Some Assembly Required

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! ☀️

If this is your first edition, welcome aboard!

If you've been here a while, welcome back and thanks for reading along.

This week we're exploring a concept that I thnk about often.

For something so complex, it's remarkable that our mind and body come without a set of instructions.

Before we start this week though, one honest note.

I'm not a medical professional, and I'll never pretend to be.

When it comes to my body, I'm still learning as I go.

The mind is where my background sits, years of studying behavioural science and psychology, so that's where I can speak with a lot more confidence.

You won't find any medical advice below.

Everybody's situation (and body) is different, so what works for me might not work for you.

My goal here is much simpler.

Get you more curious about your own mind and body, and learning to understand the signals they've been sending you all along.

Throw in the inspiring story of Quilen Blackwell and an interesting book recommendation and I’ve got your next 20 minutes covered.

Let's get into it.

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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Every day, we navigate life powered by the most intricate machine we'll ever own.

Our mind & body.

Yet, nobody hands us instructions on how to operate it effectively.

I think about this concept far too often.

Or maybe just enough, I’ll let you be the judge of that.

You can buy a toaster and it’ll come with a manual (and a warranty).

You can buy a car.

A phone.

Even a basic IKEA bookshelf that may look simple to assemble but will push your patience to its limits.

Each of them arrive with instructions.

You did not.

Our mind and body represent the most remarkable and sophisticated pieces of machinery on the planet.

Around eighty-six billion neurons make up our brain.

That in itself is mind-boggling.

We also have a heart that beats a hundred thousand times a day without ever being asked and a gut that’s running aspects of chemistry science has yet to fully comprehend.

The keys are handed to us at birth without a troubleshooting section and definitely no warranty to speak of.

Many people operate this machine for decades (even entire lifetimes) without ever fully understanding how it works.

Then learn the hard way, through health challenges, that something was off all along.

Those who take the time to understand their own wiring, fuel, and warning lights carry a distinct advantage that many overlook.

Not because they're any smarter than the rest of us.

Because they create their own internal manual based on personal experiences and nuggets of wisdom passed along to them.

I’m grateful to have had a head start on one half of the machine, the mind.

I studied Behavioural Science and Psychology at University, and have maintained a keen interest in the subjects ever since.

As a result, I’ve spent years learning how the mind operates.

While most others grow their knowledge the slower way, through trial and error, self-education and overcoming the occasional wall, I understood early that my thoughts weren't facts.

That the story I told myself about an event mattered more than the event itself.

That a mood can be contagious, and that self belief can guide an entire life.

It gave me vocabulary for what was happening inside my own head and the behaviour of others, at an age when most are simply reacting.

It also helped me understand the importance of relationships, and communication, and gain a deeper appreciation for empathy and emotional intelligence.

It equipped me with tools to navigate complex social situations and build meaningful connections with others.

Skills I value greatly to this day.

I won't try to pretend that has made me wise, though 😉

I still make poor decisions sometimes, we all do.

But when life threw unexpected challenges my way (which it inevitably does) I was armed with knowledge and tools I could rely on rather than just hoping for the best.

That's the strange thing about understanding your own mind.

It will never stop the hard stuff from happening.

But it completely changes the way you react when it does.

The other half of the machine took me far longer.

I've always been active, playing a bunch of sports throughout my youth, and I’ve never really slowed down as an adult.

But staying active and understanding your body are two very different things, and the second took me decades.

For years that assumption seemed to hold up well, so much so that I never really questioned it.

Then I found myself in a desk job, working long hours with a calendar full of meetings and my active lifestyle took a backseat.

I’ve written extensively about my burnout in previous editions but the short version still stings.

One day, I noticed I could no longer touch my toes and at the same time that I was losing my breath while playing with my kids.

Small things in the moment, but key signals we shouldn’t ignore.

What I didn't fully understand back then was nutrition, and how much my gut had to do with the way I felt.

I could easily explain how cognitive bias worked, but I couldn't have explained honestly what I was putting into my body, or why it always left me tired by three in the afternoon.

It’s only been over the last 5-6 years, through self education, suffering unexpected loss and focusing on my overall health, that the nutrition side of things has finally clicked.

I’ve learned to treat what I eat as fuel for a machine, rather than just something to tide me over or get me through the day.

I also learned that, through repetition, you can absolutely learn to crave the good stuff, just as we crave the stuff we know is bad for us.

The difference has been staggering, to say the least.

In how I feel, my energy levels, how I think, even how quickly I recover.

Two halves of the same machine.

I read one manual early to great benefit but left the other sitting on the shelf far too long.

Many people will never read either of them.

But the more that do?

The further we all get.

Every high-quality machine has a dashboard and our body is displaying readings for us to interpret constantly.

The tight chest.

The restless legs.

The afternoon energy crash.

The ache in your lower back.

The knot in your stomach before a conversation you keep putting off.

Scientists have labelled the skill involved in interpreting those signals.

They call it interoception.

Our ability to sense what's happening inside our own body.

It turns out, some of us are far better at it than others.

Researchers at the University of Sussex, among them Sarah Garfinkel and Hugo Critchley, have studied this concept for years with a deceptively simple test:

Can you count your own heartbeats without taking your pulse?

Some people are remarkably accurate.

Others have no idea what their own heart is doing.

In one study conducted on a London trading floor, the traders best at feeling their own heartbeats made more money and lasted longer in a challenging job than those who couldn't.

Their bodies were sending the same data as everyone else’s, they were just better at reading it.

That finding stuck with me.

Our dashboard is always on.

The only question is whether we've learned to pay attention and interpret what it’s trying to tell us.

Our body keeps a few surprises inside its manual too.

It’s now commonly understood that we each have a second brain.

It lives in our gut.

With more than a hundred million neurons lining our digestive system.

Scientists refer to it as the enteric nervous system.

Roughly ninety-five percent of our body's serotonin (the chemistry tied up with mood and calm) is produced there rather than in your head.

Now, don’t get me wrong, that doesn't mean a salad will fix a bad day.

It just means the line between what you eat and how you feel is far more direct than I appreciated through my early years studying the mind.

I spent them fascinated by the brain itself while underestimating its partner in crime.

The gut plays a crucial role in influencing not just digestion but also our emotional and mental health.

Greater understanding of this connection has opened up new avenues to explore how diet and gut health can impact mood and brain function.

So the mind and the body have never been two separate manuals, they were always one machine, communicating with itself.

Whether I was listening or not.

Here’s one thing nobody warns you about: everything related to this topic is constantly being refreshed and updated.

And even the machine itself changes.

While training for the Berlin Marathon in 2018, I picked up a foot injury that ended long-distance running for me.

To that point, running had been my form of meditation, my thinking time, a core part of who I was, and losing it felt like losing a limb.

So, I pivoted to something new.

Shorter runs, daily stretching and yoga, lifting and resistance training.

My body’s needs shifted and are now very different in my forties than they were in my twenties.

What fuels you at twenty-five can flatten you at forty-seven and that’s a signal worth paying attention to.

The information itself changes too.

Science is ever evolving, as new studies reveal updated patterns and results.

Medicine regularly updates its position when it learns something new.

Just because something was factual when you learned it 20 years ago doesn’t mean it will stay that way forever.

As a species we’ve become very good at keeping ourselves alive.

Learning more of what helps and what harms us with new discoveries surfacing constantly.

Whether we bother to stay up to date with it all is another story altogether.

Think about seat belts.

When the laws were first introduced, plenty of people bristled at the idea.

As though the government was reaching into your car and taking a slice of your freedom.

Then the evidence became impossible to argue with.

And now nobody thinks twice.

You get in, you buckle up, done.

What once felt like an imposition has become something we'd never undo.

More recently, alcohol has played a significant role in that conversation for me.

Growing up in rural Australia, drinking was woven into everything.

Both social and professional.

While we likely sensed it wasn't great for us at the time, we treated it as harmless fun and a real social glue.

With no real idea how much it was costing us.

The guidance on alcohol consumption has shifted hard in recent years.

Here in Canada, the old advice called ten to fifteen drinks a week low risk.

The updated version states the safest amount is none.

None.

Now, I’m not here to tell anyone what to do with their lives, but I do want to ensure more people are fully informed to make the best decision for themselves.

At the time, I could have dug in and called the updated guidance a war on fun.

But that in itself would be ignoring what is fundamentally true.

Instead I took it on board, cut back heavily, and have felt better for it in ways I never expected.

This is the entire game of life.

When better information shows up, you decide if it’s relevant to your life and if so, move with it and let it change you.

Refuse, and you become stagnant.

Running your life on a dated version of the manual that was recalled years ago.

Stay open and curious, though?

And you’ll keep finding upgrades.

In your health, your thinking, your outlook.

The whole shebang.

The latest version of the manual is handed to us in pieces, by people, all the way throughout life.

Our parents pass on what they’ve learned.

Often the very things they wish someone had told them sooner.

A teacher drops one perfect line that resonates with you and reshapes how you think about something.

A coach, a leader, a friend at the right moment, even a stranger's throwaway comment that sticks for years because it hit the target.

We're all editing each other's manuals.

Page by page, usually without realising we're doing it.

The timing though, is a bit of a lottery.

Some of us are handed accurate and up to date pages early, and it changes the direction our health and outlook takes for decades.

Some though, receive it far too late.

Long after the damage is done.

The lessons that reached me young, the ones about the mind, arrived because good teachers placed them in my hands early.

The nutrition section showed up much later, and I really felt the cost of that gap.

But none of this is fixed, and that's the part I love.

Every time one of us learns something and passes it on, the next person gets that page a little sooner than we did.

Our kids start where we left off.

A friend steps sideways to avoid a mistake we ourselves had to make to learn that same lesson.

We're not each writing our own manual.

We're all in the same document, making changes and editing it together.

And every change one of us chooses to add and save?

The rest of us get to keep.

Even with all the shared knowledge we receive, assembly remains our personal responsibility.

Every machine (each one of us) runs a little differently, which is why nobody could have provided you a finished guide at birth.

You have to put it together yourself, accounting for your own body and mind.

Not mine.

Here are a few things that have helped me greatly:

Notice the warning lights before they become breakdowns: The poor sleep, the short fuse, the afternoon slump are information to read, not just annoyances. Ask what they're pointing toward and take steps to address them.

Test, don't assume: Change one thing, your food, your sleep, your morning and pay attention to how you feel a week later. Your body will teach you more than any newsletter will.

Study both halves: Know your mind but neglect your body, or train your body but never examine your thoughts, and you're only reading half a manual. They run together, always.

Update the instructions as you age: I cannot stress the importance of this lesson enough. What worked before is never a promise of what works now. Stay curious about the machine you're in now, not the one you used to drive.

None of this is complicated.

It's just rarely taught, and incredibly easy to push aside as a priority.

Until something breaks.

We receive a manual to every machine we own, except the one thing we can never replace.

For most of my life I had one half of mine covered, but falsely assumed that was the important part.

Understanding my body, its fuel and my own warning lights, took me far longer than I'd like to admit.

Lesson learned.

What I know now is that those who stay curious about how they function?

The ones who learn to read their own dashboards and revise their manual as they and the world around them change?

They’re playing a different game.

They tend to recover faster, fall sick less often and make clearer calls under pressure.

They waste far less of their life confused or frustrated by signals they’ve never been taught to read.

You were never given a manual, that part isn't your fault.

But, you're also the only one who can write it.

Because you’re 1 of 1.

And every year you spend paying closer attention to your mind and body buys you better mileage on the only one you'll ever get.

It’s never too late to make positive change, no matter how far or how long you’ve headed in the wrong direction.

Our body is remarkably good at healing itself when you provide it with the right conditions.

Nourishing food, regular exercise, adequate rest, and a supportive environment can work wonders.

Start with one warning light.

The one you've been ignoring.

Your future self is likely reading over your shoulder, hoping you finally do.

Because it’s not about the years in our life.

But the life in our years.

If the idea of a second brain in your gut sounds far-fetched, Giulia Enders explains it far better (and more charmingly) than I can:

👋 A Lonely Four-Year-Old’s Daily Wave Rebuilt an Entire Neighbourhood - When Roman started saying “hey” to everyone who passed his house, one neighbour waved back—and slowly a street of near-strangers became a genuine community. Read more →

🪟 WindowSwap: Open a New Window Somewhere in the World - Billed as the calmest place on the internet, this little site lets you gaze out of a real person’s window anywhere on the planet—a rainy Tokyo street, a Lisbon balcony, a quiet farm at dusk—each view shared by a stranger who simply wanted to pass it along. Read more →

🧠 Coffee’s Hidden Cellular Switch May Explain Why It’s Linked to Healthier Ageing - Texas A&M researchers found that compounds in coffee activate NR4A1, a receptor that shields cells from stress and inflammation—and it’s the plant compounds, not the caffeine, that appear to do the heavy lifting. Read more →

🎭 Going to Museums, Movies and Concerts Is Linked to a Body Three Years Younger - A new longitudinal study found older adults who regularly enjoyed cultural outings had a physiological age about three years younger than those who rarely did—a benefit the researchers say may rival regular exercise. Read more →

🦏 Namibia Records Its Lowest Rhino Poaching in More Than a Decade - A 53% drop since 2024 shows what’s possible when governments, communities and rangers pull in the same direction—proof that conservation decline is never inevitable. Read more →

Most major cities across the globe have areas that many have trained themselves to ignore.

The stretch of town we drive through that little bit faster, scattered with empty lots and boarded-up shops.

Broken windows.

Weeds.

Most people look away or take a detour to avoid it.

In 2017 in Englewood, on Chicago's South Side, Quilen Blackwell walked up to one of those empty lots and envisioned a flower farm.

Today that corner hums with bees moving through rows of peonies, young people snipping stems for a pending wedding order and solar panels drinking up the sun above it all.

In December 2025, the man behind it was voted CNN Hero of the Year.

It took him more than a decade of patient, unglamorous work to get there.

One vacant lot at a time, doing work most observers had labelled a waste of time.

Blackwell is the grandson of Arkansas sharecroppers who moved north to Milwaukee for factory work.

He grew up in Madison, served in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and moved to Chicago in 2011 for ministry school.

While he was there, he tutored teenagers at a high school in Englewood, one of the most disinvested neighbourhoods in the city.

That's where his eyes were opened.

He saw how much talent was sitting in those classrooms, and foresaw how few chances those kids would get to use it.

So he made the decision to move to Englewood.

He met his wife Hannah around this time, they were drawn together by the same commitment to Chicago's inner city.

Their work began with a $150 donation from a friend, then they put their own savings into a boarded-up greystone, spending six months rehabbing it by hand.

Creating both their home and their new headquarters.

Their first idea was food.

They tried turning a vacant lot into a community garden, but quickly hit a wall.

Contaminated soil.

Regulations and red tape.

The harsh reality that inner-city dirt is often too poisoned to grow something you'd want to eat.

Then Blackwell learned something that surprised him.

Americans spend more than $35 billion a year on cut flowers, and around 80% of them are imported.

Flowers were a genuine cash crop, and nobody was growing them locally.

So that became the model.

Converting abandoned lots into off-grid flower farms, powered by solar panels and watered by captured rain.

Then sell the bouquets through their own shop, Southside Blooms.

Every purchase pays for more land, more farms and more jobs.

Each one representing one less lot to speed past.

And one more worth slowing down for.

Every farm and each bouquet exists to put a young person to work.

Quilen calls them his stars.

Southside Blooms employs around 25 young adults, aged 16 to 24, and now turns over roughly $2 million a year.

Across farms in Woodlawn, Englewood, Pilsen, West Garfield Park, the Cook County Jail, and Gary, Indiana.

Take Rashod.

He joined at 16, struggling in school with few options ahead of him.

At age 20 he became a manager, and is now one of the best florists on the team.

Let’s be real about one fact though, Chicago has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 vacant lots.

To date, these farms have reclaimed about ten acres.

Set against the size of the problem, that can look like practically nothing.

The neighbours were sceptical at first too, and it took years of turning up and taking action before people believed he was serious.

But that's the part I keep coming back to.

Some people look at a rundown corner of a city and will write the whole area off.

Others just look away.

Blackwell walked towards the thing everyone else avoided, and started growing flowers and building futures with his own hands.

That's the bit I admire.

Move towards the problem: Qulien didn't study Englewood from a safe distance, he bought a house on the block and started right where the need was. Most of us can manage a lighter version of this, stepping closer to something we'd rather avoid.

Start with what's in your hand: He began with a $150 gift and a derelict house, no grand budget or a finished plan. The first step is almost always smaller than we tell ourselves it needs to be.

Let the obstacles help redraw the map: Poisoned soil killed the food idea, but that dead end directed him to flowers, the very thing that made his entire model work. What looks like a wall is often just a redirection.

It would have been easy for Quilen and Hannah to see Englewood the way the world had decided to see it.

Broken.

Finished.

Somebody else's problem.

Instead he saw soil.

What moves me most is the refusal to accept that a place, or a kid, was beyond hope.

We all pass our own version of that empty lot.

That situation at work everyone's given up on.

The person others have already dismissed.

The corner of our own life we've stopped believing can bloom again.

That leaves me with an uncomfortable question.

Which lots have I written off, because looking away is easier than picking up a shovel?

Blackwell's entire life has become his answer to that question.

You don't need to fix the whole city.

You can just start planting right where you're stand.

Check out this brief news clip acknowledging Quilen and his incredible work:

We spend most of our lives in conversation.

With our partners, our kids, our colleagues, the stranger in the queue at the supermarket.

And, more than any of those, with ourselves.

Yet nobody really teaches us how to do it well.

We learn to talk as toddlers and then tend to assume it was a complete lesson.

Then we learn and improve our conversations as we go, based on our experiences and observations of others.

This trial-and-error approach can lead to misunderstandings, conflicts and missed opportunities for deeper connections.

A good conversation can leave you feeling lighter for hours afterward while a bad one will leave a bruise you can't quite explain.

I’ve been curious about the gap between the two for years and also a strong advocate for effective communication, given it’s the backbone of every strong relationship that’s ever existed.

So when I came across The Art of Conscious Conversations by Chuck Wisner, who has spent decades helping leaders and teams untangle how they talk to each other, I was keen to hear what he has to say on the topic.

Wisner organises the book around the four kinds of conversations we have every day: storytelling, collaborative, creative and commitment.

The first is where everything begins, and his starting point is humbling.

Most of what we call the truth is actually a story.

Our brains filter something like 40 million data points every second, and they filter them through our past, our beliefs and our culture.

What comes out the other side may feel like objective reality but it never really is.

It's simply one way to understand things, created by a machine that mostly runs on autopilot.

The trouble starts when we always treat our story as fact and everyone else's as opinion.

He also touches on something we likely all recognise but rarely acknowledge.

The running commentary in our heads while we speak.

We say things like “Sure, I can do that" while privately thinking "I have no idea how I'll fit this in."

The wider that gap becomes between what we think and what we say?

The more stress we carry and the less connection we make.

Simple as that.

One moment from the book has stayed in my thoughts for a while now.

Wisner, a real stickler for punctuality, is sitting in the car waiting for his wife.

He's stewing.

She's always late.

He's always on time.

He's right, she's wrong, case closed.

Then he catches himself and looks at the story he's telling himself.

The truth he was so sure of turns out to be one interpretation of events.

Built from habit and his judgement which has blinded him to what his wife's mornings actually look like.

That's the premise of the book in a single moment.

Once you recognise you're telling a story, you're no longer trapped inside it.

Wisner calls this developing a witnessing self.

The part of you that can keep the mental chatter in check instead of being swept away by it.

Treat irritation as data: When something sets you off, that's the signal your story has collided with reality. Ask what you were expecting before you decide who's to blame.

Write the two columns: Take a difficult conversation and put what was actually said on one side and your unedited inner monologue on the other. Your unspoken judgements really start to lose their grip once you see them on paper.

Spell out the ask: Wisner once paid his young sons to rake the leaves, gave them vague instructions, then scolded them for a poor job that was really his own doing. Most broken promises come from expectations that were never said aloud and made clear, not from bad faith or poor intentions.

I write every week about the stories we tell ourselves and ways to form a more honest dialogue with that same self.

This book still gave me plenty to think about.

I like to think I give people the benefit of the doubt more often than not.

Wisner helped me notice the way my generosity tends to run out in the moments someone inconveniences me.

And I know I'm not alone in that.

He also helped me realise how quickly I can form a private verdict, often before the other person has said a word.

Something for me to work on.

For me though, the most thought-provoking idea from this book, is that every conversation is really two.

The one happening out loud, and the one happening in your head.

Bringing those two closer together might be the most practical act of optimism there is.

Because it means trusting people with what's actually true.

Our next hard conversation doesn't start the moment we open our mouths.

It's already started, within the stories we're telling ourselves right now.

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

Think about the last person who left you feeling interesting.

Not someone who impressed you.

Someone who made you feel like you were the most interesting person in the room.

A conversation that revealed insights you never realised you possessed and left you standing a little taller.

That feeling is rare.

And when it does happen, it's rarely an accident.

The people who do it aren't performing or putting on a show.

They're leaning into their curiosity and paying full attention to you.

There's a famous old story about two rival British statesmen, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

A woman is said to have dined next to each of them on consecutive nights.

After sitting with Gladstone, she left believing he was the cleverest man in England.

After sitting with Disraeli, she left believing she was the cleverest woman in England.

Exact same dinner table.

Resulting in two distinctly different emotions.

One man spent the evening showcasing his own brilliance while the other spent it making her feel brilliant.

Guess which dinner she never forgot.

Researchers at Harvard revealed something similar.

People who ask more follow-up questions come across as more likeable, and it has little to do with how clever they sound.

It’s the attention itself that people respond positively to.

So, the quickest way to be good company, is to be genuinely curious about the company you're in.

A few small ways to leave people feeling better about themselves this week:

Ask the second question (and the third): Most conversations stop at the first answer. The good stuff is generally in the follow-up. “Oh wow, tell me what that was like?” always beats rushing back to your turn.

Drop the one-up: When someone shares a win or a story, resist the reflex to top it with your own. Let their moment stay as theirs.

Give the idea back: If someone's circling a good thought, help them reach it rather than finishing it for them. People remember the ideas they believe they arrived at themselves.

My Takeaway

It's common to think good communication means having something impressive to say.

Most of the time it's actually the opposite.

The people I remember with the most warmth rarely dazzled me.

They left me feeling more interesting for having spent time with them.

So, you can be the cleverest person in the room.

Or you can be the one who elevates everyone else.

I know who I’d rather sit next to.

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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