Riding the Waves We Get
🔥Welcome to volume 000022!🔥
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.
Hope everyone is staying safe and active while we ride this out.
🏄Riding the Waves We Get🏄
There is nothing like getting up at the crack of dawn, feeling the sand on your feet and paddling out into the ocean. The adrenaline hits us with the first blast from the water. When we get to the beach we hope for perfect waves. Unfortunately the ocean is dynamic. Every surf session, we get different waves. No matter how much we want a certain wave, we get what the ocean gives us.
Life is like the ocean. We hope for a perfect day, but life is dynamic. Our days don’t ever repeat. We get to do our best and surf the waves that come our way. We try to control what we can control. We wait to see what each day brings. We don’t get to control the waves that life offers up.
These days we get a strong sprinkle of uncertainty. Many of our rituals and routines morphed given the current opportunity set. We respond by creating new ones. We accept the current conditions. We keep growing as people and serving our family, friends and community. We build up our practices and skills, always in a ready position.
We don’t get upset with what didn’t happen. We realize that perfect is a mirage. We enjoy each day no matter the conditions. There is only one life.
We enjoy the journey with gratitude and a smile.
We celebrate, shed tears and embrace the magic.
📓Articles to Read📓
The Three Sides of Risk by Morgan Housel
His childhood story is a powerful embodiment of the last of the three sides of risk he talks about in the piece. A worthy read even if you don’t care about the investing takes.
But it opened my eyes to the idea that there are three distinct sides of risk:
The odds you will get hit.
The average consequences of getting hit.
The tail-end consequences of getting hit.
Last week I shared his 68 thoughts on his birthday and if you read them, you can see why one would be interested in how he writes.
Do you have routines that you follow when you write?
With writing, there’s a point for me that’s really hard. That usually comes for me on the first draft. I’m not a natural writer. I’ve worked with natural writers — they’re people who have to write every day; they love the act of writing; they’re happiest when they’re writing. I’m not. I’m a grumpy writer. I do it under duress. I don’t enjoy writing; I enjoy having written. So that first draft for me is the hardest because the kind of writing I do — it’s a kind of thinking. I write primarily to find out what I’ve been thinking, and I don’t know until I write it. And so it’s a very difficult process. And in those periods, which are messy and horrible, one of the things I do is I play the same song on loop, again and again. And it turns out from Tim Ferris’ crowd, this is not unusual for a number of different writers.
Bill Simmons opens up about selling The Ringer to Spotify
Simmon’s is always pushing the envelope and being creative. His columns put him on the map and he got on the podcasting wave at the very beginning. What is interesting about Bill is that he continues to push envelopes and evolve. It doesn’t always work, but he keeps the stuff that works and discards the rest.
Spotify reminded me of that point when I was at ESPN and a lot of the stars had aligned. The big difference is Daniel. The guy is like a genius. He might be Steve Jobs for audio. That’s what’s different than ESPN. ESPN always had different executives, an upper level by consensus. Daniel’s somebody who has real vision for how this stuff works, and he’s been vindicated in a lot of ways already. So the chance to work with somebody like that was cool.
The other thing is that they don’t have a lot of competition for what their goals are. People always compare them to Netflix and where Netflix was four, five years ago. The similarities are definitely obvious. You have Spotify, which has just been hammering home on the technology and know-how side to a point now where they have this war chest, which is where Netflix was in 2014–’15, before everybody realized what was happening. Netflix had a six, seven year head start on everybody, and you can feel it. They’re the dominant video platform. Sometime mid-decade, people started to realize what was happening and were like, “Oh shit, we’ve got to come up with our own versions,” and that’s what led to where we are now with Disney+ and HBO Max and Apple TV and Amazon Prime and all these things.
Spotify is in the same position, except I don’t know who the competitors are going to be. There are pieces of different competitors, but no real rival other than Apple, and Apple doesn’t care about podcasts like Spotify does. Apple makes so much money from apps and iPhones and computers, everything else. As you’ve written about a million times, they’ve never committed to the kind of money it would take to try to turn that corner.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman and Sixers/NJ Devils CEO Scott O’Neil (Spotify)
Scott has a post it note on his desk that lists all the people in his life who give him energy
Hat tip to reader Geremy for sending this over after reading the piece last week about managing and maintaining our energy
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
The Miracle Club by Mitch Horowitz
The book’s main theme is that our thoughts matter. If we can combine using our mind through our thoughts with something achievable and put emotion behind it, we can unlock magic. We can create the conditions to expand the boundaries that we live in.
The guiding principle of positive-mind metaphysics is: thoughts are causative.
It reminded me of Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods who both used visualization, intense practice and continual training of their mind to achieve their level of dominance.
The tool box is affirming, visualizing, meditation, prayer, and chanting.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Be Lucky - It's an Easy Skill to Learn - Richard Wiseman
My research revealed that lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Never forget this: the nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience
Difficult ConversationsDouglas Stone, Bruce Patton, Sheila Heen
The error we make in the realm of intentions is simple but profound : we assume we know the intentions of others when we don’t. Worse still, when we are unsure about someone’s intentions, we too often decide they are bad.
Thom Yorke of Radiohead: "I thought when I got to where I wanted to be, everything would be different. And then I got there. And I'm still here." Interviewer: "Why, in the end, have you done what you've done?" Yorke replied: "It's filling the hole, that's all anyone does."
All Gain, No Pain - Bill Hartman
Chronic stress makes humans more rigid and less adaptable to change.2,3 In some people, it shows up as high blood pressure. In others, chronic illness. It affects every system in our body and not just your internal systems. It even affects how we move. Too much time on the sympathetic side of the stress gauge reduces your movement repertoire.4 Whereas once it was easy to bend forward and touch your toes, it is now an arduous task. Aches and pains arise from increased muscle tension and joint pressure. To avoid pain, you move less; giving up even more movement capability. An endless cycle of stress, protection, and movement rigidity persists.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
What’s making you smile, cry and celebrate?
What waves are you riding these days?
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian
