🔥Welcome to Volume #00099!🔥
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.
🔑Why Consistency is Our Key to Unlocking New Habits🔑
I wanted it to end.
I speed up my cadence.
I made sure to hit all my key points, but it was more science than art.
I droned on about my life, finishing at five minutes and 15 seconds.
Watching the video, I noticed I swayed back and forth as the words passed my lips. Without sound, you wanted to know what concert I attended.
The words said made sense, but the delivery landed like a flat punch.
The audience smiled at times, but mainly it was a minimal reaction. It wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t good.
I wanted to improve my speaking in meetings and flex my public speaking muscles. I wanted to tell compelling and interesting stories.
The goal pushed me to stand up in front of a group of strangers and give my “Ice Breaker” speech.
It started like most things begin when we never did it before, a minor car accident, but no one got hurt.
The suck didn’t matter. What matters is that we show up and swing the bat. Around ten speeches later, I began to groove my swing. Each one got progressively better and added new elements.
Instead of being at a concert, I created a show when I spoke.
Consistency is Our #1 Goal in Adding New Habits.
The easiest way to grow any habits is to show up consistently. It needs to be a daily or weekly process of doing the thing.
If we do it every damn day, we level up.
The act of doing levels us up, and eventually, it becomes part of us.
The first step is figuring out where we want to focus our time, energy, and attention. We figure out what we want to do and improve.
Then we start to climb the ladder of consistency.
The Ladder of Consistency Has 3 Levels
🪜#1 Consistency of Showing Up
It all starts with being there, getting that minimum, and getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
We walk into the gym. We attend a toastmaster meeting. We sit at the computer and journal. We take a Tai Chi class.
Whatever the act that we want to improve is, we do it. We start with a minimum viable version of it.
We create a pattern, and we show up.
We start and keep going.
We create the habit of doing.
🪜#2 Consistency of Turning Up the Heat
We advance past showing up by raising our hands and stepping out onto the edge. We create metrics that we want to hit to show our progress.
The goal now is to amplify our skill level. We hire coaches or trainers. We set targets and goals and use the heat to propel us forward.
We need to show up and get a little bit better.
This level generally shows up around the third month.
🪜#3 Consistency of Structure and Details
At this level, we acquire a strong working fluency and connect the dots around our approach and structure.
We drop into a deeper level of focus, and not only do the macro, but the minor details become apparent.
We are on the road to becoming good when we hit this level.
What do you need to get consistent about in 2023?
How do you want to be held accountable? Do you need to add help in climbing the ladder in the New Year?
If so, reach out.
🧠Things to Think About🧠
Rob Henderson on Ignoring Luxury Beliefs
This is a subject that continues to fascinate me. What do we “believe” because of our status (social or economic) that is entirely false?
What ideas do we promulgate that are a disservice to our communities?
Milano’s comment is a picture-perfect example of a luxury belief: Ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while inflicting costs on the lower classes. Saying “take care of your mother while I’m gone” isn’t insinuating that women can’t take care of themselves. It’s a reminder to boys that they have a duty to their families. It’s a cue to young males—who have a tendency to be self-obsessed—to think of someone other than themselves. It is intended to suppress entitlement.
Maybe rich families can afford to let their kids be self-centered. They can literally pay people to do things. Poor people don’t have that. If they’re lucky, they have families they can rely on. But the luxury belief class doesn’t like the idea of poor people getting an ounce of enjoyment from things money can’t buy. Like strong relationships with other people. Maybe because so many members of the luxury belief class are unhappy, and they want to spread their misery.
Helena Fitzgerald Celebrates “Dead Week”
Visiting family, I tried to move the ball a bit last week, but generally let go and enjoyed the dead time.
Morning sunlight, walks, park time with the kids, BJJ and some hikes occupied
Dead Week isn’t a week off for everyone, or at least the thing it is a week off from isn’t work. Rather, it is a week off from the forward-motion drive of the rest of the year. It is a time against ambition and against striving. Whatever we hoped to finish is either finished or it’s not going to happen this week, and all our successes and failures from the previous year are already tallied up. It’s too late for everything; Dead Week is the luxurious relief of giving up.
Andrew Huberman shared this on LinkedIn
“This week I learned from a sleep expert at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that if we go to sleep 1-2 hours later than usual, we get none (zero) of the normal in-sleep bolus of growth hormone that night, regardless if we sleep in. In other words, keeping regular to-sleep times is as important as sleep duration.
A Huberman Lab podcast episode with this guest is coming soon. But this just felt too important not to share now”
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"Research has shown that of all forms of human motivation, the most effective one is progress. Because a small, concrete win creates momentum and affirms our faith in our further success." (Greg McKeown, Essentialism)
"As Jung emphasized: "Until you make the unconscious, conscious it will rule your life and you will call it Fate. But Jung also pointed out: "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious." (Carolyn Elliott, Existential Kink)
"Knowledge has entertained me, and it has shaped me, and it has failed me. Something in me still starves. In what is probably the most serious inquiry of my life, I have begun to look past reason, past the provable, in other directions." (Mary Oliver, Upstream)
‘We awaken to the actual truth of our life in all of its conventional aspects by definition, so make sure that yours is a life you will want to wake up to.” (Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, Daniel M. Ingram)
"The words we use shape how we understand ourselves, how we interpret the world, how we treat others." (Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise)
"Another trick: When nothing’s fun anymore, try to make the worst thing you can. The ugliest drawing. The crummiest poem. The most obnoxious song. Making intentionally bad art is a ton of fun." (Austin Kleon, Keep Going)
"So, uncertainty is healthy. It can change the tone of our approach, make us humble, give a pause, and cool off the arrogance that comes with the sense of having found ‘solutions.’" (Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles)
“Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.” (The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, Richard W. Hamming and Bret Victor)
"The principal problem with ideology is that you stop thinking when it comes to hard issues. Munger believes in regularly taking your best ideas, tearing them down, and looking for flaws as a means of improving yourself, which is hard to do if you are an ideologue." (Tren Griffin)
"Perpetual sacrifice. It is an ideology that invades nearly every aspect of our lives. What is being sacrificed? What is the common thread? Most fundamentally, it is a sacrifice of the present for the future." (Charles Eisenstein, The Ascent of Humanity)
"Essentialists accept the reality that we can never fully anticipate or prepare for every scenario or eventuality; the future is simply too unpredictable. Instead, they build in buffers to reduce the friction caused by the unexpected." (Greg McKeown, Essentialism)
"In a wide variety of human activity, achievement is not possible without discomfort." (Alex Hutchinson, Endure)
“But often we are so seduced by the blandishments of tidiness that we fail to appreciate the virtues of the messy-the untidy, unquantified, uncoordinated, improvised, imperfect, incoherent, crude, cluttered, random, ambiguous, vague, difficult, diverse, or even dirty.” (Tim Harford)
🙏Thanks for Reading🙏
What do you need to turn up the consistency volume around?
I’m shutting down my computer by 10pm, making sure I don’t skip my daily review and go outside for the sunrise and greet it with a 5 to 10-minute walk.
Namaste,
Christian
Alex turns 7! I also don’t know why everyone else took off their party hats.
🔑Why Consistency is Our Key to Unlocking New Habits🔑