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🔥Welcome to Volume #00074!🔥

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.

Please follow The Middle Way on Instagram and Twitter.

I’m also currently writing a daily atomic essay here.

🌎Why We Need a Strategy Around Exploring and Exploiting 🔬

Looking up at the scoreboard, we trailed by five points. Time worked against us, and we weren’t going to repeat as Chicago Player Sports Champions.

When the game ended, I made my way over to the bench, knowing that this finished my basketball career. My knees hurt way too much, and I need to stop jumping on hard surfaces. 

I felt the pang of loss as I took off my blue dunk lows. I walked away from a good friend that brought me joy, heartache and made me feel alive.

A twenty-year run came to an end on that March night. I practiced hours and hours, shooting thousands of three-pointers—all my exploitation of playing basketball now over.

We get two options in life, we get to explore, or we get to exploit. 

The clock ticks no matter which option we choose, which is why we need to choose wisely. 

Exploration is making small bets and just brushing our fingers into the water, trying things out. 

Exploitation is when we dive into the water and go deep. We practice, focusing on getting better and advancing, making it part of our operating system. 

We need to live our lives bouncing between the two ideas. Exploration opens us up to new things to exploit. The other side of the coin, exploitation, leads to mastery and practices. It is the moments that mold us and the names we use to describe ourselves. 

When look to explore, we ask two questions:

Does this interest me?

Does this make me excited? 

If we answer yes, we jump into the exploration. 

If we answer no, we move on to something else. 

Once we find ourselves exploiting, we ask two questions: 

Does this still interest me? 

Does this still serve me? 

If we answer yes, then we keep going. 

If we answer no, it is time to move back to exploring. 

Running jobs, marriages, activities with children and relationships through this lens leads to a lot of interesting discoveries and potential changes.

I wish I were more proscriptive in following this approach when younger. As much as I enjoyed hoops, I needed to spend more time exploring and exploiting other things. In retrospect, I over-exploited hoops.

Remember, we either explore or exploit, so use these powers wisely. We need to pinball between the two trying to keep things enjoyable, exciting, and engaging.

What do you need to stop exploiting? What do you want to start exploring? 

📓Things to Think About📓 

Stewart Brand on Maintenance

It is essential that we do maintenance on ourselvs and our things in the world. When we don’t do the maintenance work, things break down.

Stewart Brand, an optimist himself, notes that optimists “frequently resent the need for maintenance and tend to resist doing it,” instead preferring to live in the world of ideals rather than the drudgery of constant tasks.

Stewart drives home this idea with the sail boat race accross the world and what it took to win it, “a new boat everyday”.

While Knox-Johnston won the official race, Moitessier won the Maintenance Race — his philosophy of maintenance, which he once related to Brand as “A new boat every day,” exemplifies how preventative maintenance can lead to a certain “undefinable state of grace,” a focus and serenity that can be hard to find.

Luke Burgis on Why We Need More Omakase Creators

When you dine with omakase chef’s you hand them the reigns. We trust them with our meal.

With omakase, the chef makes the call. There is no menu anxiety, no trying to decipher strange names, no haggling over who should order what. You sit back, relax, and entrust yourself to the creativity and craftsmanship of the chef.

This line also resonated deeply and how we can’t even create the greatness that people posse. I’m +1 on this wife comment.

Ten years ago, if someone had given me a survey to fill out about the perfect woman I thought I wanted to be with, I would’ve constructed a far less wonderful person than my wife.

The chef isn’t fitting into what the market wants. He or she grinded in the craft to become the best omaske chef and they honor that tradition and work when they serve you. There is no viable minimal product, the product is years of learning the craft.

An omakase chef doesn’t take a poll from clientele about what they’d most like to eat that night. He serves them the best meal they’ve ever had—and it’s sure as hell not because it’s what you would’ve ordered. It’s because it’s exactly not what you would’ve ordered.

These chefs wins—we all win—because of the shared culture, the things we learned along the way, the daringness to take risks and give people something they might not like.

Peter Limberg on Ways to Think about Playing the Game In-Between

The Middle Way attempts to play the infinite games, but there is always games within the game and the games in between the game.

I sense the good people drawn to play Game B dismiss a lot of the practical wisdom that those playing Game A have. For example, managing time when acting as if the construct of time is real, aka time management, is a needed skill to have. Of course, knowing how to sink into a timeless state is also important. One will be untethered from consensus reality though, hence ineffective at playing Game In-Between, if they cannot switch back and be effective in a time-bounded ontology. This “ontological code-switching” is needed to play Game In-Between.

Harvard Business Review writes on Reaching the Top and Dying Early

What if you catch the brass ring and it kills you sooner?

This piece wrestles with that exact conclusion. The article asks who is more stressed: managers or their subordinates. Leading to a grand question of, do we want what we think we want?

Nicholas says he initially set out to see if he could duplicate the Whitehall results at another large organization. He was surprised to find instead that his study results cast doubt on the idea that those in lower hierarchical positions suffer more from stress-related ailments.

“This study kind of flips the Whitehall findings,” he says. “It turns out that top managers might face more health problems.”

Wake Forest Football is Playing Money Ball

My alma mater is making some noise this year and it is from a money ball approach to finding good players that they can (hopefully) help become great.

Development is always important, for all of us, and right now Wake Forest football is doing an amazing job at it.

"The key to our success is to find the guys who can still develop and become as good as those four- and five-star guys," Clawson said. "They're not missing anything physically. It's just a year of development. I really believe a lot of our players, after a year of development in our program, they'd be four-star players."

This approach raises the question for us, how can we do things differenlty?

Wake's offensive coordinator, Warren Ruggiero, compared Clawson's approach to Steve Jobs': "You can't look at the competition and say you're going to do it better. You have to look at the competition and say you're going to do it differently."

💣Words of Wisdom💣

David Brooks, The Second Mountain

"Thus, the most complete definition of a commitment is this: falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters."

Kamal Ravikant, Live Your Truth

“Life is emotion,” he said, “life is feeling. If you’re not feeling, you’re dead.” He paused. “Suffering is in the resistance. When we resist the moment.” Suffering is when we resist the moment."

Lisa Smartt, Words at the Threshold

"Repetition connects us to what is musical and pitch, which connect us more immediately to the nonverbal world, the world we can access only beyond literal language: "Oh, that is, to tempo wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow!"

Clayton M. Christensen, James Allworth, and Karen Dillon, How Will You Measure Your Life?

"Resources are what he uses to do it, processes are how he does it, and priorities are why he does it."

Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

"At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice."

🙏Thanks for reading🙏

What do you need to explore or stop exploiting?

Any thoughts or comments, please share!

Namaste,Christian

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