How to Do Hard Things...Which Makes Them Become Easier

🔥Welcome to Volume #00087!🔥 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. How to Do Hard Things… Which Makes Them Become Easier One of the mottos of our house is to do hard things. This is based on the ethos that I grew up with and conveyed by my grandfathers. My grandfather was my best friend, and I try to channel his influence when possible. He lived through the Great Depression and had stories of struggle and making struggle easier. He made it 97 years and was out shoveling snow days before he left us. He embraced the hard things. The 2020s American version of hard things is different than serving in a World War and scrapping by during a depression. Remembering his influence and doing the remixed version of “hard things,” I signed up for a drawing class. Each day I drew for five hours, taking the zoom version of Betty Edward’s Drawing With the Right Side of Your Brain. Drawing presents itself as a struggle for me. I’m a grade school art student only, spit on by a school system that told me I was sloppy, messy, and poor at art without offering me any tools or guidance on how to improve. My “limitations” show up on full display. I struggle to draw straight lines and get stuck in a loop of one “bad” line after another which plagues one’s artwork. Two things are at play when I draw. I judge myself harshly, limiting my progress, disrupting my flow, and creating the conditions I wish to avoid. Then after I finish self-sabotaging, I re-affirm my belief that I’m a shitty artist. It's an interesting feedback loop. Barley practice —> Create bad art —> Tell myself I suck at it —> Repeat How often do we half-ass something, fail to hit our ridiculous expectations, and say, “See, I suck at this.” When I ask myself, “what am I pretending not to know?” it is clear that I’m pretending this system of self-sabotage is my drawing “reality.” The joke about hard things is that the more we do them, the easier they become. They can still remain hard, but unless you increase the degree of difficulty, we whittle away at the hard part of it. Thus I’m grinding on the zoom, drawing an upside-down Picasso piece. When we draw upside down, we trick our left brain and stop judging our work. The piece comes out looking halfway decent, and my brain notes nice work for a not-so-good artist. This upside judo move made a hard thing easy. It changed my perception of the drawing and my perception of myself as an artist. The next move leveled up my skills even more. We learned to draw shapes as opposed to objects. We don’t draw eyes, but we draw the lines and shapes that we see. This overrides our programmed “symbols” for body parts and objects. All of life is perspective and perception. When we shift those, we can see, create and do things in different and better ways. It adds more mental models to our toolbox. I didn’t find greatness. I learned to let go, show up and do the work in a better manner. The keep going part got challenging at times, but the ability to learn and grow in the right environment with solid guidance leads to good outcomes. It’s like the quote that we can’t do much in a day, but we can do a lot in a year. Now I need to keep practicing and engrain the tools and techniques along with continuing to flex and grow my skills of perception. The hard thing about drawing became easier. What hard things do you need to make easy? If anyone is interested in taking the workshop, here is the link. 📓Things to Think About📓 People with Too Many Interests Tend to Be Successful This piece speaks to my strong bias to try to learn a little about a lot and find and master Pareto Laws (the 20% that drives the 80%). We want to be Foxes, not Hedgehogs. Foxes know a little bit about a lot and then can combine patterns from different disciplines. They keep an open mind about things. A hedgehog knows one thing well. They are a hammer and everything is a nail. The specialist is the hedgehog, and the fox is the generalist. Now, we are pre-supposing that you are not going to be a crappy fox or crappy hedgehog, which ruins things. If being a generalist was so ineffective, why are the founders of the five largest companies in the world — Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos — all polymaths (who also follow the 5-hour rule)? Are these legends just genius anomalies? Or are they people we could and should imitate in order to be successful in a modern knowledge economy? If being a generalist is an ineffective career path, why do 10+ academic studies find a correlation between the number of interests/competencies someone develops and their creative impact? The author of the piece followed his own advice with how he put together his writing career In order to become an effective online writer, I’ve deliberately combined academic research, digital journalism, and growth hacking into one skillset. I didn’t go to college for any of these skills, but practiced them over time and received coaching on them. My observation is that academics often look down on journalists; journalists look down on marketers; and marketers look down on journalists and academics. What many fail to see is that each brings something valuable to the table and that all of these skills combined lead to great ideas seen by large audiences. The Power of Company Culture by Taylor Pearson Anyone in an organization knows the power of culture. It can propel us to new heights or hold us down like running with a weighted vest on. The article opens with, Peter Thiel telling Airbnb the most important thing they can do is… He replied, “Don’t f**k up the culture.” When you luck out, you work with people that cultivate and create a strong company culture. When you don’t, you run into garbage leaders who say things like “I don’t care if they are a good culture person” and through in some F-bombs to boot. Not surprisingly, the former folks go on to great success, and the later leaders spend their time playing politics, losing good employees, and creating a bottom quartile company. The bad culture creators blame others or circumstances for the failures. The future trajectory of a business is merely the sum of all one-off decisions. While any single decision may not be particularly important, in aggregate, they are everything. Your culture is a leading indicator of your business’s overall health. One-off decisions made for the first time today may not seem that important. But, they put a company onto a particular trajectory that compounds over time. As anyone that has worked at or with a large company knows, institutional inertia is very real and very hard to change. Good culture comes from learning organizations, where everyone gets better no matter their place in the company hierarchy. Some leaders and firms focus on lifelong learning, open discussion and debate, and making each other better. Other places focus on cocktails, dinners, and hierarchy. You can guess which one performs better. If you have a culture of ownership where everyone gets 1% better at their job every week, it won’t really make a difference in the short run. But, if you have an organization that has been around for a decade where everyone is always getting better at their job, it is likely to be a category leader. Culture relies on how people with power within the organization act and signal. Do they go first and walk the talk? Do they even talk the talk? Good managers know that one of the reasons employees do not adhere to cultural principles is because they are fearful of potential punishments for not having been productive in the short term. Therefore, good managers personally take visible actions incurring these costs, to show that they are truly worth paying and that everyone is expected to do so. Erik Tornberg on The Current Thing We need to watch we don’t keep getting our attention (wh… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themiddleway.substack.com