🔌The Power of Plugging into People🔌
🔥Welcome to volume #000052!🔥
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.
🔌The Power of Plugging into People🔌
This month I find myself back in an online-based cohort course. My goal is to do 1-2 a year.
I’ve taken many online classes, which offer the opportunity to improve a set of skills and meet wonderful and talented people. Each class introduces a journey of exploration enhanced by your fellow course travelers. The network mind of the group provides ideas and possibilities.
This month, I’m driving through Write of Passage (WOP) for the third time. David Perell started this course with the goal of helping people write online. It blossomed a slew of talented writers and a community of people that show up, do the work, and help each other.
I keep showing up to WOP because it pushes me to write better and the fellow travelers inspire, coach, and co-create, helping to unleash newfound and stored up creativity. The real juice for WOP comes from attracting talented and caring individuals who help everyone get better.
It is like Toastmasters, another organization buttressed by amazing people who go out of their way to help everyone involved. Similar to Write of Passage, Toastmasters creates sacred spaces to challenge yourself, to grow, and to find the support you need along the way.
What makes these places sacred are the people. The people are key. But sometimes we need a North Star to bring us together. These North Stars, composed of ideas and possibilities, attract the people who genuinely care, and offer an arena for us to learn, grow, and help each other.
The power of people propels us to unexplored places.
We come for the learning and stay for the community.
📓Articles to Read📓
Jane Goodall on How to Live a Full Life
She is still going strong writing and lecturing at 86 years of age. A model for all of us to try to follow and emulate.
What new forms has your work taken on with not being able to travel?
I think the hardest thing about this life I’m leading now is giving a lecture, because if you’re in an auditorium with 5,000, 10,000 people, there’s a whole lot of energy and excitement and feedback. If you say something funny, people laugh. If you say something moving, you see them dabbing their eyes. If you say something they really like, you hear applause. But when you’re just looking at the little green camera atop a laptop and you see nobody and nothing, that’s the hardest thing to do, to get the same energy and emotion into the talk.
You’ve talked about how you love to be alone. What do you appreciate about solitude? What do you like to do by yourself?
I am by myself nearly all day. I’m up here in my little attic room that was converted. That’s not the kind of aloneness I need. I like being alone out in nature. When I look out the window, I look at trees and there’s a bird table attached to my windowsill, so I get birds coming to visit.
As someone who’s had such a full life, what’s your advice to others who want the same?
Follow your dream, follow your passion, do what you’re passionate about. When I dreamed of Africa when I was 10 years old, everybody laughed at me: How will you get by? You don’t have money. (It was wartime.)You’re just a girl. Mum said, “If you really want something like this, you’ll have to work terribly hard. You’ll have to take advantage of all opportunities. And if you don’t give up, maybe you’ll find a way.” That’s the message I take to young people all around the world, particularly in deprived areas. So many people have said or written, Jane, I want to thank you because you taught me, because you did this, I can do it too—meaning follow your dreams.
The Holy Church of Christ without Christ by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Antonio writes about how we all ultimately believe in something (though not all somethings are created the same). We create foundations and things to hold on to with these beliefs or religions.
No, this isn’t about sky fairies or who you personally profess as your lord and savior. Religion is fundamentally about dealing with reality via myth, ritual, and folklore, rather than data, empiricism, and skeptical inquiry3. There’s no less of it now than ever before. In fact, I’d go further and posit The Law of Conservation of Religion:
Religion is never created nor destroyed, in any society, merely transformed from one form to another. Ditto ancillary notions like taboo or moral guilt.
The reality is there are no atheists in the, well, anything. Humans are incapable of living while staring into the abyss of total materialist nihilism, not to mention their own looming mortality, for very long. Those who truly internalize that view are likely in a dark pit of drugs, clinical depression, or both, and the goal of treatment is restoring the basic animating delusions—friends, family, a sense of purpose and overarching narrative—necessary for human life.
The modern condition is this: We’re hairless apes who evolved on the third planet from an unexceptional star in an unremarkable galaxy adrift in a desolate universe ruled by mathematical laws of no discernible purpose. The only thing separating us from the various molds, bacteria, and mammals that swarm the planet is that we’re aware of that fact. We’re so barely in this existential funk, we’ve only had this realization for a couple of centuries; large numbers of us aren’t even educated and well-fed (or simply bored) enough to realize it yet.
Anything anybody believes beyond the purely empirical is so much sweet metaphysical frosting on a pretty bitter nihilist cake. The adherents of Sunni Islam or ‘effective altruism’ are engaged in a debate among flavors of frosting, chocolate or vanilla?, with no obvious criterion other than maybe picking the flavor that’s least bad for your (and society’s) health while still allowing you to pay your taxes and not step in front of an oncoming Caltrain.
The Future of Learning is Cohort Based Courses by Tiago Forte
As today’s intro piece noted, I’m a big fan of Cohort Based Courses and took Tiago’s first course in 2016. Tiago breaks down why he thinks this is the future.
What sets cohort-based courses apart
There are 4 elements that distinguish cohort-based online courses from earlier waves:
Community
Accountability
Interaction
Impact
Whether they know it or not, online learners are looking for a rite of passage. This is the opposite of the frictionless convenience we’ve come to expect online. As we all spend ever more of our time on the Internet, there is a tremendous hunger for deeper, more meaningful experiences that stay with us far longer than the latest Instagram story
Do the Thing by Greg Forentiero
The answer is always just the question as an action verb.
How can I become a writer? Write.
How can I learn to start a company? Start a company.
How can I get a body like an MMA fighter? Fight MMA.
So if you find yourself asking “How can I do the thing?”
Do the thing.
🎙️ Things to Listen to / Watch 📺
The Happiness Lab and Dr. Laurie Santos with Tara Brach (Spotify)
RAIN - Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture -> something we can
We live in thoughts vs. living into the emotion
Living in a fear-based story vs. showing up and being present
We need to be aligned with our emotions. We miss our emotions both the challenging ones and the good ones. This makes us lose touch with ourselves
We need to challenge the autopilot
The trance of unworthiness is one of the toughest to break out of
Be willing to come into the moment and see what is underneath it
We get to ask ourselves, what am I unwilling to feel in this moment?
We need the medicine of sitting with the emotions that we feel and see what they tell us about our utmost needs
Third Eye Drops Podcast with Alex Ebert - Can the Universe Hear You Thinking? (Spotify)
Doubt is not critical thinking. You can doubt everything. It’s linked to sarcasm and pessimism
Pessimism can be the shield and earnestness can be the sword
Life mastering me vs. me mastering life
Need both science and spiritualism and integrating the two
Spiritual and physical health connection is real
Sit with the power of I don’t know
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Hannah Arendt - THE HUMAN CONDITION
A STORY IS A KIND OF MAP. Nothing can remain immense if it can be measured. Prior to the shrinkage of space and the abolition of distance through railroads, steamships, and airplanes, there is the infinitely greater and more effective shrinkage which comes about through the surveying capacity of the human mind, whose use of numbers, symbols, and models can condense and scale earthly physical distance down to the size of the human body's natural sense and understanding. Before we knew how to circumscribe the sphere of human habitation in days and hours, we had brought the globe into our living rooms to be touched by our hands and swirled before our eyes.
The Tao of Wu -The RZA
In the end, the best strategy, the best tactic you can have in chess is the same one you should use in life: Never give up. Never let them count you out. That’s how the greats play, right down to the last move.
Transcend - Scott Barry Kaufman
As the British philosopher Alan Watts put it, "There is a contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose very nature is momentariness and fluidity."
Orange Book on Twitter
Writing gives you clarity. Working out gives you health. Reading gives you knowledge. Teaching gives you eloquence. Creating gives you satisfaction. Investing gives you self-control. Steady efforts give you confidence. Loving and being loved give you peace. Do all of the above.
Alchemy - Rory Sutherland
Weird consumers drive more innovation than normal ones.
Wendell Berry
There are no unsecured places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.
Bruce Lee
"Forced humility is false pride.... “People are always asking me, “Bruce, are you really that good?” And what I say to them is, “Well, if I tell you I’m that good, you’ll think I’m boasting. But if I tell you I’m no good, you know I’m lying.””
In Love with the World - Mingyur Rinpoche and Helen Tworkov
I learned that unconditional love—for ourselves and all beings—arises once we allow for the natural flow of change, and then we can welcome the continual arising of new ideas, new thoughts, new invitations. If we do not block whatever comes our way, there is no boundary to our love and compassion.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you find more power from the people in your life?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
