3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

The exact annual review template I use is now available for you to download for free - https://chriswillx.com/review

If you want to learn your lessons from this year and set your intentions for 2025, it should help a lot.

“Find someone who you just feel safe being a burden to.

You’re not going to intentionally be a burden but sometimes you suck, you know. Sometimes you’re a burden.

And if you don’t even feel safe being like that around your partner, if you have to withhold things from them and put on that show, you’re never going to feel safe around them and you’re not going to want to be there for them as much when they’re being a burden as well.

You just become these two people dividing and conquering all your problems rather than taking on the world together.

I think I always felt like I wanted to be good at everything I did and be great at what I did.

And I never expected to be as good as I was.

So it would just be such an interesting relief to be able to give myself to be like, you are going to be great, you’re going to have all these things that you want. But you’re also going to realise that they’re not as important as you think they are.

You’re going to come to the realisation where your relationships and your values and everything that you enjoy and experience aren’t going to come down to those spectacular moments on stage.

They’re going to be much simpler than that.

They’re just going to be those moments where you’re just being yourself, and the people who just love you for that are going to be everything.” — Chris Bumstead

A successful career and a terrible marriage can make your life miserable.

An average career and an amazing marriage can make your life delightful.

Choose wisely.

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Christmas Special - I’m back on my old couch in Newcastle Upon Tyne with Jonny, Yusef & George to go through our best hacks and lessons from 2024 plus revealing a list of the best new year’s resolutions we ever made.

Thursday.
No episode. It’s Boxing Day! Get enough sleep for once.

Saturday.
Best Of 2024 Compilation - never done this before. 11 of the best moments from the podcast in 2024 edited into a single 2-hour-long episode. Some banging insights in here.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
The UK is beating Russia.

There were 98 convictions for internet speech in Russia from 2007-2018.

During the same period, the UK had 1400 convictions for internet speech. — h/t George Mack

2.
Men’s & women’s brains are different.

If you take the MRI brain scan of a 10 year old you can predict whether that’s a male or a female about 93% of the time, which is about the same prediction accuracy as looking at an adult face.

But maybe this is just socialisation? Perhaps society just conditions boys to have boy brains and girls to have girl brains?

Well… you can see even sex differences in brain activity in foetuses that are 6 months in the womb (that’s a minus 3-months-year-old). — h/t David Geary

3.
Married couples like spending time together.

“In a study on married couples, people were 1.8 times more likely to report being very happy when they were with their spouse than when they were not.

In addition, activities with a spouse were considered to be 1.5 times as meaningful relative to activities spent apart.” — Rob Henderson