updating. We investigate whether speakers can protect their reputation when they make claims with low prior probability, with and without knowledge of the final outcome. We explore suggestions from McCready (2015) that speakers can protect themselves by hedging with evidential language: in particular with weaker propositional attitudes (“I suspect that . . .”) and so-called double hedges (“I might be wrong, but I think . . .”). We find that both forms of updating are robust to hedging with this evidential language and find no clear evidence for a protective effect. We discuss extra ingredients that may allow successful hedging. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)
I think about this when I hear people (especially management teams) say honestly, candidly and kind of . Its similar but different than what the study looked at.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan (Goodreads)
Christopher Ryan looks at “progress” and the stories we tell ourselves. It’s the good and the bad of the now vs. the past.
The myths of our origin stories, the myths of the savages of the past and questioning when progress is good and when it isn’t.
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Here is Bill Hartman riffing on making changes stick for clients .
Song “Steal the Culture” by Akira the Don and John Verveake
Corey Allen talks with James Nestor about his book Breath (Spotify)
Future Thinkers podcast with Bonnitta Roy - How to Thrive in a Time of Turmoil (Spotify)
North Star Podcast with David Perell and Will Mannon on their course Write of Passage (Spotify)
This one is most interesting to me as I was a beta tester that offered feedback when David shot the videos for the initial class. Then I took part in Cohort 1 which helped birth this newsletter.
I’m now retaking it and it is awesome to see how they’ve iterated and made it better. I’m back on the saddle because while I’ve created a daily writing habit, I’ve failed to publish any long form pieces.
Just like the class, David’s vision and thoughts around the class have evolved nicely. File under it’s amazing what you can do in a year and change if you wake up every day, do the work and aim to get better. Another example of the power of compounding.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
“What if we lived our lives forgetting the destination we’re aiming for,” I asked. “What if we woke each day and just wondered what will happen today?”
To Sell Is Human - Daniel H. Pink
The more you explain bad events as temporary, specific, and external, the more likely you are to persist even in the face of adversity.
Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens have thus been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. As time went by, the imagined reality became ever more powerful, so that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
Killing Commendatore - Haruki Murakami
He must be living a life free of worries. But viewed from his perspective, looking at me from his side of the valley, I might appear to also be living a life of ease and leisure. From a distance, most things look beautiful.
Neon Fever Dream - Eliot Peper
“I’ve had friends disappear,” she said. “Death is better. A good clean death gives everyone closure. You can get through the seven stages of grief or however many there are supposed to be. But when people just vanish… Nothing’s harder than uncertainty. Unfinished stories are the worst kind.”
Crash Early, Crash Often - Venkatesh Rao
True paradoxes are more than simple contradictions; they are the beginnings of never-ending stories.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What baselines do you want to shift? What is something impossible that you want to make possible?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
