3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, We live with a quiet superstition: that beneath the noise of our habits, mistakes and contradictions lies a truer version of ourselves - a self that is fundamentally good. An alcoholic who gets sober is “becoming who he really is”, a sober man who starts drinking again has “lost his way.” In Scrooge, Dickens didn’t just write about a man who swapped stinginess for generosity; he wrote about a man who discovered his real nature. When Richard Nixon fell in disgrace,...
8 days ago • 6 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, Humans have an asymmetry of errors. We over-index exceptions - we use things that break the pattern we’ve come to expect as a serious learning opportunity. But we tend to only learn much faster from errors of commission (things we do), not errors of omission (things we don’t do). You only learn the sting of misplaced trust when someone betrays you, but when you refuse to trust and miss out on love, partnership, or help, the loss leaves no scar to remind you. It’s...
15 days ago • 4 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, My North America live tour is getting close to selling out - LA, Vancouver, Toronto and Nashville are all gone. New York City, Austin, Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City & Chicago - limited tickets left. Come and see me live. “You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you, because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they’ve seen, fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves.” — Gurwinder Bhogal The Lonely Chapter has...
22 days ago • 5 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, I’ve been thinking about the shame of simple pleasures. “I have not yet grown wise enough to deeply enjoy simple things.” — Visakan Veerasamy We are all terrible accountants of our own joy. Most of us only accept deposits when the transaction is sufficiently large: the day we get married, the night we play the main stage at Glastonbury, the moment the business sells for $100 million. Anything less, and the entry doesn’t even make the ledger. We treat small pleasures...
29 days ago • 4 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, My North America live tour is getting close to selling out - LA, Vancouver, Toronto and Nashville are all gone. New York City, Austin, Boston, Denver, Salt Lake City & Chicago - limited tickets left. Come and see me live. I’ve been reflecting on a lot of Morgan Housel’s work ahead of recording with him later this year. I came across a list of difficult questions to ask yourself from him. Using these as journal prompts is one hell of a way to humble yourself… Which...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, There are few feelings worse in this life than being right but early. You correctly predict a future catastrophe, trend, opportunity for growth or important area of focus, only to be castigated for how short-sighted, xenophobic, judgemental, out of touch, Left Wing, Right Wing or alarmist you are. The Cassandra Complex is when someone accurately predicts a negative future event or truth, but no one believes them, and they’re often dismissed, ignored, or even...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, Get my brand new Vol. 2 Reading List with 100 more books to read before you die for free. Download Reading List Vol. 2 now. Is pop culture teaching women to choose emotionally unavailable men? Maybe. “What's the weirdest propaganda you feel like movies have tried to push on you in your lifetime? For me, I grew up with tons and tons of movies that kept saying that the worst thing a man could be is a grownup. You'd see a lot of love triangle romances where the guy...
about 2 months ago • 8 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, See me live this year in NYC, Boston, Denver, Austin, Salt Lake City & Chicago. I’ve had a lot of conversations about masculinity on Modern Wisdom. Publicly trying to work out why men are struggling is largely a thankless task. This is The Zero-Sum View Of Empathy. There is an assumption that any attention paid toward men takes it away from women, or some other minority group who is more-deserving. After all, haven’t men had it good for long enough? Maybe they...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
3 MINUTE MONDAY Hi friend, In case you missed it - I released a Vol. 2 of my Reading List with 100 more books to read before you die. Download it for free now. When I first started Modern Wisdom I was obsessed with why life felt like it was going so quickly and how to slow it down. Time to revisit the topic. Why do some days feel like years and some years feel like days? As we get older, life feels like it's moving faster and faster. We look back on a year and can't really remember where it...
2 months ago • 6 min read