The Beauty of Connection
🔥Welcome to volume 000015!🔥
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.
Thank you to all the new subscribers and welcome! 👋
We are closing in on 100 subs with another 70+ reading each letter after it posts. Sending much gratitude to everyone who spends sometime with us. 👏
🙌The Beauty of Connection🙌
My LinkedIn message box started buzzing after I updated my new company name and position. My current employer got bought leading to the change in status and the deluge of messages in my inbox. The reach outs came from a wide range of folks I’ve interacted with over the last 20+ years.
Each note made me smile. It reminded me how many great people pass through our lives. It reminded me to reach out and connect with folks more frequently. The amount of time we spend with each person varies but everyone leaves an imprint.
What makes life worth living is the people we spend it with. Life is about the connection, especially the human connection. How we treat the people around us shapes our lives.
Who do you need to reach out to and connect with?
📓Articles to Read📓
The Hero’s Journey in Everyday Life by Ed Batista
Ed breaks down the ways leaders can follow Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey.
Call to Adventure —> At some point most of us feel this call, a desire to leave the everyday world of our current career and seek our professional fortunes elsewhere--but we don't always heed it.
Threshold —> Can be a struggle to maintain independence and autonomy. Need a commitment to growth and willingness to learn.
Rebirth —> Winning the struggle that many times is the struggle within.
Return —> No victory is final and as leaders we need to bridge from celebrating the goal/win to what comes next.
I find this a compelling rationale to pursue my own Hero's Journey, striving for success without worrying too much about the results, feeling grateful for the opportunity, trusting that meaning is be found on the path, not at any destination.
Ed wants us to find our path, our Middle Way, and live our Hero’s Journeys. It’s the journey that never ends.
I have this picture of the Hero’s Journey on the board next to my desk as a reminder to heed the call when it comes.
A16Z on 1,000 True Fans can just be 100 (Kevin Kelly’s original 1,000 true fans essay)
The monetization strategy for 100 True Fans also differs from the 1,000 True Fans convention. Easy perks like offering users ad-free content and access to back-catalogs can help creators monetize at a lower dollar amount. But to gain fans who are willing to pay $1,000 a year—no small sum—creators need to offer a step-function increase in value. The recipe, then, is to go niche and to tap into users’ desire for results. Practically, what does that look like? It means providing differentiated content, community, accountability, and access.
Premium content and community that has no close substitutes
Delivering tangible value and results
Accountability
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Kevin Kelly talking about his 1,000 true fan idea on an a16z podcast
Kevin’s idea for reinventing the book industry: An author writes an ebook and sells it or $X. Then, the author pays readers who end up finishing the book $(X+1). (Most people probably won’t finish the book, enabling the author to profit
Alain de Botton on Flow Sessions with Jason Silva
We are all simply imperfect because we are human
Life is suffering and we need to accept that (Buddhist idea)
A successful life is friendship and love
Our madness is part of us
Pope hitting someone ... shows how everyone is flawed ... doesn't like gurus
Human condition is the sacred and profane... We are Gods and worms at the same time
When we love someone we accept everything including their shit
We are only moments away from the ridiculous
Dawkins "I cry when moved, not sad"
Pleasure and sadness... knowing something is transitory. The Happy / Sad
We all feel broken, lost and sad at times
How are you broken? How are you mad?
What do you regret? What are you afraid of?
Objective truth vs. Poetic truth ... Kronos vs. Kairos time
Poetic truth is beyond the literal grid
Science accuracy from the outside and poetry accuracy from the inside
Flight is an aesthetic experience. There are aesthetic experiences all around us, we just need to be ready and open to them.
Experience Design ... how do we get agency over the grace?
Religions worked hardest around experience design.. how do we bridge that gap in a non-religious world? Represent the estasis that surrounds us
We need rituals to create the habits. When we go to an art gallery we act like an art gallery patron
Kevin Kelly on Flow Sessions with Jason Silva
We design technology and technology designs us (life is ontological design… we design the world and the world designs us)
Mystical design is the idea that we can sit one foot in the here and now and one feet in all that might happen (Long Now Foundation view)
Technology is alive. All self organized systems are alive. Viruses are alive. Alive is a tricky word
Minds accelerate life, which creates technologies… which accelerate what is possible as we are running against entropy (its not against the natural world, it is the natural world)
Magic isn’t free… new technologies cause as many problems as they fix. They cause change which people don’t like and new issues
Humans are an invention of the mind. We are our first creation. We are the creators and the slaves. At the heart of life is that paradox. We are a product of the feedback loops
It is a short ride. Enjoy the body we have as it is a gift. The mundane and ordinary is precious and don’t forget that. Do amazing things with this body
We are part of something bigger than us. Open to the bigger.
📚 Books to Read 📚
Alchemy by Rory Sutherland (kindle)
This is one of the best books I’ve read recently. It’s highly recommended and can change how you look at the world, decision making and a better way to live by adding magic to the logic.
Rory walks us through how alchemy makes up much of our lives not logic.
He explores ideas like why do sales go up when prices go up. Why changing the label changes the taste. Why magic plays a key role in our lives and how logic kills magic
Just because we don’t know why something works, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
We can be both rationale and wrong.
How Red Bull broke all the rationale rules and created an improbable huge success
Randomness can be a feature not a bug
Rory’s Rules of Alchemy: The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea. Don’t design for average. It doesn’t pay to be logical if everyone else is being logical. The nature of our attention affects the nature of our experience. A flower is simply a weed with an advertising budget. The problem with logic is that it kills off magic. A good guess which stands up to observation is still science. So is a lucky accident. Test counterintuitive things only because no one else will. Solving problems using rationality is like playing golf with only one club. Dare to be trivial. If there were a logical answer, we would have found it.
A rational leader suggests changing course to avoid a storm. An irrational one can change the weather. Being slightly bonkers can be a good negotiating strategy: being rational means you are predictable, and being predictable makes you weak. Hillary thinks like an economist, while Donald is a game theorist, and is able to achieve with one tweet what would take Clinton four years of congressional infighting. That’s alchemy; you may hate it, but it works.
The Four S-es There are five main reasons why we have evolved to behave in seemingly illogical ways, and they conveniently all begin with the letter S.* They are: Signalling, Subconscious hacking, Satisficing and Psychophysics. Without an understanding of these concepts, rational people will be condemned to spend their lives baffled and confounded by the behaviour of others; with a grasp of these principles, some of the oddities of human behaviour will start to fall into place.
Once you accept that there may be a value or purpose to things that are hard to justify, you will naturally come to another conclusion: that it is perfectly possible to be both rational and wrong.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Bandwidth by Eliot Peper
Everything we do, everything we believe, everything we are, we think it’s ours to choose.” His voice quickened, words rushing to get out. “But even something as inconsequential as wanting a lawn in front of our homes isn’t a true choice. It’s the product of a never-ending series of historical accidents. We take the world we’re born into for granted. We imagine that we control our thoughts and dreams. We think we’re free to be who we want to be. But there’s this vast hidden architecture that shapes us, and we don’t even know it. It’s like we’re actors in a play who don’t realize we’re working off a script.”
Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt
Don’t tell people what to do, tell them stories about why they are doing it.
Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal
There’s one final caveat worth keeping in mind. Namely, there’s no escaping the human condition. We’re born, we die, and figuring out the in between can be brutal. As Hemingway reminds us, “the world breaks everyone.”
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Who did you need to reach out to and connect with?
What call to action are you getting for your own Hero’s Journey?
Namaste,
Christian
