🔥Welcome to volume #00030!🔥
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.
🎇Playa Mindset🎇
You feel the wind start to blow and see the dust coming your way. You pull up your mask and adjust your goggles. You stand still like a tree, as the power of nature throws around the sand. The wind feels harsh from the rocks and refreshing as the blast of cold air creates a break from the sun and the desert's warmth.
The dust storm ends as quickly as it shows up. That is life on the playa in Black Rock City, Nevada. It's the beauty and the beast.
Welcome to Burning Man.
It's warm, dusty, and you get a week using hot, smelly gross porta-potties. Holding your breath while going to the bathroom becomes a default. You need to bring all your food and shelter for the week. The only thing available is gifts from your fellow burners. It takes multiple hours to go a couple of miles and get into the event.
It's physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausting at times.
The participants help create a city from nothing, and 80,000 people spend a week living there. Then it disappears forever like an improv show.
One mindset dominates the attendees, the Playa Mindset.
This mindset prepares us for anything and opens us up to the moment. It is the mindset of the flow state. It's like that blast of wind, yeah we are getting pelted by some small rocks, but we get a breeze and some shade from the sun. The discomfort is a wonderful challenge, and every moment is a gift.
No matter what we get, the openness and joy of the moment, coupled with the I wonder what will happen next attitude, keeps us in the Playa Mindset.
The trials, tribulations, and challenges are accepted and expected.
When we evoke the Playa Mindset, we show up as our best selves. We treat people with respect and recognize we are all in this together. We greet people with a hello or a head nod. We are open to the unexpected and leave the playa with more thoughts and ideas than when we showed up.
We know the people that have the Playa Mindset. We want to work with them. We want to be on their teams. We want them in our lives.
This week the annual Burning Man event is taking place in Virtual Reality. It's not the same. We we can still channel the Playa Mindset. We can show up at work, at home, and for fellow humans, with our Playa Mindset. That means showing up with love, care, and compassion. We can acknowledge people and say hi or give a head nod.
We can go beyond the status quo and do some little acts of gifting, giving, and grace.
It is shaping up to be a challenging fall and winter. We find ourselves surrounded by the playa's harshness without all the people, play, and art.
There is a lot of pain, fear, and anger in the world.
It's a perfect time to start showing up day in and day out with our Playa Mindset.
📓Articles to Read📓
Productive is the skill of getting the right things done, so that we accomplish what we set out to do in the first place. The work that matters.
Work From Home Means Everything is 1.2x
Jason Blum and Rory Sutherland both work in creative fields and note the importance of a confidence boost–which is hard to do virtually. In his op-ed, Jerry Seinfeld wrote that New York City will bounce back, that broadband isn’t enough to do the same work. Why? “Energy, attitude, and personality cannot be ‘remoted’ even through the best fiber optic lines.”
In the same way we might leave early if an upcoming drive is through a notoriously congested area, we should adapt our decisions, interactions, and intentions as we WFH.
Here’s the suggestion: When working virtually try to be 20% nicer, more supportive, and more cautious. There’s a psychological heft that’s lost in our virtual interactions
The desires of hungry ghosts are never satisfied and they must endlessly seek gratuity from the living. They can also cause misfortune to those whose chi energy is depleted or whose luck is bad. Some are driven seek to possess weak-willed men and women so as to dispossess their souls and take over their bodies, all the better to eat and drink with. In addition to hunger, hungry ghosts may suffer from immoderate heat and cold; the moon scorches them in summer, while the sun freezes them in winter, adding to their torment. The suffering of these creatures resembles that of the souls condemned to hell, but they are distinguishable by the fact that the damned are confined to the subterranean realm while hungry ghosts can occupy the world of the living.
In Buddhism, hungry ghosts are often seen as a metaphor for those individuals who are following a path of incorrect desire, who suffer from spiritual emptiness, who cannot see the impossibility of correcting what has already happened or who form an unnatural attachment to the past.
We Will Fight the Diseases of our Networks by Realizing We are Networks by Michael Garfield
This is a test of our ability to find the others — not the ones who see the same world we’re habituated to perceive, but those for whom a different history yields usefully different insights. Find those with different priors. To do this, we will have to counter this pathology of our unconsciously constructed networks, systems made of presumptively unchanging atomistic human beings and solid axioms, with the deliberate assembly of novel networks made of humans-becoming and disposable hypotheses: a do-ocracy of those who can address the problems that we have now, whomever we may think they are.
It seems appropriate that we have calculus because of Isaac Newton’s “Annus Mirabilis,” his year of wondrous discovery while cooped up in quarantine as Cambridge shuttered through the Plague of London: “Who do we trust?” means not just measuring first-order properties of somebody’s CV, their intellectual velocity, but second-order properties of whom they’re capable of learning from, their intellectual acceleration. It means not only finding values for authority by integrating linear CVs, but over multiple dimensions of experience and how they interact — not only what a person learned in schools or former jobs, but in their lives outside of institutions and in ways that “key performance indicators” have yet failed to capture. It’s going to require stereoscopic thinking that can train both quantity and quality on a phenomenon, to see the optical illusion of identity as both a particle and wave, a noun and verb, a self and an adaptive web of algorithms.
Uniqlo’s CEO - “Withouth a Soul a Company has Nothing”
His business ideas are a great list of life ideas with the internal game being the most important part
Nobody can predict the future. So why don't you venture out and create one? Those who create the future will be blessed with luck.
THE YANAI DOCTRINE
Tadashi Yanai's 23 management principles distilled to eight key themes.
1. Put Customers First
2. Contribute to Society
3. Embrace Optimism
4. Learn From Failure
5. Focus on the Details
6. Be Your Own Critic
7. Connect to the World
8. Disrupt Yourself
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
David Blaine flew up to 18,000 feet holding a bunch of balloons
He puts on a parachute while in the air (4,600 feet) and has to control his breath as he cruises at different pressure levels. Pretty amazing stuff.
Artificial Intelligence Podcast by Lexi Friedman featuring David Eagleman (Spotify)
The brain is a livewire. It is always changing unlike hardware or software, which are poor metaphors for the brain.
What are the systems of the brain trying to accomplish is the question to ask.
How malleable is brain -> plasticity (really the ability to change) changes over time. Plastic metaphor comes from William James. It’s never plastic. It’s always changing. There never is a shape. The brain is always changing.
Things that change less in the brain, like vision, are less malleable.
The brain like Stewart Brand’s pace layers. All move at different speeds
Older memories are more stable than new memories. It’s how stuff cements in the brain.
How does the brain learn - all around what you are doing and burning in your brain. Shaping circuitry what matters to us.
Goal is to make model of world and update it
Best news for 2020 is that given COVID we got pushed out of our normal routines and find new ways to fire and wire.
Dreams getting knocked off can allow us to dream bigger and know that we can do more than we thought. Not easy to do but it’s there for us.
13 yo old kids come up to him post a talk and know so much about the brain
Current learning is just in time for kids vs just in case. Can real time quench your curiosity and learn vs the past when it was fed to you. JIT is way better model.
Epigenetics our experiences change our outcomes and what genes get turned on
Is there free will? It’s a machine but an incredibly powerful machine. A lot we don’t know, so who knows.
Might be massive unknowns. Unless you knew how does a TV works, you wouldn’t think the info is getting beamed into it. Our brain could be like that.
We are lived weird around our culture and feedback loops
Where is the intelligence in the brain? It’s like where is the economy in NYC. It’s everywhere.
David’s new product let’s your hear with your skin. You get good at heating through your skin with practice. Livewiring in action.
What is the point of life? Doesn’t know. Keep asking the question
Advice - be adaptable. Eat widely. There is tons of info out there and drink it all. When something sparks your passion, run with it.
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
Samsung Rising: The Inside Story of the South Korean Giant That Set Out to Beat Apple and Conquer Tech by Geoffrey Cain (Good Reads)
TlDR: The story of Samsung and it’s connection with the Korean government as it moves into chips and takes on Apple.
Samsung employees had a sense of loyalty, respect, and fear and a reluctance to challenge management
BC Lee former Chairman - "Be prudent in hiring someone, but once you hired them, be bold in entrusting them with tasks". -- similar philosophy to the Japanese zaibatsu, where the ruling family sets the vision and the executives execute it without micromanaging employees.
Powerful HR function and an idea that Samsung treats you the best and you give them your best
BC Lee using personal influence to grow his empire post he Korean War in 1953... used american money for his sugar business
1961 military coup d'etat -- struck a deal with BC Lee .. 1968 BC was back in charge of samsung
1974 trying to launch the semiconductor side of Samsung --> CEO Kang tried to launch them... 1980s partnered with the US ... did an offsight and climb mountains to show every thing is possible
Risk of BK in the 80s so they worked like crazy to become technologically advanced on semis
Nunchi - is the Korean word for gauging someone's mood even if they don't say anything.
Family leaders of > than half of the ten biggest chaebols are all convicted criminals -- three have been pardoned twice
5 companies make up the major parts of Samsung and touch all life in S korea
Samsung had - 1. Health paranoia and a disdain for complacency to survive in the Darwinan technological world 2. A sense of perpetual crisis and a need to find opportunity in the crisis 3. The importance of quality control and the reduction of waste. 4. HR, talent and training as the pillars of a healthy workforce 5. The urgency of building a flexible, long term, globally minded corporate culture, rather than an inward, short term bureaucratic one.
Let's change ourselves first: A comic book about Samsung's management strategy.
Samsung interviewed 700 designers and 12 got accepted-- deep HR game
Franfurt vision in 1993 -- asian financial crisis allowed the chairman to unleash it —> Change everything but your wife and children was his motto
Samsung's vision for mobile chips made the iphone work... without them no iphone -- scorching speed for them to come up with them for apple
Apple vs. Samsung IP lawsuits --> started because of Samsung phones that Apple said they copied 2011... Samsung went from bespoke sales of products to telling a STORY
CMO Todd Pendelton from Nike showed up in 2011 and changed the game --> followed Phil Knight's trying to create a brand and a culture approach
Todd was nike's first ever basketball brand manager after Freestyle campaign
He in 2003 lead the team that signed Lebron for a 7 year $90m deal --> later brought bron to samsung
Signed Kobe for 4yr $40m --> took huge risks
he was a relationship builder and a brand builder
Dale CEO of Samsung Tech USA -- kept a photo of Jobs on his desk... they put apples in the elevators -- he wanted to beat everyone...Wallce"You don't punch the 3rd, 4th, 5th biggest guy in the room when you go to prison, you punch the biggest. That is your statement of intent. That's what we have to do with Apple.". Trucks were always showing up serving fresh apples. They had one objective, to beat apple. The apples reminded everyone to take a bite out of apple.
Hired market agency 72andsunny and had four days to produce the concepts to Todd and then 2 weeks to produce the campaign --- Constraint of time and delivery ... need to move due to upcoming cell phone launch (Galaxy S II)
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Anything You Want - Derek Sivers
Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable?
In Love With the World - Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, Helen Tworkov
All things are impermanent; Death comes without warning; This body too will be a corpse.
Small Arcs of Larger Circles - Nora Bateson
Some elders teach children who not to become, how not to communicate, how not to live. Those influences are just as important as the ones who provide the inspiring contrast. Some children give their parents the incentive to live better. The day comes when most parents hear themselves say horrid things to their children and then think, “Did I actually say that?
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
Our spiritual lives are where we reckon head-on with the mystery of ourselves, and the mystery of each other.
How to Love - Thich Nhat Hanh and Jason DeAntonis
The Sanskrit word karuna is often translated as “compassion.” Compassion means to “suffer with” another person, to share their suffering. Karuna is much more than that. It’s the capacity to remove and transform suffering, not just to share it.
Pace-setting is the art of harmoniously driving the natural tempo of your environment away from its current state and towards your preferred state – slower or faster – in non-disruptive ways. The idea that systems have natural tempos is a powerful and widely studied one. Charles Fine, in Clockspeed,14 characterized different industries in terms of their differing natural rhythms.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you invoke the Play Mindset? What areas of your life do you need to add this mindset?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
