Wondering What Will Happen Next...
🔥Welcome to volume 000010!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is the ☯️Middleway Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore and share.
👀I Wonder What Will Happen Next… 👀
One of my favorite ideas comes from the book Cosmic Banditos. The main character smuggles drugs, which leads to life threatening situations. Given that dynamic, in moments of uncertainty and chaos 7he shares his technique for dealing with it.
I have a method of pulling myself out of negativity. It is a very simple concept, a short phrase. “It will be interesting to see what happens next.”
This beautiful thought can serve us well. When a conversation or meeting gets heated and our emotions rise, we can use this method. Our angst and anxiety becomes “well it will be interesting to see what happens next”. It’s like the idea of taking fear and nerves and replacing that with curiosity and excitement.
All of life is change and given that change, it will be interesting to see what happens next.
📓Articles to Read📓
Failure Found to Be an “Essential” Prerequisite for Success
To succeed we need to fail, fail fast and learn from that failure
One such key indicator (besides keeping the stuff that works and focusing on what doesn’t) is the time between consecutive failed attempts, which should decrease steadily. In other words, the faster you fail, the better your chances of success, and the more time between attempts, the more likely you are to fail again. “If someone has applied for a grant and they are three failures in,” Wang says, “if we just look at the timing between the failures, we will be able to predict whether they will eventually succeed or not.”
Eugene Wei’s latest continues on the idea of status, which builds on his piece on Status as a Service.
On the other hand, when I hear people claim they aren’t status-seeking, my initial thought is, “Okay boomer.” Well, perhaps that’s not quite right, but something along those lines. What it reveals is just how negative a valence the word "status" and the adjective "status-seeking" have today. Perhaps because we've long thought of status as a relative standing, and status competition as a zero-sum game, we find "status-seeking" personally threatening and distasteful all at once.
However, when I talk about seeking a sense of self-worth, a feeling of belonging and achievement, people have only positive reactions. Are those behaviors so easily titrated apart? I'm skeptical. But to all of you offended by being called "status-seeking," I apologize and applaud your lack of ego. I'm not saying that because I mean to raise your status, but...ah never mind.
📚 Books to Read 📚
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna - (book / audible)
This book is one of my favorite reads of the year. Jerry fills it with one thought provoking prompt and idea after another including questions to journal at the end of each chapter. How do we want to live our lives? Are we following our path? How are we complicit in the things we don’t want?
This being fierce with the reality of what is requires the bravery to ask of oneself three challenging and yet powerfully liberating questions: What am I not saying that needs to be said? What am I saying (in words or deeds) that’s not being heard? What’s being said that I’m not hearing?
How would I act were I to remember who I am? What choices would I make, what actions would I take, if I regularly said the things that needed to be said? Who would I become were I to be fully, completely, and wholly heard? What is it that I wish the people in my life understood about me? Who would I be without the myths I’ve told about myself; the stories that took hold when I was yearning to feel love, safety, and belonging?
We came to realize that the only answer to the existential question of “Does my life have meaning?” is, again, another set of questions: “In what ways have I been brave?” And “How have I been kind?”
In the end, if I’ve managed to convince you that better humans make better leaders, then your open, honest questions are simple: “What is my work to do to become a better human?” “What kind of leader am I?” And, finally, “What kind of adult am I meant to be?”
Lost Connections by Johann Hari - (book / audible)
This book looks at the anxiety and depression from the eyes of the author. Hari writes about his experiences with depression and using pills to not solve the problem. He focus on why anxiety and depression increased and some solutions and mitigates (note - its not just taking pills even if the pharma companies want you to believe that).
It asks why don’t we do the things that actually make us happy?
Loneliness hangs over our culture like smog.
While depression and anxiety do have a genetic component, meaningful work, meaningful relationships, meaningful values, connections, status and respect all can help combat it.
The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman (book / audible)
This review of the book is a great introduction.
Big picture our perceptions tend to be false constructs (or illusions) so we can navigate the world. This is a feature not a bug!
Seems to fit in nicely with the Buddhist idea of no self and taking everything seriously and not seriously at all.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Chesterton Fences - abandoned fence why was this built. When to follow history and when to strike out on our own.
The expression, 'we've always done it that way' is often dismissive but more-often-than-not it works. We've done it that way for a reason. A handy story helps us figure out when to study history and when to strike off a new way.
It was philosopher G. K. Chesterton who suggested we 'see the use of it'. He wrote, imagine that one way of doing it is:
"…a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"
Written in 1929, Chesterton wanted someone to understand a situation before they changed it. To understand why we've always done things that way.
Gregg Popovich - pre-game shoot around was a Chesterton Fence. Needed maybe in the 70s, but not today. Why you need to understand if “because we’ve always done it this way” still makes sense today.
Celtics - communication is as important or more important than the idea (if you can’t communicate the idea than it really doesn’t matter)
Mike Zarren is an assistant general manager with the Boston Celtics and he said, "the communication of the information is as important, if not more important, than the actual quantitative work that you do." Think about that for a moment. It always seems like the hard part would be figuring out a secret, finding buried treasure, or solving the riddle but Zarren is saying that's not it at all. The hardest part is convincing people to join your search party.
Names - give us a point of reference, which is very important for understanding
This episode covers Rao’s ideas around Twitter, how to find new ideas, use the inter webs and why technology fear is over done.
So the, what I think of as the traditional literary industrial complex of academia, TED talks, very high gravitas, newspaper op-eds and stuff, it has the form and structure of depth. You look at it and you think, 'Hey, this should be good, deep stuff.' But it's not. I mean, you look at the New York Times op-ed section--it's like warmed over, recycled one-week-late clickbaiting that's actually picking up where Twitter leaves off. And the original conversation on Twitter ends up being, like higher signal, lower noise, more interesting and more current than the NewYork op-ed version of it. You look at half the books that come out--they're the same.
So I want to sort of point that out that so this is not a both sides-ist argument. This is actually a comment on humanity. Humans come in grades of, like, sophistication, shallowness, superficiality of interests, depth of interests. And you will find people in every medium who are going deep and doing, like, profoundly interesting things, exploring information spaces. And you will find 90% of people using whatever form the medium offers to produce honestly, bullshit.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
No Mud, No Lotus - Thich Nhat Hanh
Some of the situations and accidents that cause us the greatest suffering, when seen objectively, do not look very big. But because we don’t know how to manage them, they feel enormous. If we lose a loved one, that is of course a major loss. There is real pain there, and we feel it mightily. But we also can spend days worrying that someone doesn’t like us, or that we didn’t say or do the right thing, or that we won’t get the promotion we want. These are small sufferings, relatively speaking, but we magnify them until they seem to take up all our mindspace.
Trees, in particular, seem to be extraordinarily clever at stretching out to collect the diffuse and fitful energy of sunlight and at the same time standing up to being bullied by the wind -and all in the most cost-effective way. The tallest trees reach a height of about 360 feet or 110 metres, being by far the largest and most durable of living structures. For a plant to reach even a tenth of this height, however, its main structure needs to be both light and rigid; we shall see later that it incorporates a number of important lessons for engineers.
Eventual elites typically devote less time early on to deliberate practice in the activity in which they will eventually become experts. Instead, they undergo what researchers call a “sampling period.” They play a variety of sports, usually in an unstructured or lightly structured environment; they gain a range of physical proficiencies from which they can draw; they learn about their own abilities and proclivities; and only later do they focus in and ramp up technical practice in one area.
Every past enhancement – from transfusions to vaccinations to birth control – has been called unnatural or immoral.
A Joseph Campbell Companion - by Joseph Campbell
We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. If we fix on the old, we get stuck. When we hang onto any form, we are in danger of putrefaction. Hell is life drying up. The Hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed. If we are hanging onto the form now, we’re not going to have the form next. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Destruction before creation.
🙏Thanks for reading.🙏
I wonder what interesting things will happen next for you. 💪
Any thoughts, comments or ideas to share, please reach out.
Namaste,
Christian