Dig The Well

Welcome to The Brighter Side of Everything.

This newsletter serves a simple purpose → To help you build optimism, resilience and a solution-focused perspective.

Each week, I’ll share actionable insights that not only brighten your day but position you to be a leader within your own life and seize life’s opportunities.

Read time: 20-30 minutes.

Hello, Brighter Side readers! ☀️

Thanks for being here again.

Summer in Toronto has arrived (it’s so hot 🥵) and the World Cup has had the entire city buzzing.

Add to that the fact that my oldest friend just visited us twice inside three weeks, and I'm feeling pretty darn grateful.

As a result, this week is about the friendships that hold us together.

Starting with a personal one that’s 34 years in, and as solid as it’s ever been.

We also meet Tu Youyou, the humble Chinese chemist who cured a disease older than history and has saved millions of lives as a result.

I suggest a book that dives into the impact our expectations have on our biology and finish with a bright idea about why facts alone rarely change minds, and what actually does.

Have a great week 😀

See you on the Brighter Side,

Chris

P.S. Please feel free to send me feedback on how I can improve. I respond to every email.

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My oldest friend lives on the other side of the planet.

Yet, he understands me better than many of the people I see regularly.

I feel grateful to have received a rare gift recently: two visits inside three weeks.

He passed through Toronto for a few days on his own while travelling for work (and attending the World Cup), then returned again last week with the rest of his family joining him.

We have a shared history that stretches back 34 years to our high school days in regional Australia.

He stood by my side as my best man, just as I did for him and his wife has been part of our story and a close friend for just as long.

During our time in Melbourne, we shared an apartment while attending different universities, creating another memorable chapter in our lives.

Not long after, I started chasing the world, and it turned out he had the same itch.

Different cities, different continents, and somehow, without ever sitting down and deciding to, we’ve built something that doesn't come along very often.

A friendship that transcends borders and time zones.

A connection that defies the usual constraints of distance and circumstance.

Despite the miles that separate us, our bond has remained strong.

Not by chance.

It’s been nurtured by shared experiences, mutual understanding, respect and a deep appreciation for each other's unique perspectives.

Apart from the odd lull where life gets in the way, we’ve never lost touch.

In person when it’s possible but always quick to be present and connect when needed.

He'd been in the house a matter of hours before we were three layers deep in a conversation many people never get to have.

Life, death, family, kids, parenting, career, sports, music … no topic was of the table.

That's the thing about the people who've known you forever.

You don't have to translate who you are or where you've been, or get reacquainted first.

You can just carry on from where you left off.

Because the most challenging part was completed a long time ago.

I love slipping into a deep conversation with an old friend because it feels like no time has passed.

Almost as though we pick things up mid-sentence.

As if our last conversation had paused rather than ended.

The real ones understand that people will come and go and that you can't always be physically present in each other lives.

When you have a history with someone like this, the entire shape of a conversation changes.

You skip the preamble and head straight to what matters.

And it runs the full range.

One minute we're in fits of laughter over something spectacularly stupid, the next we're into a deep and vulnerable conversation.

The type you can only have with someone who truly knows you.

Some of the best of it happened late at night, long after the kids had gone to bed.

We talked about the real stuff.

Careers.

Regrets.

Our children.

The silent worries you reserve for only a select few people.

There's an ease to these moments that are impossible to fabricate.

The understanding is already there, and so is the permission to be completely yourself.

Warts and all.

There's a new dimension to it now, too.

We've watched each other grow as parents.

His kids are teenagers already; mine are twelve and eight.

And there's a real joy in cheering on someone else's children almost as if they were your own, knowing they do exactly the same for mine.

At one point we were discussing a creative project I've been working on and his wife offered to read it.

It’s something I’ve yet to show many people.

One of those things that feels a little fragile the first time you share it.

The response I received was far from polite encouragement.

It was honest, generous and sometimes challenging feedback.

Exactly what I needed.

The type that only lands well because I know, without any doubt, that it comes from someone who wants the very best for me.

That's the thing about her.

She’s never been simply my best friend's wife.

Over those same decades she's become a trusted friend in her own right, and I love and respect her every bit as much as I do him.

A stranger can flatter you.

A new acquaintance will usually be kind.

But the friend who has known you for over thirty years can tell you something hard, and you actually hear it, because they've earned the right to say it.

That's always been our deal, and it runs both ways.

We point out each other's blind spots.

We push each other to keep growing.

Never to keep score, but because we each really want to see the other do well.

You can't put a price on feedback like that.

And you certainly can't manufacture it in the few months after meeting someone new.

It has to be built, slowly, over years.

The foundation for these conversations was laid well in advance.

The trust & the shared history.

The track record of being there for each other through weddings and funerals and all the regular moments in between.

Decades of effort and dedication.

I vividly remember being in my twenties, living and working in London, catching up by phone.

We'd swap everything we were up to, be genuinely thrilled for each other's news, and at some point I'd always catch myself pointing at the ground.

Pointing straight down through the earth and out the other side to where he was standing.

Half a world away, but always one of the first people I wanted to tell anything.

That went on for years.

Different time zones, different chapters of life but with the same thread running beneath it all.

You can't phone someone out of the blue after years of silence and expect the kind of frankness that only grows from deep roots.

The relationship has to be there already.

That’s the concept I’m attempting to shed light on this week, it’s an easy one to miss when life get’s busy and everyone is well:

That the best time to build a relationship is before you need it.

There’s actual science behind why old friendships feel so different.

A researcher named Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas set out to measure how long it takes to make a friend.

His findings were oddly specific.

Roughly fifty hours together to move from acquaintance to casual friend.

Around ninety to become a genuine friend.

And more than two hundred hours before someone becomes a close friend.

Two hundred hours.

That’s so much more than a coffee here and there.

That's years of turning up, over and over.

It captures a common feeling that we often experience but fail to identify.

When a lifelong friend says something critical and it lands with love?

It's because they've banked hundreds of hours of goodwill.

The account was full long before they ever made a withdrawal.

Then there's the Harvard Study of Adult Development, that has followed the same group of people since 1938, making it one of the longest studies of human life ever conducted.

After more than eighty years of data, the clearest finding has nothing to do with money, fame or career.

It's that the quality of our relationships is the single strongest predictor of how happy and how healthy we'll be as we age.

The research even found that loneliness can be as damaging to our health as smoking.

The people who thrived weren't the wealthiest or the most accomplished.

They were the ones with good people to lean on, who let themselves be leaned on in return.

I don't want to give the impression this is only about friends you've had since you were a teenager.

I've lived in Canada for eighteen years now.

And some of the friendships I treasure most, I’ve built right here, from scratch, well into adulthood.

They mean every bit as much to me as the ones I've carried for decades.

And that didn't happen by accident.

It happened because at some point I chose to be open.

To let people in past the polite version most lead with, be a little vulnerable, and to keep coming back consistently enough for trust to find a home in the relationship.

The shallow stuff has a place.

It just can't carry much weight.

And the payoff comes exactly when you need it.

When the wheels of life come off, and eventually they always do, these are the people who are simply there.

I don't even have to ask.

You Can't Cram a Friendship

You can't cram for a friendship the way you cram for an exam.

There's no shortcut to the required two hundred hours.

So the challenge we face is to keep building the relationship, while the sun is out.

Here are a few things I rely on:

If you think something, say something: A thought is fleeting. Send the message or make the call while it's there, not later when it's convenient, because later has a way of never arriving (and if you’re reading mate, this is when I sent you that message 😉)

Put something on the calendar: The friendships that last tend to be the ones with the next catch-up already booked.

Invest before you're in need: Be the friend who checks in when nothing is wrong. That's what funds the account you may one day be grateful to draw from.

None of this is complicated, it just seems to take a back seat to every other aspect of our lives.

So, go first with honesty, because depth runs both ways.

The more willing you are to open up, the more you give others room to do the same.

And never forget that our friends are the only people in our life who choose us for who we are.

Watching them drive off a few days ago, I felt that familiar ache of a goodbye that will stretch on longer than I’d like.

It's gentler these days, softened by the distance between us but also knowing we'll be knocking on their door in Australia before too long, just as they trekked across the globe to reach ours.

None of it’s convenient, and I love them all the more for it.

But underneath the ache lies something bigger.

Gratitude.

Gratitude that a friendship started in a high school classroom could carry this much weight decades later, across oceans and time zones and entirely different lives.

That wasn’t the plan at the time.

We were just there for each other, again and again, until the roots ran deep enough to support almost anything.

And that ⬆ is what this most recent visit has left me certain of.

You can't build a deep friendship the moment you need one.

By the time trouble comes, the well is either full or it's dry.

There’s no digging it in a hurry.

The most important people in your life don't just appear like a genie the moment you summon them.

They’re there because you were there for the ordinary moments as well.

The days when nothing was wrong and there was nothing to gain other than building on the foundation you already have

That unglamorous, everyday investment is what compounds, over the years, into something you can rest your whole weight on when you need to.

So take a moment and think of the person who came to mind as you read this.

Don't wait until you need them.

Reach out today, while the skies are still clear.

Because life will keep throwing its curveballs.

It always does.

And when it does, the depth of your friendships is the thing that keeps you whole.

Dig the well, my friends, long before you're thirsty.

Too many assume the friendships we lean on for life are locked in by our twenties.

This 13-minute talk from Dr. Marisa Franco makes a compelling, science-backed case that they're not:

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Malaria is likely the most successful killer in human history.

For thousands of years, insects have claimed more lives than any war or famine you could name.

Even today, it takes a young child somewhere in the world, almost every minute.

Knowing this, you’d expect the individual who played the most significant role in diminishing its influence would be widely recognised.

She isn't.

In fact, you may well be reading her name for the first time.

And she’s totally fine with it.

Her name is Tu Youyou.

A reserved chemist from China who, by choice, never sought the recognition she deserved.

Despite achieving more than most of those who actively pursue it.

Tu was sixteen when tuberculosis almost killed her.

It stole two years of her schooling and left her weak for an extended period after.

But it also planted something within her.

As she lay there, slowly getting better, she decided she wanted to spend her life on the other side of illness.

Not as the patient but as the person hunting for a cure.

She studied pharmacology in Beijing, then accepted a job that would shape her future.

She trained in both Western medicine and in traditional Chinese medicine.

The ancient type, rooted in herbs and manuscripts, often dismissed by contemporary scientists.

At the time almost nobody thought those two worlds belonged together.

Tu Youyou spent her whole career proving they did.

In 1969, the Chinese government handed her a problem that had proven unsolvable to that point.

Malaria was cutting through soldiers in the jungles of the Vietnam War, on both sides, faster than the fighting was.

A secret military project had been set up to find a cure, and by the time it reached Tu, researchers worldwide had already tested approximately 240,000 compounds.

Not a single one of them worked.

She was placed in charge of a small team and, in effect, asked to succeed where the rest of the planet had failed.

No big deal right?!

What she did next defied all expectations.

She didn't reach for a cutting-edge lab or a shiny new approach.

She went backwards instead.

Centuries backwards.

Tu and her team pored over hundreds of old Chinese medical texts, hunting for any plant a folk healer had ever used against fever.

She came across one entry that stopped her.

It was a line about sweet wormwood, which is a scrappy roadside weed, written by a physician named Ge Hong in the year 340.

The instructions he provided were oddly specific.

Soak the plant in cold water, and drink the juice.

Cold water.

That small detail unraveled everything.

Each time her team applied heat to the plant, they unintentionally eliminated the crucial element that made it effective.

So she switched to a gentle, low-temperature extraction, and on the 191st attempt, in the autumn of 1971, there it was.

A compound that killed the malaria parasite.

Every single time.

To be sure it was safe for others, she tested it on the first human being she could ethically use.

Herself.

While the story above reads simply, this was not the calm, well-funded lab work you might have pictured in your mind.

This all took place in the thick of China's Cultural Revolution, when simply being an educated person could get you punished.

Her husband, an engineer, was branded too privileged and shipped off to a labour camp in the countryside.

So Tu made a brutal choice.

She sent her two little girls away.

Her four-year-old was sent to a nursery across the city, and her baby to her parents care.

So she could head south to the malaria wards and work.

By the time she came home, three years later?

Her own children didn't recognise her.

The compound she extracted from that weed became known as artemisinin.

Today it is the frontline treatment for malaria across the planet, credited with saving millions of lives, most of them young children in Africa.

And for multiple decades that followed, very few knew she was behind it.

The project was secret.

The papers were released with no names on them.

And Tu was never the sort to put herself forward.

She had no doctorate, no foreign degree and no seat in China's grand academies.

In her own country they referred to her as the "three-nos" scientist.

When recognition did finally come, it came late.

In the shape of a major American research prize in 2011.

Then, in 2015, at the age of eighty-four, Tu was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The first ever won by a Chinese woman.

Some argued the discovery had been a huge team effort, and that no one person should take the bow.

There's truth in that for sure, and Tu was always the first to say so.

She has spent her whole life pushing the credit outward.

To her colleagues and the ancient scholars who wrote it all down centuries before she was born.

Sometimes the answer is behind you: She cured a modern disease with a 1,600-year-old book. Progress doesn't solely live in what's new. Now and then it's sitting patiently within the pages of books that everyone else forgot.

The quiet ones carry more than we notice: Tu never performed for a camera or a crowd. She just worked, for decades, on the one thing that mattered. The people who are positively changing your life are rarely the loudest in the room.

Purpose can outlast applause: Tu did her greatest work with no name attached, no expectation of a prize on the horizon and no promise that anyone would ever know. She did it because children were dying and she wanted to help.

If you haven’t noticed there's a type of person I've come to love writing about.

The extraordinary ordinary individuals who make a difference behind the scenes, yet remain out of the spotlight.

The people scattered across the globe who take whatever skill they happen to have, and point it at one of humanity's problems.

Most of them you'll never hear of because they don't trend.

They aren't "entertaining."

They give an interview or two and slip back out of a spotlight they were barely in to begin with.

And so they fade, while louder, emptier stories are told a thousand times over.

But make no mistake, these are the people we owe everything to.

The reason a child in Kenya lives through another malaria season.

The reason so many of us lead comfortable lives today without ever knowing whose shoulders we're standing on.

Tu Youyou is one of them.

She saved millions of lives, asked for nothing in return and would genuinely rather you talked about the science than about her.

So maybe that's the simplest thing we can do in return.

Notice them.

Learn their names and pass their story on.

Because the world is full of Tu Youyous.

And it's a far better place because of every one of them.

For a brief review of her achievements, check out this brief video:

I've been writing about the science of optimism for years now.

Sharing the research that consistently outlines it’s benefits on things like lower cardiovascular risk, better quality of life through the hardest chapters and even living a longer life.

I was confident I had a solid grasp on it.

Then this book took me even further.

Robson is a British science writer who spent years pulling together the research on how our baseline expectations tend to steer everything.

Everything from how we experience stress right through to how we age.

From how we process food to how we respond to exercise.

The core idea is simple.

Our predictions about the future directly influence our body's actions in the present.

Through hormones and blood chemistry.

As a result of the way our nervous system reads the world around it.

Most of us have heard of the placebo effect.

Which is the phenomenon where a person experiences a real improvement in their condition after receiving a treatment that has no therapeutic effect, simply because they believe it will work

A sugar pill you believe is medicine can reduce your pain.

Providing real reductions that are measurable in brain scans and blood chemistry.

Its darker twin, the nocebo effect, is much less well known and suggests the flip side.

That, if you believe a treatment might harm you, your body will often oblige.

When you warn patients in vivid detail about the possible side effects of a certain drug, they tend to report those side effects at higher rates than patients who were never warned.

The expectation itself does the work.

There is particular case study from the book stayed with me.

A group of Spanish teenagers began developing dizziness, breathing problems and fainting spells in a pattern that mystified their doctors.

The cause turned out to be a soap opera featuring a fictional virus with those exact symptoms.

None of these teens had a real illness.

But their expectations, once seeded, produced symptoms consistent with the fiction.

Robson is careful with this material.

He anticipates the critics who'll write it off as 'The Secret' in a lab coat and heads them off early.

He's clear that you can't wish away real illness or manifest a lottery win.

But he makes a compelling case that our beliefs about the future shape our biology more than most of us realise.

A few things I've been thinking about since reading it:

Watch how you talk about ageing: Studies Robson cites show people who hold negative views of ageing live nearly eight years less than those who don't. The story you tell yourself about getting older changes how your body actually ages.

Reframe how you interpret stress: Telling yourself a racing heart is your body preparing to perform, rather than panicking, produces measurably different physiological outcomes. Same physical response in each circumstance but two very different results.

Stay alert to the nocebo effect: Never ignore medical warnings but notice that vividly imagined side effects can produce real ones, and being careful about how much fear you invite into the room with you.

Take his caveats seriously: Robson warns against turning expectations into a moral scoreboard. Bad things will still happen to positive people. This is a tool for tilting the odds but never a stick to discipline yourself with when life goes sideways.

I've spent the last couple of years writing this newsletter around a single idea.

That the evidence favours an optimistic outlook more than most people realise.

Robson's book adds an additonal layer I was aware of but hadn't fully appreciated.

That optimism reaches all the way into our bodies.

That our immune system responds to it.

That our heart responds to it.

And even the rate at which we age responds to it.

Every week I make the case that optimism is a skill worth developing and this book gave me a stack of new information to further support that case.

Because what we tell ourselves, our bodies believe.

Please share; I'm always keen for great suggestions.

Think about the last time you tried to talk someone out of a belief, a belief you were sure was wrong.

You likely did the obvious thing and gave them the facts.

More facts.

Then better facts.

But they didn't budge.

If anything, they dug in a little harder.

We keep treating disagreement as an information problem, as though the right information will do the trick.

But, interestingly, people rarely change their minds.

Why?

Because they are often deeply rooted in their beliefs and their values.

Which are shaped by their own biases, personal experiences, cultural influences and social environment.

The facts bounce off for a reason.

Most of our strongly held beliefs are bound in who we are, and which groups we belong to.

So when a fact contradicts one of them?

Our brain treats it less like new information and more like an attack.

Psychologists call this motivated reasoning.

Yale professor Dan Kahan has shown that when a topic is tied to our identity, our reasoning switches sides.

It goes to work defending the belief instead of testing it.

And the smarter we are, the better we tend to get at justifying it.

This is why "just show them the facts" so often fails.

It's also why humility and curiosity work where information can't.

Humility lowers your own guard: I might be wrong.

Curiosity lowers the other person's: what am I missing?

Both trade the threat for something safe enough to let real thinking (and conversation) happen.

Always lead with a question: "What makes you see it that way?" keeps the conversation open. "Actually, you're wrong" ends it. You’ll learn something, and the other person keeps their guard down.

Say "I may be wrong” first: When you model a little doubt, you make it safe for the other person to do the same. Certainty invites a standoff while a bit of openness invites a conversation.

Get curious about your own certainties: The beliefs you'd defend hardest are usually the ones worth examining most. Ask yourself what you'd have to see in order to change your mind. If the honest answer is "nothing," that's really worth noticing.

I'd love to say that I only see this in other people.

I don't.

I can be as guilty as anyone of defending a position well after voice has told me I'm standing on shaky ground.

What's helped greatly is the one question I've started asking myself the moment I feel my defensiveness rise: what if I'm missing something here?

It doesn't always change my mind, but it always changes the conversation.

It shifts the interaction from a contest you’re trying to win into something you might actually learn from.

The surest sign of ignorance, it turns out, is certainty.

The people hardest to teach are the ones convinced they've got nothing left to learn.

So, moving forward, notice the belief you feel the strongest urge to defend, and aim to be more curious about it before you become defensive.

Ask what you might be missing.

Ask them to help you understand their position.

The answer is often more interesting than being right.

Transform your daily routine with my specially crafted gratitude journal.

Start (or end) each day with a moment of reflection and positivity.

As you develop daily your gratitude, you're also helping grant wishes to children facing critical illnesses.

It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

🌟 What's Inside:

Ready to embrace the power of gratitude?

Click here to order a copy now!

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