The Deciding Vote

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! ☀️

Thank you all for being here again this week.

Some weeks I’m generous, patient, and up for just about anything.

Other weeks?

You could ask me the exact same question and get a flat no.

It’s all me, it’s just sometimes we let our emotions guide our decisions.

This week, we take a proper look at what’s actually going on under the hood.

And why it took me way longer than it should have to walk away from a career I loved.

We also meet a fascinating engineer from Romania who’s assisting the blind, a delightfully rude Australian comedy about an unwanted dog, and explore why turning your weekend hobby into a side hustle isn’t always the answer.

The kettle just boiled, go grab your 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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Decisions.

We make them constantly, and we like to believe we're the ones making them.

We weigh things up.

Consider the options.

Sleep on it when it matters enough.

Sometimes, that's exactly what happens.

Other times though?

Something else entirely is behind the deciding.

Say yes to something one morning, rested and feeling generous, and it seems like the obvious call.

Put that same question in front of us at nine o'clock on a Thursday evening, at the end of a long week, and many would turn it down without a second thought.

Nothing about the offer changed.

Only we did.

We like to think of it as just a matter of circumstance.

We’re tired.

We’re stretched thin.

We’re caught at a bad moment.

I've come to believe it's something else entirely.

When we're not clear on what we value?

Our emotions make the call for us.

Not now and then.

As a general rule.

Which means some of our bigger decisions are handled by a feeling that's gone by Friday.

And then we live with what they decided.

When our core values remain undefined?

Every decision arrives as a blank page.

There’s no filter waiting to catch it and no predetermined answer already sitting there.

So the question is handed to whoever happens to be present at the time.

And the only thing reliably in the room is how we feel right at that moment.

Our mood takes the job by default.

Not because it's qualified to do so but because it showed up.

This is how we end up saying yes on a Tuesday to something we begin to resent by Thursday.

From the outside, that looks a bit like inconsistent.

It isn't, really.

We're following something with unwavering dedication.

It just so happens that it can change by the hour.

I spent more than two decades in a corporate career I loved, and I've written extensively about walking away from it to protect my time.

What I've never really explained is why it took so long.

It wasn't fear, or money.

For months, I evaluated my feelings about this potential decision.

During the good weeks?

Staying felt obvious.

Momentum, great people, work that matters and I enjoy.

On a hard week, though?

Leaving felt urgent.

Missed dinners, another flight, another moment I'd only ever hear about second-hand or on video.

I'd swing back and forth between these two positions and regularly mistake the swinging itself for careful thinking.

Nothing actually shifted until I stopped asking myself how I felt about it and started asking something different.

What am I actually trying to protect here?

The answer, once I said it out loud, was simple.

Spend as much time with my kids in their formative years as possible, because they’re awesome.

That’s it.

Nothing more to be said.

Once I’d labelled it and my values we’re set?

The decision pretty much made itself.

It was no longer tied to a coin flip that was influenced by the ups and downs of my week.

The decision itself was never that hard.

My values weren't defined clearly enough to see it through.

Read that again ⬆️

My son said something recently that has massaged my mind ever since.

I overheard him describing me as someone who's around.

Present, available, at the things that matter.

He wasn't paying me a compliment in any way.

He was describing his dad the way you'd describe someone's height.

Just a fact about the world.

Three years ago it wasn't true.

I wanted it to be, and I certainly got there as often as I could.

But my responsibilities kept putting me somewhere else.

Now, he doesn't remember that version of me.

I've been fortunate enough to hear plenty of kind things over the years but nothing has ever landed quite like that.

Back in the 1970s, Aaron Beck, the psychiatrist behind cognitive therapy, coined a term he was regularly observing in his patients.

Emotional reasoning.

He, and his colleagues, described it as mistaking feelings for facts.

You’ve likely experienced it yourself.

I feel it, so it must be true.

I feel unwelcome, so I must be.

I feel like this won't work, so it won't.

The feeling arrives first, then off it goes diligently looking for evidence to back itself up.

Years later, Paul Slovic and his research team completed the picture by introducing the concept known as the affect heuristic.

We tend to attach a quick sense of good or bad to most things we come across.

Then, when a decision presents itself, we prioritise our intuition over the details.

It's fast.

It's efficient, and it's how we make the vast majority of our everyday decisions.

And we'd be lost without it.

If we stopped to properly weigh up every choice we’re faced with, we'd never make it out of the supermarket.

The catch surfaces in what Slovic's team found buried in their data.

When people liked something, they rated its benefits as high and its risks as low.

When they disliked it, the exact reverse.

One feeling was influencing both figures.

And none of them realised they were doing it.

It felt like they weighing things up.

It felt like clarity.

So this shortcut has definitely earned its place and it's very good at what it was built for.

What it was never built for?

Is the handful of decisions each year that actually shape your life.

These ones deserve a little more consideration and a slower pace.

But we can only slow down if we notice it's happening.

Ask most of people what we value and we'll spit out a list many would agree with.

Family, honesty, health, kindness.

All true.

But not much help at all when we're standing at an actual fork in the road of life.

Why?

Because they don't rank.

Shalom Schwartz, an Israeli social psychologist, spent years focused on this problem.

He surveyed more than 60,000 people and found supporting evidence across 82 countries for ten basic values that showed up across every culture he tested.

Achievement, benevolence, conformity, hedonism, power, security, self-direction, stimulation, tradition and universalism.

The list is interesting in itself.

Now, ten words on a page aren't much use on their own.

What matters is how Schwartz arranged them.

He mapped the ten as a circle, because some values sit happily side by side and others sit directly opposite one another.

Security pulls against self-direction.

Achievement pulls against benevolence.

We can't have all ten turned up to maximum volume.

Opting for one option inevitably means sacrificing another, and it's this very trade-off that defines the worth of a value.

A value that has never cost us anything is decorating our decisions rather then guiding them.

Then there's a different problem in that most of us never actually chose ours.

We absorbed them.

From our parents, our first boss and other influential people throughout our youth, along with everything that surrounded us growing up.

Borrowed values can feel identical to real ones.

Right up to the moment they're tested.

Jennifer Campbell, from the University of British Columbia, developed a way to measure a concept she called self-concept clarity.

How clearly and confidently our sense of ourselves is defined.

How consistent it is on the inside and how steady it stays over time.

What she found is worth paying attention to.

People that were lower in clarity showed more reactivity to stress.

They read a wider range of somewhat ordinary situations as threatening.

Daily setbacks quickly drew them into deep reflection.

While individuals with greater clarity?

They experienced reduced anxiety and depression.

The events and environment remained the same but it was as though they experienced different weather patterns where they stood.

Then there's Claude Steele's work on self-affirmation, which goes back to the late 1980s.

His experiments were beautifully simple.

Before handing someone a piece of threatening information, researchers had them spend a few minutes writing about a value that mattered deeply to them.

Those people were less defensive and their physical stress response softened.

They could absorb the information rather than feeling the need to fight it off.

A few minutes of reconnecting with what they stood for changed how far a threat could move them.

Which tells us something powerful, that steadiness grows out of clarity.

It ain’t a temperament that some are blessed with and others aren't.

It’s within everyones reach.

One last idea, because it can shift how this whole concept feels.

In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, which was developed by Steven Hayes and his colleagues, values are defined as chosen life directions.

Unlike goals that we set, they have no endpoint.

A goal can be completed, which also means a goal can fail.

But there’s no finish line to being a good father.

We never complete the experience of being honest.

There's no prize or certificate or promotion handed to us.

There's just the direction we're facing, and whether we moved that way today.

Fall short of a goal and it becomes evidence about us, something we failed at.

Drift from a direction, though, and we've simply gone a little off course.

We can turn around.

Thursday might go poorly, but Friday will still be there.

Draft five, then trim to three: A list of ten values won't hold up through a tough week or when life comes knocking. What remains after you've crossed things out is what truly matters.

Check both your calendar and your bank statement: Your values are already written down somewhere. Look at where last month's time and money went, then reference it against your list. Your truth lies within that gap.

Label what you're willing to lose: If a value has never cost you an opportunity, a friendship or a night's sleep, it hasn't been tested yet. Every real value has a bill attached, and knowing the cost in advance makes it far easier to pay.

Decide before you're asked: The whole point of a filter is that it's set in advance. Choosing your position while your heart rate is up isn't really choosing. Work out where you stand on the things that keep surfacing, while nothing is on the line.

Run a Thursday night test: Before committing to something, ask whether the tired version of you would still say yes.

If there's one thing I've become properly stubborn about over the years, it's this.

I know what I stand for, and I don't renegotiate that when I'm tired or annoyed.

Reading that back it may sound a bit rigid, but in practice, it's the most freedom I've ever had.

Because most of my decisions are already made.

I'm not rebuilding my whole life from scratch every time something arrives from leftfield or something challenging comes my way.

The emotions still come and they always will.

I still get frustrated.

Still get tempted by an easy yes.

Still have days that don't go to plan.

The difference is that those moments don't get a vote anymore.

They get to speak and I hear their message, but they don't decide.

My values do.

When you lack clear values you don’t become calm and neutral.

You become available.

Available to whoever pushes hardest, or whichever mood is loudest.

The steadiest people I've ever met feel everything the rest of us feel.

It’s just that they're steadfast about what they won't trade.

And once you know that?

The noise will still be there, it just stops steering the ship.

My son knows me as present and see my footprint as part of his daily life.

That is win in itself.

Though, he has no idea a decision was ever made.

No clue there was a version of me that very nearly didn't get there.

He'll never know that a vote was taken.

And, even less so, that it was him who cast it.

Want to go a bit deeper on this? The following video is from Steven Hayes, the man behind ACT therapy, and is well worth a watch:

🧠 Multilingual People May Have Brains Up to 13 Years Younger - Researchers in the Basque region built a brain-ageing clock from the faint magnetic signals of 728 people, then applied it to 144 more and found that speaking two languages left a brain looking about six years younger than a monolingual one, three languages about seven, and four languages roughly thirteen—with an earlier start and deeper fluency strengthening the effect. Read more → (ScienceDaily)

🐉 This Tiny Thai Lizard Shares Its Name With a ‘House of the Dragon’ Beast - High in the evergreen forests of Mae Wong National Park, researchers have described a horned lizard new to science that measures barely seven centimetres and lays up to sixteen eggs at a time, naming it after Syrax for its yellow colouring—and one co-author says the find is really a reminder of how much biodiversity is still hiding in forests we assume we already know. Read more → (Mongabay)

🧭 How to Rediscover Your Purpose Later in Life - Psychologist Denise Taylor thinks the cultural pressure to reinvent yourself at 60 quietly makes people feel like failures, and offers a gentler alternative she calls reorientation, built on two questions you can ask of anything still on your calendar: does this still feel alive to me, and if I were choosing it today, would I choose it again? Read more → (Psyche)

🏛️ The Natural History Museum Is Opening a Room That Has Been Closed to the Public Since 1943 - A second-floor gallery in London’s Natural History Museum was sealed off during the Second World War when bomb damage forced the botanical collection into it, and on 16 September it opens again—free—holding fifty objects that range from a 400,000-year-old handaxe to a 1980s Star Wars toy encrusted in marine life. Read more → (Time Out London)

🔭 How to Build Perspective as a Daily Practice for Resilience - Psychologist Robyne Hanley-Dafoe treats perspective as a lens you can build rather than a temperament you’re stuck with, and the piece turns that into small daily habits—zooming out to ask whether this will still matter in a year, adding the word yet to anything you can’t do, and remembering what her son told her courtside when everything was going wrong: this is going to be a bad hour, not a bad day, and absolutely not a bad life. Read more → (The Optimist Daily)

There's a curb at the end of our back deck that leads onto the grass.

I've stepped over it countless times.

Though, I couldn't tell you specifically how high it is.

Same goes with the gap between the platform and the train, because our mind sorts it all out without asking us first.

Most of us live like this and never give it much thought.

Cornel Amariei, though, he was the only person in his house who had that privilege.

Both his parents have locomotor disabilities, and his sister has cerebral palsy.

He was the only one who could cross a room, as simple as it seems, without having to work it all out first.

So he started doing the working out on their behalf.

Which door opened the wrong way.

Which staircase had a rail and which one didn't.

Which curb could turn a peaceful afternoon into a difficult one.

His motivation coming from the desire to make their lives a little easier.

Cornel started programming at just seven years old.

At fifteen he founded Romania's first high-school robotics club.

He even started two companies before he finished school, with one of them paying for his engineering degree in Germany.

Then Cornel moved into the car industry.

As Head of Innovation at Continental Automotive, he oversaw patents that ultimately became integral to European electric vehicles.

The work itself was related to self-driving.

Teaching a machine to observe a street it's never seen and work out where it's safe to go next.

Mindblowing.

Now, let’s discuss two numbers.

Did you know there are more than forty million blind people in the world?

I know I didn’t.

Yet, there are only approximately twenty-eight thousand guide dogs.

You don’t need to be a mathematics wizard to see where the equation fails.

Add that a guide dog costs between forty and sixty thousand dollars to train and will work for about a decade.

Amariei observed the sensors bolted to the front of a car and asked the question?

Why do we only ever point them at roads?

He then left Continental in 2020 and founded .lumen.

The glasses involved carry six cameras and read street information in three dimensions.

Curbs, potholes, scooters, a low branch at head height, the edge of a platform.

All of it worked out on the device itself.

No internet, no pre-mapped city, nothing sent anywhere.

They don't talk, which surprised me.

A guide dog doesn't bark five times when there are five things in the way.

It just walks you through them. So the glasses do the same job with a gentle vibration on the forehead.

This way.

And you follow it.

A similar instinct to the harness on a dog.

Except a factory can make these.

And nobody has to raise and train one from a puppy.

Within two years of him leaving, the European Innovation Council had put nine million euros behind the idea.

Then, in January 2026, .lumen won the accessibility prize at CES in Las Vegas, and was named a CES Innovation Award honoree.

Then, this summer, fifty-five days, forty-one Romanian cities, and more than nine hundred blind people aged seven to ninety-two putting the glasses on and walking.

The glasses are not a replacement for sight.

They can direct someone around a broken sidewalk, but they can't fix the sidewalk itself.

Blind advocates have spent years pointing out that an inaccessible world is a design decision.

Rather than a medical fact.

Clever technology just lets the rest of us off the hook for it.

But, this is early on, and it’s also progress.

Preorders and a testing tour aren't the same as thousands of people trusting a device every day for years.

The first deployments are carried by a Romanian public assistive programme, which is the right way round.

Since cost usually decides who gets access to technology like this.

I have a soft spot for Romania.

We spent three weeks driving around the country as a family in 2018, and it's still one of the trips we all bring up.

So I came to this one already on his side, which is a poor way to start reading about anybody. It took me most of the week to work out that the part I admire isn't the technology at all.

He was never the one stopped by the curb.

He was the one watching the people he loves most get stopped by it, over and over, from the one spot in the house where you could see how ordinary it was and how much of it didn't have to be that way.

Most of us have a view like that on something. A difficulty we can see clearly precisely because we aren't the one inside it. My usual response is to feel sorry about it, which is comfortable, and which has never once helped anybody.

He did the other thing. He paid attention for twenty-odd years, handed in his notice, and spent five more turning that attention into a machine that lets someone he'll never meet walk to the shop on their own.

If you want to hear a little from Guillermo himself, check out this short video where he gratefully accepts the Laureus Sport for Good Award:

I should declare a bias before I start.

I was born in the land Down Under and will always have a soft spot for Australian comedy.

Eighteen years in Canada hasn't shifted that fact at all.

My wife found Colin from Accounts before I did.

She watched an episode, maybe two, then told me I needed to see it.

The first episode was all it took for me.

Crass, in your face, and observational in a way that brought back memories.

Australians never labour at being funny.

Someone says the thing everyone in the room is already thinking, nobody explains it, and onward you all go.

We got through the rest of it far faster than either of us had planned to.

One thing before you press play.

This show is coarse.

Properly coarse in patches, and the swearing is enthusiastic to say the least so make sure younger kids aren't within earshot.

With that housekeeping now sorted?

I guarantee you belly laughs.

The setup is simple enough.

Two strangers in Sydney, a moment of distraction on a busy street, a car accident, and a badly injured dog.

How that accident happens will tell you everything you need to know about the show's sense of humour.

I’m not going to spoil it for you. 😉

He's Gordon, running a microbrewery that's barely staying afloat.

She's Ashley, a medical student, and a fair bit younger than him.

Neither of them wants the dog and neither of them can quite walk away either, so they end up sharing custody of him, and eventually of each other.

They call him Colin.

The most gloriously ordinary name they could have chosen, and it never stops being funny.

Patrick Brammall and Harriet Dyer wrote it, star in it, and are married in real life.

You can feel that in every scene.

They talk over the top of each other, land lines the other one clearly wasn't expecting, and laugh at things nobody appears to have planned.

You can't build that through rehearsal.

It either exists between two people or it doesn't.

They even split the writing between them too.

Dyer took the odd-numbered episodes and Brammall took the evens, then they swapped over for the second season.

A married couple writing alternate episodes about two people who can't work out whether they want to be together at all.

I love that.

Underneath all the filth, it's far more tender than you'd expect.

Two adults well past their twenties, both carrying a bit of damage, trying to work out whether they're brave enough to want something with each other.

Nobody in it seems to have a plan.

They keep coming back to (and for) each other anyway, mostly badly and occasionally beautifully.

I'm not the only one who rates it, either.

Both of the first two seasons sit at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it has also earned a BAFTA nomination along the way.

For a small Australian comedy about a dog.

That’s pretty impressive.

See below for a few lessons this show left me chewing on:

Responsibility often arrives uninvited: Neither of them chose Colin. He lands in their lives by accident, and looking after him turns out to be the thing that improves them both.

Laughing together counts for more than most give it credit for: Watch the two of them and you can see their affection landing in real time. Wanting to make someone laugh tells you more about a relationship than any grand gesture.

Know when to stop: Three seasons, then out. Their decision, made while it was still excellent. Good on them, great things rarely seem to end that way.

That last lesson is the thing I keep turning over.

Brammall and Dyer called time on it themselves.

The ratings hadn't dropped and nobody chose to cancel them.

They'd simply said what they wanted to say.

So they stopped.

Most people are nowhere near that disciplined.

Hanging on to the job, or the routine, or the version of ourselves that stopped fitting years ago.

Because leaving while things are still good feels like a waste.

When the truth is?

Walking away would preserve the moment in all its glory.

But enough about that, the good news is timing works in your favour.

Season three wraps up shortly so you're getting a complete story, with a proper ending, which is rarer than it should be.

Check your local listings for the best way to watch it where you call home.

Start at the beginning.

The episodes fly by and you'll spend most of them laughing.

Two people who wanted nothing to do with each other, held together by a dog neither of them asked for.

Not everything that’s good in life arrives via an invitation.

Watched it already, or about to start? Hit reply and tell me what you thought of it.

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

Somebody sees (and loves) the photographs you take on weekends.

Or smells the bread you've been baking.

Or the old chair you spent a few weeks restoring in the garage.

They say it warmly and as a glowing compliment.

"You should sell these."

It sounds like praise, so we take it as praise.

Then you put a price on it.

Then you set up an online shop and start taking orders.

And somewhere in the months that follow, the Sunday afternoon activity that used to charge your batteries has become a deadline.

The skill and ability remain intact.

What's gone missing?

Is the desire.

In the early 1970s, researchers Mark Lepper and David Greene from Stanford, alongside Richard Nisbett from Michigan, completed a study at a nursery school to explore this phenomenon.

They watched preschoolers through a one-way mirror and picked out the ones who genuinely loved drawing with felt-tipped markers.

Whenever the markers came out?

Those children gathered.

Then they split them three ways.

One group was promised a Good Player Award before they drew, a card with a gold star and a red ribbon and their name across it.

One group drew with nothing promised, then got the same award as a surprise.

One group got nothing.

A week or two later the markers reappeared in the classroom, with no researcher in sight.

The children who'd been promised the gold star spent about half as much of their free time drawing as the other two groups.

The other two hadn't shifted.

They labelled it the overjustification effect.

Underneath it sits a question we answer all day without even noticing.

Why am I doing this?

Attach a reward and all of a sudden the answer becomes "because there's something in it for me."

That answer is sticky.

When the reward eventually stops, the wanting seems to dissappear with it.

There's also a second finding, and it's even clearer.

Three judges who knew nothing about the groups rated the pictures drawn in the session.

The ones completed for the gold star came out worst.

The reward took the joy out of the drawing, and the care out of the work.

Not that rewards are always the villain.

If a child has no interest in drawing, a gold star might be exactly what gets them to pick up a pen.

Plenty of good things start as a bribe we offer ourselves.

The trouble seems only to exist in relation to what we already loved.

Think hard before you put a price on it: When someone urges you to sell what you make, be honest with yourself about what you'd be giving up. Some pursuits are worth more to you unprofitable.

Praise it, don't pay for it: With kids especially, "tell me about this part" keeps them interested while "finish it and you'll get more screen time" kills it. A thank you afterwards takes nothing away from their experience while a carrot dangled changes why they choose to do it at all.

Notice when the scoreboard arrives: The run of joy you experienced becomes the pace to beat. The reading becomes a tally of books finished. When a number attaches itself to a pleasure, check whether you're still enjoying yourself or just feeding the number.

I think about this concept in relation to this newsletter.

I didn't start it to make money.

I started it because I love writing and want to share the experiences that have shaped me, providing practical value to as many people as I can.

That hasn't changed.

Money has begun to show up since.

Sponsorships, climbing subscriptions and opportunities have started to surface.

All of this is welcome, I'd be lying if I said otherwise.

But none of it is why I write.

The measure I trust most is the replies.

When someone writes back telling me that something landed for them during a hard week.

That’s the part I'd want to retain if every other reward vanished tomorrow.

What I want to know, about anything I give real hours to, is whether I'd still do it with nobody paying and nobody watching.

With this one I don't have to wonder.

The writing came first, and if the rest fell away, it would still be here.

For you?

You already know the things that bring you joy.

They're the things you make time for on the days you have no time.

Protect some of them.

They’re the ones a reward could ruin.

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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