🟡Punching the Gas or Tapping the Breaks?🔴
🔥Welcome to volume #00060!🔥
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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🟡Punching the Gas or Tapping the Breaks?🔴
When the workday ends, and you find your thoughts centering on Max Richter songs about sleep, you might need a break.
When life feels like Tetris on an upper level, it might be time to take a pause. When exhaustion creeps in, we face that flashing yellow light. We either speed up or stop.
Younger me always went with acceleration. There is a beauty to going faster and not stopping. Objects in motion, stay in motion. It's easier to stay on track and keep ourselves up when we choose speed. If a project is happening, it gets done by hitting the gas.
Eventually, without taking a rest, we either crash or our tank runs dry. When we don't recharge, our batteries slow down, and we lose ground versus a slow and steady pace. It's the tortoise and the hare analogy in action.
My wife recently took a new job and went from a predictable work-life balance to the work side of the seesaw overloaded and sitting on the ground. Life includes calls to the other side of the globe at various hours.
We operate as a team, attempting to balancing our yin and yang. When her cart fills up, ideally, my cart remains a little bit empty. Today that means more time watching two energizer bunnies (ages 2.5 and 5.5) and trying to run them down before bed.
Typically I solider on and keep piling up things on my plate. Currently, I'm watching as my plate starts to crack. Memorial Day weekend offered up an opportunity to rest, recharge, and refresh, but instead, the energizer bunnies ran me down.
Unfortunately, my battery failed to recharge and needed jumper cables to start.
The Middle Way is to offset our yang with yin. It's to notice when we run all out, and remembering to breathe, rest, and recover.
We want to maximize flow in our lives, and an integral component of the flow cycle is the rest and recovery.
We need to know when to tap the breaks to rest, refresh and recharge. The goal is to keep ourselves healthy and playing infinite games.
📓Articles to Read📓
Incentivizing Outcomes or Optics by Mike Dariano
We all wrestle with this question during our careers. Are we maximizing an outcome or just playing the optics game? The frustration builds when we or the people around us mix this up.
Things which are difficult to measure will be evaluated by optics. In these conditions it’s best to maximize optics.
Things which are easy to measure will be optimized on their measured quantities. In these conditions it’s best to optimize.
Naithan Jones on Inclusion Not Being for Outsiders
This concept resonates as we continue to attempt to find true diversity and inclusion by opening doors that remain shut (outsiders!). Using a narrow band and checking boxes is not the goal. How do we unlock more doors without falling victim to simple heuristics or markers that don’t accomplish what they are intended to accomplish?
I believe that it’s time for a more encompassing inclusion discussion. One that focuses on finding ideological diversity, one that uses advanced methods to identify and make machine-readable raw talent that isn’t pre-screened by Harvard, or maybe even by any college. What are the methods that can be used to find extraordinary people who are every bit as smart and capable as the Stanford grad but from a starting block much further back? At its core, isn’t inclusion and diversity a mobility and company performance issue? Isn’t the idea that businesses could be better and more productive by widening the net for more people striving to achieve the American dream? Why do we bias our programs towards only the pre-assimilated? Some of it is because we already know what our (or the abilities of those we admire) look like; it becomes a quick shortcut to screening competence. People tend to think “Hey I’m competent and I worked at Google and came out of Stanford CS so this candidate must be at least marginally competent as well”. But inclusion rings hollow if all it does is give opportunities to people who have plenty of opportunities, and only identifies talent that is already easier to identify.
Inclusion should be an answer to the issue of finding brilliance, talent, and new ideas across the entire population both inside and outside of the existing institutions and backgrounds. Diversity of economic background and diversity of worldview in hiring processes is largely ignored for identity-based diversity. Going to the same institutions and screening models creates a narrow archetype for what intelligence and ability looks like. Those candidates already stand out and won’t lack opportunities. It’s the talented individuals who are hidden that are the unrealized success stories: The single mom from East Palo Alto who learns how to code on the weekends while she works at Home Depot; the street kid with the natural hustle and sales ability from South Los Angeles who was kicked out of school before we could learn that he has naturally gifted abilities that translate to sales operations; and on and on.
Morgan Housel on How to Do the Long Term
We all want to think long term and make decisions based on the long term, but what happens when the long term changes and the present changes? Enter flexibility vs. the long term.
Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might be the opposite: The longer your time horizon the more calamities and disasters you’ll experience. Baseball player Dan Quisenberry once said, “The future is much like the present, only longer.”
A long time horizon with a firm end date can be as reliant on chance as a short time horizon.
Far superior is just flexibility.
Time is compounding’s magic whose importance can’t be minimized. But the odds of success fall deepest in your favor when you mix a long time horizon with a flexible end date – or an indefinite horizon.
Martin Gurri on The Great Unmasking and what is next for the US
People want prosperity and move to where prosperity exists. Life changed and that change will continue to reverberate through our lives.
Population flows that were visible before the pandemic will thus swell to the proportion of mass migrations. The control-oriented states of the Northeast, and possibly California as well, will continue to transfer their humanity to the business-minded South and West. The ability to work from home will spur this movement: You can now enjoy New York or San Francisco salaries while paying Decatur, Georgia, housing prices. Radical shifts in home construction will feed the process. While new homes in Idaho, Texas and Florida are going up at warp speed, California and New York seem unable to build at all.
Power shifted from the major metros and from companies to the people and where they are heading.
Companies that demand a return to the office will discover, as Google did, that they no longer have complete authority to make that call. Urban areas will have to wait, maybe forever, for the reappearance of COVID-19 refugees.
New York, San Francisco and Chicago won’t vanish in a puff at the start of the new times. They will remain great cities, hubs of finance and technology. On occasion, too, the urban public will assert itself and disregard the politics of control. But creative energy has fled elsewhere. Big-city elites seem consumed by a fever dream of egalitarian virtue, and will continue to tear down institutions like schools and police departments in pursuit of Utopia. Economic life, to them, is either a natural phenomenon like the air we breathe or an enemy to be subdued. The best minds will walk away from the rule of the righteous.
🎙️ Ideas from Podcasts/Videos 📺
Richard Dunbar visits TheStoa and talks about the Dunbar Number
Dunbar number has layers —> 150, 500, 1500, 5000 with closely decreasing moving out but still considering ourselves part of the same group or tribe
Your 150 can include dead ancestors, saints, gods, plants, animals, etc. Can be anyone you like. You still have 150 slots to fill and needs to include a reciprocated relationship
7 pillars --> language, location, education, interest/hobbies, world view, humor, and music for belonging to a group
The trait that people relate most to someone else is music (for whatever reason)
Digital media slows the decay of friendship at some point we need to see people in person to keep that relationship going
Friction increases relationship decay (moving etc)
There is an inverted U-shaped curve for relationships (increases up to age then decreases over time). The bulk of people on Facebook have 150-250 friends with the U-shaped layer taking place and most people actually contacting and communicating with 250 (constraint is in our mind and maintaining more relationships and predicting how they think or model someone’s thinking)
Four mind states. The number of close friends shows a number of minds. Conversation. Four minds for a convo is best
What Makes a City Great?
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Emergent Strategy - Adrienne Maree Brown
In a non-linear process, everything is part of the learning, every step. That includes constructive criticism, it is part of the feedback loop—experiment, gather feedback, experiment again. This is how we learn.
The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow
The central contention is simply this: the passages, portals, and may be entryways common to all mythologies are rooted in physical anomalies that permit users to travel from one world to another. Or, to put it even more simply: these doors actually exist.
Creativity - Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
In all cultures, men are brought up to be “masculine” and to disregard and repress those aspects of their temperament that the culture regards as “feminine,” whereas women are expected to do the opposite. Creative individuals to a certain extent escape this rigid gender role stereotyping.
Michael@mmay3r
People love to tell myths about themselves that remove all culpability for personal failings.
For example, “I’m an introvert” removes all culpability associated with poor social skills.
Meaningful - Bernadette Jiwa
The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How do you recharge when the Tetris blocks keep falling faster and faster?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Going to miss working with Shanu. He additionally helps comment and edits some of the pieces you see in this newsletter. Excited about his new endeavors and watching his continued success.
