Don’t Unpack Your Bags

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! ☀️

Welcome to our newest subscribers and continued thanks to those who continue to make room for a little optimism in their week!

Nobody hands out a title belt for picking yourself up off the canvas.

Which is a shame, because I reckon the time it takes you to get back up tells you more about a person than pretty much anything else.

Ten minutes? The rest of the week?

This week we're putting a clock on it.

Not whether life knocks you down, that part's guaranteed, but how long you stay there once it does.

And why the small recoveries are a rehearsal for the bigger ones.

We also meet Drew Brees, the quarterback nobody wanted whose incredible story of resilience recently landed him in the Hall of Fame.

There also a great book recommendation on this same topic and we learn about a brilliant Portuguese word, used for getting yourself out of a mess using whatever's currently available to you.

Here's to a quick trip back onto your feet this 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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I was a young kid the first time I watched Rocky.

But I can still picture exactly what I was doing.

Sitting too close to the telly (Australian for TV), on my knees on the floor, yelling at a fictional boxer like he could actually hear me.

"Get up, Rocky. Get up!"

Down on the canvas, bloodied and swaying, every part of him with a good excuse to stay down there.

And somehow he drags himself back to his feet.

Again and again.

I get it, it’s fictional, but the message rings true throughout so many aspects of life.

Whether or not he won, barely registered with me.

What I clung to was the getting up part.

Something about this lodged inside me very young and has never really left.

Get knocked down, get back up.

Keep moving forward.

Never quit.

Life, of course, doesn't offer you a title belt for pulling yourself out of bed.

It's a lot more subtle than that.

Something goes sideways and, just like that, our whole day tilts.

A pointed reply from someone that reads much colder than they likely meant it to.

A plan you were getting excited about, gone from the calendar.

A pesky thought that lodges itself in your head and refuses to leave.

It happens to everyone.

Me included, more often than I'd like to admit.

Just last week, I read a line that put into words the lesson Rocky had been showing me all along and an approach to life I’ve always strived to live by:

"Your goal in life should be to reduce the amount of time it takes you to get out of a bad state."

Now, I've read a (small) library's worth of thoughts on resilience over the years.

Most of them delivering the usual requirements to stay positive, or to grow a thicker skin so nothing can seep through.

This one landed differently.

Because it doesn't pretend you can dodge the bad moments, moods and setbacks.

They're coming for all of us, as life tends to do, and no amount of positive thinking changes that.

What it asks is much more profound.

And a lot more useful.

Once you're in a bad state, how long do you stay there?

Ten minutes?

The rest of the afternoon?

A whole week where you're just not quite yourself?

Honestly, that one number might tell you more about a person than almost anything else.

I first learned this the hard way, years ago, playing Australian football back in Australia.

Injury was my teacher.

If you've played any sport seriously, you'll know the gloom of getting hurt.

One week you're in the thick of it with the senior side and the next you're on the sideline in plain clothes.

Watching everyone else train and wondering to yourself how long it'll be before you're of any use again.

For me it was a couple of nasty concussions that saw me miss time, and then a shoulder that popped out badly enough to cost me a few months.

The time doesn't sound that long, until you're the one counting the days.

Watching your team and the season carry on without you.

Nobody warns you about this part as a kid, but how you carry yourself while you're on the sidelines gets watched every bit as closely as how you play when you're firing on all cylinders.

You can sulk about it.

You can let the frustration curdle and half-heart your way through the rehab.

Or you knuckle down, grind your way through the rehab exercises and give yourself every chance of coming back stronger.

I chose to go with the second one.

Not gracefully every time, mind you.

But each time I got better at feeling the frustration for a bit, because it’s crucial to acknowledge your feelings rather than try to push them aside.

Then pouring my energy into what actually shortens the wait: the attitude, the rehab, the work.

Each time, I made it back into the side, but being sidelined hurt every time.

I just never let that hurt move in and unpack its bags.

Across countless conversations throughout life I’ve observed that many people believe bouncing back is a trait you’re were born with.

Some people have it, some don’t.

Tough luck.

Turns out the science is much kinder than that.

Richard Davidson is a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who’s spent decades studying what he calls our emotional style.

One of the things he measures is resilience, and he describes it almost word for word like that line I read: how quickly you recover from adversity.

Some people come back from fear or sadness or anger fairly quickly.

Others get stuck there.

Sometimes for weeks.

He can see the difference in a brain scan, in how well the calm, sensible part of the mind stays connected to the part that loves hitting the panic button.

Here's the part of the results that stood out.

Davidson found that the way you handle the small stuff?

Predicts how you'll handle the big stuff.

The person who can shrug off a rotten commute tends to be the same one who finds their feet quickest after a proper gut-punch.

So all those tiny, forgettable recoveries?

They're your rehearsal.

A chance to practice before the big game.

The thing that actually keeps many stuck, more often than not, is rumination.

That lovely (tongue firmly placed in cheek) habit of hitting replay on the same upsetting moment.

Again and again.

A psychologist named Susan Nolen-Hoeksema spent her whole career showing that chewing a problem over like this doesn't fix a single thing.

It just keeps the cut open and stretches what could be ten minutes of hurt into ten hours.

There's an old Buddhist idea I recall from my time in Sri Lanka earlier this year.

When something painful happens, that's the first arrow.

Fair enough, life fires those sometimes.

The second arrow is the one we pick up and aim at ourselves afterwards.

The replaying, the blaming, the whole dramatic story we spin about what it all means and why it’s important.

We can't always dodge the first arrow.

The second one, though?

That one's on us.

While playing sports was my training ground in facing adversity, adult life came along and tested the theory for real.

I've been made redundant more than once.

Three times in fact.

If you've been through it yourself, you'll know the sting has less to do with the money or the title.

It's the burning 2am question, the one that jolts you awake and won't let you back to sleep.

Was it me? Did I stuff something up?

Am I just not good enough?

The first time flattened me.

By the time it happened again, though, I'd built the muscle and I knew the routine.

Feel it, properly.

No pretending it didn't happen.

Then drag my focus back toward the only thing I can control, which was whatever I did next.

And just like when fighting back from an injury, people were watching how I handled it.

Not to gloat.

It's just that watching someone ride out a period after being knocked down tells you more about them than a hundred good days ever could.

In the months after each one of those redundancies?

I didn't just get back on my feet.

I landed somewhere better, in more elevated roles than those I'd lost.

I refuse to wrap it in a bow and call it fate.

It was a hard, stressful stretch.

But the way you act and behave when your backed into a corner?

Is often a true test of your resilience and character.

It's in those challenging moments that you discover your strengths and learn to adapt, skills that aren’t tested very often.

Climbing out of that bad state quickly, rather than marinating in it for months?

Allowed what could have been a rough chapter to become a better one.

The one person who’s taught me the most about all this is my wife.

We've got this unspoken little system.

One we’ve never once sat down and planned out.

After 16 years of marriage, we're both quick to spot when the other one's running low.

Snappy, flat, hungry, worn thin by a hectic day.

Somewhere south of a five out of ten.

Here's the part I really love: we don't keep two separate scorecards.

There's no me-out-of-ten and her-out-of-ten, tracking who’s feeling better this week.

We're one team.

And the team is scored out of twenty.

So when one of us dips to a three, the other doesn't take it to heart or start keeping count.

They just pick up the slack, because they have the mental bandwidth.

Whoever’s got a bit more in the tank that day tends to carry a little extra.

Some days that's me.

Plenty of days, it's her.

It means neither of us has to climb out of a bad mood alone.

It's always quicker with someone reaching down to drag you up.

None of this is about bottling things up or plastering a brave face over a bad day.

Feel the thing. It's real, and it's earned a minute of your time. The idea is just to stop pitching a tent in it.

Here are a few things that have genuinely help me:

Say it out loud: The second I can go "yep, I'm in a rotten mood right now," it loosens the grip a little. Naming it puts a bit of daylight between us and the mood.

Move before you think: A walk, some fresh air, ten minutes of anything physical. It shifts something chemically that no amount of sitting and stewing ever will.

Spot the second arrow: When I catch myself retelling the same gripe for the fifth time, that's my cue. The actual event finished a while ago. The story I keep looping is what's keeping me down.

Grab the one thing you control: Injuries, redundancies, waking up on the wrong side of the bed, most of it is never up to us. What we do in the next hour generally is.

Let someone take the load: You don't have to climb out solo. Ask for help. Let the people close to you know when you’re running low.

I once thought being strong meant being the bloke who could take a hit and not so much as blink.

I've well and truly changed my mind on that concept.

The people I look up to most now aren't the ones who never come undone.

They're the ones who come unravelled, have a bit of a wobble, and then find the road back before a challenging moment defines who they are.

Fighting my way back from injury provided the early lessons.

Losing a job or three taught me far tougher ones.

And my wife’s presence reminds me often, that the quickest way back is rarely on your own.

The bad moments will keep on coming.

There’s no getting around that fact.

But the clock?

The stretch of time you spend wallowing down there before you climb back into your own life?

That part is yours to shrink.

Somewhere in me, that same kid is still yelling at the screen.

Get up. Get up.

But these days I know he was really yelling it at me.

The following video's a break from my usual science-backed picks. It's fiction, scripted, Hollywood through and through, but the message is as true as anything you'll find in a study:

🔭 The Biggest Map of the Universe Ever Made—and Anyone Can Go Exploring in It - Astronomers stitched together 263,407 telescope exposures taken over 2,285 nights into a 5.6-trillion-pixel colour map holding nearly 4 billion stars and galaxies, and then put the whole thing online for free—because, as one of the leads put it, the skies belong to everyone. Read more → (Berkeley Lab News Center)

🎒 Sixth Graders Spent the School Year Inside a Long-Term Care Home—and Everyone Came Out Better - In Saskatoon, a class of 11-year-olds swapped their classroom for Sherbrooke Community Centre, journaling, gardening and writing limericks alongside elders living with dementia—and on the days those conversations felt most meaningful, both generations reported feeling healthier, kinder and more connected. Read more → (Greater Good Magazine)

🐦 Birdwatching Is Now the Second-Fastest-Growing Hobby Among Young Brits - Numbers are up 1,088% since 2018 among 16- to 29-year-olds, and 23-year-old Ben Smith reckons it comes down to growing up under a climate crisis and wanting something real—his advice for starting out is that you don’t even need binoculars, just get out there. Read more → (Positive News)

🚚 A Stranger Handed a Broken-Down Band the Keys to His Truck - Stranded on a rural Wisconsin highway with ten hours to reach a festival 500 miles away, the Autumn Kings met Ernie, a man in his sixties who lent them his Ford Explorer for days—because, as he put it, he’d never met a live band before. Read more → (Good News Network)

🍄 Crocheted Mushrooms Are Turning Minnesota Hiking Trails Into Scavenger Hunts - Lydia Hansen started walking every week to look after her mental health, then began stitching native fungi out of secondhand yarn and tucking them along the trail—each one a small nudge to lift your eyes off your feet and notice what’s actually around you. Read more → (Colossal)

🌡️ The Volunteer “Heat Pump Coaches” Helping Their Neighbours Go Green - In more than 60 Massachusetts towns, trained volunteers walk through their neighbours’ homes for free to demystify heat pumps, contractors and rebates—a quiet movement that sits alongside solar co-ops born when two teenagers watched a documentary and started knocking on doors. Read more → (Reasons to be Cheerful)

In 2006, two broken things found their way to each other.

One was a football city half of the USA had written off.

A year earlier, Hurricane Katrina had put most of New Orleans under water and turned the Superdome, the Saints' home, into a shelter for tens of thousands of desperate people.

The other was a quarterback nobody wanted.

Drew Brees had just shredded his throwing shoulder in the last game of his contract playing in San Diego.

His playing future became as cloudy as they can get.

His own team let him walk and most other teams looked at his medical charts and decided to pass on him.

So the discarded quarterback threw in with the one city that was as written off as he was.

Four years later, remarkably.

They won the Super Bowl.

Brees was never an obvious pick at quarterback.

He stands six feet tall, which is in fact short, in a game built for giants.

He spent his early career in San Diego being doubted, then benched, then effectively replaced when the Chargers elected to draft Phil Rivers at the position.

Then came the injury.

In the final week of the 2005 season he tore the labrum in his throwing shoulder.

Suffering the kind of damage that has ended many careers.

While most teams saw the risk and decided he was finished, New Orleans, with a first-year coach named Sean Payton?

Decided he was far from it.

At his first press conference, still months from being able to throw properly, Brees was asked if he was worried.

"No concern whatsoever," he said.

"No concern."

You could have called it bravado.

His teammates soon called it something else.

As linebacker Jonathan Vilma put it, almost losing his career to that shoulder changed Brees, as a competitor and as a man.

It lit a fuse in him the doubters never bothered to account for.

What stays with me most is what Brees did next.

He didn't treat New Orleans as a stop on the way to somewhere better.

He made it his home.

He and his wife Brittany poured millions through their foundation into the damaged city, rebuilding schools, parks, playgrounds and athletic fields.

Including one designed specifically so children in wheelchairs could play alongside everyone else.

The team (and the city’s) recovery ran in parallel, almost becoming the same story.

The Saints home, known as the Superdome, finally reopened in September 2006, just thirteen months after it had sheltered thousands who'd lost everything.

The Saints ran out in front of a crowd that was fully present and ready to show that this city wasn't finished.

Very early in the game, Steve Gleason blocked a punt.

The Saints recovered the ball in the end zone, and the building came apart with a noise the locals still describe as unlike anything they’d ever heard.

There's a statue of Gleason’s block outside the stadium now.

They named it "Rebirth."

Steve Gleason, the man who delivered that block, has a remarkable story of his own which has previously featured in this newsletter.

That block was the most memorable moment in New Orleans Saints history.

So far.

And Brees was the steady hand and driving force at the centre of it all.

While the team made great strides and delivered some impressive results throughout the first few years, it was the 2009 season that saw everything fall into place.

After starting the season a perfect 10-0, the team delivered a statement on Monday Night Football.

On a Monday in late November, in that same Superdome, Brees tore apart the New England Patriots, the measuring stick of the era.

He threw for 371 yards and five touchdowns.

Barely missing a throw all night, and Bill Belichick even pulled Tom Brady off the field before it was done.

The building roared like it had something to prove.

It did.

They continued on their merry way to the Super Bowl that season, and the setting for the game couldn’t have been scripted any better.

It was played in Miami, the alternate city Brees could have made his home following his injury.

Brees was surgeon-like on the field that night.

Completing 32 of 39 passes, winning the Super Bowl title, and named the game's Most Valuable Player.

When it was all over, he stood in the confetti taking it all in while holding his baby son.

And while he did, a region that had lost so much were finally able to enjoy a night of pure, uncomplicated joy.

Back home, streets that had been under water four years earlier filled with people dancing.

The trophy belonged to the Saints.

The night belonged to the city and the entire region.

For a franchise that had never experienced anything close to this, and a city that had lost almost everything.

They’d reached the summit at last.

While the team never made it back to the Super Bowl, the Brees era became the most successful period in franchise history.

By a mile.

He retired after the 2020 season as the most accurate passer the game had ever seen, and its all-time leader in passing yards and completions.

And he did much of it without much help behind him, often near-flawless just to keep the Saints in a game.

Which he often was.

It wasn't all triumphs along the way though.

He never won a second title.

In 2011 they lost an epic last second playoff showdown with the 49ers in what was the best game I’ve seen.

In the 2018 playoffs, a referee's obvious blown call in the final minutes almost certainly cost the Saints a second trip to the Super Bowl.

Throw the “Minneapolis Miracle” and “Beastquake” into the mix and this team suffered some of the most extraordinarily epic losses in the game’s history.

A wound that still aches in New Orleans because Brees didn't receive his fairy-tale ending.

But he never stopped believing, and the city will never stop believing in him.

Just last weekend, Brees took his rightful place in the NFL Hall of Fame.

Standing alongside him was Sean Payton, the one coach who chose him when no one else would.

What a decision that was.

Someone's cast-off is someone else's cornerstone: Most teams saw a broken shoulder while Sean Payton saw a leader with resolve. When you feel written off, it generally says more about who's doing the looking than about you.

Stay green: Brees played into his forties still talking about how much he had left to learn, long after he'd won everything the game could give him. You never fall behind if you never stop learning.

Put down roots, don't just pass through: Brees could have played in New Orleans and lived somewhere easier at the time. Instead he helped rebuild the place. People will remember what you gave a community far longer than the games you won in it.

Drew Brees is the reason I started watching the NFL.

As a lifelong sports fan I’ve always been drawn to individuals and their story when selecting a team.

I’d like to say it was tactics or teams, but it was really him.

An undersized guy nobody rated, playing passionately for a city on its knees, refusing to accept a story everyone else had already written on his behalf.

I got hooked on that.

Especially after visiting the city on a game day in 2008 with my mum and wife.

The energy in the streets.

The resilience of the people.

And the quarterback who chose the hard path.

Because he knew what it would mean to the people.

That’s a rare thing in sports.

And I’ll be honest, the game hasn't felt the same since he hung it up.

Something feels missing.

Really, I was watching two comebacks at once.

A city and a player that refused to quit, who decided together that their ending was yet to be written.

Some of his records have already been broken, the way records always are.

But what he gave the people is harder to break: a stubborn belief that the odds don't ever get the final say.

That part stays with you.

In 2019, near the end of a 20-year Hall of Fame career, with nothing left to prove.

Drew was asked how he kept going?

He replied that a coach once told him something he’s never forgotten, and I can't think of a better note to leave you on:

Always humble.

Always committed to growth.

Always a Saint ⚜

Check out the second half of this video to hear Drew tell the story of his arrival in New Orleans:

Most stories we hear about resilience are trimmed down to a single moment.

The comeback.

The turning point.

The one decision that changed everything.

But real life is rarely that clean and tidy.

I've clearly been thinking about this topic a lot this week.

Which is what sent me back to a book I read twenty-five years ago.

I couldn't tell you much about what else I read that year but Endurance by Alfred Lansing has stuck with me for years.

I also wrote an article on Ernest Shackleton back in January as I've had the utmost respect for this man for as long as I've known his story.

And I’m sure you will to.

This book is a great place to start.

Lansing wrote this in 1959.

More than forty years after the actual expedition, giving him ample time to do his research and align his story.

Nearly every surviving member of the crew sat down with him for interviews.

Virtually every diary kept while on that ice was made available to him.

Shackleton had insisted each man keep one, which is the reason why there's so much of it.

The result reads like twenty-eight men describing their own days, while those days were still happening to them.

Lansing writes it flat with no heroic framing.

No added polish.

He lays the facts down and steps out of the way, and the story lands much better for it.

One caveat though, this book is storytelling rather than factual academic history.

As a result there’s a few small factual slips people have picked at over the years but none of them impact what the book is actually good at.

One thing that really came across in this book that a highlight-reel version could never deliver is the sheer length of the expedition.

The Endurance sat locked in the pack ice for nine months before the hull gave way.

The men then lived on drifting ice for another six.

They didn't stand on solid ground for four hundred and ninety-seven days.

And every plan failed.

Crossing the continent, nope.

Save the ship, nope.

Wait for the ice to let them go, nope.

Drag the boats to one island, then another.

Then an 800-mile open-boat crossing to South Georgia.

Then an uncharted mountain range on foot.

Then four separate attempts to reach the men left waiting on Elephant Island, three of them beaten back by ice.

Every one of those is an absolute knock-down.

And every one of them needed a man to get up, accept that plan was dead, and start again on a worse one.

Also, one lovely footnote is that the ship took her name from the family motto on the Shackleton coat of arms.

Shorten the horizon when the horizon is unbearable: Shackleton rarely asked his men to think about rescue. He asked about the next meal, the next watch, the next mile.

Ordinary routine is not trivial: Hot food, assigned duties, shared jokes, football matches on the ice. These weren't just distractions from the business of surviving, they were how the surviving actually happened.

Failing the mission is not the same as failing: The expedition didn't achieve a single thing it set out to do. More importantly, every single man came home.

After reading this book in my early twenties, I finished it with a different idea of resilience than I went in with.

Being brave for an afternoon is an easier version, most of us have that within us somewhere.

What Lansing captures is slower and far less cinematic.

Getting up on day two hundred, when the plan has collapsed again.

The cold hasn't shifted, and there's still nothing to suggest anything is going to work.

Nobody was watching them do it.

They had no tangible finish line in view and no guarantee waiting at the end of it.

But they picked themselves up each and every day anyway.

This book is a well crafted recollection of one of the greatest survival stories ever told and one I highly recommend.

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

The Portuguese have a clever word for getting yourself out of a mess with whatever happens to be lying around.

Desenrascanço.

It comes from enrascar, to tangle.

So the word means, literally, disentangling.

Or solving a problem you have neither the right tools nor the right training for.

Using only what's within your reach.

We often apologise for work like this.

Saying things like I just threw it together.

It'll do for now.

Don't look too closely.

In Portugal, though, they use it as a compliment.

Just a few weeks back I built a backyard swing for my daughter.

The rope wrapped around a wooden pole that was the seat and I wanted something to cover the pole so it wasn’t too hard for her.

I had nothing obvious available that would do the job.

What I did have was a small unused trampoline.

Sitting there with some nice padding on its poles.

So I pulled the padding off, slid it over the wood and taped it on.

It's not the fix I would have designed.

But it works perfectly.

We’re often given the opposite advice when starting out.

Wait until you have the proper gear.

The proper qualification.

The skills.

Then begin.

Management research has actually landed somewhere else.

In 2005, Ted Baker and Reed Nelson published a paper in Administrative Science Quarterly called Creating Something from Nothing.

They studied 29 firms working in genuinely resource-poor conditions, then borrowed a word from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe what they were seeing.

Bricolage.

A bricoleur uses what's already in the shed and works out what can be made from it.

The businesses that succeeded weren't holding out for proper funding or proper equipment.

They used what was already available to them.

Materials, skills, favours, a spare corner of a room.

Things everybody else had written off as useless.

Baker and Nelson's own phrase for it is even plainer than any of that.

Making do.

Constraint wasn't the thing stopping these people from being inventive.

Constraint was actually the thing making them inventive.

A few ways to work this into your week:

Do the scrappy version: Take one thing you've been waiting to do properly and produce a rough version of it. This version will teach you things a plan never could.

Check the house first: Before buying anything to solve a problem, spend ten minutes seeing what you already own. Most of us are far better resourced than we think.

Give it sixty seconds: When a plan falls over, count out a full minute of "what can I actually use here" before you call the whole thing off.

There's a real freedom hiding inside this one.

If the only version of something that counts is the fully vetted, properly resourced version?

Nothing would ever get started.

There's always a piece missing or something we ‘just’ need before getting started.

When the question shifts from "what can I make from what I have here?"

You're never reallly stuck.

You can find a solution and a way forward in the moment.

My daughter has no idea her swing is padded with a trampoline’s pole protector.

She just knows it swings.

And most importantly, that it’s comfy under her behind.

I reckon that's why the Portuguese made a compliment out of it.

They understand something the rest of us keep forgetting.

That resourcefulness is a skill.

And like most skills, it only sharpens on the days you'd rather not have needed it.

You’ll rarely have the right thing in the moment.

But you’ll almost always have something.

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:

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