3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

My LA and Toronto live shows sold out in hours. Absolutely wild.

Limited tickets remain for all other US & Canada dates - get yours here.

I’ve been thinking about impediments to happiness.

And I can see two obvious roadblocks.

First is wanting things to be different.

If you want the world to be different, your happiness is held hostage until that change occurs.

Sometimes this is an actual change you need to make.

To leave an unhappy friendship, change from an unfulfilling career, complete a difficult conversation.

And we often will remain in years of misery to avoid a few minutes of pain.

The second roadblock is uncertainty.

If you feel like you can’t predict the future, you will default to fear, worry and rumination.

Your mindscape will eclipse reality’s landscape.

Worrying about the thing you can’t predict usually involves a nightmare fantasy which is way worse than what could happen in reality.

However, this imagined nightmare briefly collapses the chaos of the world into certainty.

This is how much humans abhor not knowing how the future will unfold; we would rather imagine a catastrophe than deal with something unpredictable.

Sometimes these situations overlap.

A family member gets an uncertain medical diagnosis and we can’t be with them, we argue with our partner while we’re apart and don’t know how they’re feeling overnight, we try to mend a broken friendship with a letter and haven’t yet got a reply.

So, if you’re feeling unhappy, look to where you’re uncertain, and where you want things to be different first.

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.
Cameron Hanes - the world’s most famous bow hunter, father to the world pull-up record holder and all round savage discusses resilience, motivation and more.

Thursday.
Martha Beck - Oprah’s life coach on overcoming anxiety, becoming a friend with your inner voice, self-esteem and finding happiness even during discomfort.

Saturday.
Gen. Stanley McChrystal - why is developing a strong character such an important but under-discussed trait? Where does real discipline come from?

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Men are not intimidated by highly educated women.

A recent study examined the effect of education on dating success on Tinder.

They analysed data on 3,600 evaluations of 24 fictitious profiles.

They find that the effect differs sharply between men and women.

Women strongly preferred highly educated men, however men exhibited no such preference.

They also found no evidence that men have a preference against highly educated women.

“In contrast with recent influential studies from the field of economics, we do not find any evidence that men would have an aversion to a highly educated potential partner.

Additionally, in contrast with most previous research – again from multiple fields – we do not find any evidence for preferences for educational assortative mating, i.e. preferring a partner with a similar education level.”

2.
​Fight for something or you’ll damage yourself for nothing.

"Men destroy each other during war, and themselves during peacetime." — Nassim Taleb

3.
​Close your eyes, think of all the times you got it right.

“Man is fond of counting his troubles but not his joys.” — Dostoyevsky

LIFE HACK

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Healthspan to track how your habits affect your pace of aging.

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Join for free, pay nothing for the brand new Whoop 5.0 strap and get your first month for free, plus there’s a 30 day money-back-guarantee.

Try the new Whoop risk-free.
​

Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
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PS
The new Sleep Token album is everything I wanted it to be.