🔥Welcome to volume #00067!🔥
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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🎬Proof of Work🎬
"It's often easier for one to give advice
Than it is for a person to run one's own life
That's why I can't be caught up in all the hype"
- Gang Starr, You Know My Steez
This quote hit me last week talking to a group of students. Offering advice falls into a tricky category. How do you make it valuable and useable?
Trying to inspire is generally excellent and meh. It's great because you get to share an idea that could change someone's trajectory. It's meh because there are no tangible action steps or follow-ups. Oh yeah, and that GangStar quote.
We all know people who hit the target for that quote. They quickly pull the trigger, telling others what to do. It's harder to run your own life.
Chatting with a new hire, I realized I wanted to leave the students with the idea of proof of work.
If you want to excel at a task, you need lots of proof of work.
The term, proof of work, comes from the crypto world. It means that one party proves to another party that they expanded an amount of computational effort. Instead of computational effort, we want to show that we did something and did it well.
We want to leave a wake from our progress and effort. That wake shows what we know.
A CFA, an MBA, an Olympic medal, or a black belt are proofs of work. Being a parent, creating a class, giving a presentation, or doing a teach-in, are proofs of work.
Most projects tend to involve less structure and formality than the acronym soups. We don’t need external validation, we just need to create. Given that the internet unlocks infinite possibilities, we can create unlimited proofs of work.
When we note all the great people we got lucky enough to have in our lives, the common denominator is proof of work. When we describe these folks, it centers around what they did or created. How they made us feel. They leave us with something tangible, memorable and make our lives better. They deliver, and we remember what was in the packages.
Acting and thinking with a proof of work mindset turn life into a collection of Austin Kleon books in action. We steal like an artist, we keep going, and we share our work.
It's that old saying get busy doing or get busy dying. I'm looking forward to what we all get busy doing.
📓Things to Think About📓
Kevin Kelly on Making the Case for Optimism
Kevin’s twitter pins one of his favorite ideas “the future is decided by optimists”. A saying that has greatly affected me. Any time I fall into the pessimist or skeptical bucket, this quote helps pull me out of it.
It keeps our eyes on the prize.
Why optimism?
On the surface, an optimistic belief might seem no more valid than the stance of pessimism. But the deep history of new ideas makes it very clear that the optimistic stance of believing something is possible is a requirement to make anything new real, and is thus more powerful than pessimism. In the long run, optimists shape the future.
Asymmetrical Possibilities (exactly the kind of investments one looks for)
This asymmetry in knowledge is reason to be optimistic, because it means there are no limits to our improvement. We can always imagine a better way -- and we are also always improving what/who the “we” is. Optimism recognizes that our potential for improvement is infinite in all directions.
The Long Now of History
While that sudden stop is possible, it is statistically more probable that it will continue, at least for several more decades. This long and on-going trend operates on a scale way beyond our own lifetimes. It is a phenomenon far bigger than ourselves. Being optimistic puts you in alignment with the long arc of history, and a part of something much bigger than yourself.
He finishes by offering seven drivers of optimism for the future.
Can People Change- Why we get stuck in painful relationships? by Maria Popova
Unlike Kevin Kelly’s being optimistic about the future, when it comes to painful relationships we need to watch for being stuck in optimism and hope.
It’s like watching our energy levels around certain people. If they always end up draining us, then the only road is to exit the relationship.
Because the unwillingness to walk away from a hurtful person is rooted in the belief that people change, the predicament gnaws at the fundaments of human nature and our ongoing effort to better understand what we are made of. Because relationships are the most fertile crucible of growth and transformation, because decades of research into psychology and the science of limbic revision have demonstrated that “who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” this wager we place on the prospect of change is a transcendently optimistic belief. It is also a dangerous belief, for optimism can often metastasize into willful blindness. (To say nothing of the counterpoint possibility that, across a span of time and unfaced trauma, people can change for the worse, their good qualities eroded, for instance, by the twin metastasis of addiction and unhappiness feeding each other as they destroy their host.)
Career Sampling by Nat Elison
He follows the infinite game idea that resonates so dearly with me. Then he layers on this question of figuring out what crap you can put up with. A great way to think about a North Star and the guard rails around it.
The Goal
I think the goal of any career search is to find a sufficiently lucrative infinite game you could keep playing indefinitely.
Every job is a game. Some of the games suck. Some are fun. Some are lucrative. Some aren’t. And it’s all individual. There are things you love that others hate. Things you hate others love.
The goal of high-speed career sampling is not to get a bunch of jobs. It’s to do a bunch of different forms of work. You can do types of work without permission or anyone giving you a job. And you should probably try on the type of work before you take on a 2-4 year job.
Basically you want to find a type of work that you enjoy doing, that pulls you in deeper, and that you’d keep doing for minimal compensation. If it happens to also pay a lot, great, but you should enjoy it even if it doesn’t.
This doesn’t mean “find your passion” or that brand of nonsense as much as it means what kind of crap you’re willing to put up with. For example I’m very okay with sharing my random thoughts about things to tens of thousands of people with minimal editing. Many people are terrified by that idea. So that’s one kind of crap I’m willing to put up with.
Seth Godin on What Makes a Job Worthwhile (Oldam and Hackman model)
Job satisfaction is driven by five factors:
Task significance: Does the work you do create meaning or impact?
Task identity: Do you feel ownership (emotionally) in the work you’re doing?
Autonomy: Do you have the freedom to make choices?
Skill variety: Is the task monotonous?
Feedback: Are you in a place where you can safely and easily get feedback and use it to improve?If you think about your moments of flow, or the pastimes and hobbies we choose, they have all or most of these elements.
And if you think about the most boring day you’ve ever had, or the worst job you had to do, it’s likely that most of these were missing.
🎧Things to Listen to 🎧
Jocko Pod - You are NOT Right, So Don’t Act Like It
Jocko Willinik offers this quote as a way to think about our thinking (link to the quote)
His main point is using “this is what I think I know right now, but I might be wrong” for everything that we believe makes a lot of sense. There is very little that we actually know to be true.
Rackets I produced This Week":
Teamwork Makes the Dreamwork featuring Andrew Park
Real Instagram Moments from the Top of the Mountain featuring DJ Valenti
Embracing Our Neurodiversity featuring Andrew Park
How to Live Like a Hall of Famer featuring Andrew Park
📚Books to Read 📚
Leading Without Authority by Keith Ferrazzi (Goodreads)
This concept jumped out at me because in most cases we lead without authority. Even when we have “authority” it’s about capturing hearts and minds. We can’t push a person up a hill, they need to want to do it. Creating that want is what leading without authority is about.
My tweet storm about the book is below. Click on the tweet for the entire breakdown.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Lifelong Kindergarten - Mitchel Resnic, Ken Robinson
When people work on projects that they are interested in, it seems pretty obvious that they’ll be more motivated and willing to work longer and harder—but that’s not all. Their passion and motivation make them more likely to connect with new ideas and develop new ways of thinking. Their investment in interest pays off with new knowledge.
Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It - Kamal Ravikant
If there is one lesson I can share from the experience, it is this: share your truth. Whatever your truth is, live it, share it. The world will respond in ways you never could have imagined. Life will blow your socks off.
Bandwidth - Eliot Peper
Like memory, history was synthetic. Humans thought of both as factual records, but study after study confirmed that they were more like dreams, narratives constructed and reconstructed by the mind to fit the demands of the present, not the reality of the past.
Redesigning Leadership - John Maeda and Rebecca J Bermont
Knowing our limitations is what makes us human; ignoring them is what helps us believe we can lead.
@NoreBateson
Not yet. It is just not time yet to say what has changed, or how I have changed or how our relationships have changed. There is much still revealing. The tapestry is still unraveling, re-raveling. The way it was is not how it is anymore. This is the time to tumble in the waves.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What proof of work do you want to add to your bucket?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Alex and I doing a Roda on State Street with Axe Capoeria Chicago (video)- still need to work on improving my proof of work.
🎬Proof of Work🎬