Reflecting, Reassessing and Restarting

🔥Welcome to volume 0000012!🔥

I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share ideas. The Middle Way is your path.

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🎆Reflecting, Reassessing and Restarting 🎆

Last week I sat down at the iPad to craft my annual review*. I took a deep dive into my 2019 and thought about what I wanted to do in 2020 and beyond. The annual review lets you relive the hits, misses, and the surprises. Most importantly it gets you to examine your life. It’s a nice forcing function for reflection and projection.

There isn’t any magic to a date like the year end, but we make it magical because our attention creates the magic.

Reflecting

It starts with reflecting on your life. What are you grateful for? What is working? What is not working? What brings you joy? What takes away joy? What habits serve you and which habits do you need to release? What do you stand for? Did your actions match what you stand for?

The questions help you draw the map of your life. This sets the table to next think about the future.

Reassessing

This is stuff that you are maintaining, taking to the next level or kicking to the curb. You keep some doors open, close doors or open new doors.

A nice roll of thumb for reboots is Derek Siver’s idea of Hell Yes or No. What are you still saying Hell Yes too? What are you saying maybe to that needs to become a NO? What do you want to experiment some more with and see what happens? Do you need more randomness, or do you have the right amount?

What do you want to do more of? What do you want to do less of? What do you want to taste and see what you think?

Restarting

Year end is a nice reminder to look back, take stock and take aim at the future. When we restart it’s a clean slate. There is no disappointment or frustration. We live in space of possibilities. If we want, we can view each moment in the day as a potential restart. Every moment is like the start of a new improv scene. It starts fresh. We can restart multiple times each day. We can take a breath and go back to the beginning.

When we restart, we get to make sure our next action heads us in the direction that we want to go. If we get flustered at a loved one, a colleague, a news story, we can step back breath and restart. We can get back to the best us and not let extrinsic pressures get us off our path. We can take the Middle Way. 

*PS if you want a copy of the template I’m using, send me email. 

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📓Articles to Read📓 

How to tell a story like Mike Birbiglia

I didn’t watch much last year minus some YouTube talks and tutorials, but last week I watched Mike’s latest Netflix’s special (I recommend it again in the watch section of this newsletter). Wow! Just wow. It’s a storytelling master piece and is highly recommended (this was the only TV I watched this year because kids).

• Tell things you DON’T want to share —> that is the gold

• He doesn’t like the beginning, middle and end…instead start where you want to finish

• Make the story applicable to as many people as possible

• Only the essential if you digress

• Be YOU

Mike Posner Walked Across America

I find Mike Posner pretty fascinating. He has the fortune and the fame, but realized it wasn’t working for him. Instead he walks across America. His music is also top notch.

• Pair with his track “How It’s Suppose to Be”

“When people die, it’s just a reminder that you’re gonna die too, dude—you’re next,” he says. “In the meantime, you should start doing the things that are important to you now. This is it. This is your life. Look around, here it is.” 

“Unplugging made the journey a lot deeper, because I went to places in my mind that I didn’t know were there,” he says. “I tapped into my superpowers, as I call them. The trip is supposed to be hard, so you’re just riding these up-and-down waves. At some point, I figured out how to get through a low to the next high with only myself.”

Too many people see happiness or enlightenment like the end zone on a football field, he says—like you can just dance across the line and spike the ball in celebration that you’re done. But in reality, it’s a day-by-day decision of who you’re going to be. 

What will you do to stay weird?

My favorites:

• 1. Adhere to a weird ideology.

• 6. Marry someone from another country.

• 14. Take up an unusual hobby at an inappropriate age.

• 20. Truly don't care what other people think. That guy has moved on and the space is open.

• Truly weird people don't try to be weird; most do not want to be weird; they struggle to understand what makes them seem weird to others.

• Hunter S. Thompson once said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

  My extension of that: "When the weird turn pro, the pros learn to act weird."

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📚 Books to Read 📚 

Idea Trails by Mike Dariano

Mike riffs on ideas from business, books, and podcasts. The book is short, but it is one great idea after another include:

• Power of naming things

• Base rates

• Jobs to be done

• Complex Adaptive Systems

  Teams are also CAS. Some people make everyone around them better, some sour the spirit. Markets are also CAS. It's buyers and sellers that interact in ways with knock-on effects that make predictions difficult. Withing CAS base rates are especially helpful. No matter what our optimism, effort, and intelligence our individual (or group) effects won't matter much with the many interacting elements.

Infinite Detail is a fun science fiction thriller. The book riffs on what happens when people opt out of the network.

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🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺 

Mike Birbriglia’s Netflix Special “The New One”

• Full on master class on storytelling!!!

Tony Fadell on The Tim Ferriss Show

• “A lot of people learn then do. I like to do, fail, then learn.”

• Every decade in our career we need a reboot and to do something different

• Tony asks himself —> “Who am I? What’s a great manager? What’s a great leader?”

• He answered those questions —> Mentors, Reading, Psychologist/Coaching, and going deep on everything

• Lessons from Steve Jobs —> “The biggest one was storytelling, storytelling, storytelling. Always, with whatever you’re doing, have great stories or great analogies because you need to relate to people on their level.”

• “If you can have a great analogy for someone, they’ll continue to repeat that to everyone else.”

• Ask “Why” five times to try to get to root causes

• How to find the Middeway between impatience and getting to the future.

• Optimize for self-care

• “We all go through all of these changes in our lives, we all go through failure. If you’re open to learning, and you’re open to the failure and pushing hard… It can end up happening if you really keep pushing. Whether it’s a failure or a success, keep pushing… Keep staying a beginner, trying to stay humble, and trying to work with others. That’s your superpower at the end of the day.”

Adrienne Maree Brown: Are Your Satisfiable? on Hurry Slowly Podcast

• How to invite the “orgasmic yes” into your life

• Why you should do something to awaken your body every day

• How to create more equity by sharing your “idea lineage”

• Why you don’t have to produce anything to feel satisfaction

• Ideas on how to “give without grasping”

• “I’ll ask people, ‘When was the last time you were satisfied? Can you imagine being satisfied? What are the things that satisfy you in a given day? How do you know that you have done enough in a given day? Do you understand that you don’t have to produce anything to deserve satisfaction?’”

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💣Words of Wisdom💣 

All Things Shining - Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly

The central challenge of the contemporary world, Wallace seems to think, is not just that we don't know how to live meaningful lives; it's that we don't even seem to be able to focus for very long on the question.

The Laws of Human Nature - Robert Greene

Understand: Like everyone, you think you are rational, but you are not. Rationality is not a power you are born with but one you acquire through training and practice

Alchemy - Rory Sutherland

Talking to Ole Peters, I realized that the problem went wider than that – nearly all pricing models assume that ten people paying for something once is the same as one person paying for something ten times, but this is obviously not the case.

32 Thoughts From a 32-Year-Old – Ryan Holiday – Medium Ryan Holiday

Jerry Seinfeld once talked about how ‘quality time’ with your kids is nonsense. Time is time. In fact, he said garbage time — eating cereal together late at night, laying around on the couch — is actually the best time. I think that’s true of life as a whole. Forget chasing experiences. It’s all wonderful, if you so choose.

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🙏Thanks for reading.🙏

Wishing everyone a great start to the new year and the new decade. If you are finding value in the newsletter, please share with a friend.

My themes for 2020 are movement, music and writing. What are your themes?

Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.

Namaste, 

Christian