The Wall Isn’t Real

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! ☀️

Thanks for being here, I hope you enjoyed the weekend.

The warmer weather has hit Toronto and it’s always a pleasure to feel the energy of the city come to life.

This week we cover what it looks like to give yourself a chance. To decide on trying something, then refuse to let it go, long after many would have.

We start in my own backyard, watching my daughter as she set her mind on learning to ride her bike for the first time. Then we celebrate Mohamed Salah, and the fourteen-year-old version of him who caught five buses a day, for three years, just for the chance to kick a ball.

I also recommend a classic novel that asks more of you than most and rewards every page you stay with.

Let's embrace the spirit of resilience and celebrate the stories that inspire us to keep going.

Even if the path does seems a little daunting.

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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If you ever have the chance, watch a small child when they decide to learn something.

There’s no business case presented.

No weighing of the odds or risk involved.

No inner voice asking whether they'll be any good at it, or who might be watching if they're not.

They just start.

And when it goes wrong, which it inevitably does, almost straight away, they don't read much into it.

They get up and start again.

Somewhere between then and now, most of us lose that.

We improve at nearly everything except beginning.

Last week we touched on the people who believed in you first.

For me it was the coaches, and parents, and leaders who said something out loud before I'd done anything to earn it.

I finished that article expressing that I want to further build a platform of belief within my own kids.

This week I had the perfect chance to see what that looks like.

For a couple of weeks now, my daughter has had her mind set on one thing.

Learning to ride her bike.

No training wheels.

Just straight into it.

It started with rolling around the backyard.

Coming to terms with the pedals, the brakes, her balance, and each of the small things that feel impossible right up until the moment they feel easy.

There were falls.

Plenty of them.

There were tears too, some from the sting of the fall and some from the deeper frustration of wanting something and not quite having it yet.

Day one was hard.

Day two was harder, when the falls kept coming and the progress didn't.

Day three was a little easier.

Day four, easier again.

Then she did something that surprised me.

She decided to practise on her own.

No audience, no help.

Just her and a simple promise to herself.

Pedal and balance for five metres without falling.

Partway through, she came inside looking for a bandaid.

The pedals had caught her arm and her leg, and I could see the tears welling.

I asked if she was okay.

"Don't worry, it's just a scratch. I'm heading straight back outside to go again."

And she did.

She tried.

She fell.

She tried again.

And then she did it.

You could hear the joy from the other side of the house.

She did it again, this time with her big brother cheering her on from the grass.

Then she started to turn.

Her balance began to find itself and her confidence started to grow.

So, we left the backyard and walked down to her school, where there was room to really test her newfound skills.

She gave it everything.

Fifty metres without falling.

Around the playground.

Weaving between pinecones like they'd been set out as pylons just for her.

Around poles, around people, and then the whole way home.

After a string of falls, pleny of tears and more attempts than either of us counted, she rode her bike on her own.

And she hasn't looked back since.

I'm not sure I've ever felt prouder.

There's a detail from those four days I keep coming back to.

At no point did my daughter consider that the problem in this situation might be her.

She fell, and she treated it as information.

Lean less that way.

Brake a little sooner.

She never once picked herself up off the grass and decided that riding a bike simply wasn't for her.

Children do this instinctively, and the instinct runs deeper than you'd think.

A developmental psychologist named Karen Adolph spent years studying how toddlers learn to walk.

Her team filmed children at the age when walking is brand new, and the numbers are remarkable.

In a single hour, the average new walker takes more than two thousand steps and falls around seventeen times.

Stretch that across a day and you get a child who falls roughly a hundred times, and gets back up a hundred times.

Not one of them stops to wonder whether walking is really their thing.

A falling toddler has no concept of failure.

There is only the goal, the next attempt, and eventually the goal is achieved.

We were all, every one of us, once that relentless.

So what changes?

The most impactful thing is that we learn to keep score.

We collect a few bruising experiences and start treating them as evidence about who we are, rather than information about what to try next.

We invent an invisible wall.

Most of the things that stop an adult from trying something new aren't really out there in the world.

They live in a story we've written in our own heads, where the fear of failure, or embarrassment, or the memory of an old sting hardens into a blockade we treat as solid brick.

Embarrassment is a big one, and psychology has a name for the trick it plays.

The spotlight effect.

Decades of research on this topic keep revealing same finding: we badly overestimate how much other people are noticing us.

We walk around feeling watched and judged, while the truth is that most people around us are busy feeling exactly the same way about themselves.

That wobble you're so worried about?

Almost nobody sees it.

And the few who do have likely forgotten it by lunchtime.

My daughter rode straight past a schoolyard full of people without a flicker of self-consciousness.

Nobody has taught her, yet, to build the wall the rest of us walk around with.

Which is the hopeful part of all this.

A wall you built yourself is also a wall you are allowed to take down.

There was one more thing I did across those four days, and it's the part that ties back to last week.

In between the falls, I made sure my daughter understood something.

No empty cheerleading, because kids see straight through that.

I reminded her of her own track record.

The ability to read she had to fight hard for.

Learning to swim last summer and diving under water despite her fears.

The singing (and groovy dance) she'd practised alone in her room until she was ready.

Every other thing she had set her mind to and, with enough effort, delivered on.

I told her, after day one, that the bike isn’t a verdict on what she is capable of.

It was just the next item on a long list of things she had decided to do.

And then did.

I want the belief to be hers, not mine on loan.

There's good science lying beneath that instinct.

The psychologist Albert Bandura spent a career studying where confidence actually comes from, and he found that the most powerful source of it has nothing to do with encouragement from other people.

He called the real engine a mastery experience.

It’s the plain, undeniable proof of having done a hard thing yourself.

Her five metres in the backyard was a mastery experience.

So was her reading.

So was the swimming.

So was the singing.

Each win is evidence she gets to keep.

The confidence had to come from her.

I simply pointed to the evidence she had already gathered, confident she would arrive at the obvious conclusion.

A few things worth carrying into your week.

Name your bike: There's something you've been wanting to try. A class, a conversation, a project, or a change you keep (almost) starting. Name it honestly, then take the first small, awkward step this week. Starting is the hard part. After that, you're only adjusting.

Keep the promise small enough to keep: My daughter didn't aim for the full playground on day one. She aimed for five metres. Confidence is built by stacking small promises you actually keep to yourself, not by clearing one heroic leap. Find the five-metre version of whatever you're chasing.

Treat each fall as data: When it goes wrong, resist the pull to make it mean something about you. A toddler acknowledges a fall and makes adjustments. Lean less that way. Take smaller steps. Then go again.

Watching my daughter's persistence turn into confidence over four short days was something I won't soon forget.

It was all there in front of me.

The falls, the frustration, a small private win, and then a kid riding circles around pinecones like the world had always been hers to ride through.

That willingness to have a go isn’t a childhood phase we’re meant to grow out of.

It only feels that way because we let fear and pride and the dread of looking foolish talk us out of things, year after year, until staying put starts to feel like maturity.

Maturity is often just the polite word for not trying, or not wanting to try.

Never lose the kid inside you.

The curiosity.

The wonder.

The enthusiasm.

The imagination.

The openness toward other people.

None of these have an age limit stamped on them.

We don't lose these things to time.

We hand them over ourselves.

And anything you’ve handed over, you’re always allowed to take back.

Confidence grows the way my daughter's did.

Through challenges met head-on, and through promises kept to yourself, one five-metre stretch at a time.

So whatever your bike is, and I’m hoping some part of you already knows exactly what yours is, go and get it.

Fall if you have to.

Then dust yourself off and go again.

You deserve to feel confident.

You deserve to learn something new.

And more than any of it, you deserve to live this life on your own terms.

My daughter rode away from her school this week and hasn't looked back since.

I don't think you should either.

If you have a few extra minutes this week, check out this video about a nine-year-old who built something extraordinary out of cardboard:

🚲 Cycling Classes During the School Day Are Helping Kids With ADHD Focus — and Lifting Every Other Student Too - A "Riding for Focus" study tracked 48 kids over three years at a Wisconsin middle school: the cycling group's math scores improved twice as much as the control group's, and reading nearly double. Outride's program is now in 400 schools across the US and Canada — many of them Title I or serving students with dyslexia, autism or ADHD. Aerobic, low-barrier, and kids actually want to keep showing up. Read more →

💵 A Florida Man Spent Days Tracking Down the Owner of $30,000 He Found in a Bathroom - Luis Salazar walked into a Wawa convenience store, found a fanny pack hanging in the stall, and discovered "several huge wads of cash" inside. He spent days trying to find the owner — who eventually reported it missing to police and came in to collect it, crying as Salazar handed it back. "It's not my money to take. I was not raised that way." Read more →

⏰ Australia's Four-Day Week Trial Just Reported Its Results — and Almost Every Company Stuck With It - Fifteen Australian firms ran the 100:80:100 model (100% pay, 80% hours, 100% output) for a year. New Nature-published research shows all but one kept the four-day week afterwards. Six of them reported productivity gains; the rest reported no difference. Burnout was lower across the board. The case keeps quietly building. Read more →

🦪 Volunteers Just Dropped 20,000 Oysters Onto an Artificial Reef in Southern England - The Blue Marine Foundation's project at Chichester Harbour is reintroducing oysters — among nature's most powerful water-filterers — to a 3.5-hectare seabed reef. More drops are planned across another 2.5 hectares. "It is so lovely to see the number of genuine connections made between people from all walks of life, all coming together for a united cause," said restoration scientist Dr Luke Helmer. Read more →

🍦 One Free Ice Cream Cone Snowballed Into Free Ice Cream for Every Kid All Summer - Madyson Silvagnoli — known online as @maddytheicecreamlady_ — gave a free cone to one child whose family couldn't afford it. The video went viral, donations rolled in, and now every kid who shows up at her truck this summer gets a free treat, fully funded by strangers. A small kindness that multiplied. Read more →

When Mohamed Salah was fourteen years old, he caught a bus.

Then another.

Then another after that, all on the same day.

In fact, he would catch five buses just to get himself to training in Cairo.

Then, he’d catch the same buses to get home.

Up to nine hours of his day, gone, every single day.

All so he could spend a couple of hours kicking a ball around at a youth academy.

He did this for three years straight with his teachers telling him he was wasting his time.

His friends also couldn't understand.

His Arab Contractors coach even offered him a spot in a hostel near the training ground, but Mo was committed to coming home each night to see his family.

So … he caught the buses, time and time again.

Nagrig is a small village in the Nile Delta region of Egypt.

It has a population of around 11,000 people and is comprised of dirt roads, farmland, a mosque and a few shops.

It’s one of those places it seems nobody leaves and nobody arrives.

By the time Mo became a teenager, the smaller clubs across the Delta had noticed him, and then soon after, the clubs in Cairo.

Arab Contractors officially signed him at fourteen and that’s when the long bus rides began.

What stands out most often when you read about those years, is his refusal to stop.

He slept on buses, completed his schoolwork on his lap and even managed to arrive at training before his coaches did.

A trait that he would maintain throughout his entire career.

That was the dedication and work ethic that Liverpool would eventually sign.

Salah's path to Anfield was far from the smooth ride people often imagine.

It was paved with challenges and moments where he had to prove himself over and over again.

He made his name at Basel in Switzerland.

Then Chelsea bought him in 2014, and barely played him.

He then went out on loan to Fiorentina, then Roma, where he seized an opportunity to play more regularly and steadily turned himself into one of the best wingers in Europe.

And then, the world.

When Liverpool paid £36.5 million for him in 2017, a fair chunk of the football world rolled its eyes.

Another Chelsea reject, they said.

But in his first season, Mo scored forty-four goals.

Forty-four.

I remember watching it all unfold in real time.

When he first signed, he was seen as an exciting addition to the squad.

After his first season at Liverpool, he was famously described as a one season wonder.

Not many observations have ever been this wrong.

Within a year he was the most lethal forward in the league.

Within two, a Champions League winner.

Within three, a Premier League champion.

After that, a regular in the Ballon d'Or conversation, the annual award for the best player in the game, multiple years running.

His standards kept rising, season after season.

His work in the gym, his uncompromising discipline and the dedication that became his hallmark.

His coaches and teammates have spoken about it for years.

He’s the bloke who arrives early, stays late and refused to ease off, even when the medical staff suggested he should.

This dedication never slipped.

Ever.

For all the goals, the thing that draws me to Mo is everything around them.

The bow to the fans after he scores and the smirk that never quite leaves his face.

After nearly a decade in the spotlight, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone with a bad word to say about him.

He doesn't do tantrums.

He doesn't do nightclubs.

He goes home to his wife Magi and his two daughters who he adores, and lets his football do all the talking.

Back home in Nagrig, he's built schools, funded a hospital wing, paid for ambulances and helped countless families he's never met.

He doesn't post or brag about any of it.

He's simply calls the place home and wants to contribute.

Mo played his final game for Liverpool last Sunday, and I'll miss him more than I can sensibly explain.

Watching him grow from a £36 million gamble into one of the greatest players this club has ever had has been a real joy for nearly a decade.

When I think about his career, my mind goes straight back to that bus.

The fourteen-year-old kid who decided he was going to give himself a chance, even if it cost him nine hours a day.

The consistency that followed - the gym sessions, the early mornings, the focus that arrived long before the trophies did.

What carried him from the buses all the way to Anfield was a refusal to quit.

Then once he'd made it, a refusal to coast.

While most of us aren't going to find ourselves on a bus to Cairo, every one of us has something we're trying to give ourselves a chance at.

And most of us underestimate how far you can travel by simply not stopping.

By pushing forward patiently, every day, for years on end.

The buses are the easy part of the story to admire.

The harder part is what Mo did after the climb.

He kept the same discipline when he reached the top and kept the same humility once everyone wanted a piece of him.

Mo's career is what life can look like when you just keep going.

His journey exemplifies the perseverance and resilience required to not only reach the pinnacle but to stay there.

Constantly evolving and striving for excellence without losing sight of the values and principles that guided him from the start.

Mo leaves Liverpool having scored numerous goals, cementing his legacy as one of the club's all-time greats.

After scoring 44 goals in his first season, he went on to break 44 records at Liverpool Football Club.

Winning the Premier League’s Golden Boot a record 4 times and finishing 3rd all time in the clubs goal scoring list.

Pretty remarkable for a kid from Nagrig who grew up playing football on the streets of his small village in Egypt.

Even if he doesn’t need the buses anymore.

At least he'll never walk alone.

If you’d like to learn more about Mohamed Salah’s story, this 9 minute video is a great place to start:

Lately I've found myself entrenched in the classic novel phase of my life, and I’m loving it.

Every one I read highlights the enduring impact of these stories.

This week's recommendation is a novel that multiple people have mentioned I read over the years.

I'd circle it on my list, sometimes pick it up in bookstores, then put it down and somehow never quite commit.

I finally made it happen and am soooo glad I did.

‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel García Márquez.

It’s a brilliant novel that helped earn him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982.

It tells the story of multiple generations of the Buendía family, who establish themselves and create a life in the small town of Macondo.

What unfolds across those generations moves delightfully between history, folklore and something linked more closely to a dream.

García Márquez presents a wide range of complex characters and relationships that can be overwhelming at first, but incredible, once you find your groove.

He blurs the line between the magical and the real with such skill that it becomes difficult to distinguish between the two.

As a novel it was beautiful, strange and unlike anything I've read before.

García Márquez writes like a poet who chose to tell stories instead.

His words dance along the page as his sentences carry weight and rhythm, and you sometimes need to slow down and read them twice.

Because of this it can be a tough read at times.

There were moments I had to flip back a page (or three) to make sure I understood what was happening.

The names repeat across generations and they intertwine constantly as the story unfolds.

José Arcadio, Aureliano, Remedios, Ursula and many more.

Each character has just enough in common with their ancestor to confuse you, but also just enough that's unique to surprise you.

I actually considered putting it down early on, but pushing through was more than worth it and became part of the reward.

By the end, the patterns start to feel intentional and you realise, the confusion is partly the point.

The authors ability to describe a moment is like no one else.

A storm, a meal, a memory, a stranger arriving in town.

He delivers each one with such care and beauty that ordinary scenes can feel like the most important moments in the world.

And then, without warning, he slips in a touch of fantasy.

A character who lives for well over a hundred years.

Yellow butterflies that follow a man wherever he goes.

A girl who floats away into the sky while folding sheets.

I’m trying not to give away too much here 😉

García Márquez has a rare ability to make impossible things seem perfectly normal, and even expected.

He never explains or justifies it, it just happens, the way real life does.

That blend of the everyday and the impossible is what people refer to as magical realism.

For me, it felt more like he'd discovered a way of ‘seeing’ the rest of us had forgotten.

A lens to see the extraordinary, within the ordinary.

A few things this book remind me of:

Slow down for the things that matter: We live in a time where most content is built for skimming and context is overlooked. Reading something that asks you to pay attention is a small act of defiance, and one that will reward you greatly.

Re-read without apology: I went back over passages (even pages) constantly, and the expereince was richer for it. There's no medal for finishing fast.

Look closer at the ordinary: García Márquez highlights that the daily details of family, love and time are anything but boring. If you look closely enough, life is already remarkably strange and beautiful.

Choose books that ask more of you: I finished this novel knowing I'll read it again one day, likely more than once.

I loved this book.

Absolutely loved it.

It might be my favourite novel I've ever read, and I say that knowing it’s a big claim.

There's something about the way García Márquez writes that lifts you off your feet and into another world.

Yes, I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it felt like so much more than just reading.

You move through it, you get lost in it and you feel a little changed once you're done.

I'm already looking forward to reading it again with a better grasp of who everyone is.

Because that's what the great novels do.

They keep giving you more, every time you come back to them.

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

Change rarely arrives alone.

It tends to bring uncertainty along for the ride, and uncertainty is usually what trips us up.

It’s the not knowing what's on the other side.

The blank page that remains where a plan used to be.

If you always chase certainty, you'll spend most of your energy frustrated because it’s like trying to hold water in your hands.

Learn to make peace with uncertainty though?

And you become damn near impossible to stop.

A life filled with change has taught me this the hard way.

My parents separating when I was young.

Moving countless times across cities and countries.

Changing careers more than once.

More recently, losing both Mum and Dad.

For a period when i was younger, I built walls.

I'd brace, plan and try to lock things down, but it never really worked.

Walls don't keep change out.

They just make you smaller inside them.

A windmill doesn't fight the wind.

It turns the very thing that could destroy a wall into something that powers what's next.

Clinical psychology refers to this as intolerance of uncertainty.

The more we struggle to sit with the unknown, the harder change becomes.

When you actively build that tolerance up, though, adapting starts to feel less like crisis and more like opportunity.

Here’s a few simple ways to build your own windmills this week:

Name Your Actual Fear: Next time you feel yourself resisting a change, ask, "Am I afraid of the change itself, or just the uncertainty around it?" That simple question can shift the entire conversation in your head.

Hold Your Plan Loosely: Stay committed to the direction you’re heading, but flexible on the path. Life almost never moves in a straight line.

Move before you feel ready: This is important because certainty will rarely show up before you take a leap, it tends to arrive after. Take one small action in the direction of what's changing and see what happens.

Life gets so much more interesting (and enjoyable) the minute you stop resisting what's next.

Comfort with uncertainty is one of the most powerful (and useful) skills you can build.

It keeps your head clear in the hard moments, and leaves you curious when life begins to shift.

The wind will continue to blow either way, that part isn't up to us.

What we do get to choose?

Is what we build when it does.

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