The Middle Way
The Middle Way
🧰Our Most Powerful Tool 🧰
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🧰Our Most Powerful Tool 🧰

🔥Welcome to volume #00069!🔥

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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🧰Our Most Powerful Tool 🧰

During a meeting this week, I started feeling anxious when things ground to a halt. The presenter attempted to move things forward, but a barrage of questions threw everything up in the air. The pause pushed me to start tracking when we spiraled forward and when we rolled back.

How do we unlock better moments in our life? How do we keep things moving forward for ourselves and others?

This most powerful tool that we possess shows up in our careers, with family, friends, and when we get introspective. When done right, it unlocks thoughts and ideas. When done well, it energizes us and pushes us forward.

This tool is the power of good questions.

The commonality during the meeting was that good questions moved it along and energized everyone. People wanted to hear the answer to those questions. Poor questions acted oppositely. They were like running into a dead-end and getting stuck at a cul-de-sac. They paused the meeting, pulling the air out of the room.

When we pitch a perfect question, like throwing batting practice, the question explodes into beautiful energy, and the answer carries a long distance. We get enthralled, surprised, and learn from the response. It’s like saying Yes And** during an improv show.

When we whiff on a question, we notice the receiver gulp and the awkwardness that follows. We watch the toothpaste pour out of the tube, wanting nothing more than to put it all back. We correct this error by asking another question to redirect and claw back the dissipating energy.

Asking good questions is a superpower.

Great coaches know this and use them to prod and poke to help reframe our focus. Great leaders know that getting everyone on the same page due to a great question changes people’s worlds. We all know that asking ourselves the right questions opens up our curiosity, creates a beginner’s mind, and takes us to new real estate.

Good questions create leverage because we can run the question program over and over. They help us understand the world, our friends, family, and ourselves better.

Learning starts with asking a question and then trying to answer it. Questions act as our most powerful allies. 

**Yes And is the concept where no matter when your scene partner says you support the choice and the authenticity of their words (no narrative violations)

A question mark picture I took at Burning Man

📓Things to Think About📓 

How to Curate Talent Like Tyler Cowen by Tony Kulesa

Subcultures are super interesting to me.

Tyler's success at discovering and enabling the most talented people before anyone else notices them boils down to four components:

  1. Distribution: Tyler promotes the opportunity in such a way that the talent level of the application pool is extraordinarily high and the people who apply are uniquely earnest

  2. Application: Emergent Ventures’ application is laser focused on the quality of the applicant’s ideas, and boils out the noise of credentials, references, and test scores. 

  3. Selection: Tyler has relentlessly trained his taste for decades, the way a world class athlete trains for the olympics. 

  4. Inspiration: Tyler personally encourages winners to be bolder, creating an ambition flywheel as they in turn inspire future applicants.

Tyler on mentors.

“Get a mentor… Say you want to learn about contemporary art..You need a mentor. Yes you should read some books on it, but you want a mentor to help you frame them, take you around to some art, talk about it with you. Get as many mentors as you can in the things you want to learn.”

Tyler on how he evaluates people.

How would you evaluate other people’s ability to be great “talent evaluators?”

“I don't think I have insightful answers, other than looking at results. But I do look rather intensely at how well they understand music, the arts, or whatever culture they might be interested in. I place great weight on that, though not absolute weight. With Shruti [Rajagopalan, who now runs Emergent Ventures India], for instance, I was deeply impressed by her knowledge and understanding of Indian classical music. I thought ‘if she can figure that out...’ etc.”

The Harms of Masking Kids by Vinay Prasad

Vinay offers a strong reminder about tradeoffs. Everything includes a cost and a benefit and we need to think through those costs vs. benefits.

The money shot from the piece.

Scientists have an obligation to strive for honesty. And on the question of whether kids should wear masks in schools—particularly preschools and elementary schools—here is what I conclude: The potential educational harms of mandatory-masking policies are much more firmly established, at least at this point, than their possible benefits in stopping the spread of COVID-19 in schools. To justify continued masking of schoolkids—with no end date in sight—we have to prove that masks benefit kids, and at what ages. States and communities that are considering masking policies just to be safe should recognize that being overly cautious has a cost, while the benefits are uncertain.

As always we need to run randomized controlled studies (ask the questions!!!) and be ready to follow where the results take us. Why we haven’t run them is strange.


🎧Things to Listen, Watch & See 🎧

Visa Veerasamy on Reframing Your Ambitions on the MetaLearn Podcast with Nasos Papadopoulos (Spotify)

  • Visa realized he had ADHD and adjusted his operating system for it (The Middle Way touched on that subject here)

  • He thinks ADHD is a misnomer and in the future gets redefined

  • ADHD is like you can’t walk, but you can fly for some people

  • Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, it is all about how we learn to use them

  • Seek out circumstances that work for you. Like playing a video game figure out the way to slay your dragons!

  • A growth mindset is key and believing you can get better at things

  • How do we express our ambitions as honestly as possible and support each other on that journey is one of his main focuses

  • You need to find the right building blocks to grow your ambition (including the right people)

  • People seeking prestige you want to gravitate away from

  • Everyone is remixing the people that came before them so just be ok with that and you will make changes to it that is part of your style

  • Be prolific and makes lots of stuff. Make the smoke and see where it travels

  • Creators provide an opportunity for kinship and belong, one of the best gifts you can offer

  • Use your curiosity and ask questions! Conversations plus curiosity is his methodology

Alex and I continue to advance our proof of work for our Acro Yoga Game (Instagram)

Vitalik did an AMA on Twitter that is worth browsing. A lot of crypto, but a lot of other stuff too (Tyler Cowen from the piece above 👆 makes an appearance too).

Took this picture of a porta-potty at Burning Man

💣Words of Wisdom💣

The RZA, The Tao of Wu

"Practice wit and deflection every day. You never know when you’ll need it."

Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby

Play is the signature of childhood. It’s a living, visible manifestation of imagination and learning in action

Drake

“How can anyone tell you the truth when they are misinformed?”

Derek Sivers, Anything You Want

"How do you grade yourself? It’s important to know in advance, to make sure you’re staying focused on what’s honestly important to you, instead of doing what others think you should."

Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership

"Instead of letting the situation dictate our decisions, we must dictate the situation."

John Kay, Obliquity

"Oblique problem solvers do not evaluate all available alternatives: they make successive choices from a narrow range of options."

William Gibson, Distrust That Particular Flavor

"writing speeches, curiously, one sometimes finds out what one thinks, at that moment, about something."

James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief

"We might say that we join the communitas when the questions being asked there become our questions."


🙏Thanks for reading🙏

How can you ask better questions? Do you notice and track how your questions land? What can you do more of and what can you do less of?

Any thoughts or comments, please share!

Namaste,

Christian

Think about that Playa Mindset on the week that Burning Man usually takes place.

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