🎨Make Beautiful Art 🎨
🔥Welcome to volume #00057!🔥
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.
🎨 Make Beautiful Art 🎨
Sitting in the conference room, I exhaled as I felt all the eyes in the room staring at me.
I quickly looked down at my talking points and then jumped into my investment pitch. My pitch needed to match the data, and my delivery needed to convey the story.
Potentially investing millions of dollars of your investor’s money in one of your ideas feels daunting at first. Then you begin to develop a process and a procedure. After a couple hundred of these, you realize it’s an art, and you are an artist.
The art is picking investments that work. It doesn’t stop there though, you then need to convey your ideas by telling a compelling story. This ensures that the investment gets made. The entire process makes up the art.
When we refine and improve our approach, we are artists touching up our works before putting them out in the world. When we learn a new skill, we are artists expanding our reach.
We forget that we are all artists.
Each encounter in our day is a work of art. We decide how we show and how much respect we give our art. The art we create in our everyday left is the essential art we create. We forget we are making art, getting caught up in doing the task, and collecting our paycheck. We punch the clock being a parent or friend without thinking about our craft.
We are all artists.
We produce and create our world and the world around us through art. The best art projects involve the others. We thrive when we make art with our family, friends, and colleagues.
We make art when we turn a phrase. We make art when we complete a project. We make art raising a child or being there for a loved one.
Our work is our art. Our life is our art.
We are all artists.
Let’s remember to keep making beautiful art.
📓Things to Think About📓
Byron Reed Leads a Tribe of Success
One of my mentors was featured in a piece by the LA Sentinel. Byron creates his art by helping lift up others and then watch as those same folks pay it forward.
Reed’s Tribe is a “Colorblind Mentorship through Authentic Leadership.” In explaining what the phrase means, Reed shared that the process of undergoing tutelage is a shared responsibility. He went on to elaborate on the importance of this kind of work, and the benefits of seeing his pupils grow. He mentioned seeing the different levels of success within his pupils is a triumph within itself.
Reed’s Tribe has shown tremendous achievement; young leaders are shaped to know their worth and understand what to ask for in terms of the companies they work for with no hesitation.
Through his success, Reed was able to harvest the knowledge and pass it down to the future generation. Reed’s Tribe looks to uplift young leaders from diverse communities and inspire them to reach their full potential. Reed has found much joy in shaping the following generation for success.
Reed closed with this word of encouragement for those finding their momentum in the daily effort to better one’s life. “I understand life is a big burden and it’s what you make of it, but I would tell them to really understand who they are, what they are, and really what they are trying to achieve in this life.”
Laura Foster writes about Another Year Later: A Flow Genome Project Training Review. I attended this training and reading it reminded me how much of life is just about the people we dance with and make our art.
The people are the real stars of this show. The one’s who show up. From dreamers, to psychotherapists, to entrepreneurs, to brain coaches, to tech CEO’s, to writers, to voice coaches, to teachers, to acroyoga masters, to lighting technicians, to vice optimization coaches, to actors, to empaths, to yoga instructors, to principals, to Navy SEALS, to mom’s & dad’s and beyond… These humans have changed me, for the better with all of their love, support and challenging nudges.
Charlie Bleecker writes about The Magic of Note Taking
As I’m currently winding my way through a 30 Day Course on Roam (thank you Marc Koeing) to continue to improve my note capture system, this article hit close to home. Capture it first and foremost!
This is not about which tool is the right tool. This is about simply writing things down.
It doesn’t matter how you capture ideas. What matters is that you capture them. Systemization is actually what makes writing and creating magical. Because if you don’t write things down, those ah-ha moments, those epiphanies, those connections slip away like your favorite dreams. It doesn’t matter how tightly you close your eyes and try to go back to sleep, it’s impossible to get those moments back.
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Aarti Shahani on The Art of Power interviews Geoffrey Canada on how he Reimagined Schools in Harlem
Kids were missing the experience not intelligence in Harlem
Find People that believe in you to partner with
Geoffery made his art by starting Harlem Children’s Zone (schools focused on breaking the cycle of poverty)
Failed then fixed his mistake when he launched his first school and did it in public because he let his supporters and parents down. Always take responsibility
If it’s tough enough, you might fail. Don't give up
He stuck to metrics and how he was going to measure performance, even though some of his staff quit when they heard his approach
Went to where the money and access were including partnering with Stanely Druckenmiller from Duquesne Capital. Stanley provided millions of dollars and loved and supported Geoffery being a number geek
He didn’t care if he had to upset white folks from taking the money from white hedge fund managers, he would go where ever the money is to enable kids to get out of poverty.
He would go to whoever had the resource to get it for the kids
He didn’t care if people thought he was doing white imperialism by teaching families how to parent
It’s all about finding the access points to then deliver the resources to the kids
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Bird by Bird - Anne Lamott
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.
What Great Storytellers Know - Bernadette Jiwa
“The storyteller’s role isn’t to tell us what happened, it’s to make us care that it happened and understand why it happened.”
Lifelong Kindergarten - Michael Resnick, Ken Robinson
There’s an old saying “We treasure what we measure.” Schools tend to focus more attention, and place more value, on the things that they can measure, rather than valuing and focusing on the things that will make the biggest difference in children’s lives.
LindyMan@PaulSkallas
One advantage of living in a place with stairs is that you can go down the stairs and then come back up with a different personality Your spouse just rolls with it The stairs basically end the scene and start a new one. Hard to do that in an apartment w/ no stairs
Can’t Sleep, Time to DO…@visakanv
40. how you conduct yourself in crises will define you much more than 95% of everything else you do, so it’s worth mentally rehearsing them. be the person that people can count on when shit hits the fan
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What art do you need to start creating? What art do you need to continue to put your all into?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
