🔥Welcome to Volume #00076!🔥
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.
Please follow The Middle Way on Instagram and Twitter.
🐬How Knowing Our Values Can Bring Out the Best in Us and Others🐬
Staring at the blinking cursor, I thought deeply about "my current values."
I tried to picture the perfect values and replay them in my current and future life. I worked on sinking into those values and finding the appropriate "word" to fit what I felt.
What does flow feel like? How about joy? What about grace, gratitude, and goodness?
The beauty of listing out your values is that you get to notice how aligned your life is with your values.
VALUES ARE HOW WE WANT TO SHOW UP in the world and what we want to be around. VIRTUES ARE HOW WE SHOW UP.
We want our virtues and values to intersect.
The exercise creates a two-way street to check your values and virtues because a life unlock occurs when they align. If the keys don't fit, we must rethink our top values.
I do this exercise yearly when doing my annual review, which offers a bonus of showing us how we changed and where we stayed the same.
Again, the drum beats of Flow and Joy hit the hardest for me.
I'm doing a program with my company and Columbia Business School, which led to this event's earlier kick-off. Folks from CBS helped guide our mission, as we needed to list eight values and then arrange them in order with our most impactful value at the top.
When the list is complete, we start with that meta value, or the primary value we want to feel, and work to connect it with our other values.
My list of eight included:
Joy
Flow
Growth (self and others)
Mastery/Learning
Gratitude
Playfulness
Wisdom
Curiosity
Each one of these values leaves me wanting to find them in my life. They energize me, and when people accentuate them, those people energize me. When I see them showing up in my life, that is the time when things feel the best. That is when life feels memorable.
When Values converge = Peak experiences follow.
When I'm giving and receiving those eight values listed above, I experience my best life. Not only do I enjoy these values by myself, but they get magnified when shared with others, especially my family and friends (why I love learning with my kids and co-workers).
What values show up when you are living your best life? What values do you want to share with the world and surround yourself with?
Are your values and virtues in alignment?
As we enter the new year, it's a perfect time to run this exercise and see how you evolved over the past year and where you want to go.
For those of you who may be curious, other values such as helping, kindness, achievement, humor, resilience, autonomy, authenticity, compassion, love, optimism, peace, oneness, and service got left on the draft room floor. They matter but not a top eight. All those values show up in my main list as parts of other values.
📓Things to Think About📓
How to Engineer a Good Conversation by Patricia Hurducas
A good conversation starts with the backdrop of how the setting makes us feel as we enter into the art of conversing. When we prime the environment, we prime ourselves to create a good conversation.
The setting and atmosphere in which a conversation is held heavily impact the flow of the conversation, and the mood of the participants.
Then we focus on creating the experience we need when we create good conversations. The conversation finds depth, it challenges us and changes us. We wrestle with ideas and questions in a giving manner.
Beyond (the art of) a good conversation, people want an experience: Damascus moments, life-changing questions, meaningful insights, kind words.
When we exit a worthwhile conversation we feel words like excited, enthusiastic, pleasantly exhausted, and maybe even a bit of fear by what we unpacked and ran into.
David Epstein, the author of Range, explores the success of the Williams sisters in tennis in his newsletter.
Their father focused on “FUN”, not winning when helping them as children to then become tennis greats.
Rather than drilling his daughters into the ground, Richard is distinguished from other tennis parents in the film by his focus on fun. He keeps reminding his daughters to “just have fun out there,” even when it’s in the same breath with his grand ambitions: “You gonna win Wimbledon....you just go on out there and you have fun.”
When Epstein presented on Range, Serena in attendance, raised her hand and let everyone know that she too practiced range.
Then Serena stood up, and began. “I think my father was ahead of his time,” she said. And then she proceeded to inform the audience that as a child she participated in ballet, gymnastics, taekwondo, and track and field. It was amazing. I talked to her later that day, and she said that she and Venus would throw a football to develop the motion for a powerful serve, a habit they continued as pros. After meeting her, I read Serena’s book, On The Line, and was amused by the section where she described the card game UNO as “a great teaching tool for any individual sport.”
Ryan Holiday on Gratitude as a Daily Practice
How do we want to view the moments in our life? What do we want to take from them? Ryan sites Pete Holmes and his mantra of Yes, thank you as a way to view each moment no matter what happens.
In his book, Comedy Sex God (as well as on his wonderful podcast and on his HBO show) the comedian Pete Holmes talks about the aftermath of the dissolution of his marriage. After his wife cheated on him and their subsequent divorce, he was hit with a long developing crisis of faith in the religion he had grown up with. He describes this period as many nights on the road. Lots of work. Lots of drinking. Lots of crying. Lots of Counting Crows songs on repeat. Then he came up with a mantra that lifted him above his pain, that shifted his world view, that restored his hope and happiness. All with just three simple words: “Yes, thank you.”
Your crying baby wakes you up at 3am? Yes, thank you. I know she is alive and now I get to spend time with her, just she and I.
Flight gets delayed? Yes, thank you. Now I can sit and read.
Show gets cancelled? Yes, thank you. Now I can do something else instead.
This idea of two handles is a powerful one. Which one do you want to hold onto?
Epictetus said that every situation has two handles; which was I going to decide to hold onto? The anger, or the appreciation?
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
I followed and admired Virgil’s work, and jumped in his and podcasts after his passing.
His main ideas for becoming a designer from his talk “Insert Complicated Title Here” that he gave at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
Think in different disciplines
What’s your signature?
What is your DNA?
Go back to your earliest memories before you knew too much?
What did you like?
What systems did you use?
Do Projects
Do one project and believe in it and see what happens. You can’t predict which project makes it happen for you
Make stuff to spark ideas and options
DO opposites. Find the space in between. When you find something new. Why he works on many projects at a time to find new spaces and things
Puts himself in the process so two different views -- as a designer and as a participant
Own your own voice and try to find your voice
Design is just assumed today. We don’t notice the door handle until it breaks. Design is to be cherished and people forget about it
“ The zig-zag approach finds new space, linear thinking results in copies of past products” - Virgil Abolh --- oblique thinking
Practice
Trains his eye to see things
Using something that you are doing often
Can be simple like Instagram photos when you see one thing
Dead mentors
Have them answer WHY
Have them edit your work
Communication art exercise
That is what art is ... long speech/presentation and then find the cheat codes to make it
There is no failure... Failure is as real as Halloween ghosts.
His approach is below and it took him 37 years to figure out
Anna Gát: The Four Rules of Hosting
1) Imperfect Host
2) Stickiness
3) Ritual Space
4) Anchoring (to Truth)
There are great conversations on the internet, but they are rare, random and risky. At the ii, the conversations will always be good – not always great, that's magic, but every conversation will be good
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Virgil Abloh -
“In my mind, I haven’t done any work yet. I’ve just made a case for why my point of view is valid.”
“The zig-zag approach finds new space, linear thinking results in copies of past products.”
Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance-
"Clearly recognizing what is happening inside us, and regarding what we see with an open, kind and loving heart, is what I call Radical Acceptance."
Robert I. Sutton, Good Boss, Bad Boss -
"Wise bosses are devoted to knowing what they don’t know. They act boldly on facts they have right now, but search for signs they are wrong—seeking a healthy balance between courage and humility."
Peter Drucker -
"Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things."
Miyamoto Musashi -
"If you wish to control others you must first control yourself"
@DellAnnaLuca
“If you need to write it down to remember it during your presentation, your audience won’t remember it either.”
George Leonard - Mastersy
“In the words of the great Japanese swordmaster Yamaoka Tesshu: Do not think that This is all there is. More and more Wonderful teachings exist— The sword is unfathomable.”
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How aligned are your values and virtues? How do you want to show up differently in the new year?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
🐬How Knowing Our Values Can Bring Out the Best in Us and Others🐬