🔥Welcome to Volume #00081!🔥
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.
If you enjoy the newsletter please share it with your friends.
💫What Happens When We Create Good Vibes?💫
"Christian, you are just a young kid. What do you really know?"
Damn...Shots...Fired.
My first board seat took place in 2013, trying to help sell a struggling business.
The controlling shareholder's board member pushed and pulled against everything I attempted to do.
I represented the minority holders, and we wanted to exit the business through a sale.
He generally told everyone he hated their ideas, but I got extra special treatment. I didn't cow down to his badgering, and being the most significant voice of dissent made me his largest threat.
Fortunately, being thirty-five years old with fourteen years of experience meant that his words carried no weight. Working through 2008 and the following stress and distress leveled me up.
I always looked young and still do today, meaning that I still notice people using my perceived “age” against me, 20+ years into the investing game.
When this board member fired shots, I found myself breathing hard and returning fire during our weekly calls. I noticed myself shaking during these calls. Other folks stepped in to push against him and found themselves facing a barrage of counter strikes.
One person killed everyone's vibe.
He stopped the progression of ideas and positive solutions. Hijacking meetings and, worse, hijacking people's amygdala hurt the business and our decision-making process.
Eventually, I woke up to the fact that he drained my energy. Fighting steel with steel while sharpening my blade wasted my energy and drained my batteries. This made me less efficient.
Spending time working with stressed and distressed investors who primarily use brute force to get the outcomes they want rubs off on you. I found myself falling into those same patterns.
Luckily, this experience cured me of that disease.
This gentleman (though there was nothing gentle about him) taught me a critical lesson. The management team, his co-workers, other board members, and everyone involved in the situation felt his vibe-killing ways. Every single interaction with him left you exhausted, frustrated, and wanting to punch a wall.
He killed vibes.
He led me to always attempt to answer the meta-question:
How Do I Leave People Energized After They Interact With Me?
My response to this question became a central tenant of how I try to work and live. That simple question governs it, how do I leave people energized after interacting with me?
What happens when we aim for good vibes with all of our interactions? How does our life change? How do our energy levels respond throughout the day?
It’s like practicing gratitude, it brings goodness to us and to others.
When we bring good vibes to situations we:
Let people know we care about them
Enable people to ride our energy which opens up space vs. contracting it
Create that real positive change because ideas form from that energy
Form the culture because our interactions are the culture
Paying it forward to other people who copy our approach
We can't control when other people try to kill vibes. We control our ability to kill or create good vibes.
Think of the times that situations turn negative, and now imagine them with positive vibes.
How much better is the outcome?
We can create those better outcomes.
We can create that kind of vibe.
We get to bring those good vibes and watch what happens in our wake.
📓Things to Think About📓
Arthur Brooks on How to Want Less
Arthur introduces the idea of success and attemping to find that elusive satisfaction. We get stuck on the hedonic treadmill chasing those feelings of success.
Abd al-Rahman III, the emir and caliph of Córdoba in 10th-century Spain, summed up a life of worldly success at about age 70: “I have now reigned above 50 years in victory or peace; beloved by my subjects, dreaded by my enemies, and respected by my allies. Riches and honors, power and pleasure, have waited on my call.”
And the payoff? “I have diligently numbered the days of pure and genuine happiness which have fallen to my lot,” he wrote. “They amount to 14.”
He introduces the idea of stripping away to find our happiness and peace. We need to get rid of the desire to find our satisfaction and ultimately need to manage our wants.
As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace. The Tao Te Ching, a Chinese text compiled around the fourth century B.C. that is the foundation of Taoism, makes this point with elegance:
People would be content
with their simple, everyday lives,
in harmony, and free of desire.When there is no desire,
all things are at peace.
What Makes a Pro by Kris Abdelmessih
This is a great definition of what makes up a pro by Kris.
A person who consistently studies what went wrong, to get better.
A grandmaster reviews why the opponent moved the rook to D4.
The QB watches film to see how they got baited into a pick-6.
The businessperson who takes the earnest Yelp review seriously.
It’s not fun to look backward. Just as we don’t like to hear our own voices or see ourselves on video, reviewing losses is painful or even cringe. And rewinding the wins can be even harder. We want to just believe we nailed it and move on. Finding out we won for the wrong reasons requires deep swigs of self-honesty. But it’s a key part of being a pro. You don’t walk around with the wrong lessons only to have them defeat you when the stakes are higher.
A Thousand Rivers by Carol Black
A common saying among Aboriginal people in Australia is, “All our children are clever.” Even the author of Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter reports that, lo and behold, research is beginning to show that dyslexics are smarter in some ways than early readers. Did we really have to wait for science to discover this? Could we really not just look in our children’s eyes and know that they all bring something unique and precious to the world? Did we have to line them up and compare them and find a predictable percentage of them to be deficient and even “disabled?”
So what are we to do while we wait for science to rediscover all this, for the data to prove it? What are we to do with this child, this completely unique constellation of human gifts and brilliances and burdens, this unique radiant human child who stands before us today, right now, this very minute?
We still need need wisdom, not data, to raise good children. Ironically, while the science of learning is still crude, primitive, the cultures some call “primitive” embed knowledge about human development that is sophisticated, profound, nuanced, and empirical, based on generations of observation, intuition, experimentation, insight. Talk to gifted scientists, writers, artists, entrepreneurs. You will find they learned like a Yanomami child learns, through keen observation, experimentation, immersion, freedom, participation, through real play and real work, through the kind of free activity where the distinction between work and play disappears. Talk to a really good auto mechanic, carpenter, farmer, fiddle player, web designer, film editor, songwriter, photographer, chef, and you will find they learned the same way.
We can begin rediscovering it now. Experiment. Observe. Listen. Explore the thousand other ways of learning that still exist all over the planet. Read the data and then set it aside. Watch your child’s eyes, what makes them go dull and dead, what makes them brighten, quicken, glow with light. That is where learning lies.
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Neckar Value offers up a wonderful podcast with Tom Morgan exploring the Voice Telling You It’s Time to Move
They explore a bunch of my favorite subjects including flow, following our curiosity, and the friction around it.
“It's about what you can do plus what the world needs. And you, you can't neglect either of those things because it's a, it's a conversation, right? Your flow with the world, you have to be open to feedback from the world.”
“And that is the biggest conceptualization that I think is missing from Western culture is that requires vulnerability and an openness to feedback, but also an awareness to the synchronicities and coincidences that are going to show you that you're going in the right direction.”
“But the, the irony of slack and the Greeks called is Kronos time and Kairos time and Kronos time is moloch, which also, ironically is the other name for moloch in these traditions, Saturn, Kronos and Moloch, they've all been equivalently the same God, the God of time. And then there's Kairos time, which is sort of the inspiration time, which you just can't control when it comes. You can create the kind of circumstances where it shows up, but you can't force it to show up. Cause it just, it just doesn't play by the same rules.”
“Because often it just, it involves destroying yourself to find it right. Oh, he's destroying the ego, right? Letting that unconscious charisma flow through, you often have to get the ego out of the way and it kills you. Right? At least that was certainly my experience. Right. What I want to do with my life is help people out of moloch into slack. Help people out of stuck places and into a different stage where they can get themselves out. Because I saw the wasted human potential. I saw from people at the top of their fitness landscape, just going around in infinite loops that couldn't get themselves
And you know, the bargain you make to moloch, who is the Canaanite god of child sacrifices, throw whatever you want on there, through whatever you value most onto the furnace and I will grant you power. And whatever you value most often is, your time, right? You will sit there in an office dying in return for your salary, right? And it, that literally is the sacrifice that you choose to make. But that voice often is very loud and incredibly rational and persuasive and articulate.”out because they didn't know how to trust and trust their hearts effectively.”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
"For what matters in life is not whether we receive a round of applause; what matters is whether we have the courage to venture forth despite the uncertainty of acclaim.”
Jerry Colonna, Reboot
"My radical, surprising, unprecedented question that always does the trick is quite simple; I ask, “How are you?” But then I follow it up with, “No. Really . . . how are you?”
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
"It will seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first."
Anne Lamott, Almost Everything
"The harm is in the unwanted help or helping them when they need to figure things out for themselves. Help is the sunny side of control."
Robert Kegan, Lisa Laskow Lahey, An Everyone Culture
"Unlike happiness as a state brought on by experiencing only the so-called positive emotions, happiness as a process of development includes the experience of loss, pain, and suffering (rather than standing in contrast to it)."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow
"The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen."
Steven Pressfield, Do the Work
"The opposite of fear is love—love of the challenge, love of the work, the pure joyous passion to take a shot at our dream and see if we can pull it off."
Joseph Campbell
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.”
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
How can you create more good vibes?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Every Super Bowl reminds me of the last one I went to.
💫What Happens When We Create Good Vibes?💫