3 MINUTE MONDAY

Hi friend,

I'm touring UK & Ireland this October with a brand new live show.

Edinburgh, Portsmouth, Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Exeter, London, Dublin (Sold Out), Newcastle & Belfast 🚀

​​G​et your tickets now.​

Conor McGregor’s knee snap last night at UFC 329 cements some of the gnarliest lessons in life:

• You can’t take 5 years off from a pursuit that people dedicate themselves to daily and come back to have the capacity you did before.
• 100% obsession isn’t just worth 2x what 50% obsession would be; it’s closer to 10x. Because all the gains accrue to the very best in any discipline, and the biggest game-changing insights come from having every waking moment focussed on obsessing over your craft.
• Relying on raw talent to carry you through will not work in a discipline that is so much about conditioning. Perhaps purely skilful art forms like concert piano or watercolour might have less fall-off, but in a game where any competitive edge is sought after, momentum is a helluva performance-enhancer.
• Age comes for us all. Conor is the same age as me. Workouts, parties, injuries and late nights take way longer to recover from now. Even Cristiano Ronaldo isn’t the player he used to be despite living like a monk for decades. McGregor's nose coffee lifestyle was always going to create a big uphill climb.

On this topic, I’ve been fascinated by the difference between having fallen off, and having never made it...

Trajectory is way more important than position.

If you’re #2 in the world but last year you were #1, that is way worse than sitting at #150 but being on a huge upward slope from #300 12 months ago.

There’s a few reasons for this…

Recency bias; if your value is increasing right now, that means you have to be popular at the moment.

By looking at recent trajectory, you are selecting for only the people who are trendy right now, which is all we can remember.

We can romanticise where someone will be in future if they’re currently hot stuff.

How high might they climb?

Who knows, maybe to the top, maybe beyond the top.

Humans struggle to realise that everything is temporary, including growth and decline.

Instead it’s easier to label people as heroes and losers based on what we know of them right now so we don’t have to predict a messy future.

This doesn’t just work for status but for possessions, achievements, wealth, sex, everything.

And it’s not just how we see other people, it’s also how we see ourselves.

We know when we’ve moving up or down, when life is getting better or worse.

The philosopher A. Tate once said “Having things isn’t fun, getting things is fun.”

Another way to look at it is this…

Any accomplishment is just a new, higher bar for you to get over in future.

I see this in my own work.

Let’s say we do a new episode that hits a million plays in a day.

Amazing! That’s very exciting and a new record.

Wow... also that means that every video in future is now going to feel unimpressive until we hit 1.1m or higher.

In this way, rapid increases in success are more a curse than a blessing.

Even though we might want our goals and accomplishments to arrive immediately, maybe a smarter strategy is to stretch out the achievements of our dreams.

We shouldn’t wish for overnight success as we would then need to be able beat it pretty soon, lest we feel like we’re declining.

Instead, slow, consistent progress is a more reliable way to maintain satisfaction.

Purposefully aiming for Slow Success Strategy may actually ensure you always feel like you’re going in the right direction.

MODERN WISDOM

I do a podcast where I pretend to have a British accent.
​

This week’s upcoming episodes:

Monday.
Caleb Hammer - the Gordon Ramsey of personal finance explains why everyone is broke and whether shouting at them and calling them names helps. Listen now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Thursday.
George Mack - I dress as The Hamburglar. George is a Roman senator. That is enough reason to watch.

Saturday.
Alex Petkas - a historian’s breakdown of the true story behind The Odyssey. Nothing to remember, just 2+ hours of amazing storytelling from Ancient Greece. So good.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED

1.
​Americans are more likely to place a gambling bet than read a single book.

Fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.

Only 38% read a novel or short story.

A study analysing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57% of Americans placed a bet.

2.
​Unplanned Childlessness is the dominant trend of our times.

A huge new UN survey concluded that 72% of women and 80% of men aged 35-39 without kids still want them - and that tendency is global.

“From my own research, most won't get the chance – and many people who no longer dream of having a family actually once did.” — Stephen J. Shaw

(“What young adults want and what shapes their decisions about parenthood and relationships: Findings from the Demographic Futures Survey 2026”)

3.
​Choose right.

“I read somewhere that ‘When you choose a life partner you're choosing your eating companion for about 20,000 meals, your travel companion for about 70 vacations, your retirement friend, career therapist, & someone whose day you'll hear about 18,000 times’ and I really can't stress this enough.” — @valawakened

LIFE HACK

You might not need more caffeine or sleep, you might just be dehydrated.

The more I learn about the role of salt and electrolytes in alertness, energy and function, the more certain I am that this is going to be one of the next big health revolutions.

Proper hydration is not just about drinking fluids, it’s about having sufficient electrolytes in your body to actually use those fluids properly.

Drinking LMNT Salt first thing in the morning is the way I’ve started my day for over 3 years now.

It tastes delicious and contains zero sugar or any other junk.

I keep harping on about it because it really works.

Unlimited duration money-back guarantee where you don’t even need to return the box - so you can buy it 100% risk-free.

​Try LMNT Risk-Free with a free sample pack. (US only)
​

Big love,
Chris x

Try my productivity drink Neutonic.
Share this article with your friends here.

PS
My brain has started to function again a little bit after meditation retreat. But I'm still pretty spacey. What a trip.