Between a rock and a hard place...
Plus meditations on water, sharing what you know, and a DII Football Coach
Hi everyone,
Happy Friday!
We’ve added 13 new subscribers since our last newsletter. If you are new or if you’ve been here for a while, it would mean the world to me if you could share this newsletter with someone who you think would add to our community and benefit from the content.
I mentioned last time that I had some big updates that I was getting ready to share. Here they are:
1.) I (like, apparently, a lot of other Californians) moved to Austin, TX. I just signed a 6-month lease on a studio. It’s the first time I’ll have a place to myself and I’m very excited to design a space to create in.
2.) I will be the Course Manager for Performative Speaking with Robbie Crabtree (who some of you know). Our team is bringing several decades of teaching and practical persuasive speaking experience to the course. It’s going to be a transformative experience. You can learn more about Performative Speaking here. If you are interested in enrolling or have any questions, please reach out. I’d be happy to get on a call with any of you.
Here’s what I have for you this week.
Share What You Know
👨🏼🏫I’ve been attending the 2020 Teachable Share What You Know Summit. I decided to sign up after Tiago Forte, who’s course Building a Second Brain revolutionized my personal productivity, said he attended before launching his now very successful online school.
I’ve been sharing my experiences in a Twitter thread that you can find here.
If you are considering launching an online course or knowledge business, that thread will be helpful. My intention is to add the notes from as many of the sessions as possible before Teachable closes access at the beginning of October.
There are also threads on mindset, productivity, and creativity that will be helpful whether or not you are a course creator.
This is Water
💧I relisten to David Foster Wallace’s This is Water once every few months. He starts the speech with a story:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
DFW also talks extensively about cliches. He says:
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
and in reference to a common trope (“liberal arts teaches you how to think”) used in commencement speeches:
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.
I’ve been thinking extensively on both of these points: how we can be blind to obvious realities (like fish to water) and how cliches can point to “a great and terrible truth.”
But it can be difficult to understand the deeper meaning of a cliche - the very reason why it’s a cliche - until you’ve lived it.
I recently had the lived, felt experience of “being stuck between a rock and a hard place.” There was a moment where I felt it, where it clicked. I was able to identify and label the emotions in my body (“the rock and the hard place”) of neither option being one hundred percent right or wrong, of my head and my heart wanting different things.
It turns out, as I can best reasonably surmise, that is water.
You can listen to the speech at the link above or read the transcript here.
The Greatest DII Football Coach Turned Soccer Coach Ever
📺NBC Sports started broadcasting English Premier League games in 2013. They enlisted Jason Sudeikis, who plays fictional coach Ted Lasso, to help them market the launch. Sudeikis recently reprised the role of Ted Lasso for the AppleTV show of the same name.
Ted is an unassuming DII Football Coach who is hired by a Premier League team currently facing the threat of relegation. The new owner, a woman who gets the team in a divorce, spite hires Lasso because he is completely unqualified. She hopes that he will ruin the team, the only thing her ex-husband loves more than himself.
Ted is an affable and unassuming coach who is wildly out of place in England and the Premier League. Despite the somewhat janky premise and origins of the show, it has a surprising amount of depth and is gratuitously sprinkled with laughs. It’s well worth a watch.
It’s currently streaming on AppleTV. You can watch the trailer here.
Book Club Reminder
📚We will be meeting to discuss How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of The Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett at 10AM CDT next Sunday, October 4th. You can view the event in your time zone here. I will be sending out the Zoom link in next Friday’s newsletter.
I’ve been thinking about Ben Franklin’s Junto and what we can do to make our club similar and how we can use that to add value to one another and ourselves.
Your ideas are graciously and generously welcomed.
Also, our book for next month will be Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse.
The eBook and audiobook are both available on Scribd. Get 60 days free here.
Grab a copy so we’re ready to rock for next month
That’s it for this week.
I really enjoy getting responses from each of you, hearing your thoughts on what I’ve written, and learning more about you. Please reach out.
Until next time.
Be good to one another,
KB
Thank you for this newsletter, Kyle. Your headline stopped me in my tracks ( ... between a rock and a hard place ... ). I know just what you mean when you tell us you had the "lived, felt experience" --identifiable in your body. It's rare to experience that level of awakeness. I think it's a privilege, and also a gift perhaps to hear a wake-up call (sorry, a cliche) that we can't conveniently close our ears to. Thank you for the pointer to David Foster Wallace's This Is Water. It's new to me, and I believe I needed to hear it. I'm enjoying your writing and continue to read as much as I can make time for. All the best to you. Janette