🔥Welcome to volume #00065!🔥
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.
🐰Giant Sucking Sounds🕳️
When I started working in the investing world, my “knowledge” came from college courses and reading books. Yeah, I didn't know anything minus some feeble outlines of how things work. Listening to coworkers talking and trying to follow the conversations, I felt like a shark trying to breathe on the beaches of Lake Michigan.
It happens to all of us. We enter a new arena, and confusion reigns. Welcome to the dark forest.
We feel excited and stressed while reaching for the rhythm of this new world. We don't understand what is going on, but our desire to get it radiates like a WIFI signal from our router. The terminology is foreign and the movements perplex us.
We exist in the what the hell is happening mode
Any project we undertake introduces us to the darkness. Then we piece it together and start to open up the blinds letting in the light.
We then start to feel the pull. We begin to hear that giant sucking sound as we fall down and down and down. Welcome to the rabbit hole.
We peeled back the blinds and fell into this new world. A picture begins to emerge and slowly we find ourselves in the picture. Information and ideas hit us square in the nose, and patterns begin to emerge. We find the rhythm but still play at a limited tempo. We begin mastering parts of the vocabulary, figuring out what’s going on.
We are not experts by any stretch, but we now play the game. The unknown becomes the known at least a little bit. The rules begin to dance before us.
Like learning a language, we go from tracking individual words to replying to statements. Each incremental learning in the rabbit holes unleashes a feeling of success and goodness.
We keep doing the damn thing.
We listen to podcasts, take on projects and chop it up over the subject. We devour books, follow legends, and the most innovative minds on the topic on Twitter. We jump into online classes and youtube videos as we transverse the rabbit hole. The only governor to the rabbit hole is our own efforts.
One day we meet a noob* (newbie), and we realize how much we internalized over the years by doing the reps. We made it back to the surface and integrated our learnings into our lives. The rabbit hole became part of us.
We always stand ready for that next giant sucking sound.
*Thanks to my 5 yo for the many explanations of how a noob compares to a pro with most of his learns during his rabbit hole of figuring out ways to build in Minecraft
📓Things to Think About📓
This week I didn’t run into any readings that really spoke to me but these two poems.
Good Bones poem by Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful
Sometimes a Man Stands Up by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.
How amazing is the Giannis story?
Yes to all of this!
Where are people’s friends? Is this due to the burbs and the death of community?
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Robert Anton Wilson
"Buckminster Fuller had correctly defined Capital as “ideas that work”; i.e. bits of information that accurately map some part of the non-verbal world and thus allow humanity to quantum-jump to ever-higher levels of understanding"
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
“If a person is living out his Personal Legend, he knows everything he needs to know. There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”
Liminal Thinking, Dave Gray
Make a list of what you think your governing beliefs are. What are your core beliefs? What beliefs make you the person that you are and create the foundations for your choices in life, large and small? Then sit down with a friend, someone you trust. Tell them what a governing belief is and ask them what they think yours are. Compare their observations with yours.
Distrust That Particular Flavor, William Gibson
This is it, right here, and I love it. Shinjuku at night is one of the most deliriously beautiful places in the world, and somehow the silliest of all beautiful places—and the combination is sheer delight.
Charlie Munger
The best thing a human can do is help another human know more.
The Power of Showing Up, Daniel Siegle, Tina Bryson
We have to let them learn that with life comes pain, but that lesson should be accompanied by the deep awareness that they’ll never have to suffer alone.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What rabbit holes do you need to jump down?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
🐰Giant Sucking Sounds🕳️