3 MINUTE MONDAY

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When faced with a challenge, your nature might be to worry and obsess and grip tightly.

The classic Insecure Overachiever mindset.

Because worrying is so common in every pursuit you attempt, your successes are seen as proof that worrying is a performance enhancer, and your failures are proof that you should have worried all along.

Unfalsifiable negativity.

“A walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity” as Andrew Wilkinson says.

You build a link between worry and performance.

A belief that your performance would have been markedly worse if you hadn’t worried so much, and that the worrying is precisely what motivated and enabled the outcomes you wanted.

Even when you reach black belt status and have confidence in your capacities, there’s a lack of enthused energy.

Perhaps the worry has left you but it’s not been replaced with excitable enthusiasm, just high expectation.

I want to propose a radical new approach… assuming that things will go well.

After a while, I don’t think that the fear is aiding your performance.

You’re primarily running on habit and skill and experience.

Maybe the fear was needed in the beginning to narrow your focus and create the obsession, but now you’ve reached escape velocity and are drifting in space.

So why are you still holding the controls just as tightly as when you were on the launchpad instead of enjoying the view?

Fuck me this will all be over soon. You do realise that right?

This isn’t going to last forever.

Your final sports match, the last trip to give a presentation, a concluding project at work.

You can look back on a great run of miserable successes, or actually try to embrace some enjoyment.

Perhaps to even prioritise it.

Do not confuse relentless dour severity with seriousness and sophistication.

It is not more noble to treat your pursuits so sternly that the only positive element is the end result and absolutely none of the experience.

Things will go well. You will figure it out, just like you always have.

So go seek some joy.

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Charlie Houpert - how do successful people learn to feel their feelings? Simple question, deep response. Absolute cinema. So so so good. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
Dr Danielle Sulikowski - the ruthless strategies of female sexual competition. Spicy one here. Insanely interesting.

Saturday.
Scott Solomon - how will human biology adapt, survive and be destroyed when we live on Mars? Also amazing. Slamming 3 eps this week.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​London can’t build houses.

In order to alleviate its acute housing affordability crisis, London has been set a target of building 88,000 new homes per year over the next decade.

Last year construction started on just 5,891 - 94% below target, a 75% year-on-year decline, the steepest drop in the country, the lowest tally since records began almost 40 years ago and the lowest figure for any major city in the developed world this century.

2.
​I’d like to speak to a manager (19 times a day).

In 2015, Reagan National Airport in DC received 8,760 noise complaints; 6,852 of those complaints (78%) came from a single household, meaning the people living there called to complain an average of 19 times a day.

This seems to be common both across airports and across complaint systems in general: the majority of gripes usually comes from a few prolific gripers.

Some of these systems are legally mandated to investigate every complaint, so this means a handful of psychotic people with telephones—or now, LLMs—can waste millions of dollars.

I keep calling to complain about this, but nobody ever does anything about it.” — h/t Adam Mastroianni

3.
​Reverse role models are everywhere.

“As we pass through life, sometimes God shows us dopplegangers, bright or dark mirrors of ourselves, glimpses of how we might turn out if we zig or zag on the path ahead. Some of these people are meant as shining inspirations, others as terrible warnings, but they're all our teachers.” — Scott Alexander

LIFE HACK

I have a music playlist.

It rules.

​https://chriswillx.com/bangers​
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Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
I'm going on tour to Australia, New Zealand & Bali in March. Come see me.​