🕯️Like an All-Time Great 🕯️
🔥Welcome to volume #00058!🔥
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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🕯️Like an All-Time Great 🕯️
I looked up from the scores table, giving Tim a head nod as he walked back on the court. He nodded back with a pensive grin.
When play resumed, my eyes attempted to will the team to make a run. It didn't work. I clenched my hand around the pencil, knowing that time was running out. Hope continued to float away as the clock ticked down.
I sat at center court in Tucson, Arizona, acting as the official scorekeeper for the Wake Forest Demon Deacons in the 1996-97 NCAA basketball tournament.
Please don't make this Tim's last game!
As time expired, we found ourselves unable to make up the difference. Six points separated us from playing another day. Tim Duncan exited the college basketball scene when the buzzer sounded. One of the all-time greats sailed off into the NBA sunset, becoming the number one pick in the draft.
The locker room after the game mimicked a funeral. No eyes remained dry, and thoughts went to what could have been. Collectively the season disappointed. Individually, Tim received the player of the year award.
This weekend Tim Duncan got inducted into the NBA Hall of Fame. But, beyond basketball success, Timmy left us with a blueprint to find our inner greatness.
Choose Your Best Road
Tim stayed in college for all four years, passing up being the number one pick in the NBA draft two of those years. Then he played in San Antonio for his entire NBA career. When he found a good situation, he hung around.
He got ridiculed and criticized for being boring and avoiding promoting himself. His nickname Big Fundamentals said it all. The only path he followed was his path. He mastered the basics and let his game say the rest.
Then he went on to win five NBA championships, ending up as one of the most dominant players ever.
Team First and Culture First
The goal is always for the team to succeed. The Spurs made the playoffs every year of Tim's career, seventeen years in a row. The team goals triumphed all else, and the culture he helped to mold created the team.
Tim took a $10m pay cut to allow the team to resing players in 2012. He put the team over himself and continued to play on below-market rates as he finished his career. That sets the culture, putting the team and his teammates first.
We create the culture, and the culture creates us.
It always takes a team to succeed. Tim needed a coach like Pop and a general manager that constantly restocked the team with new talent when players left or retired.
Seek Wisdom and Pass it Along
It started at Wake Forest, following Randolph Childress's footsteps and learning from him. Then he learned from David Robinson, Sean Elliot, and Coach Gregg Popovich, helping lead to his first NBA championship.
Then he passed along this knowledge and wisdom to future Spurs, and they won even more.
They acted like a family, played as a family, and went to dinner like a family. The Spurts won four titles and 575 games with Tim, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker playing together for 14 seasons (or the average length of two marriages in the US)!
You don't dominate the NBA in a small market without passing along the wisdom. It takes a special moment with extraordinary people to make the playoffs for 17 straight seasons. Oh yeah, and Tim came back as an assistant coach for two seasons.
We can follow in Tim's footsteps, maybe not making the NBA Hall of Fame, but by following his lead.
We can live by the beat of our drum and map our road. We can help create the cultures where we live and work. We get to be great teammates and seek and share wisdom with those around us.
We get to try to be a Hall of Famer in how we show up and live our lives.
📓Articles to Read📓
How to be Great by Steph Smith reminds us to just be good consistently.
I love this concept because we can all be consistent and being great may or may not happen. At the very least from being consistent we end up being good.
So if you’re still asking the question, “How do I become great in life?”, I would ask you to reframe the question as “How do I become good in life” or even “How do I become decent” and focus on developing those habits to repeat over time. Transform these habits to be your baseline.
Remember, there is no “magic moment” when you become great, so if you are looking for your path towards greatness, stop looking for “greatness” and consider that your most probable path there is just to focus on what’s good.
Peter Limberg writes about Becoming a Live Player.
This concept of live players resonates as it appears more people fall asleep and just follow a script. Those scripts no longer work and lead to deadends and unfulfilled dreams.
Dead players can’t create anything new, live players can. The problems we face need to be solved by live players, not the old scripts run by the dead players.
One of the things we realize pretty quickly when we get out of school is that there are no adults. Everyone is just making it up, which is another reason we need to be a live player and not a dead player.
My mentor was right. There are no parents upstairs. There is nobody to tell me how I should live my life. There were no obvious scripts I could follow. This sucked. This was hard. This was confusing. There was an upside though …
Bullshit gets put in place to keep dead players in power. You know it when you hear it “you aren’t senior enough”, “you don’t have enough experience”, or “that is how we’ve always done it” gatekeepers closing the doors. Throw out show-stopper questions or use limp phrases that contain no meaning. You can’t argue against bullshit.
Bullshit is a different phenomenon than lying, as lying attempts to influence while being aware of what is true, bullshit on the other hand attempts to influence without any consideration about what is true, or what truth even means. As John says, “we are drowning in an ocean of bullshit.”
We do have the power of gods today. From nuclear power to the ability of the internet to overthrow governments or get people elected.
As Schmachtenberger famously said: If we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we will self-destruct.
Ultimately the question we face is how to remain a live player and not get stuck in the stream of dead players.
I have been enamored with Samo Burja’s notion of a live player for a while, which he contrasts to a dead player. From his Great Founder Theory:
A live player is a person or well-coordinated group of people that is able to do things they have not done before. A dead player is a person or group of people that is working off a script, incapable of doing new things.
Steven Brophy asks, What makes you spellbound?
We have lost our way with the magical. Our overzealous relationship with the quantifiable, the tangible, the logical has stripped us of our delight in the mystery. Our delight in that which holds us spellbound. Music. Nature. Art. Human connection. All are magical potions that can enchant us out of the narrow inner story of our lives. It can breathe us alive with rapture, bringing colour to life.
So ask yourself, what holds you spellbound?
And when were you last spellbound?If you struggle to answer either of those questions, then bring the magic back into your life by opening your senses to the wonder of this tremendous place we get to call home.
You only have a short time here. You might as well witness the magic of aliveness as much as possible
Support People Making Beautiful Art
Sean Coyle, a hilarious and talented writer and improviser from Chicago, is launching a sci-fi fantasy comic book that you can order and support here. He is making beautiful art.
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Tim Duncan’s Hall of Fame Induction Speech from May 15, 2021
His mom told him “good better best, you never let it rest because better and better is your best”
Alonzo Mourning brought some US college basketball coaches to the US Virgin Islands and a buddy asked Tim if he wanted to play. This lead to a kid that didn’t start playing basketball until age 14 getting a scholarship to Wake Forest based on a random pickup game.
Two Fun Crypto Inspired “Reality Parody” Videos on Dog Coin and DEFI State of Mind
Given the movements in Crypto Currency the timing is solid.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Matterhorn (Goodreads)
Karl Marlantes, a former Vietnam Vet and PTSD suffer, takes us inside the Vietnam War with a fictional account.
The enlisted men try to survive while watching people around them get blown up, severally damaged, and trying to kill the enemy. This book helps put in perspective how awful it is to fight a war.
“He ran as he'd never run before, with neither hope nor despair. He ran because the world was divided into opposites and his side had already been chosen for him, his only choice being whether or not to play his part with heart and courage. He ran because fate had placed him in a position of responsibility and he had accepted the burden. He ran because his self-respect required it. He ran because he loved his friends and this was the only thing he could do to end the madness that was killing and maiming them.”
“It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about”
“Meaning came out of living. Meaning could only come from his choices and actions. Meaning was made, not discovered.”
“The smart guy gives the guy with the power the credit, whether he deserves it or not. That way the smart guy is dangling something the boss wants. So the smart guy now has power over the boss.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Artists Way - Julie Cameron
Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.
The Coaching Habit - Michael Bungay Stanier
You can see there are many reasons that the ship of “What do you want?” might never make it out of the harbour. George Bernard Shaw put it succinctly when he said, “The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” The illusion that both parties to the conversation know what the other party wants is pervasive, and it sets the stage for plenty of frustrating exchanges.
Colin Champ, MD - @ColinChampMD
It is interesting that the word "responsibility" is being passed around a lot these days by hospitals and doctors when it comes to billable services, but rarely when regarding those non-billable ones like following a healthy lifestyle, exercising, etc.…
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
Bonnita Roy - @bonnitaroy
Some teachers are "bridges to" a destination. Some are "bridges over" troubled waters. Some just push you in. Be careful what you wish for.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What can you do to show up like an all-time great? How can you improve the culture in your life?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
