Just Close Your Eyes

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! ☀️

I hope the weekend was good to you.

A big welcome to all new readers this week, and a huge thank you to those who keep coming back.

I’m so glad you’re here.

This week we’re closing our eyes and heading back to the conversations that never really leave us.

Tea on a patio with Mum, a Guinness in Ireland with Dad.

We also meet the innovative and enigmatic David Byrne, a YouTuber who makes engineering fun and a reminder that smooth seas have never made a skilful sailor.

Grab yourself a cuppa and settle in ☕️

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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There are some conversations that don't end when they finish.

Or maybe they don’t finish when they end?

Either way, they’re the ones that follow you home.

Sometimes they sit there for years, and then a song or a smell or a memory drops you straight back into the middle of the moment.

These days?

I don't have to wait for those moments to make it happen.

I just close my eyes and go.

I'm instantly sitting on the back patio in Australia, and the type of drink in my hand tells me what time of day it is.

A cup of tea signifies it’s early in the day.

The sun coming up, countless birds are chirping over each other and there's a chill in the air.

While a glass of wine means it’s later in the day.

Here the sun is going down and a new chorus of birds has taken over, the noisy cockatoos have joined in, and a warm breeze is moving through the trees as the light drops away in the distance.

Either way, Mum and I are sat side by side sharing stories about all things life.

Our challenges.

What makes us happy.

What makes us smile.

The people we love.

Parenthood.

Life.

We had so many of these conversations.

So, so many.

And then there was Dad.

I'm sat at a café in Rome on a brisk October morning, sipping on a cappuccino while he and I work our way through an important question.

If you had one shot at making the entire world laugh, how would you do it?

That was Dad.

He always saw the joy in life.

He loved making people smile and laugh, and was always pointing out the good, the bad (and the funny) in the world.

I don’t recall if we ever agreed on an answer to that question, but boy, did we have fun trying.

These were the types of conversations we had and I anticipated them eagerly each time.

In between the jokes and the laughs came the more serious discussions that challenged our perspectives and broadened our understanding of the world.

We delved into topics that mattered deeply to us, exploring different viewpoints and learning from each other's experiences.

These moments weren’t just about finding answers but about life’s journey and the joy of intellectual companionship.

They made me think.

They helped me grow.

And they always came from a place of love.

I can’t pick up the phone and call either of them anymore.

In 2019, Dad passed away unexpectedly.

Five years later, we lost Mum.

The loss was profound, and adjusting to this new reality has been challenging in ways you simply can’t anticipate.

Both were in their sixties, leaving us well before their time.

One of the most challenging aspects has been the timing.

Now arriving at midlife as a parent myself, and knowing they won’t be here for it.

They were both so proud of their grandkids, yet neither will have the chance to see them grow up.

I've mentioned previously that the cruellest part of losing them so young has been the conversations we'll never get to have.

And I stand by that.

But there is another half to this equation.

The conversations we did have.

They’re all still available to me, and I can revisit them at any time.

My parents separated when I was very young, and my Dad moved to Far North Queensland, which was a 4 hour flight away.

As a result, throughout most of my youth, I saw Dad in person just once a year.

As I entered my teenage years, the conversations naturally dived a little deeper.

Then as an adult, deeper again.

They started taking place in locations all over the world.

Always making use of the time we had together, no matter how short.

They were how I filled in my perceived gaps and began to understand the complexities of the world around me.

They allowed me to ask questions in an attempt to make up for, what at times, felt like lost time.

And they allowed me to learn more about why I am who I am.

While my memory is quite solid, there are some moments that stand out much more vividly than others.

About twenty-five years ago, give or take a year, I was living in London.

Dad and his sister, my wonderful aunty, joined me for an incredible road trip across Ireland.

We met up in Dublin and set off on a quest to find relatives, going back generations.

We knew some names and had a rough idea of the region, but not much more than that.

What I loved about this trip was that we had no concrete plan.

We simply followed our noses.

Each day we'd drive, make it up as we went, take in the rolling green hills and chat away.

Of an evening we'd find a B&B, drop our bags and head for the pub.

This was Dad’s ideal playground.

We’d have a meal, a few Guinness, sing some songs and have a chat with the locals.

We’d swap stories, ask questions about our family and hunt for clues to guide our next move.

And somewhere within all of that, the three would delve into some wonderful conversations.

After several days of driving we reached a town outside Galway, on Ireland’s west coast, believing we were close to finding a relative we'd never met.

My aunty set off for the local cemetery to look for the name on the gravestones, try some local shops and then maybe the phone book.

This was the early 2000s.

Meaning the phone book was still a legitimate research tool.

Dad had a different idea.

He decided we should try the pub, because that's where the stories get told and where people know each other.

So we found one and the two of us walked in.

It was a small town, and two strangers coming through the door stood out.

There were maybe three people sat along the bar, along with the barman who was stood behind it.

"How can we help?" he asked.

And Dad, the Australian that he was, said, "G'day. We're looking for a man called George S——."

The barman grinned straight away and pointed at one of the men at the bar.

"That right there is George S——."

Dad just bent over and cackled.

Instant laughter, and it caught on.

Everybody in the pub had a bit of a giggle.

Then we walked over to him, hand outstretched eagerly.

We introduced ourselves and discovered quickly that he was one of a couple of George Scotts in the region.

And this one knew which of them we were after, and kindly put us in touch.

The next day we were sitting around a large table for an Irish Sunday roast at their house, sharing stories about our families, our life in Australia and their life in Ireland.

All of this was triggered by Dad walking into a room of strangers and asking a question.

That's what stands out to me now.

The curiosity, and the willingness to embrace people we'd never met.

One of life’s most precious gifts is the ability to connect with others and he had it in spades.

And all I ever have to do to go back there?

Is close my eyes and remember.

The small conversations are in there, too.

One of the many conversations with Mum before something hard when I was a teenager.

Or the phone call after our first child was born, when it hit me that Mum had been through exactly what I was going through, and I was that child.

The weight of that conversation lingered.

Then there were the conversations about her relationship with her own mother.

Her struggles and triumphs.

They made me realise how interconnected our experiences are and how each generation carries the burdens and joys of the previous one.

With Dad they happened driving out to the hangar in his ute, talking about what it was like to be a kid in the sixties.

About moving away from family to the other side of the country.

About what it's like to travel the world.

Some of them inspired me.

Some of them challenged me.

And I’m grateful I can go back to them because they aren't here to do it anymore.

So what is actually happening when I close my eyes and go?

The memory researcher Endel Tulving spent a career on that question.

In 1985 he described what he called autonoetic consciousness, the self-knowing awareness that comes with remembering an experience.

It's the sense that this happened to you, at a particular time.

And you're living it again.

Knowing that Galway sits on Ireland's west coast is one thing.

Standing in that pub again is another.

There's also a reason these particular memories are so sharp.

Psychologists call it the reminiscence bump.

Adults tend to recall more memories from roughly ages ten to thirty than from the years either side.

Researchers have yet to settle on why.

One idea is that those are the years we build our identity, so what happens in them becomes part of our story.

Then there's the feelings that come along for the ride.

Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut at the University of Southampton study nostalgia.

They found that nostalgic memories centre on close relationships.

They tend to be positive, though often with a thread of sadness running through them.

In the experiments, people who were asked to recall a nostalgic memory rated their lives as more meaningful than those asked to recall an ordinary day.

The major route seemed to be feeling connected to other people.

That research wasn't specifically about grief, so I hold it lightly.

But it fits the patio and the cafe and the pubs in Ireland.

Mostly warm, with a subtle ache running underneath.

For most of the twentieth century, the accepted wisdom held that a healthy mourner eventually lets go.

Freud pushed that view in 1917 in his paper Mourning and Melancholia, arguing that grief work meant detaching from the person you'd lost so you could move on to new relationships.

In 1996, Dennis Klass, Phyllis Silverman and Steven Nickman published a book called Continuing Bonds that pushed back.

They'd noticed what mourners tend to do.

People talk to the person who died, dream about them, feel them nearby and ask what they would do.

I’ve certainly experienced some of those.

The authors described a relationship that carries on, changes over time and typically brings comfort.

Again, I’ve experienced those.

The neuroscientist Mary-Frances O'Connor, author of The Grieving Brain, describes grief as the brain slowly learning to live in a world that no longer has that person in it.

It takes time.

And it doesn't follow a tidy set of stages.

Staying connected isn't always simple, though.

For a minority of people, a bond they aren't aware of can keep them anchored in the past.

When I go back to the patio with mum, I know where I am and why I’m there.

I also choose when I leave.

You don’t have to wait for a song or a smell to take you back.

If you have somewhere like this, you can go there whenever you like.

You can go on purpose.

You just have to find your way in.

My entry is the sound of the birds.

They’re with me the minute I close my eyes, and the patio (and company) comes along with them.

It doesn’t have to be a parent, though.

The same goes for the people who are still here.

I go back to friends, teachers, mentors, too.

To all the wonderful people and conversations that have shaped me.

The conversations I can go back to exist because we had them.

They likely weren’t scheduled.

We simply sat down, asked some good questions and stayed with them long enough to comprehend the answer.

So ask the ridiculous question.

Order the second coffee when the conversation is flowing.

Because you never know which ones you'll end up going back to.

Also, tell the stories out loud.

Especially to those who’ve never met the people in them.

There's research behind that.

Robyn Fivush and Marshall Duke at Emory University developed a 20-question scale that measures how much children know about their family’s history.

In one small study, teenagers who knew more family stories reported higher well-being and a stronger sense of identity.

It’s a correlation from a single study, so I don’t want to oversell it.

But it’s still a great reason to keep telling stories.

I do that often with my kids.

They knew Mum really well.

They called her Granny, and we visited each other often.

It was never as often as we'd have liked given we live on the other side of the planet, but video calls and plenty of travel made a real difference.

Dad is different.

He passed seven years ago, when my son was six and my daughter just two.

My son's memories of him are few.

My daughter's are non-existent.

What they have is me, and the stories I tell.

They know how much I love him, and the relationship we shared.

It's the one I hope to build with them.

I hope I never stop missing them.

I can't call Mum.

I can't sit across a table from Dad.

What I can do is close my eyes and go back.

I do it often, and when things get heavy it's where I go for strength.

Dad is there, telling me I'm capable of anything.

He had no doubt I'd figure out whatever came my way, and I've leaned on that confidence since I was fourteen.

I admired his kindness, his humour and his work ethic, and I take all three very seriously to this day.

Mum is there too, and the conversation is bouncing all over the place.

What stays with me is how proud she was of my independence.

She supported my travels, came to visit regularly and never once made me feel bad for not living closer to home.

They're exactly as they were.

Mum on that patio.

Dad at that café, and at the pub in Galway.

And all of the places we slowed down to engage in the conversations that matter.

Nobody can take that away from me.

And I'd never let them.

If you’re grieving yourself, or you’ve grieved, the following talk from neuroscientist Mary-Frances O’Connor is well worth your time. She explains what grief is doing in the brain, and why it can take time to accept that someone is gone.

Watch it here:

🌌 A Shark-Shaped Nebula Just Won Astronomy Photographer of the Year - Ali Alobaidly spent two nights in the desert of western Kuwait and more than 28 hours of exposures capturing the Shark Nebula, 650 light-years away, to take this year’s top prize, and the category winners are just as striking, from an aurora bathing a tiny Icelandic church in green light to star trails swirling through the trees of Botswana. Read more → (BBC Science Focus)

📼 A $130 Second-Hand Camcorder Held a Stranger’s Childhood, and the Internet Found Her in a Day - When Ben Coleman bought a vintage camera on eBay, he found eight years of a Utah family’s home movies still on it, from a first birthday party to Christmas mornings, and with a clue from a child’s Utah T-shirt and the names spoken on the tapes, he tracked down the Darling family within 24 hours so they could relive memories they thought were gone. Read more → (Scoop Upworthy)

🦗 New Zealand’s Heaviest Insect Was Down to a Single Island. Now It Lives in Ten New Places. - Over 15 years, Auckland Zoo and Butterfly Creek bred and released more than 11,000 wētāpunga, a giant wētā that once survived only on Little Barrier Island, and a new study confirms at least four generations have now been born in the wild on two of the islands, with the species moving from Nationally Endangered to Nationally Increasing. Read more → (Department of Conservation, New Zealand)

🚶 Couples Who Move Together Talk Better, Says New Research - A Brigham Young University study of nearly 1,700 young married couples found that partners who exercise together report better communication, calmer conflict resolution and less marital stress than those who work out alone, and the most common shared activity was nothing fancier than going for a walk. Read more → (ScienceDaily)

📚 Es Devlin Built a Library of 2,000 Books to Show How a Creative Life Takes Shape - The artist and stage designer’s first European retrospective at London’s Design Museum walks visitors through a recreation of her studio and 30 years of sketches before ending in a kinetic, colour-coded library of the books that shaped her, a route she says she laid out so young designers can see, step by step, how a creative practice grows. Read more → (Wallpaper*)

Rio de Janeiro, 1986.

David Byrne is in town to support and show a film at the Rio Film Festival.

It's his first time in Brazil, and a local music fan kindly offers to take him record shopping.

He leaves the store carrying an armload of vinyl.

One of the records says samba across the cover, above an image of barbed wire, which seems an odd match.

He buys it anyway.

The artist is someone called Tom Zé.

A week later, back in New York, he drops the needle.

"I'd never heard anything like this," he later wrote.

He then releases a compilation of Zé’s old recordings, then asks him to make a new album.

What Byrne doesn’t know at the time, is that Zé was about to quit.

Largely forgotten in Brazil, he was getting ready to move back to his hometown of Irará and run his cousin’s gas station.

Instead, a younger generation of Brazilians discovered his music.

And Zé?

He found himself back on stage.

Years later, Byrne stumbled on a name for what happened to Tom Zé.

A sleeping beauty.

Something good the world overlooked.

Then managed to find again.

Byrne's family left Scotland when he was just two years old and settled in Hamilton, Ontario.

When he was eight or nine they moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he exchanged his Scottish accent for an American one in order to fit in at school.

His middle school pushed him away from the choir.

The reason they gave?

He was "off-key and too withdrawn."

Byrne himself has since described himself as autistic, and has said that music became the way he communicated when talking face to face was out of reach.

He’s even called it a superpower.

Because it lets him lock onto creative work for hours at a time.

In 1975, Byrne co-founded the band Talking Heads.

Their first gig was at CBGB in New York, opening for the Ramones.

In a room full of leather jackets and punk rockers, they arrived looking like art students.

Which is exactly what they were.

By 1984, Byrne was being broadcast across cinema screens in their concert film Stop Making Sense, wearing an enormous suit, running laps of the stage and jolting around like a man that’s plugged into the mainframe.

Many critics still refer to it as the greatest concert film ever made.

Ok, so he was too withdrawn for the choir?

But also impossible to look away from on stage.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Byrne's story is far from a clean one.

Talking Heads ended in 1991, after quite a bitter split.

Bandmates Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz have been openly critical of him for decades, and Frantz's memoir didn't hold back.

Byrne has owned his part in it, though.

“As a younger person, I was not as pleasant to be around,” he said in 2023.

“I was more of a little tyrant. And then I learned to relax.”

In that same year, a 1984 promotional video resurfaced in which Byrne played a string of characters, some of them wearing blackface and brownface.

Again, he didn't hide from it.

He called it "a major mistake in judgement that showed a lack of real understanding."

More recently, in September 2023, all four members of Talking Heads sat on the stage together in Toronto for the first time in twenty-one years.

A restored version of Stop Making Sense was premiering at TIFF, with Spike Lee asking the questions.

A nearly forty-year-old film returned to cinemas and successfully managed to captivate an audience that wasn't even born when it was originally created.

One of Byrne's sleeping beauties had finally stirred.

Byrne knows the bad-news morning well.

"I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and I say to myself, 'Oh no!' Often I'm depressed for half the day."

So he decided to start collecting good news, "as a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy."

That habit grew into a concept known as Reasons to Be Cheerful, an online magazine devoted to solutions-focused journalism.

A place I regularly go hunting when I'm putting together the Bright Reads section of this newsletter.

Byrne’s new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, borrows its name from a 2004 paper by Anthony van Raan, a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Van Raan used it to reference scientific studies that sat ignored for years before the world finally caught up with them.

Tom Zé was a sleeping beauty.

So was Vera Rubin, the astronomer I recently featured, whose early work on how galaxies cluster was ignored for twenty years.

I've never really been a Talking Heads fan.

Their style of music just never stuck a chord with me.

David Byrne the person, though, especially in his more recent years, has definitely captured my attention.

In April of this year, he returned to Coachella, eight years after he opened the American Utopia tour at the same festival.

I watched it live on YouTube.

He was seventy-three.

The entire band was dressed head to toe in orange.

No cables, no amps, nothing tying anyone to one spot.

Drums strapped to bodies.

Singers and dancers moving together across a bare stage, with colour pouring off the screens behind them.

It was light, and it was joyful.

His energy for good radiated through the screen.

After one of the tracks, he told the crowd that "love and kindness are a form of resistance."

Words that ring just as true today as they did then.

Byrne seems to enjoy it all.

The writing, the performing, the theatre, the art.

Riding his bike around New York City.

He's someone who always wants people to leave happier than they arrived.

A telling reason why he’s such a cherished figure in the arts community.

And beyond.

Not yet doesn't mean never: Tom Zé was about to swap making music for a job at a gas station. Vera Rubin waited decades for telescopes good enough to prove her right. If something you created went nowhere the first time, it may simply have arrived too early.

Go looking for the good news: Byrne went hunting for reasons, one story at a time rather than waiting for them to come to him. Try it this week. Good news is everywhere in this world, you just have to be willing to look.

David Byrne has spent a good part of his life waking things up.

An astronomer's story, retold for a new set of readers.

A forgotten Brazilian musician.

And on some mornings, he’s waking up his own mood, after the news has done its worst.

He's now seventy-four and yet still curious enough to go down a rabbit hole with a research paper and climb back out with a book.

He hasn't always got things right, and he's said so himself.

Everyone makes mistakes.

It’s how we respond, take responsibility, learn and move forward that becomes our story.

It’s his misteps that make his cheerfulness easier to trust.

It comes from a person that has faced the bad news, including his own, and chooses to go looking for reasons to be cheerful anyway.

I suspect most of us are sitting on a sleeping beauty of our own.

A version of ourselves we’ve packed away because the timing was wrong or a great idea we have written somewhere in a notebook.

The world can be slow to notice good things.

Sometimes they just need someone willing to pick up a random record and buy it unheard.

What’s something you’ve put to sleep that may be ready to wake up?

If you’d like to witness the joy I’m talking about, Byrne’s recent Tiny Desk Concert set is twenty minutes that define joy through music:

We tend to learn how to use things long before we learn how they work.

I'm a good example.

When something at our place breaks, or needs an upgrade, I'll usually figure out a way to sort it out.

You know, a bit of reading here, a YouTube video there, and I find my way forward.

Problem solving itself has always come fairly naturally to me, but the engineering that sits behind the problem?

Much less so.

Once the job is done and the tools are packed away, I often come out the other side with a question that stays with me.

Why was it put together like that?

Practical Engineering has been a great resource for finding these answers.

The man behind it is Grady Hillhouse, a civil engineer from Texas who spent close to ten years working on dams and water projects before going full-time on YouTube in 2021.

The idea took shape after he gave a talk to his wife's kindergarten class.

He realised how few people ever get a proper look at the engineering that holds their lives together.

So… he set out to change that.

Almost 5 million subscribers later (clearly I wasn’t alone), he's still at it, releasing a new video every first and third Tuesday of the month.

Then, most importantly, there's the way he explains things.

As I mentioned, complex math and engineering have never come easily to me.

If I'm going to properly understand something technical, I need it explained in simple terms that I can then build from, ideally with an analogy or an example I can picture.

That's exactly what Hillhouse does.

He takes something complicated and breaks it down so cleanly that the question forming in your head gets answered, often before you've had the chance to ask it.

He regularly builds his own models to show you what's going on, and never once talks down to you.

The result?

It sticks.

You come away with a clear way of thinking through the problem.

Arming you for similar challenges when they surface in our own lives.

The last video of his I watched was focused on Stormwater drains, how they function and where the water actually goes.

Most folks will walk by them for years without noticing, but they play a crucial role in urban infrastructure.

These drains are designed to prevent flooding by channeling rainwater away from streets and buildings, directing it into larger drainage systems or natural bodies of water.

Understanding their function can help our communities better manage water resources and reduce environmental impact.

I’m grateful for people like Grady.

The ones who make engineering (or any other complex topic) fun and interesting for everyone.

Not just the mathematically or technically inclined.

A quick heads-up: many episodes will cover disasters and failures.

One looks at the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure in California, when around 200,000 people downstream were evacuated.

These videos can be sobering to watch, but they're also some of his best work, because he doesn't stop at what went wrong.

He walks you through why it happened and what engineers have learned since, so the next dam, bridge or building is safer than the last.

I find plenty of hope in that.

A hard lesson, studied honestly, becomes a better design.

There’s also plenty of much lighter episodes to balance out the heavy ones.

Like the one that answers the question, are beavers actually any good at building dams?

Swap one scroll for one episode: Choose learning something useful over mindless scrolling. Next time you've got a spare twenty minutes and reach for your phone, watch a video instead.

Start close to home: Begin with the most practical topics in relation to your life. The episodes on outlets, water pressure and what's buried under our feet are ones that will definitely pay off around the house.

Learn from failures: The disaster episodes outline how one community's worst day became a safer design for everyone else. It's a useful way to reflect on our own mistakes too.

Look around on your next walk: After a few videos, you'll start noticing the storm drains, retaining walls and grey utility boxes you've never given a second glance. That’s your curiosity growing.

In my 48 years, one of the most useful things I've learned is that there's almost always a better way to do something.

I just didn't know it existed.

We don't know what we don't know.

And this is true of the jobs we need to do around the house too.

I can usually get them done, but getting something working and understanding why it works are two different things.

The second part is what makes the next job easier.

It's why I keep returning to Practical Engineering.

Every episode adds a little to what I understand about the world, and every so often that knowledge pays off.

When something at home, or in life, needs fixing, changing or adjusting.

Because the more we learn?

The more curious we become.

And the more curious we become?

The better we understand and appreciate everything.

If you’ve never seen one of his videos, check out the following insighful one that digs into the dam building skills of beavers:

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

Nobody willingly signs up for a rough patch in their life.

Given the choice, most would choose calmer seas each and every time.

But if you step back and take a look at the bigger picture?

You'll often find that it’s within the challenging times that we grow the most.

It's during moments of adversity that we discover what we’re capable of, our strength, resilience, and capacity for change.

Navigating through challenging times often results in significant personal growth and provides a deeper comprehension of ourselves, and the world we inhabit.

There's a proverb that’s widely circulated, often credited to Africa, that shines a light on exactly that.

Anyone can steer a ship confidently when the water is flat.

The real skills are built out in the swell, when the wind turns and the plan falls apart.

That’s when you find out what you can really do.

Does hardship really make us more capable?

Researchers have put this theory to the test.

Mark Seery and his colleagues at the University at Buffalo ran a study from 2001 to 2004 with 2,398 people from a national survey panel.

Each person reported the hard things that had happened to them over their lives.

Across those years they were also surveyed repeatedly about their mental health and wellbeing: how distressed they felt, how well they were managing day to day, and how satisfied they were with life.

Those people carrying a particularly heavy load of hardship reported worse mental health and wellbeing.

No surprises there.

The surprise was who reported the best.

No, it wasn’t those people who’d been spared any challenges.

Those with some hard times behind them reported less distress than people with a lot, and less than people with none at all.

They also coped better with fresh setbacks, meaning more recent experiences with challenging situations seemed to shake them less.

Seery's team were careful about what this proves.

It was a survey, so it can't display that their hardship caused their strength.

The authors state only that the pattern they discovered aligns with the idea that a moderate amount of adversity can build resilience.

My read on why: someone who's never been tested hasn't had to find out whether they'd cope.

Come through to the other side after one hard stretch and you've now got evidence you can point to.

You were frightened/uncomfortable/sad (whatever the cause) and yet you carried on.

So the next time the water starts to swell?

You have proof.

These same patterns show up in how we learn.

UCLA psychologists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have spent years studying what they call desirable difficulties.

Spacing your practice over several days instead of cramming it into one sitting.

Quizzing yourself properly rather than just rereading your notes.

Both will feel harder, and your progress likely look slower.

But these approaches build knowledge that lasts.

The more comfortable methods will generally only help you in the short term.

The trap is that easy practice can often feel like it’s working.

Yet the Bjorks warn that performance can rise quickly without much lasting learning, and we’re easily fooled by how well we seem to be doing.

Smooth seas feel like a skill right up until the weather changes.

There’s a limit, though, and it’s the “in moderation” again.

A difficulty only helps when you have the background to meet it.

Push too far past what you can handle?

And it transitions from practice to a full-blown storm.

What you’re trying to find are the waters that test you, without sinking your ship.

Keep the proof: When you come through something hard, use a journal to write a line or two on what happened and what you did. Keep it somewhere you’ll find it. The next time the water turns, read it. Your own record is better evidence than anyones pep talk.

Choose one small headwind on purpose: The conversation you’ve been avoiding or the task you keep pushing aside. Choose something hard enough to feel and small enough to survive. Then build upon that baseline strength.

Test yourself before you feel ready: If you’re earning something new, like a language or a speech? Close the book and try it from memory first, then check out what you missed. It feels less effective than rereading, but it’s what makes it stick.

Calm waters are lovely, and I'd certainly choose them most of the time.

But calm waters can't teach you the lessons or provide the experiences that a powerful swell and high winds can.

The swell is where most of us find out we're sturdier than we thought.

That we’re capable of much more than we think.

That we can overcome much more than we think.

So if you're in a bit of a swell right now?

Take heart my friend.

You're learning to sail.

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It's a powerful cycle of hope and optimism.

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