š„Welcome to volume 0009!š„
IāmĀ Christian Champ. This is the āÆļøMiddleway NewsletterĀ āÆļø. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
Investing In Loss
A couple weeks ago, I participated in a capoeira workshop at AxeCapoeira in Chicago. The workshop was three days in a row of intense practice, which elicited a challenge for this mere beginner.
Capoeira is a Brazilian martial art often compared with dancing. Having limited experience dancing and marital arts experience minus a couple years of TaiChi, Iām coming at capoeira from a pure beginnerās mind. This beginnerās mind includes beginnerās moves!
Josh Watzkin, from Searching for Bobby Fisher, compares creating new skills with what he calls āInvesting In Lossā. This describes my performance in the workshop. I focused on perfecting a small portion of each movement. When that part improved, Iād try albeit generally unsuccessfully to add another move. The idea of investing in loss permeated the workshop for me.
Investing in loss is opening up to the possibilities and letting go of the ego. My performance only mattered if I grew as a capoeirst, not how I performed vs. anyone else. Investing in loss was the only route to create that outcome.
How can you invest in loss? How can you let go of that ego and slowly level up a skill? What skill do you want to practice?
šArticles to Readš
Why Ambitious People Have Unrelated Hobbies
The swordsman Musashi, whose work was aggressively and violently physical, took up painting late in life, and observed that each form of art enriched each other. Indeed, flower arranging, calligraphy, and poetry have long been popular with Japanese generals and warriors, a wonderful pairing of opposites ā strength and gentleness, stillness and aggression.
Get What You Want Without Compromise
The real question might not be, āwhat do you want,ā it might be, āwhat do you care enough to compromise for?ā
Stories can be Powerful and Persuasive , so can facts
When should we use facts and when should we use stories?
Communal Intelligence
- An Edge.org conversation with Neil Gershenfeld)
Itās important to note, and Neil Gershenfeld pointed this out, that by far the largest amount of information processing going on in the human body is not in the brain; itās digital-chemical information processing thatās going on at the level of DNA and RNA, which is the ultimate digital forum for information, because quantum mechanics makes nature digital.Ā
This gives us a cooperative power as aĀ global organism, which is causing lots of trouble. If I were another species, Iād be pretty damn pissed off right now. What makes human beings effective is not their individual intelligences, though there are many very intelligent people in this room, but their communal intelligence.
LLOYD:Ā We overemphasize. As artificial intelligences get closer to the capacities of human beings, they are already exhibiting behaviors that are very human-like, messing up in weird and inscrutable ways that we donāt understand. Artificial intelligence often leads to real stupidity, and thatās one of the signs that itās intelligent. Human beings operate in a self-contradictory fashion. We donāt do things rationally, and by god we shouldnāt do things rationally, as youāre arguing. Computers are going to do that as well. Deep neural networks are already beginning to design the next generation of programming systems. This is not some science fiction. This is happening already.
šĀ Books to ReadĀ š
After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley
Rob Reid (founder of Listen.com) offers a sci-fi thriller around AI and based on his experiences working in the valley.
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Technology by Erik Davis
Technology is a trickster
We question the world, ourself and the myths. That is not a bad thing. Ā
Plug into the earth the feminine and the natural world vs consumerism.Ā
Myth of the Individual is the new myth for consumerism. Ā
Spiritual awakening plugs you back into the earth.Ā
New path self actualization is the awakened consciousness. Self as singularity in a web of group minds.Ā
The paragraph below includes the middle wayā¦ in this case the good and the bad of technology
āI have always been a fan of the āmiddle wayāābetween reason and mystery, skepticism and sympathy, cool observation and participation mystique. Facing the technological future, I remain a being of the excluded middle, suspended, like many, I suspect, in a vexed limbo of bafflement, wonder, denial and despair. I remain fascinated and amazed by our real-time science fiction and the cognitive enhancements (and estrangements) provided by our increasingly posthuman existence. But I also find myself profoundly alienated by the aggression of consumer technology, aggravated by the fatuous and self-serving rhetoric of Silicon Valley, horrified by our corporatized surveillance state, and saddened by the steely self-promoting brands that so many people, aided and abetted by social media, have become.ā
šļøĀ Listen / WatchĀ šŗ
Happiness Lab with You are Not So Smart Podcast
Itās always interesting to think about what we think makes us happy and what actually makes us up (ideally the two meet though like Twain rarely do the two meet).
āWeāre using intuition to design whole systems that actually reduce our happinessāĀ āĀ Laurie Santos
People say they want isolation and quiet, but we actually enjoy the opposite
TALK TO PEOPLE (Iāve been thinking about this is testing it and almost 100% of the time asking an interesting question leads to an interesting convo and is >>>> silence or my podcast)
We generally donāt know what we want, which is kind of crazy
āWeāre using intuition to design whole systems that actually reduce our happinessāĀ āĀ Laurie Santos
Money only solves money problems
Angela Duckworth Talking Grit with Dave Chang
Dave has an underdog mentality still today and does not want to be complacent
Novices want to hear what they are doing well. Experts want to hear what they can improve.
Children need constant challenges. Uncomfortable challenges along with some support. People believing in them while they are constantly challenged.
Books and ideas became Daveās foundation
If you donāt feel like you want to quit, you arenāt doing it right
Dr Peter Attia - Finding Meaning in the Struggle
The beauty and power of struggle
How do you know when to give up?
TONS of people are trapped by resistance
Ask yourself:Ā āDo I love it, and is it working?
If you love it and itās working, keep doing it
If you love it and itās not working, keep doing it (because you love it)
If itās not working and you donāt love it, quit
If itās working, but you donāt love it, quit
One note on the above: Make sure you decide in advance (when you start out) what the definition of āworkingā is.
š£Words of Wisdomš£
Barking Up the Wrong Tree - Eric Barker
Research from the journal Cognition and Emotion shows that gratitude is the quality that makes people want to spend more time with you. Gratitude is the tactical nuke of happiness and the cornerstone of long-lasting relationships. If itās that simpleājust taking time to say thanksāwhy donāt we all do it? Researchers call it āhedonic adaptation.ā I call it ātaking things for granted.ā When you first get your new house, itās the greatest thing that ever happened to you. A year later, itās that money pit that needs a new roof. The joy of the new never lasts. And this happens with everything.
The Lost Art of Good Conversation - Sakyong Mipham
A good conversation increases our life-force energy and changes our lives by connecting us heart to heart with another person wherever we may be.
Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn - Richard Wiseman
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Extrastatecraft - Keller Easterling
When the social scientist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson referred to a man, a tree, and an ax as an information system, he made self-evident the idea that the activities of infrastructure space can be a medium of information.
What loss do you need to invest in?
What kind of dancing do you need to do like no one is watching?
Thanks for reading.
Any thoughts or comments, please reach out.
Namaste,Ā
Christian
