☀️Never Forget Your Shine☀️
🔥Welcome to volume 000026!🔥
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.
☀️Never Forget Your Shine☀️
Do you have people on speed dial for career and life advice? Do you have folks that you can call to give you crisp feedback, a hand when you need to be pulled up and reassurance that if you fall, they will help you back up?
More important than that, do people have you on their speed dial? Are you stepping up and helping others?
Last Saturday I did some zoom hellos, meeting up with old friends and a bunch of new friends. One of my mentors planned a gathering in Los Angeles for his mentees, but the Corona Virus took the venue away from us. Thus it was Zoom Time and doing the best we can.
My mentor, Byron, is a person on the starred contact list for many people. His list is long. He does the work and acts as a stepladder for others. He is about mentorship, leadership and giving back. He leaves a wake with his actions and he makes a difference.
We spent a couple hours on Saturday going through introductions and talking about the work he does. The group included people from all over the map. The group transcends ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Each person spoke with gratitude and left you feeling inspired. The common theme amongst the group is good people helping out good people.
What the call reminded us of is how we all can make a difference. We all can help others level up and forward. We can be a rock when the sea gets rough for others and they can do the same for us.
Everyone one of us struggles. Everyone one of us gets lost. When we have a hand we lend it and when we need a hand we grab it.
Byron left us with some words of wisdom. He said “Let your light shine bright and pay it forward”. “Never forget your shine”.
Are we remembering our shine? Are we sharing our shine and helping in these challenging times?
📓Articles to Read📓
Kevin Lee Twitter Thread on Moe (manager) and Marshmello
Hustle, great ideas and some good tunes…
Chris aka Marshmello makes over $40m a year
32/ Chris doesn't care about fame. He loves the anonymity because he enjoys walking down the street without hoards of people crowding around him. He can live his life and produce the music he loves. People who work with him praise his humility and love of music.
33/ Moe knows what's important. In interviews, he says:
"Money doesn't bring happiness. Success and money – in the end, you lose when you allow that to change you. This could all be gone tomorrow. If you burn everybody on the way up, the way down is gonna be terrible for you."34/ "I meet people, especially in L.A, that are like, ‘Do you know who I am?’. And I’m like, no – I really don’t care. You’re no different than anybody else. You could be the President of whoever and whatever. It honestly doesn’t matter. We all bleed the same blood."
Tim Ferriss’ asking new questions
You said you lost your shit this morning. When that happens to me, I wonder if any of the therapeutic work I’m doing is actually helping me become a calmer, saner person. Have you been able to be more self-forgiving over the years?
I’d say that’s the biggest change that I have focused on, and seen in myself over the last five to six years—that change in the inner voice. And there are many things that have contributed to that, including interactions with people like Tara Brach, who wrote an outstanding book called Radical Acceptance, which was recommended to me by a neuroscience PhD who is as anti-woo-woo as possible. That's a great starting place for learning to accept and be friends with the emotions and thoughts that you would otherwise label as bad.
Another is Awareness, by Anthony de Mello. I've gifted at least a hundred copies of this book to people, and it makes the point very early on that most of us say we want to be healed or we want to change, but that, in fact, is not true. What we want is a reprieve. What we want is a salve to remove pain. But there's a big difference between looking for a reprieve and looking for a solution. The solution involves focusing on things that can be very uncomfortable.
[I’ve also used] tools like “turnarounds,” from [author] Byron Katie. It’s where you take a phrase that is a belief of yours—I don’t have a sister but let’s just say, My sister is selfish and always asks me to do A, B, and C—and you turn it around by saying, I am selfish and I always ask her to do X, Y, and Z. Or, My sister is not selfish, and she thought that X, Y, Z. In each case of rephrasing, you are required to produce two or three points of evidence to support this restructuring of a statement. I've seen some incredible transformations just with that alone.
Fair to say that the trajectory of the toolkit you’ve written about parallels your own personal evolution?
Yeah, it's one hundred percent personal. All of my books, all of my podcast episodes are personal. I'm trying to figure something out, or I'm trying to learn more about something, or I'm trying to achieve a goal or remove a pain. Everything I do is scratching my own itch, because if I do that, at least I know I have a guaranteed audience of one.
Certainly in the beginning you might think that money is the answer. After that, you might think that more time is the answer. After that, you might think, I simply need to care more for the physical vehicle, or I want to learn more. Then it's really just about acquiring skills, maybe they're productive skills, or maybe they're just for fun.
And then, at some point, you have to sit in a room and be able to live with yourself. And with COVID, I want to say that suicide hotline volume is up 600 percent right now. I think I read that on Forbes. At the end of the day, you would want to be able to sit with yourself and not suffer.
If you've checked some of those boxes I just described and you're still suffering, that says to me that something has been missed. Certainly I found myself, after checking a lot of those boxes, still suffering.
Black Thought’s lyrics from the Roots Summer Virtual Picnic (hat tip reader JR)
These bars are better than anything we hear on the “news” today
Any activism is bad for bank business
America's always been safe for straight killers
Yo, the trail was tailor-made for me to fail
The kill or be killed all end with me in jail
It's funny how the new Mark Twain could be Chapelle
And we shut down the starving trend if we prevail
I won't be reduced to simply a trope
It proves everything that I wrote's a slippery slope
It's hard to cope and still push the envelope
When your mind is far beyond this kaleidoscope
Ayo, the way they cutthroat a brother, do we not bleed?
And from the shots, do we not run in top speed?
Whether black, blue, brown, bow-legged or knock-kneed?
Every weapon is not made by Martin and Lockheed
Are we detained if they say that we cannot leave?
Am I insane if I tell you I cannot breathe?
Messages written in languages they cannot read
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
A Memory Called Empire by Arakady Martine (Goodreads)
Great summer read for a fast paced sci-fi story. Following in the footsteps of Malka Older and the current crew of great female sci-fi writers.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Brad Feld on Tim Ferriss podcast (Spotify / Read)
Below are a couple of my favorite comments from Brad, who though monetarily and conventionally successful, has dealt with depression throughout his life
We all struggle and we struggle when our actions don’t match our words
When we get stuck, we find the others (coaches, friends, therapists) to get through the darkness
Brad:And he says, “Brad, they can’t kill you and they can’t eat you. Suit up.”
Brad:And the specific thing that was wrong was my words didn’t match my actions. And that has become a foundational part of my relationship with Amy and a key part of how I try to live. Although we’re human, I make mistakes, I screw up plenty. But I try to have my words match my actions.
Brad:In 2012 and then also in 2013, several entrepreneurs committed suicide. There was a little bit of conversation around that, but not a lot. Aaron Swartz was probably the first of the stream. There was a pop of, “Oh, my gosh. This person — how could this have happened?” Then it would drift away.
In this moment, I wasn’t ashamed anymore. I had been open about my struggles with depression to my friends. I was blogging all the time about my life, for various motivations, a lot of it to be that I think by writing versus thinking some other way.
I think that was it all clicking into place for me, which is, “All right. I’m going to die some day. I hope that I have more good experiences than bad experiences between now and then.” I probably will, because, in the Warren Buffett words, I won the genetic lottery. I’m a white male in America. I happen to be in my mid-50s. I’ve got plenty of resources. Probably lots better than worse for me, and so I should be aware of that, and try to use that as a force for good in the world on whatever dimension I can.
Brad Feld: The one about how are you complicit in the conditions that you’ve created is so powerful to reflect on. It’s a conversation that Amy and I have been having for 30 years. I work too much. I work a lot. I create time and space for myself. I used to travel all the time. I could complain about it, but how am I complicit in creating those conditions?
I have — you did too, right? You have the freedom to do what you want to do, where freedom is a very American word in some ways, very poignant word in this moment. But as, again, white men with resources, we have a lot of freedom relative to many other people, most other people on Planet Earth. So when I find myself in a modality that I don’t want to be in, working too much, or not having time and space for my relationship, or fearful of something, or whatever, in a relationship with a company, with a founder, with work, with a friend, that’s not healthy for me, what is my responsibility? What is my role in creating those conditions?
A lot of times, when I look at that and carve out the time to look at that — there’s a tactical, “Okay, I’m not going to do this anymore. I don’t want to do that anymore. I’ll stop doing this.” That’s tactical. That’s different than going into it and saying, “All right, I can change that. I can fix my schedule. I can delete some things. Why am I doing this? What is it satisfying in me? Is that thing it’s satisfying a good thing or a bad thing? Is it a wanted thing or an unwanted thing?”
Man, even with things that seem so obvious from the outside to my best friends, I don’t see them. I think that’s true for many people. We’re in complete denial of how we’re creating those conditions that create our unhappiness. Create our happiness, that’s good, but create our unhappiness, create our limitations, create our, put whatever box around and put a negative sign in front of it. Again, he is good at poking through that, not touching it and tapping it, but just barreling into it and saying, “All right. Here we are in this box. Let’s talk about all the mess that’s in this box.”
Tim Ferriss: You are allowed to have two billboards.
Brad Feld: I think my billboard for the world would probably be “Breathe.”
Tim Ferriss: I like that.
Brad Feld: Just “Breathe.” Another billboard, which is not probably the Bay Area billboard, but there’s plenty of places would be some version of, “Don’t believe your own bullshit.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
The Passion Paradox - Brad Stulberg, Steve Magness
Autonomy, also sometimes referred to as authenticity, is about acting in harmony with your innermost being. It means you’re connecting what you do with who you are. Your work should reflect your core values and beliefs; you should express some part of your innermost self in your activity. Unfortunately, in a modern economy that emphasizes external rewards over internal fulfillment, too many have lost sight of this basic need.
So my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.
Letter to a Friend Who May Start a New Investment Platform - Graham Duncan Blog
What if being a young agent who is long on time and short on cash who loves hitting your version of the ball was actually the optimal position for you? What if there was no promised land of security and control on the other side of making a billion dollars? How would your climate in the skull change if that were your default belief? Does it extend your time horizon, injecting spaciousness around a given decision.
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It - Kamal Ravikant
What we believe, that's what we seek, it's the filter we view our lives through
The enemy of memory isn’t time; it’s other memories. Each new event needs to establish new relationships among a finite number of neurons. The surprise is that a faded memory doesn’t seem faded to you. You feel, or at least assume, that the full picture is there.
The Power of Showing Up - Daniel J. Siegel, Tina Payne Bryson
Showing up means what it sounds like. It means being there for your kids. It means being physically present, as well as providing a quality of presence.
The Philosophical Baby - Alison Gopnik
Human development is more like metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies, than like simple growth—though it may seem that children are the vibrant, wandering butterflies who transform into caterpillars inching along the grown-up path.
In the physical sciences, cause and effect map neatly; in behavioural sciences it is far more complex. Cause, context, meaning, emotion, effect.
The Buried Giant - Kazuo Ishiguro
A couple may claim to be bonded by love, but we boatmen may see instead resentment, anger, even hatred. Or a great barrenness. Sometimes a fear of loneliness and nothing more.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can we let our light shine?
How can we pay it forward?
Namaste,
Christian
