🔥Welcome to Volume #00098!🔥
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.
🥅Finding the Right Scoreboards 🥅
Logging on to E-Trade and looking at my account balances meant the difference between winning and losing.
Working in investing and measuring life success and satisfaction by your net worth is a tired trope. At the same time, it's the easiest scoreboard to subscribe to, and it pulled me in.
My goal was FU money.
You know, that ability to say FU to anyone at any time. I got the idea from reading Charlie Munger, whose thirst for financial independence drove his desire for FU money.
Unfortunately, wrapping up our success and failure and equating our worth with our financial net worth is an easy way to lose ourselves. It's also an easy way to live a terrible life.
Spending a couple of decades in finance disabuses one of the notions that money beyond a base level solves people's problems. Wealth appears to begin to own people beyond a point.
The idea of chasing money to an unfathomable level of spending potential ended up being a poor scoreboard for me.
Instead of being my scoreboard, chasing money for money's sake became something to watch out for.
Earning money isn't an issue, especially doing things you believe in and find pride in doing. It's the stacking up of another chip for the sake of a chip while neglecting to live-that is the problem.
It’s feeling your worth in your gut because of some number on a screen.
It's the same issue with chasing titles, power, and other ego-enhancing outcomes.
What is the point of the chase?
Are we aiming at the right outcomes?
We Need to Be Intentional About Our Scoreboards!!
The scoreboards we track change our behavior and change us. We align our actions with our goals.
Chasing the vanity metrics is a simple way to end up at the wrong place on the map.
We want success to become the journey of doing the right next actions, which happens when we score the right points.
Ways to Be Intentional with Our Scoreboards
1/ Make Sure Our Scoreboards Serve
We need our scoreboards to serve us and the things we care about. They need to measure the things we value. They need to relate to what matters.
They create meaning for us.
When we light up the scoreboard, it must be for winning battles we care about.
2/ Respect the Scoreboard
When we care about something, we must ensure that we do it. When we set up a scoreboard, we need to align our actions with the desired outcomes.
The scoreboard is sacred and demands respect.
A scoreboard I use is to always show up with good energy.
I recently violated this principle when I felt exhausted and overwhelmed. I forgot what mattered, and instead of working on resting and replenishing, I showed up in half form.
I needed to remind myself that I fell short and to respect my scoreboards.
3/ Inner Scoreboards First
We get to use inner and outer scoreboards. The game to focus on is the inner game.
When it comes to the inner game, we maximize our agency. The only person that decides our fate is us. The only person that knows if we succeed at the inner game is ourselves.
A solid inner game always manifests itself in our outer actions.
4/ Feel Aliveness
Our scoreboards need to give us energy, inspiration, and joy. They need to help us flourish and feel alive.
Those are the things that we need to run after. Those are the personal records we need to set.
We want to feel that thrill of victory when we score points.
5/ Play Infinite Games
Infinite games are our best cheat codes because the point is to keep playing the game. We only need to ensure we are on the field when we find these games.
Infinite games include:
Helping others.
Being a lovely person.
Showing up with good energy.
Creating good art and sharing it.
Taking on adventures and challenges.
Supporting our communities and organizations to help them thrive.
The ultimate scoreboards are playing games beyond ourselves.
Infinite games align our values, actions, and scoreboards.
What's Next?
Spend some time reflecting on your scoreboards.
Are your actions aligned with your scoreboards, or is the pull of the river life dragging you along?
🧠Things to Think About🧠
My friend in flow, Lucas Cohen, put a piece together on using 5 AI tools for Creativity
He also released a book today that he created over the weekend using ChatGPT, asking questions to AI Rumi, AI SunTzu, and others. Check the book out here.
If you haven’t played with ChatGPT, get on it.
The tool that I’m most excited about from Lucas’ piece is this AI that summarizes Youtube videos.
Company Culture by Taylor Pearson
Taylor breaks down how company culture drives substantial value even though it is illegible. This piece pairs nicely with last week’s newsletter focused on our micro-culture.
When one thinks back on their career, one can note the changes in culture that took place. The shifts that created and unlocked value and the decisions and changes led to the opposite.
Your culture is a leading indicator of your business’s overall health. One-off decisions made for the first time today may not seem that important. But, they put a company onto a particular trajectory that compounds over time. As anyone that has worked at or with a large company knows, institutional inertia is very real and very hard to change.
When people believe in the culture, they evangelize it and work hard to uphold it. When they stop believing, you see the high performers exit, and the effort levels of the remainers decline.
This is a great definition of culture (with a hat tip to Seth Godin’s idea of “people like us do things like this”).
There are many definitions of what constitutes a company culture. I think the best and simplest definition is this:
People that work here do things like this.
If something goes wrong, does the person that notices it take responsibility and propose a solution? Or do they try to deflect blame onto someone else and say “that’s not my job”?
If you want to know what the culture of a company is, you could have everyone on the team anonymously complete this fill-in-the-blank exercise.
People who do__________ here get raises, praise and promotions. People who do not do __________ get ignored, chastised, fired, or quit.
What is a functional company culture?
A functional company culture is one where the culture creates institutional structure (e.g. reporting lines, SOPs, general principles) that cause team members to autonomously make decisions in a way that maximizes the long-term survival and value of the company.
Taylor leaves us with ways to change a culture. Changing the culture of course is similar to how culture is created. What gets celebrated and rewarded, and what gets penalized?
Making cultural changes takes time. So how exactly do you emphasize cultural principles?
The biggest thing is making them visible somewhere and then constantly behaving in accordance with them. There’s no clear to-do manual for this, it’s something that any leader or manager needs to be constantly aware of.
Habit-Based Learning by Barbara Oakley
Education is fumbling the ball when it comes to teaching because of focusing on deliberate thought and forgetting about fast learning. The idea is that you can look up anything, and “drilling is killing.”
The brain has two major learning systems. One is based on practice, and leads to fast, automatic behavior. This system is not accessible by conscious thought and is the source of intuition. The second system is based on deliberate thought—it is slow but flexible. You are consciously aware and can verbalize what you have learned.
Fast thinking often involves the procedural system, which deposits neural links in long-term memory primarily through the basal ganglia, a part of the brain with no conscious access. Slow thinking, on the other hand, uses the declarative system, which deposits links in long-term memory primarily through the hippocampus.
We need more rote practice.
Properly varied rote learning, accomplished with modern insights such as spaced repetition and “interleaving” (that is, interweaving similar materials during study so that students swiftly and intuitively know the difference), means that students can carry out even complex activities without conscious thought. This, of course, is part of why learning to play a musical instrument well, speak a foreign language easily, smoothly perform a magic trick, or gracefully slalom down a steep ski trail, can bring such great intrinsic pleasure.
📕Books to Read📕
How We Learn to Move: A Revolution in the Way We Coach & Practice Sports Skills by Rob Gray
Gray believes that the approach of mastering repetitive movements does a disservice to the athlete. Instead, we want to increase capabilities and capacities.
Powerful Ideas from the Book:
Static, isolated, and choreographed movement practice doesn’t work well
We want to increase capacity and affordances
We can use constraints (rules, equipment, size of field, # of players) to create additional capacities
We want multiple solutions and redundancies for movements and actions
We have attractors and internal dynamics for everything we perform
Top performers have a large variance in their individual moves
“Skillful movers in the same discipline do not all coordinate their movements in the same way–there is significant inter-movement variability between performers. Skillful movers do not achieve their goal by moving the same way every time there is significant intra-movement variability within performers.”
Coaches need to be designers and guides trying to promote practice environments that create exploration and self-organizing
Learning is highly non-linear (a complex system where results are highly unpredictable - not-smooth increases in learning)
“Coaching is not building a house from the ground up. It is a renovation and expansion. Success requires designing a practice that builds on each performer’s foundation.”
The human nervous system is very noisy
We want to produce the same outcome, but under ever-changing conditions, I have to use a different movement every time.
How do we learn to solve problems? By practicing a lot of different ones. In other words, by having variability in our practice conditions.
Variability in practice leads to more adaptable problem solvers.
“I like to think of constraints as informative boundaries. They guide self-organization by pushing performers away from certain solutions, encouraging them to look for others, and providing them information about how they should change how they are moving. This latter effect is why error amplification works–it allows the performer to figure out on their own why they pattern of coordination they are currently using is not effective. Instead of movement techniques being drilled into an athlete through repetition, in this new view of learning, skill emerges in the face of the constraints involved.”
“I hope that that you will also adopt an approach to your own learning and development that is consistent with the ideas we have been discussing. That is, one of exploration, self-organization, and connecting with your environment.”
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Ian Chang joined the Stoa to talk about Worlding.
The talk is based on Ian’s book about how to create worlds.
Here is the AI summarize.tech summary for the talk.
This chart shows a pretty good chart to follow for happiness regardless of age.
Shreyas Doshi on Linkedin
“One of the most important pieces of feedback you can get from your manager is *how you are perceived* by folks in a position of power within your org. It plays such an important role in how you are reviewed, promoted, compensated, and yet a candid 1:1 discussion on this topic is quite rare.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"Art isn’t a result; it’s a journey. The challenge of our time is to find a journey worthy of your heart and your soul." (Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception)
"I realized that the bigger learning and growing challenge for me was letting go, not staying on." (Derek Sivers, Anything You Want)
"It took me a long time to realize that the artist is not one person, but a crew of individual mental states inside myself. Each with their own strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and personality." (Ian Cheng, Emissary's Guide to Worlding)
"A World offers what Ursula Le Guin describes as ‘room enough’ to survive, thrive, and imagine possible futures for ourselves, indefinitely." (Ian Cheng, Emissary's Guide to Worlding)
"Here are some questions to consider as you watch yourself in action: • How did you know what to say? • How did you know when to say it? • How did you know how much to say? • How did you know whether it made a difference?" (Nicklaas C. Winkelman, The Language of Coaching)
"In gradually developing my own approach to teaching, one of my central objectives was to reverse this balkanizing tendency. In my view, no subject is ever finished. No concept is sealed off from other concepts. Knowledge is continuous; ideas flow." (Salman Khan)
"The thrill of life is not about who we are but about who we are in the process of becoming." (David Eagleman, Livewired)
"Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." (Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way)
"Man finds he has two halves to his existence—leisure and occupation—and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results." (Mary Oliver, Upstream)
"Do you sacrifice economy for performance or performance for economy?” (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)
"we can only know the world as we have inevitably shaped it by the nature of our attention." (Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning)\"The only time we suffer is when we believe a thought that argues with what is. When the mind is perfectly clear, what is is what we want." (Byron Katie, Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life)
🙏Thanks for Reading🙏
What’s the most important scoreboard in your life? How do you make sure that you keep scoring and lighting it up?
If you have any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Hanging out at the gym, in Pittsburgh that my brother runs as part of his effort to help his cancer patients with exercise and nutrition.
🥅Finding the Right Scoreboards 🥅