🔥Welcome to Volume #00114!🔥
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 We Want Bumps in Our Life 🏔️
Dang, it felt cold.
We keep the house cool but not cold.
The thermostat read 58 degrees, letting us know something funky happened.
Of course, my HVAC decided to act up on a busy day. I googled what to do when your furnace stops working and did all the troubleshooting. Yep, nothing worked.
It all did end up working out stressfully. A blown transformer was replaced. The fire drill made the morning feel more alive.
Life seems smooth when everything clicks. When there is no friction, everything goes almost automatically.
Then, a challenge appears, and life becomes more real, more demanding, and more alive.
There never seems to be a rest from new challenges entering the arena. It’s at home, it’s at work, it’s with our significant others, kids, coworkers, or our competitors. It’s coming back from injuries, sickness, or running around for a month straight to hold it all together.
It’s breakdowns in communication and trying to reconnect to our stories and find meaning.
The mountains we climb constantly throw snow storms, torrential rain, and other events that knock us off our pace. We need to keep going and recover at the same time.
What if the variance is good for us? What if we need the challenges to create resilience and appreciate our lives?
What if the bumps in the road make life more meaningful? What if we need the noise to remember what is essential?
We don’t want to numb the challenges; we see what certain drugs do that accomplish it, but we should develop the ability to notice the noise and see our world more clearly.
In his fantastic book How We Learn to Move, Rob Gray included the study below about variances.
In an interesting study published in 2008, Waddington and Adams asked a group of 22 international-level soccer players to reproduce different foot positions while blindfolded. So, for example, on one trial they might be asked to roll their ankle 30 degrees inwards while on another they might be asked to roll it 15 degrees outwards. They were asked to do this in three different conditions: while standing barefoot, while wearing soccer shoes with the typical smooth insoles, and while wearing soccer shoes with insoles that were covered in small, textured bumps.
What did they find? When the players switched from barefoot to wearing the standard shoes with smooth insoles the angle production accuracy decreased significantly, by about 5%. This is not surprising. Adding rubber cleats, socks and insoles between your feet and the ground should weaken the tactile signals you receive on contact – a critical source of sensory information particularly when you don’t have vision.
What happened when they switched from smooth to bumpy insoles? Surely, this should make things worse. The bumps are going to make the tactile signal you receive when moving your feet around noisy and variable – think about driving your car over a road being repaved. But that is not what was found. Adding the bumps to the insole significantly improved performance such that it was slightly better than the level achieved when standing barefoot. What is going on here? The human nervous system is riddled with sources of noise and adding even more helps. Maybe we need to look at variability in a different light.
How We Learn to Move A Revolution in the Way We Coach Practice Sports Skills (Rob Gray)
Bumps, in this case, improved performance. Bumps increased the signals we received to see the world more clearly. They make us reconsider what is important and what we must focus on. They let us know what we can let go of and watch that balloon fly away without a care.
They change the way we live our lives.
When we run into a storm, while uncomfortable, it increases the noise so we can see the signal in our lives.
🧠Things to Think About🧠
Jerry leaves us with many words of wisdom. Find things to get good at. Figure out what matters for you to level up (in his case, it was laughs). Try new things that play off existing skills (he is directing a movie for the first time but using his comedian’s eye).
Get good!
It’s great to be 70, because you really get to preach with some authority: Get good at something. That’s it. Everything else is bullshit.
Do real things with stakes.
Audiences are now flocking to stand-up because it’s something you can’t fake. It’s like platform diving. You could say you’re a platform diver, but in two seconds, we can see if you are or if you aren’t. That’s what people like about stand-up. They can trust it. Everything else is fake.
We want pure experiences and flow.
Stand-up is this very pure experience. This is why I’m so addicted to it. The only other thing in life that I truly idolize is surfing. I watch a lot of Instagram surfing videos, and when somebody catches a great wave and they’re just sliding down it, it just hypnotizes me. That’s how it feels when you’re having a good set—like you’ve caught this gigantic energy and are just sliding down it.
When life is great we go for it and it is simple.
You want to be broke. You want it to be all you’ve got. That’s when life is great. People are always trying to add more stuff to life. Reduce it to simpler, pure moments. That’s the golden way of living, I think.
🎧Things to Listen, See, and Watch 🎧
Shail Bloom offers 9 Rules For Starting a Career
1. "Swallow the Frog" - Do what your boss hates doing.
2. Do the old-fashioned things well.
3. Work hard first and smart later.
4. Don't do your best… Don't do your best; do what is necessary. Do what it takes to win.
5. Build storytelling skills.
6. Establish a reputation for figuring it out.
7. Dive through every cracked door.
8. Build a personal board of advisors.
9. Prioritize people and experience, not salary.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
"The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order, but their importance is reverse." (Eric Jorgenson, The Almanack of Naval Ravikant)
"That's a powerful way to show respect. The authors of Crucial Conversations observe that in any conversation, respect is like air. When it's present nobody notices, but when it's absent it's all anybody can think about." (David Brooks, How to Know a Person)
"Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig." (Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers)
"Why are the failures of schooling always met by a call for more schooling rather than less? Why do people remain blind, or indifferent, to the obvious contrast between the institution's stated purpose and its actual result?" (David Cayley, The Rivers North of the Future)
"The first step is to clarify your intention when asking for feedback. You decide how to ask, whom to ask, and how you know whom to ask, when you decide what you’re interested in finding out." (Herbert Lui, Creative Doing)
"Brevity would have made the whole thing ineffectual, for what Whitman is after is felt experience. Experience only, he understands, is the successful persuader." (Mary Oliver, Upstream)
"Liminality is uncomfortable, as all transitions are difficult. But here's the good news: even unwelcome transitions are usually seen differently in retrospect than they are in real time." (Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength)
"In fact, much luxury goods expenditure can only be explained in this way – either people are seeking to impress each other, or they are seeking to impress themselves.* Is almost everything a mood-altering substance?" (Rory Sutherland, Alchemy)
"What and how much had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead of what I myself had wished to do?" (Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man)
"For most of us, though, changing our behavior is driven by our desire to fit in (people like us do things like this) and our perception of our status (affiliation and dominance). Since both these forces often push us to stay as we are, it takes tension to change." (Seth Godin)
🙏Thanks for Reading🙏
What bumps do we need to lean into?
Namaste,
Christian
The whole crew competed a couple of weeks ago in both gi and no gi!
🏔️Why We Want Bumps in Our Life 🏔️