🔥Welcome to volume #00070!🔥
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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🏰Pilgrimmages and People🏰
It was early.
We beat the sun, but so did a lot of people.
Standing in line, we waited to experience greatness. Being young and naive, we showed up wearing suits. Pilgrimages are unique, and we do wear suits for special occasions.
The buzz kept building as we got closer to the doors opening. We found meeting new friends a crucial part of the process. As the day progressed, our family grew. The acquaintances became friends, and new friendships blossomed.
This journey led us to Omaha, Nebraska, in May 2008. The crew included four close buddies and over thirty friends of friends.
We acted as a group of people trying to unlock one of life's significant challenges, the art of investing. We showed up as lifelong learners getting to listen to two great lecturers.
Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger sit on the Mount Rushmore for investing legends. The exciting thing about them isn't their net worth, social status, or investing track record. It is the efforts they make to share their knowledge. It is how they help to shape and change people.
Sitting in the audience at the annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting, you felt the power of the community. It included people just like us, trying to understand the world a little bit better. You felt the power of the gospel of Buffet and Munger. You couldn’t help but get caught up in the wave.
The pilgrimage changes us because of the people we spend it with and how their energy and ideas seep into us. The environment creates energy waves that help transform us.
As much as the event is about seeing Warren and Charlie, it's really about the community of people walking next to us. The learning and knowledge that come from our fellow travelers.
The backdrops enhance our journeys by pushing us closer together. The people, are the key. The people play essential roles in our transformative process. We continue to help shape and shift each other when we return home.
I don't remember the comments from Warren or Charlie, but I left with lifelong friends whose influence remains.
The pilgrimage is about the people, the people we meet, the people we surround ourselves with and the people we become.
📓Things to Think About📓
Bonnitta Roy on the Spirituality that We Need
I just started her course on Embodiment last week and ran into this piece that spoke to me.
We need to make commitments, we need to track how we keep our commitments and then we need to make sure we keep the right commitments
She believes
The spirituality we need today must reconcile this separation and come to see that the mind and the body are of one nature, and that “nature” is the same as when we say “nature,” and point to the natural world.
Types of Commitments
First Principle: The spirituality we need is based on commitments we are willing and able to enact. These include
Ontological commitment - What is real?
Epistemological commitment - What is true, and how is truth validated?
Axiological commitment - What is good, ethical and moral?
Metaphysical commitment - 1) A metaphysics of the universe: How did the universe come to be and where is it going?, 2) A metaphysics of experience: What is the self, what is consciousness, what is our place in the universe?
She offers this exercise to check on how we are doing with our commitments and how consistently do they sit with what we believe we are about.
Exercise: How would you describe your set of commitments? How does what you do reflect the view(s) you are actually committed to? Are these behavioral commitments coherent with what you say you believe?
Seth Godin writes about the Urgent Cultural Change
Culture is changing faster than ever and what we can control is our response to the change.
Our conversations and arguments about how we react to changes in the culture do little to change the forces that are shaping our future, though. Change persists whether we asked for it or not. Wishing and insisting won’t get us back to a world that’s static.
Our response to change is often all we have control over. And the way we respond is how we create the next cycle of culture and possibility.
Jordan Hall offers a take on NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) as a Nation-State or DNA
He offers a great example of the power of Nike, which began as an idea and now “exists”. Then introduces the concept of the nation-state and DNA as like NFTs. Which is an interesting parallel to draw.
One of my favorite financial newsletters The Diff written by Byrne Hobart likes to note that technology companies are currently Seeing Like the State (acting as nation-states… with the seeing like a state comment linking back to James C Scott’s book titled the same).
Let’s take Nike. But instead of taking it as it is now, turn back the clock to the beginning. Well, as I don’t actually know the real beginning, to a plausible beginning that serves to illustrate the general principle. Nike began as a dream. A vision largely of Bill Bowerman and Phil Knight. An essence whose constellation of qualities were valuable to Bill and Phil. Valuable enough that they bound their energy to realization of those qualities in the world. In a fashion, Bill and Phil became the earliest embodiment of the essence of Nike.
Their agency furthered the embodiment of the essence. The boundary of Nike expanded to include more reality. Tokens like the name “Nike” and the swoosh helped realize the essence, to make it more real and to expose those qualities more easily to other people. Choosing to adorn yourself with the swoosh placed you on the boundary of the agency of Nike, bringing the essence of Nike into the sensemaking of more agents.
The operating structure of “Nike” deployed energy in a fashion that returned more energy. This helped support the furthering of the agency of the essence. Over time the operating structure included more and more people (and more and more energy). A distributed sensemaking system oriented attention towards the instantiation of new tokens: new shoe designs and technical patterns, new icons like Air Jordan and Just Do It.
Energy creates and the NFT system invovles a lot of energy.
Over the past 14 years, this evolving ecosystem has grown to over 40 million people and more than $2 Trillion dollars of stored wealth. It has birthed an entirely new global technology stack, a fundamentally new approach to finance and is now quite aware of the “public goods” problem and the requirement of expanding its agency beyond technology and finance into politics and beyond.
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Anything You Want - Derek Sivers
Business is not about money. It’s about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.
Anything You Want - Derek Sivers
Just pay close attention to what excites you and what drains you. Pay close attention to when you’re being the real you and when you’re trying to impress an invisible jury.
Tweets from @ShanuMathew93
Awesome insight from The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi: "If receiving praise is what one is after, one will have no choice but to adapt to that person’s yardstick and put the brakes on one’s own freedom.”
Tweets from @RyanHoliday
Questions to ask yourself every day:
- Is this essential?
- Am I progressing?
- Why am I taking this so seriously?
- Am I making a positive contribution?
- "What would less look like?" (@tferriss)
- "Do I fear death because I won’t be able to do this anymore?" (Marcus Aurelius)
Tweets from @praseedjagan
To improve your probabilistic decision making "(1)look for areas you have a distinct edge (2)think deeply about time horizon (3)obsess over process vs outcome (4)do premortems (5)maintain a decision journal in an effort to provide clear, honest feedback"
The Heart - Maylis de Kerangal
The notion of his death is contradicted by the way he looks, because, when it comes down to it, his flesh is warm, it moves, instead of being cold, blue, and immobile.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What pilgrimages have you taken? What pilgrimage do you need to take? How do people from your pilgrimages help shape your world?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Outside of the Berkshire Hathaway meeting with some buddies and our in May 2008. My dad called me that morning to tell me that my great Aunt died (who was an extra grandmother to me), which is that call I’m taking in the photo.
🏰Pilgrammages and People🏰