More Than The Moment Asks

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 immense thanks to those who continue to read along, you mean the world to me.

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Lately I've been thinking a lot about people who always give a little more than the moment asks.

You know, the ones who choose kindness and more considerate in moments when they have every right not to.

Those who break the cycle of reaction and the rest of us feel the energy.

From the runner who gave up his New York Marathon to help me back to my feet a decade ago, to Sam Neill, a man who always seemed to give a little more.

Also, there’s a Moscow funk album that's had me grooving in recent weeks and we finish with a wise old Japanese proverb.

So 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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Have you ever had a perfectly good reason to be a jerk?

You know those moments when someone's rude to you, or they’ve let you down.

When someone cuts you off in traffic or you receive an email that gets right under your skin.

In that moment, it often feels like you've got a free pass to match their energy.

To be short with them.

Cold.

Maybe even a little petty.

And let's be honest, nobody would blame you.

Most of us do just that.

We hand people back exactly what they handed us and call it even.

Some of us (let's not kid ourselves) choose to give back even worse than we got.

But every now and then, you meet someone who doesn't.

Someone who stays present, warm and considerate, when they have every right not to be.

They give a little more than the moment asked of them.

I've always found these people fascinating.

And honestly, I think being a better human than the situation requires might just be the most underrated practice in modern life.

I still think about a man I met for about ten minutes back in 2016.

I was running the New York City Marathon, turning on to the Queensboro Bridge, when another runner unknowingly cut across me.

I tripped over his feet, went down hard, and dislocated my shoulder (a somewhat frequent event at the time due to a previous injury) as I hit the pavement.

What he did next has stayed with me ever since.

He stopped.

He gave up his own race, everything he'd trained months for, came back and stayed with me until I'd eased my shoulder back into place.

Only once I'd promised him I was okay did he carry on.

Nothing in that moment required that of him.

The moment gave him every excuse to keep running and never look back, and most people would have.

He chose to be a far better human than the situation asked him to be.

Nearly ten years later, I'm still telling his story.

Most of what we do is witnessed by someone.

Our work gets reviewed, our promises are remembered and bad behaviour gets noticed by others.

But this one is different.

It shows up when the stakes are low and the audience is gone.

When no one would ever know you took the easy road.

The waiter who got your name wrong will never see whether you were gracious or cold about it.

The person who needs help carrying something up the stairs isn't keeping score.

There's no updating the scoreboard and no applause.

Which is exactly why it tells you so much.

Anyone can be decent when they know they're being watched.

It’s what you do once the watching stops that reveals the truth.

It goes beyond merely exposing you.

Those consistent unseen choices are how our character is built.

Choose the high road when no one's looking, enough times, and you stop having to choose.

It just becomes who you are.

Now, this is the part I love.

Philosophers have a name for this behaviour, and it's a wonderful one.

In 1958, a British philosopher named J. O. Urmson wrote a now-famous essay called "Saints and Heroes."

It was a simple idea, but a big one at the same time.

For centuries, we'd sorted human actions into three boxes.

Things you must do.

Things you may do.

Things you must not do.

Urmson confidently stated that a box was missing.

There's a whole group of actions that are good, but that nobody could ever demand of you.

He called it supererogation.

A clunky word for what is a great idea.

It means exceeding expectations and going above and beyond the call of duty.

It’s the soldier who throws himself on the grenade to save others or the stranger who jumps into the river to pull someone out.

These a grand moments, sure, but you'll also find it in the smallest moments.

You aren't required to be patient with the person who tested your patience deliberately, or to always give someone the benefit of the doubt.

But you do it anyway.

Not as a reflection of their character but a reflection of your own.

That's the kind of good I mean.

The good that sits just above the line of what's owed and expected.

And if you ask me?

That's where the best people spend most of their time.

We love to explain people's behaviour by their circumstances.

You know how it goes: It’s okay, he was having a bad day.

She was under pressure.

They were provoked.

And there's some real truth in that.

Shit happens, and a rough day really does impact the way we act.

But there’s another crucial detail to consider.

If the situation always explains what we did?

Then it always excuses it, too.

Tired, stressed, slighted, rushed, hungry, overlooked, hard done by.

There's never a shortage of reasons to be at our worst.

The people I admire most aren't the ones who are never tested.

It’s those who are tested and choose their character over their circumstance.

And it’s not because they feel like it.

Often they don't.

They've innately decided in advance who they want to be, so the moment doesn't get to decide for them.

That one decision, made ahead of time, changes everything.

When you've already made it?

A rude comment or a long queue or a missed deadline is less a test of your patience.

It becomes more like the weather, unpleasant at times, sure.

But it always blows by while you stay exactly who you were.

Now for the part that surprised me most as I read further into this.

Being better than a moment asks doesn't end with you.

It spreads to the people around you, too.

The psychologist Jonathan Haidt studies an emotion he refers to as moral elevation.

It's that warm, slightly choked-up feeling you get in your chest when you witness someone being unexpectedly good.

You feel it inside you.

But Haidt's research found that elevation does more than feel good.

It moves you to act.

When we watch someone rise above what a moment required, we walk away wanting to be better ourselves.

That runner on the bridge did exactly that to me.

His goodness was contagious.

And it travels further than you might think.

In 2010, researchers James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis ran experiments on how cooperation spreads through groups.

They found that a single generous act ripples outward to people the original giver never even met.

Up to three degrees of separation away.

Your decision to choose kindness reaches the friend of a friend of a friend.

So the small choice to be gracious when you could have been cold isn't small at all.

You're improving far more than one specific moment.

You're setting off dozens more, in people you'll never even meet.

And it cuts both ways.

When someone's rude to you, or lets you down, there's a real pull to hand it straight back.

To keep the bad cycle turning.

But you can (and should) be the one who breaks that cycle.

Choose the kinder path and you've modelled an alternate path through the moment.

It won't always work.

Now and then, it rubs off, and the next time they find themselves on the other side of it, they pass on the kindness instead of the hurt.

Someone has to start that cycle.

It might as well be you.

There isn’t a running scoreboard to tally these moments or even monitor their impact.

You rarely receive applause and there’s no visible payoff to collect thanks as a result of your good work.

There is one significantly overlooked payoff, though.

It just doesn't show up at the time.

Researchers consistently find that the people who give the most tend to live longer, healthier lives.

Stephanie Brown's team at the University of Michigan followed older adults for years and found the ones who regularly helped others had a markedly lower risk of dying.

The surprise was that receiving help made no difference at all as the benefits actually stem from giving itself.

Our body responds, too.

When older adults with high blood pressure were asked to spend a little money on other people for three weeks, their readings dropped by about as much as doctors would expect from medication or exercise.

Much of the benefit seems to come down to one thing: stress.

Specifically, avoiding it.

Choosing the higher road lightens the mental load you carry, and our body notices.

It's not the reason why you should do it.

But it’s a significant reward, for those who do.

The hard part is that being better than the moment requires asks the most of you precisely when you have the least to give.

When you're tired or when they started it, and even harder still, when you're right.

So, it can't rely on your willpower in the moment, it has to be an internal decision you’ve made earlier.

Here are a few things that helped me put this into action:

Decide on your standard before you need it: Decide now how you want to treat people who get it wrong, who let you down, who can do nothing for you. Make the call once, so you're not renegotiating it every time you're provoked.

Give the benefit of the doubt you'd want: Most people aren't being difficult on purpose. Assume the better story and you'll be right far more often than you're wrong.

Watch yourself in the low-stakes moments: The way you treat a call centre worker, someone that’s new or in training, even your uber driver. These are the real tests, because there’s nothing forcing you to be kind to any of them.

Let it be invisible: The moment you need credit for it, it becomes a transaction. The moments nobody sees are the ones that count because you both know it comes from a genuine place.

Nowhere has this mattered more to me than with my own kids.

It's tends to be easy to show up for the biggest moments like the milestones, the games, the days that were locked in the calendar and always going to matter.

The much harder (and more rewarding) thing is the small stuff.

The drawing they're desperate to show you when you're elbow-deep in making dinner.

The story shared with joy that wanders on with no end in sight.

The question that comes the second your mind is focused elsewhere.

It doesn’t demand much of you.

You could even nod along, half-listen and get away with it.

But I'm convinced those little moments matter more than we recognise.

Because every time you stop, turn around and give them more than the moment was asking for, you're telling your kids something real.

That they matter.

That you're listening.

That coming to you is always a safe option.

And most importantly, you're setting the table for later.

The kids who feel heard about the small things become the ones who come to you with the big things.

The friendship that fell apart at school, the worry they can't seem to put into words or the mistake they've been too scared to own up to.

We don't earn that when the big moment arrives but in the hundred little ones, long before.

So, I try to give my kids more than the moment asks for.

As often as I can, because I want them to know that the love and the support is always there.

The world has no shortage of people meeting the moment exactly where it is.

Matching rudeness with rudeness.

Giving people back what they were handed or worse, rarely better.

It's our default setting.

It's what most people do without even thinking about it.

It’s a reaction, not a response.

Being better than the moment required means swimming against that current.

Often for no visible reward beyond simply knowing that you did.

And I'll be honest here, I don't always manage to follow through on this.

Some days I'm tired or annoyed or hungry and react in a way I’m not proud of.

None of this is about being perfect, because perfect doesn’t exist.

Those small, unasked-for moments will tell you more about a person than their job, their title, or their highlight reel ever will.

Those moments become who you are when a situation gives you every reason to be less, and you decided not to be.

That decision is always an option.

Every rude comment, every short reply, every chance to just walk past.

The world will keep handing you a free pass to be smaller, but you don't have to take it.

You can always give more than the moment asks.

You may recall seeing this moment from the Boston Marathon earlier this year, when two runners stopped to assist another who was struggling. Everything this piece is about, in a couple of minutes:

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Somewhere in the south of New Zealand, there’s a pig that does yoga.

Its unlikely coach, until this week, was one of the most recognisable actors on the planet.

Most mornings he would wander out to the paddock, prop his phone against a fence and film the two of them stretching together.

Why?

So that strangers all over the internet could start their day with a laugh.

Sam Neill died on Monday, at 78.

Throughout a remarkable fifty-year career spanning dinosaurs, spaceships and Oscar-winning dramas …

It's a pig doing yoga in a paddock that might reveal the most about the man.

He came into the world in Omagh, Northern Ireland, and crossed to the far side of it to New Zealand with his family at age seven.

A shy boy with a stammer who, by his own account, spent much of his childhood hoping nobody would talk to him.

He became "Sam" at school, after deciding his given name, Nigel, was too posh for a New Zealand playground.

For a kid who dreaded being spoken to, he chose a curious way to make a living.

You've seen him in something.

He was Dr. Alan Grant removing his glasses in awe as he witnessed dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.

The unflappable boss of a country radio telescope in The Dish.

The repressed husband in Jane Campion's The Piano.

The menacing lawman in Peaky Blinders.

Wherever he caught your eye across five decades of film and television, there he was, often exactly right for the part.

He was never chased the spotlight but was always steadily, reliably excellent.

If Sam was in it, some part of it was always worth your time.

And for how big of a star he became and the Hollywood of it all, he never really belonged to Hollywood.

He belonged to a farm at the bottom of the world.

If you've never seen Hunt for the Wilderpeople, put that right ASAP.

In Taika Waititi's little New Zealand gem, Neill plays Uncle Hec.

A gruff, grieving, barely literate old bushman landed with a rebellious foster kid from the city he has no idea what to do with.

It’s phenomenal.

It's the whole of Sam Neill on display in one role.

The tough exterior.

The dry, throwaway humour.

And underneath it, without a word of fuss, an immense amount of heart.

He could break you and make you laugh in the same breath.

Sam’s real love was never the screen.

It was Two Paddocks, his farm and vineyard in Central Otago, and the crowd of animals he kept there.

He named every one of them after his famous friends.

Pigs, ducks, cows and chickens, all christened after the Meryl Streeps and Michael Caines of his acting life.

His reasoning was simple, and always delivered with a perfectly straight face.

"You can't eat a friend."

When the world was locked down and the news turned relentlessly grim, Neill did something small and wonderful.

He started filming his animals.

A pig doing yoga beside him in the paddock.

A duck causing chaos everywhere it goes.

Him, gently taking the mickey out of himself, playing a bit of music and cooking a bit of dinner.

He understood something a lot of people with a large platform seem to forget.

That amid all the anger and noise hurled at us every single day, most of us just need to watch a pig eat an ice cream every now and then.

So that is what he gave us.

On purpose.

To the very end.

In 2023, Neill informed the world he had a rare and aggressive blood cancer.

Stage three.

Chemotherapy, he mentioned at the time, for the rest of his life.

He wrote a memoir, Did I Ever Tell You This?

Partly to make sense of it all, and even there he couldn't help himself.

Sharing warm, funny and endlessly generous stories about everyone he'd ever worked with.

And always stubbornly unwilling to make himself the hero of the story.

It’s a very movie-star thing to say, but he never thought of himself as a star.

And he meant it.

This past April, he shared some really uplifting news.

He was cancer free.

Which is what makes his passing a little harder to take in.

His family said the loss was sudden and unexpected, but they felt blessed by the fact that he’d left them with the cancer already beaten.

You notice one thing straight away, when reading the countless tributes to him this week.

Nobody has a bad word to say.

Steven Spielberg called him part of the Jurassic family, never to be forgotten.

His fellow New Zealander Karl Urban called him truly brilliant.

An inspiration to everyone who followed.

Co-stars, crew, and strangers who only ever knew his animals, all saying the same thing in slightly different ways.

That he was kind.

That he was humble.

That underneath the fame, he was a genuinely lovely man.

You can learn an awful lot about a person from what's said about them once they're gone.

On that life test?

Sam Neill scores about as high as anyone can.

Range is a choice: He could have stuck to one type of role for forty years, but he chose to keep challenging himself and stayed curious. His success in everything was more about not getting too comfortable than just pure talent.

A platform is a responsibility: He had a big online following, and used it to make people feel better, not worse. Whatever the size of your audience, you get to decide which way you point it.

Stay humble and people will notice: He genuinely didn't think he was a big deal, and it made everyone love him more. Nobody has ever been made smaller by being kind.

I'll always picture Sam as Uncle Hec.

I first watched Hunt for the Wilderpeople with my Mum, who wouldn't stop raving about it.

And she was right, as Mums usually are.

It's funny and warm and it glues itself to your memory, with a good chunk of that because of him.

But the part of his story that grabbed my attention this week wasn't a film.

It was an ageing movie star, tucked away on his New Zealand farm, deciding that the best use of his fame was to point a phone at a pig and make strangers smile.

That's a choice.

And it's one any of us can make, on a far smaller stage.

I’m guessing we won't all star in Jurassic Park but we can all be the person who adds a little light instead of a little heat.

The one who checks in.

The one who chooses humour over anger.

That's the Sam Neill I'll remember.

The one who had the whole world watching, and chose to spend it brightening ordinary mornings for others.

Rest easy, Sam.

And thanks for sharing your pig.

Want to hear him tell it himself? Here's Sam on Graham Norton back in 2016, explaining with a perfectly straight face why his farm is full of animals named after movie stars:

Every Friday, a fresh batch of music lands in my New Music Friday playlist.

Most of them get a quick listen but there’s always a few that get saved for later.

Ornithology was saved, and then it just sat there.

For months.

A couple of weeks ago I finally pressed play, and I've spent the days since making up for lost time.

It took me all of about thirty seconds to realise what I'd been sitting on.

Consider this my apology to the album.

The Diasonics are an instrumental funk outfit from Moscow.

There's no singer and no lyrics, with not a single word uttered across the entire record.

Ornithology is their second album, following their 2022 debut Origin of Forms, and it was recorded in a studio the band built inside an old Soviet lamp factory.

That detail gives a little insight to their sound before you've heard a note.

The whole album feels like it was beamed in from another time and place.

Old film soundtracks, 1970s library records, Soviet jazz fusion, a little Eastern psychedelia, all stitched together with a disco-funk pulse.

Eleven tracks, totalling thirty-five minutes.

Oh, and every song is named after a bird.

Jay. Peregrine. Storm Petrel. Chickadee. Cuckoo.

I love that.

This has become my working album of late.

With no lyrics, there's nothing to pull your attention sideways.

But, don’t me wrong, this is no background record.

It moves.

It peaks when you need a push and settles when you need to think.

It keeps your mind moving, but it also keeps your body moving.

Yesterday I caught myself switching to my stand-up desk, mid-sentence, just so I could boogie while I wrote.

That's always a good sign 🕺

If you only sample one song, make it Oriole.

It's the album's high point, a great place to dip your toe in and the one track I keep going back to.

A few ways to get the most out of this one:

Put it on while you work: Writing, planning, anything that needs your full brain. It gives you a pulse without demanding your attention.

Listen front to back at least once: It opens with the funk-driven Jay and closes with Cuckoo, and it flows like a movie soundtrack. Their sequencing is part of the craft.

Let it move you: Literally. If you feel the urge to get up from your desk, don't fight it. Consider it cardio and enjoy yourself.

In saying that, you don't need to be working to enjoy this, it’ll do just as well on a road trip, or while hosting or cooking dinner.

I've had Ornithology on repeat for days now, and it keeps revealing subtle details that I missed the first few listens.

But mostly, I keep coming back to the name.

The band say the album was inspired by the birds that circled their studio while they worked, and by ideas of movement and freedom.

I'd say they’ve nailed it.

Music with no words, named for creatures built to fly.

No wonder it's so hard to stay in your seat.

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

We've all had that moment.

You go to do something you're genuinely good at, and somehow you blow it, right when people are watching.

Anyone can fumble something new.

We expect that.

But when you drop the ball in your area of expertise?

The thing you've done a thousand times.

It stings in a different way and feels like it means something.

There’s a Japanese proverb that’s held the counterargument to this for centuries.

Even monkeys fall from trees.

I've actually seen it happen.

Back in 2007, I was in the rainforest of Manuel Antonio in Costa Rica, head tilted up at the canopy, watching a group of monkeys leap around and play through the branches.

Then one of them missed and fell.

It came straight down with only a tangle of brush braking the fall.

It survived, but I'd never seen anything like it.

Even an animal that spends its whole life in the trees, can fall down.

The point here is gentle but firm.

Being genuinely good at something has never made anyone immune to getting it wrong.

It gets even stranger.

Some of the mistakes we make come precisely because we're skilled.

British psychologist James Reason spent his career studying human error, and he drew a useful line between two kinds.

A mistake is when your plan is wrong.

A slip is when your plan is right but the well-worn action misfires, something that happens when a task becomes so familiar it runs itself.

Slips are errors of competence.

The experienced driver who makes a turn toward the old office.

The seasoned cook who forgets the one ingredient they never forget.

That monkey didn't fall because it's bad at climbing.

It fell because it's up there all day, moving without a second thought, and every so often a movement it's made a million times, misfires.

It's the small, unavoidable tax of doing something so well it's become second nature to you.

Separate the slip from the story: A dropped catch is a dropped catch. It only becomes "I'm useless at this" if you let it. Notice the leap your mind makes from the event to the verdict, and then refuse to sign off on it.

Talk to yourself like you'd talk to a teammate: If a good friend fumbled something they're brilliant at, you wouldn’t choose to pile on. You'd say “oh well, it happens to everyone" and mean it. Offer yourself the same grace.

Get back up the same day: The longer you dwell on the fall, the bigger it grows. Climb back into the tree and try again, even badly, before a new internal story has time to establish itself.

I feel this most with this newsletter.

I care about it.

I read every edition more times than I'd admit before it goes out.

And every so often, one still sends with a glaring typo I managed to read straight past multiple times.

The first reaction is generally a flush of embarrassment.

How did I miss it?

What does it say about me?

The honest answer is: not much at all.

All it says is I'm someone who writes a lot of words (5-10,000 a week), and people who write a lot of words occasionally send one out with a mistake in it.

That’s it.

It just means I was up in the tree, moving fast.

If you take real pride in what you do, the mistakes aligned to your strong suit will always sting the most.

That sting is just the price of caring.

So, when you next fumble the thing you’re good at, try to hold it lightly.

Even the monkeys fall.

What matters far more is that you're back in the tree.

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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