Measuring Our Lives...

Feb 02, 2020

🔥Welcome to volume 000014!🔥

I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share.

📏Measuring Our Lives 📏

Two giants in their fields, Clayton Christensen and Kobe Bryant, passed away last week . They both touched, inspired and affected millions of people with their ideas and their body of work.

Mamba Mentality

Mamba Mentality is the belief that the journey is the award. The journey is the gift. We show up, do the work and enjoy the work. We follow the process.

How We Measure Our Lives

Clayton gave us Disruption Theory, but what really sits with me is Clayton’s idea of How Do We Measure Our Lives.

As Clayton writes:

Over the years I’ve watched the fates of my HBS classmates from 1979 unfold; I’ve seen more and more of them come to reunions unhappy, divorced, and alienated from their children. I can guarantee you that not a single one of them graduated with the deliberate strategy of getting divorced and raising children who would become estranged from them. And yet a shocking number of them implemented that strategy. The reason? They didn’t keep the purpose of their lives front and center as they decided how to spend their time, talents, and energy.

Clayton reminds us that it starts with a clear purpose. We need to know what it is we are trying to do and have the proper scoreboard. Then we allocate our scarce resources of time, energy, and our talents appropriate for our purpose. We then find the right environment and culture to cultivate our scarce resources to serve our purpose.

Kobe reminds us that it is all about our journey and enjoying the process.

Are you following your process, enjoying your journey and living your purpose?

📓Articles to Read📓

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen

Clear purpose, allocation of time/energy/talent, culture, humility and right scoreboard!

One of the theories that gives great insight on the first question—how to be sure we find happiness in our careers—is from Frederick Herzberg, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn’t money; it’s the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognized for achievements.

Shanu Mathew wrote a great personal reflection piece on Kobe.

If the tragic events on Sunday taught me anything, it's to consistently be grateful and appreciative of the people that make you better in your life or inspire you - your parents, your friends, your coaches, your mentors, your idols. We didn't just lose a celebrity. We lost a leader, a dreamer, a creator, a teacher, a cultural icon, and all-around legend.

Zach Lowe Profile of Kobe “His Greatness was Beautiful and Maddening”

Critics mocked Bryant's "Muse Cage" videos, in which he talked with a puppet snake named Little Mamba, but I admired him for going for it. He took big swings. He would accept failure, even humiliation. He would not blend in.
That is what so many in the league admired: Bryant practiced every skill within a skill, every trick of footwork, every post-up move (the up-and-under step-through was a personal favorite), and watched enough film to know how to deploy them in specific situations against specific opponents.
That knowledge translated to defense. He knew every game plan and individual tendency. He was a rover and a gambler, but he had an edge. If he made a mistake, it was one of overactivity -- of overestimating how much he could do. He almost never lost focus or botched some element of a game plan.

The stubbornness and determination that made him great also alienated teammates and worked against the Lakers here and there as Bryant's athleticism waned. There were times he would have been better had he struck a healthier balance in his game. But had he been wired to find that balance in the first place, he might never have been as great as he was. Maybe you don't get great Kobe without the flawed, maddening, sometimes cruel one.

How to Make Hard Life Decisions

5 Methods that you can use and compare to make that decision

🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺

Power of Narratives and Storytelling for Investors

Lux Capital showing the power of narratives by offering power videos with great narratives
Three essentials for engaging narrative: 1. Make someone care. 2. Make it interesting (original) 3. Make it human
Making someone care is talking in their interest
Making it interesting creates curiosity, challenges beliefs and rewires neurons
Make it human by building trust, being vulnerable and relatable. Not superhuman.
Story telling is an art, so make it your own.

Krista Tippet on Being featuring Allison Gopnik (transcript)

Ms. Gopnik:Well, we’ve done — when I was saying before about the children switching from exploration to exploitation, we’ve actually done a bunch of studies that show that, in fact, children are more creative, can consider more possibilities early on than they can later on or they can as adults. But then we had a version of that where the problem was a social problem. It was about explaining why people did what they did, rather than explaining, say, why a machine lit up. And what we discovered there, somewhat to our surprise, was the preschoolers, the 4-year-olds, were very creative; the adults were not creative — that was consistent with other people’s findings; there was a decline at school age, which is what we’d found otherwise; but there was actually a burst in creativity in the social world in adolescence. So, the adolescents were actually the ones who were the most flexible when it came to thinking about a solution to a problem like, “Why did that person do what they did?” And I think there’s a lot of reason to believe that adolescents are often at the cutting edge of social change. And part of that is this capacity to think about all the different possibilities about the way the world could be.
Ms. Gopnik: I think, often, when people are thinking about science and scientists or the science of human nature, they see it as a rather reductive part of saying, “OK, here are the constraints on what human nature is like. Here is what humans are doomed to be. Here’s the way that humans are doomed to be.”
And I think, actually, the science tells us something very different. What the science tells us is that there’s this stream, this river, this ability to change in unpredictable ways. And when we see our children, we actually see that in real life, for good or for ill. But that’s what human nature is all about. Human nature is culture. What’s innate in us is our capacity to learn and change. That’s what human nature is really all about. And I think that’s a much more hopeful and positive picture than maybe some of the pictures we’ve had in the past.

Jared James talking Spirituality with Jim Rutt (transcript)

Seems magical and we use spiritual vs saying prefrontal cortex shuts down
Magical elements -> concentration, sports, psychedelics. Feels like sacred space and words that are problematic
Suffering is pain times resistance
We can drop the resistance and have that magical / spiritual moment
Hunter Thompson - Faster faster until the fear of death is exceeded by the speed
Like a rollercoaster and enjoying it vs afraid of it
Be Ok with this moment
Growing up and waking up key for understanding and having these experiences
Awareness of the stories we tell about things is key
Be aware we act in our own self interest and how can we act w groups.
Thoughts are confabulations - notice that. Notice feelings and attachment between confabulations
Meaningness is being aware of all of ourselves
What has happened happened. F the Past
We make the decision then tell ourselves a story
Body is far more important for making decisions than we realize

📚 Books to Read 📚

Barking up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker (audible / print)

What defines success for you, is, well up to you.
Too often we label things as “good” or “bad” when the right designation might merely be “different”.
Know thyself and pick the right pond
It’s the stories we tell ourselves that keep us going. They can be a higher truth. Or, in many cases, they don’t need to be true at all.
Try being more like a comedian or a kindergartener. Try things. Quit what fails. Then apply grit.
Atul Gawande is an endocrine surgeon. And a professor at Harvard Medical School. And a staff writer for the New Yorker. And he’s written four bestselling books. And he won a Rhodes Scholarship and a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. And he’s married with three kids. (Every time I look at his résumé I think, Jeez, and what the heck have I been doing with my time?) So in 2011, what did he think the next thing he absolutely needed to do was? Get a coach. Someone who could make him better.
The most important part of success is alignment, which equals know thyself

💣Words of Wisdom💣

“I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.” “I can’t believe that!” said Alice. “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.” Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” — Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

But later, I could see that it was like other aspects of creation, and had its own passions and wars. It is we who nourish the Soul of the World, and the world we live in will be either better or worse, depending on whether we become better or worse. And that’s where the power of love comes in. Because when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert M. Pirsig

When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts. Mark Twain’s experience comes to mind, in which, after he had mastered the analytic knowledge needed to pilot the Mississippi River, he discovered the river had lost its beauty. Something is always killed.

🙏Thanks for reading.🙏

Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.

How are you measuring your life? How are you following the process?

Namaste,

Christian

The Middle Way

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