🧗Keep Going🧗
🔥Welcome to volume #00028!🔥
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.
🧗Keep Going 🧗
A great mystery of life is finding out what works. Sometimes when we finally find it, we find out that it no longer works. We get knocked down and we get up again.
Struggling to get my newsletter out this week as my system broke down, I find myself on the ground trying to get up. The weekend became a blur and my writing time turned into family time.
This newsletter is like a lot of things in life. At times it just flows and feels right. At other times we get to paddle against the current and like Robert Frost wrote, “the only way out is through”.
We need to keep going and get through it.
We strike gold by continuing to mine. Some weeks gold comes early and often while other weeks lead to a dry a spell. The longer we mine the more magic we find. We run hard until we hit the finish line and at the same time knowing that there is no finish line.
The key is to keep going.
📓Articles to Read📓
Expiring vs. Permanent Skills by Morgan Housel
A few permanent skills that apply to many fields:
Not being a jerk. Being a jerk offsets being talented one for one, if not more. They don’t teach this in school, but it’s the single most important career skill. Part of this includes empathizing with jerks who are being jerks because they’re dealing with stress.
The willingness to adapt views you wish were permanent. Accepting when expiring skills have run their course. A lot of what we believe about our fields is either right but temporary, or wrong but convincing. Sam Arbesman’s book The Half-Life of Facts makes this uncomfortably clear. “Medical knowledge about cirrhosis or hepatitis takes about forty-five years for half of it to be disproven or become out-of-date,” he writes. “This is about twice the half-life of the actual radioisotope samarium-151.”
Getting to the point. Everyone’s busy. Make your point and get out of their way.
Respecting luck as much as you respect risk. Acknowledging risk is when something happens outside of your control that influences outcomes and you realize it might happen again. Acknowledging luck is when something happens outside of our control that influences outcomes and you realize it might not happen again.
Accepting a certain degree of hassle and nonsense when reality demands it. The ability to be comfortable being miserable. Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, said the most remarkable thing about the president’s paralysis was how little it seemed to bother him. He told her: “If you can’t use your legs and they bring you milk when you wanted orange juice, you learn to say ‘that’s all right,’ and drink it.” A useful and permanent skill in a world that’s constantly breaking and evolving.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff from Ness Labs on learning how to learn
3. Just do it
Procrastination often gets in the way of progress. But getting started is half of the battle. Here are a few techniques that can help you do just that.
The Pomodoro Technique: you probably have already heard about this one, but the reason why it’s so popular is because it actually works. You set a timer and do nothing except studying the topic at hand, and keep on focusing until the time is over. A typical Pomodoro timer is 25-minutes with a 5-minute break afterwards.
Chunking: this consists in breaking what you want to learn in manageable chunks, and master each of the chunks until you can form a bigger picture in your mind. First, prime your brain by surveying the content, for example by scanning the table of contents of a course. Then, observe an example, such as watching a video of the instructor building an app. Finally, do it yourself. This is a very important step to consolidate your knowledge.
Process versus product: learning is not a project with a beginning, a middle, and an end. You need to fall in love with the process. Want to become a better writer? Write everyday. A better coder? Code every day. It’s impossible to know everything about a topic, but you should embrace that impossibility.
Will Hines offers up What makes an improv scene funny
Will wrote a great book on improv, which is highly recommended, and offers some ideas for making improv scenes work. I haven’t performed improv since little man #2 hit 3 months old, but these ideas work for improv, speaking, writing or just creating more fun and play in our daily lives.
Speak Your Mind
Commit
Accept Most Offers
Lose
Focus on the Wrong Things
Be Silly
Make Things Worse
Use Non-Round Numbers
Be Silly
My most vague piece of advice. But funny people seem to have a twinkle in their eye and just like silly details, overly specific words, and certain... randomness that insert chaos into things.
This is a scene described to me by Joe Wengert that I’m sure I can only vaguely recall except that it made me laugh.
Player 1: “Nice to meet you. My name is Ellen.”
Player 2: “Call me ‘the Commish.’”
Player 1: “Are you a police commissioner?”
Player 2: “I am not.”
I saw a scene yesterday and the actor (Jim Woods) kept insisting on how he got a lot of inspiration from the sports channel ESPN2. Whatever it is that made him pick ESPN2 and not just regular ESPN is what I’m talking about here.
A bit of silly physicality helps. Lift your knees a bit too high. Lean in an inch too close. Raise your eyebrows in a nice staccato POP.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Hit Markers by Derek Thompson (Goodreads)
“The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency—to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.”
“People gravitate toward products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible: Most Advanced Yet Acceptable--MAYA.” (from Raymond Loewy -- Who designed the logos of Exxon, Shell, Luckystrike, and USPS )
MAYA = Familiar + 1
Audiences don't know everything, but they know more than creators do
To sell something familiar, make it surprising. To sell something surprising, make it familiar
People sometimes don't know what they want until they already love it
Make Beautiful Things + Understand the Network to get them shared
Content is king and distribution is kingdom
We use to consume content, now content consumes us too - our behaviors, our rituals, and our identities
What do we pay attention to and why? -- notice what we notice
Inter play between simple and complex = what the audience wan
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Finding Mastery w/ Andrew Huberman (Spotify)
Our eyes are part of our brain and the way we see the world. They are the key to set our overall arousal system (be awake/be asleep)
Sunlight in the morning (2-10mins) and evening everyday! Improves your sleep and gets you ready for the day/to sleep.
Andrew’s childhood was perfect until age 12 when his parents split and then it became chaos (his dad was one the scientist that helped develop chaos theory)
Adventure is the corner stone of life. Get in a car and have adventures
Grew up skateboarding and seeing 9 year olds hang out with adults (why I currently skateboard, ride BMX bikes and train capoeira with my 4.5 yo son)
Vision, how we see drives so much of how we live
Vision creates meaning for us
40 percent of the human brain is invoked in vision, most of any sense
Dopamine drives us (molecule of more) and we need to get a big dopamine release at the end (we get dopamine releases as we move towards the end)
Dopamine at end needs to be > dopamine along the way or we feel burnt out
Jokes create buoyancy in a group and rests dopamine
To calm down exhale 2x your inhale and dial out your gaze (panoramic vision)
Panoramic vision is what let’s martial artists see punches and kicks coming at them
Optic Flow - get into at least once a day. Waking, swimming, biking.
Flow is the sweet spot between Discipline and Surrender
Flow is beyond boredom and anxiety
Why Japanese Climbers Are So Incredible
Kaizen approach of continuous improvement
Japanese has 455 climbing gyms and they are built for people that climb not like US gyms for average people
Japanese climbers go to the climbing gym to get better not for just exercise
💣Words of Wisdom💣
If we could resist the urge to be logical just some of the time, and devote that time instead to the pursuit of alchemy, what might we discover? Quite a lot of lead, I suspect. But a surprising amount of gold
The Undoing Project - Michael Lewis
“Amos thought people paid an enormous price to avoid mild embarrassment,” said his friend Avishai Margalit, “and he himself decided very early on it was not worth it.”
Dr. Sayres taught me the first of three magical questions: “What am I not saying that needs to be said?” Consider that question alone when you consider your own wayward, twisting, tacking-across-the-surface-of-the-lake path to leadership and adulthood. What have I not been saying, recently, in the last few years, in all my life, that needs and needed to be said? Consider and check your heart rate. That beat, beat, beat you feel is not love but the dread felt at approaching fierce, fearful truth.
As behavioral scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.”
Small Arcs of Larger Circles - Nora Bateson
We are not here to win one another, nor to be won. Winning has a flawed polarity within it that suggests the possibility of defeat, and presumes the impossibility of being equals. Win a prize, or win a race: I am neither. Whatever the math is of our giving and receiving, it is not to be counted, or compared like taxes, nor contaminated with doubt and manipulation.
The Gervais Principle - Venkatesh Rao
The most visible sign of their capacity for self-delusion is their complete inability to generate an original thought.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What do you need to keep going on?
What do you need to keep showing up for and struggling through?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
