3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

Jennie Jerome, Winston Churchill's mother, once dined with both Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and his rival, William Gladstone, on consecutive nights.

When asked about her impressions of the two men, she said, “When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman”.

Most people think they want to be charismatic.

They want their energy to be compelling and their stories to be electric.

To walk into a room and everyone be impressed.

But when I think about the friends I love and want to spend the most time with, they don’t have charisma. They have Reverse Charisma.

Why do certain people make us feel boring but others do not?

Why do we feel full of stories and inspiration around some people, but around others we have nothing to say?

We tend to assess people based on how interesting they are, but thereby miss a much more important issue - how interesting they make us feel.

How engaged is this person?

How much of us can they tolerate?

How much of our reality can they handle without us editing ourselves?

How encouraging and reassuring are they?
How much do they make us want to dig deeper and talk more?

How comfortably can we sit in silence without needing to fill it?

Basically, how much of us do they “get”?

If it’s not a lot, then we will inevitably be cautious.

A person feels interesting, precisely to the extent that they have become familiar and at ease with things that are extreme, sad, dark, agonising and shameful.

If they are at home with their own strangeness, then they can help us feel at home with ours.

Where they have gone, we can follow.

What they have felt safe exploring in themselves, we will be able to safely unpack around them.

Architecting your charisma is a nebulous, scrappy task that autistic pickup artists gave themselves existential crises by failing at achieving.

Building your Reverse Charisma is something that anyone can do - by becoming curious, patient and encouraging.

Some people feel interesting, some people make us feel interesting.

There’s a place for both, but on average our favourite people are the latter, not the former.

— h/t Alain de Botton

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MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent. You should subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
David Senra - one of my favourite historians and podcasters gives 15 lessons from history’s greatest founders. Absolute slammer of an ep.

Thursday.
13 Lessons From 2024. It’s me solo. Talking about what I’ve learned from Alex Hormozi, Elon Musk, Dry Creek Dewayne and more.

Saturday.
Greg McKeown - revisiting one of my favourite books and philosophies on its 10-year anniversary. Essentialism is more important than ever. Enjoy.

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THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​How do you say non-binary in Spanish?

“In Spanish, non-binary is translated as “no binario" or “no binaria”, depending on the gender of the person.” — Kira via Grok.

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2.
​Elon’s thoughts on being a CEO.

"A lot of times people think that creating a company is going to be fun. I would say it’s really not that fun.

I mean, there are periods of fun, and there are periods where it’s just awful.

And particularly if you’re the CEO of the company, you actually have a distillation of all the worst problems in a company.

There’s no point in spending your time on things that are going right, so you only spend your time on things that are going wrong, and there are things that are going wrong that other people can’t take care of.

So you have like the worst, you have a filter for the crappiest problem in the company, the most pernicious and painful problem.

So I wouldn’t say it’s, you have to feel quite compelled to do it and have a fairly high pain threshold.

And there’s a friend of mine who says, like, starting companies is like staring into abyss and eating glass, and there’s some truth to that.

The staring into the abyss part is that you’re going to be constantly facing the extermination of the company, because most startups fail.

Like 90%, arguably 99% of startups, that’s the staring part.

You’re constantly saying, okay, if I don’t get this right, the company will die.

Quite stressful.

And then the eating glass part is you got to work on the problems that the company needs you to work on, not the problems you want to work on.

So you end up working on that.

You really wish you weren’t working on it.

That’s the eating glass part, and that goes on for a long time."

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3.
​Why you never feel satisfied in your successes.

“We weren’t designed to be happy. We were designed to try as hard as we can.” — Lionel Page

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Big love,
Chris x

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PS
The vlog from London is now live. Go watch.​