Who Believed In You First?

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 once again, I appreciate each and every one of you.

This week we touch on a question that’s been on my mind recently.

Who was the very first person to believe in you?

We explore the ways belief gets handed from one person to the next, not those who support you now, but those who saw something in you well before there was much to see.

We then touch on the remarkable story of Norman Borlaug, a plant scientist whose determination managed to save more than a billion lives, that’s right, a billion 🤯

We also spend time with Cleo Abram, a YouTuber who asks the future the question most of us forget to: what if things actually went well?

This is a fun one, so grab 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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Take a moment and think of the first person who believed in you.

Not the ones who love you now, with years of evidence to draw from.

The very first one.

The person who saw something in you well before there was much to see at all.

Most of us have one.

They believed in us before we'd earned it.

Before there was proof, or any sort of track record.

Likely before we even believed it ourselves.

And at some point, they made the crucial decison, to tell us.

It's a strange gift to receive.

Belief you've done nothing yet to deserve.

But it stays with you.

The first person to believe in me out loud was my baseball coach, Mr. Cassidy.

Growing up as a kid in Australia I would happily chase any ball you put in front of me.

He saw something in me well before I could.

But the real gift was that his belief always came with a higher bar attached.

At least, that's the part that stayed with me.

He never told me I was good and left it there.

He also told me I was capable of more and then expected me to prove him right.

Years later I found and absorbed the research that explained it.

In 1968, psychologists Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson told a group of primary school teachers that certain students, picked at random, were about to bloom intellectually.

That label was pure invention.

By the end of the year, those same children had pulled ahead of their classmates.

The teachers, without realising it, had treated them differently.

Warmer attention, harder questions, more patience.

The expectation reshaped how those kids were taught, and they rose to meet the challenge.

They called it the Pygmalion effect.

I’m assuming Mr. Cassidy never read that study, but he understood it in his bones.

When you believe in someone, expect more of them, and let them feel it?

You change what they become.

Before any coach, though, there was home.

My dad, my step-dad and my mum each lifted me at different points, in their own ways.

Most of it I couldn't point to if you asked.

Belief from a parent rarely arrives as a speech

It accumulates through their actions and behaviours.

A nod of encouragement or the right word at the right time, always with the assumption that of course you'll be alright.

There’s one moment I can place exactly.

I was fourteen, out with my dad, the two of us waiting around on one of his jobs.

We were talking about everything and nothing, the way you do when there's time to fill.

At some point I mentioned something I was finding hard.

He didn't reach for advice.

He told me, plainly, that whatever I came up against in life, he had no doubt I'd figure it out.

That it would be hard at times, but I had the skills, and the personality, to find my way through whatever happened.

Fourteen years old, and I've leaned on those words ever since.

Through more hard stretches than I can count.

There's a phrase that stems from attachment research I keep coming back to.

The concept of “a secure base.”

John Bowlby used it to describe what a child needs in order to explore.

They venture out and take a small risk, but only as far as they trust there's something solid to return to.

The more secure the base, the further they roam.

That doesn't stop being true when childhood ends.

What my dad gave me that day became part of the base I carried out into the world.

It's a large part of why, years later, I could move countries, change careers and walk toward uncertainty without freezing in front of it.

I wasn't fearless in those moments.

I simply trusted, underneath it all, that I could handle whatever was around the corner.

That trust was built early, by people who decided I was worth lifting.

The belief didn't stop when I left home.

Early in my working life, I spent a few years working at a hotel in London, UK.

The general manager pulled me aside one afternoon and told me there was no ceiling on what I was capable of.

That was the whole conversation.

One line, that I’m sure she wouldn’t remember saying that I’ve carried with me ever since.

A while later, at the start of my career in travel, a senior leader sat me down for a full hour.

Not five rushed minutes between meetings.

An hour.

He was honest with me, telling me plainly where I needed to improve.

But every piece of that feedback was wrapped inside something unmistakable.

He believed in me.

Completely.

That conversation set the platform for 17 years working for a company I loved, in roles I adored.

That blend is rare, and I've never forgotten it.

Honesty on its own can flatten a person.

Belief on its own can drift into flattery.

Together, they hand someone the truth and the confidence to act on it.

Researchers who study how people grow identified a name for connections like that.

They call them developmental relationships, and the ones that change a person offer real care packaged with a real challenge at the same time.

That leader gave me both inside the same hour.

He set a standard, and made me believe that I belonged above it.

What They Never Knew

Most of these people had no idea of the impact their words had on me.

My coach wasn't thinking about my tolerance for risk decades later.

The manager in London almost certainly forgot those words shortly after she said it.

None of them knew they were planting seeds of growth within me.

That's part of what makes it feel sacred to me.

A throwaway line on an ordinary day which may seem small to the person giving it, but is foundational to the person receiving it.

And the giver almost never gets to see the result.

Then there are close friends.

The ones who reminded me what I was capable of in the stretches when I'd lost sight of it completely.

Through grief, through rejection, through the ordinary hard seasons that find everyone of us.

I don't take any of it for granted.

I didn't get here on my own.

Nobody does.

All of this planted something within me.

An obligation, in the best sense of the word.

If belief can be handed from one person to the next, then I'm holding some that was never only mine to keep.

The most important version of this for me is happening at home.

I want to build a platform of belief under my kids.

It's harder, and far more interesting, than it sounds.

Empty cheerleading is easy.

Anyone can say "you've got this."

Kids see straight through it anyway.

The belief that lasts is the kind my coach gave me, it comes with a standard attached.

So I let my kids fail.

I let them be bored and find their own way out of it.

I let them stay with a problem long enough to solve it themselves.

The belief I want them to have can't stay on loan from me.

It has to become theirs.

The internal self belief that stays in the room after I've left it.

There's a saying that I’ve heard uttered a lot lately: “No one is coming to save you.”

It's true, up to a point.

The work of building a life is yours, and waiting to be rescued is a poor strategy.

But it misses something.

You can't save another person, but you can set the table for them.

You can be the one who believes in them out loud, early, before the evidence arrives, and let that belief grow into something they own.

I get plenty of this wrong.

I'm far from a perfect parent.

I make mistakes constantly, and that's part of trying.

I'd rather make mine in the direction of effort than play it safe, and I’ve also come to believe in something simple:

That mistakes become lessons, and setbacks become setups.

When your perspective is aligned to belief in yourself.

Three simple things worth carrying into your week:

Say it, and be specific: If you feel something, say something. Pick a person whose potential you can see clearly, then tell them exactly what you see in them. Belief kept to yourself helps no one.

Pair the belief with a bar: Don't stop at "you've got this." Tell someone they're capable of more, then expect them to reach for it. Encouragement with a standard attached is the kind that lasts.

Protect the struggle: When you're helping others, resist the urge to rescue. Let them be bored, let them get things wrong, let them find their own way out. Belief only becomes theirs once they've tested it.

I think about the people who believed in me first far more often than I used to.

Maybe it's age.

Maybe it's watching my own kids stand at the edge of things, working out whether the world is safe to reach into.

What I keep landing on is how subtle all of it was.

Nobody sat me down and announced they were shaping a life.

They simply paid attention, expected something of me, and said so.

The shaping happened underneath, where neither of us could see it.

That's the part I want to honour.

Not with a thank-you card, though I certainly owe a few of those.

With the way I treat the next person who needs it.

Yes, be your own biggest cheerleader.

That matters, and I'll keep saying it.

But if I've understood anything from the people who believed in me first, the more important job is the other one.

Cheering, loudly and early, for the person who hasn't yet found their footing.

Saying the thing out loud while it can still change the course of a life.

Someone likely did that for you once.

And somewhere ahead of you is a person waiting for you to do the same.

Don't make them wait.

If this resonated, Rita Pierson spent forty years in classrooms, and her case for why every kid needs a champion is worth 7 minutes of your time:

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There’s one man who has saved more than a billion human lives.

That’s right, a billion.

And the craziest part?

Most people have never heard his name.

Norman Borlaug was a plant scientist from Iowa.

In 1944, at twenty-nine, he made a wrenching call.

He took a research job outside Mexico City and flew south alone, his wife and newborn son staying behind until he could send for them.

The Rockefeller Foundation had sent him with a task to see if Mexico could grow more of its own wheat.

At that point, the country was importing more than half of what it consumed.

Norman spoke zero Spanish, had no real research budget and packed little more than two pairs of overalls.

He would spend the next sixteen years in Mexican fields.

By the time he finally left Mexico?

He was credited with saving more lives than any single person in modern history.

That’s a big deal.

Borlaug grew up on a small farm in north-eastern Iowa during the period nestled between the two world wars.

The Great Depression was tough on his family and their land was not very productive.

He worked his way through the University of Minnesota partly via manual labour and earned himself a doctorate in plant pathology.

When he arrived in Mexico, he chose to pursue something the scientific establishment had told him was pointless.

He chose to work in two different altitude zones that were hundreds of miles apart.

One in the highlands near Toluca, and the other in the lowlands of Sonora.

He would plant a crop of wheat in one zone, then drive overnight to the other zone, plant the next crop, then make his way back to harvest the first.

He called it shuttle breeding.

The process gave him two harvests a year instead of one and essentailly cut his timeline in half.

Every expert told him it wouldn't work.

All of them.

Declaring that wheat that is grown at one altitude wouldn't perform the same at another, because that was the accepted wisdom at the time.

Borlaug ignored their advice.

He spent the following years crossbreeding thousands of wheat varieties.

Hunting for one that could do three things in particular.

Resist the diseases wiping out crops across Latin America, grow strong enough to handle fertiliser without toppling over and thrive in various soils and climates.

When his breakthrough finally arrived, it arrived via a shorter, fatter stalk.

A semi-dwarf wheat that could carry a heavy head of grain without collapsing.

Once his crossbreeding produced this particular version?

It worked everywhere they tried planting it.

By 1963, Mexico was self-sufficient in wheat and exporting grain.

Think about that for a moment.

A country that had been importing more than half its wheat was now able to feed itself.

All because one man refused to accept what he was told was impossible.

And that’s just the beginning of the story.

Here's what makes Norman’s story extraordinary.

While Borlaug was working in those Mexican fields, the rest of the world was running data and analyis on famine and had decided (incredibly) that it was inevitable.

In can be hard to imagine today, but yes, the decision was made that famine was inevitable.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the smartest people and most informed people such as the economists, scientists and demographers were all saying the same thing.

Population growth in India and Pakistan was outrunning food production.

The question at the time wasn't whether millions would starve, it was which countries to give up on.

In 1967, two brothers named William and Paul Paddock wrote a book called Famine 1975!

They argued the United States should write off India entirely.

The word they used was triage.

The same word battlefield medics use when they decide which casualties are too far gone to save.

That had become the professional consensus.

Hundreds of millions of people, already written off.

Borlaug again refused to acknowledge the decision, and once again, he chose to take action.

He immediately started shipping his wheat.

In 1965, he sent his Mexican seed to both India and Pakistan.

The first shipments arrived in the midst of a war between the two countries, against a monsoon failure, with artillery close enough to be heard from his test fields.

Then, he once again, spent years on the ground.

He was training local farmers, demonstrating new techniques and pushing through the immense political resistance that comes with changing how a country feeds itself.

By the end of the 1960s, both countries had doubled their wheat yields.

Within a few more years, they both began exporting grain.

While the people who predicted the famine secured themselves book deals based on false claims, Borlaug got his boots muddy and took action on the problem itself.

One of my favourite aspects of writing this newsletter is researching the people who end up in this section.

I look for extraordinary ordinary people.

And what fascinates me every time is how many of them I've never heard of.

I had no idea who Norman Borlaug was before I started digging.

And yet, what he achieved touches every one of us.

He saved a billion lives.

These are the people who deserve the spotlight.

Those doing the work that holds the world together behind the scenes while the rest of us scroll past headlines we forget by lunchtime.

In 1970, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave Borlaug the Peace Prize.

The citation that accompanied it said he had "given a well-founded hope."

I love that phrase.

Not a wish.

Not blind optimism.

A well-founded hope.

One built years in the fields, researching data, by a man who refused to accept that the world's worst predictions were the final word.

Borlaug kept saying, right up until his death in 2009 at ninety-five, that nobody had the right to predict famine as a certainty.

Especially when nobody had actually done the work to find out whether it could be solved.

So, he spent his life doing the work.

That's what stays with me.

We live in a world that loves a confident prediction of doom and the headlines love to sound the loudest alarm.

But somewhere out in a field, someone nobody has heard of is doing the work that will prove them all wrong.

Borlaug arrived in Mexico with no Spanish, no budget and two pairs of overalls.

He went on to save a billion lives that would otherwise have ended in famine.

If you've never heard his name before today, you have now.

And, given his lack of ego, I reckon he'd be perfectly fine with the late introduction.

There’s no better showcase of Norman’s humble nature then his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech (5 minutes):

A few weeks back I was researching the incredible recent London Marathon results.

Somewhere in my browsing, a YouTube video about modern running shoes landed in front of me.

Fifteen minutes later I had a brand new understanding of carbon plates, foam stacks and why elite runners are suddenly doing things we used to think were physically impossible.

The presenter was Cleo Abram.

I’d never heard of her before that afternoon and have been watching her videos regularly since.

Cleo runs a YouTube series called Huge *if true.

The premise is simple and genuinely refreshing.

She picks a piece of science, technology or innovation that could meaningfully change our future and walks you through it with curiosity and easy to follow evidence.

No doom and no fear-mongering.

Just well-researched explanations about the ideas that shape how we’ll live, work, move and connect over the years ahead.

A quick look at her background helps explain why she’s so good at it.

Cleo was trained as a journalist at Vox, contributed to Netflix’s excellent Explained series, and has built Huge *if true into a channel with more than seven million subscribers (and over a billion views).

Each episode is meticulously researched.

The interviews take place with the actual scientists and engineers and beautiful animations make complex ideas so much easier to absorb.

What I love most though, is the tone.

She approaches the future with a question most folks have forgotten to ask.

What if this actually went really well?

The thing Cleo does better than most is translation.

She takes a topic most of us would scroll past (quantum computing, fusion energy, gene editing, supersonic flight) and turns it into something you genuinely want to understand.

Her episode Quantum Computers, explained with MKBHD is a perfect example.

She and colleague Marques Brownlee built an entire virtual video game world to help viewers picture how qubits work and you can feel that care in every video.

Most of YouTube (and social media) is built on chasing the algorithm and far too much of it leans toward stoking outrage.

Cleo is building something different.

She’s built a growing library of episodes that leave you a little smarter (and a lot more curious) every time you press play.

That’s a rare combination on the internet right now.

Optimism can be rigorous: Cleo’s work shows that hope and quality reporting are not opposites. Asking ‘what could go right?’ deserves the same research and effort as asking ‘what could go wrong?’.

Complexity is usually a translation problem: Don’t give up on complex ideas. Most hard ideas aren’t actually beyond us, they just need a better translator. Find people who can translate the world in a way that works for you, and your curiosity will compound.

Curiosity is a daily decision: Following someone like Cleo nudges your feed in a better direction. Small, repeated choices about what you consume shape how you see the world.

The stories we tell shape the future we build: When we only tell ourselves stories of decline, decline is what we expect. Stories of what’s possible help us ot actually envision and build better futures.

Most of what slides across my screen about the future comes wrapped in worry.

Cleo cuts through that wrapping.

Her videos remind me there are brilliant people, all over the world, ambitiously working on extraordinary things.

Cleaner energy.

Better medicine.

Faster computing.

Smarter materials.

Food sources.

Even the shoes on our feet are being reimagined.

Spending ten minutes inside one of her videos leaves me hopeful and a little more informed than I was before and that’s a rare gift in 2026.

If you’ve been craving a smarter, brighter corner of YouTube, Cleo is a great place to start.

Pick any episode of Huge *if true and you’ll see what I mean.

For a taste of her work, here is the video that caught my attention:

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

You know that moment when a strong feeling comes over you and within seconds, your hand is reaching for something.

Your phone. The fridge.

Another task to bury yourself in.

Anything to ditract yourself from the feeling.

We all do it.

Not because we're weak, but because discomfort fires up a very old instinct within us.

Make this feeling stop.

Those quick exits rarely resolve the feeling though.

All they do is delay it.

And a delayed feeling doesn't disappear.

It waits.

Neuroanatomist Dr Jill Bolte Taylor observed something fascinating.

The initial chemical surge of an emotion lasts roughly 90 seconds before it begins to fade, if you let it pass without feeding it a story.

This exact number is up for debate, but the idea itself rings true.

Most people rarely let it pass, though.

Instead, we replay the trigger saying things like “this always happens to me" or we reach for a distraction, before the feeling has had a chance to pass on its own.

Scrolling.

Snacking.

Overworking.

Overbooking your week so there's no quiet space left for anything uncomfortable to surface.

Each of these moves does the same thing.

It numbs the sharp edges while the feeling sits underneath, untouched.

And importantly, feelings that don't get dealt with don't stay quiet for long.

They leak out sideways as irritability, or poor sleep, or a short fuse with the people who deserve it the least.

The pattern is so automatic most don't even recognise it as avoidance.

It just looks like any normal day.

Catch the reach: Next time a strong feeling hits, notice what your hands do in the first five seconds. That first impulse, the grab for the phone or the walk toward the kitchen, is your avoidance reflex in real time. Just notice and acknowledge it.

Give 90 seconds before you move: Before you reach for your usual exit ramp, stay still for a momentf. Let the feeling peak. You may find it passes even faster than the distraction would have lasted.

Name the swap: When you notice a pattern forming, like stress equaling snacking or anxiety equaling scrolling, acknowledge it to yourself plainly. "I'm not hungry, I'm anxious." That tiny act of honesty breaks you out of autopilot.

If you develop a habit of pushing away feelings or attempting to stifle them?

You’ll find these emotions resurface in unexpected ways or intensify over time.

It's important to acknowledge (and process) your feelings to stay emotionally healthy and avoid problems with your mind and body.

Ignoring or suppressing emotions can lead to increased stress, anxiety, and even physical issues over time.

On the flipside, when you address your feelings effectively, you develop healthier coping mechanisms and improve your overall quality of life.

I started paying attention to my own escape routes many years back and the list grew longer than I expected.

Distractions, procrastination, avoidance - I drew my attention to all of it.

Each kept me one step removed from whatever it was I was actually feeling.

What I changed wasn't a big breakthrough.

I just started staying still for a few extra seconds before reaching for anything.

And in those seconds, the feeling often lost its urgency, all by itself.

One of life’s greatest lessons is the understanding that you don't have to enjoy every feeling that passes through you.

You just have to stop running long enough to see it clearly.

Most of the time, they were never as big as you made them seem initially.

This week, when something uncomfortable shows up, try giving it a few seconds before you reach for an exit.

You’ll be surprised how quickly the wave passes when you stop fighting it and let it flow.

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.

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