🧨Lighting More Fireworks 🧨
🔥Welcome to volume #00063!🔥
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.
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🧨Lighting More Fireworks 🧨
Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The Chicago Fourth of July never fails to disappoint, especially if you like neighbors putting on homemade firework displays. The pulsing bangs of exploding M-80s rock you to the core. It starts around dusk and goes all night long. When one neighbor stops, another picks up the baton. Every year the firework imporve.
My 2.5-year-old son sat on my lap as we watched and felt the neighbors lighting it up. Isaac sat on the edge of intrigue and fear. The lights expanding brought the intrigue, and the crescendos made him flinch. His grip on my hands tightened when the neighborhood shook.
Next year will he want me to hold him, or will the sounds thrill him like his older brother? The fireworks, for me, were watching his reaction and being there with him.
How do we make the fireworks in our lives happen more frequently along with being better and louder? How do we do more of the things that make us sing? How do we include the people that light us up?
We want to find the things that enthrall us while making us sweat. That push us to the edge of what we think possible. Occasionnaly, we find a dud, but we light up our skies when it comes together. We get those incredible goosebumps running down our arms and the boom reverberates in our chest.
How can we light more fireworks and see what happens?
📓Things to Think About📓
HBR piece on servant and humble leadership.
I’ve been thinking more and more about leadership over the past couple of years and this article hits the nail on the head. Leaders need to tell good stories and empower followers.
When I think back to the leaders I’ve seen over the years, servant leaders are who you want to work for, work with, and become.
Humility and servant leadership do not imply that leaders have low self-esteem, or take on an attitude of servility. Instead, servant leadership emphasizes that the responsibility of a leader is to increase the ownership, autonomy, and responsibility of followers — to encourage them to think for themselves and try out their own ideas.
Here’s how to do it.
Ask how you can help employees do their own jobs better — then listen
It sounds deceivingly simple: Rather than telling employees how to do their jobs better, start by asking them how you can help them do their jobs better. But the effects of this approach can be powerful.
Seth Godin reminds us it’s always about Trust and Connection
It’s not what is new that matters but what is effective. Just like being a humble servant leader, we all care about trust and connection.
The technology keeps changing, but connection and trust are what still work. Ideas that spread, win. Ideas that stick are worth even more. You can race to be first on a new platform, but it’s far better to be the voice that we would miss if you weren’t there.
📚 Book Breakdowns📚
Bruce Lee: A Life by Matt Polly (Goodreads)
I didn’t know the Bruce Lee story well and it’s a doozy. His life includes lots of perfect randomnesses (like his dad traveling to America with his pregnant mom and him being born in the US) coupled with an unbelievable talent, who got excited about Kung Fu by constantly getting into gang fights.
His first teacher taught him to relax and to be like water. He fought tense and might have gotten himself killed if he didn’t adjust
His experiences traveling around the US doing martial art clinics while entertaining the audience, and choreographing fight scenes in movies, built up the skills that lead to his success
His success in Asia came about because a guy broke away from the top studio in China and tried to go out on his own creating the opening for Bruce Lee
When he became a huge star in Asia, it was bittersweet as he couldn’t go anywhere anymore. Success entrapped him
He wanted to be the biggest star in Asia and the US, something he did but didn’t live to experience it
His goal was to beat Steve McQueen at the box office, which he did after his death
His success was a rocket ship that then exploded in his death
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The boy was beginning to understand that intuition is really a sudden immersion of the soul into the universal current of life, where the histories of all people are connected, and we are able to know everything because it’s all written there.
“It is neither necessary, nor possible to change others. But if you can change yourself you will find that no other change is needed. To change the picture you merely change the film, you do not attack the cinema screen!”
Maps of the Imagination by Peter Turchi
A prerequisite for finding our way through any story or novel is to be lost: the journey can't begin until we've been set down in a place somehow unfamiliar. And part of a reader's willingness to be led is a willingness to be betrayed, outwitted, jumped from behind.
Upstream by Mary Oliver
Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What fireworks do you need to partake in more frequently?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
My wife and I made some shapes after handstand class
