🌱 Your relationship with relationships

Here's your 3 insights in 3 minutes. 

🛸 What an Alien Would Notice

Philosopher Alain de Botton says 60% of life satisfaction comes down to one relationship... 

Your partner. The person you share most of your life with.

He has a thought experiment that’s stuck with me. Imagine an alien lands and learns that 60% of all human happiness rides on that ONE relationship. It'd be fair to assume we spend most of our waking lives trying to get good at it.

Then it watches us optimize our morning routines, clear our inboxes at 9pm, stay glued to our phones, and grind to get great at our jobs, while mostly winging the relationship that matters most.

It'd be pretty confused.

📈 Better Predictor Than Cholesterol

This goes beyond your partner. The data on relationships in general is wild.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development tracked people for over 85 years, the longest study of its kind. The director, Robert Waldinger, summed up the headline finding:

Quality relationships were a better predictor of your health than your cholesterol. And chronic loneliness even carries a mortality risk researchers compare to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

Naval Ravikant says the returns in life, in wealth, relationships, and knowledge, all come from compound interest. We get that with money. We forget it with people.

🔍 One Level Deeper

So how do we get better at it? 

We tend to show people only our good parts. But you can't get close to anyone without being vulnerable, sharing a failure or something you haven't figured out yet.

It feels scary, which is why most conversations stay on the surface. The weather, what we did this weekend, upcoming trips. 

Paradoxically, we don't share how we really feel because we think it'll repel people. But that's the very thing that brings us closer.

Going deeper can be as simple as just naming how something actually makes you feel. Something you're sad about, anxious about, or something you regret. Whatever it is. Even if especially if, it’s imperfect.

Okay, okay, I almost got away with telling you to do something without sharing a real example myself.. (gulp)

I spent literally like 2.5 hours writing this today. It started somewhere completely different, and I care too much about it to ship something I'm not excited about. Which is a little embarrassing, because it feels like I should be able to do this faster by now. But here we are.

What will you share this week?

Salud,
Mitchell

Ps. ai for business