Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.
He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.
Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.
Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.
Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.
Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.
Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.
The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.
Be a man.
• Leave that toxic relationship
• Leave your hometown
• Ignore small talk
• Live on your own
• Build a business
• Journal every night
• Invest your money
• Believe in God
Take charge of your destiny.
"We must be careful not to believe things simply because we want them to be true.
No one can fool you as easily as you can fool yourself".
Professor Richard Feynman
vía @ValaAfshar
“Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.”
― Derek Sivers
There is a MAN somewhere right now who has:
No girlfriend
No side chics
No sneaky links
Just by himself and fixing his life.
Wherever you are bro, you will WIN.
God alwayyyyyyys rewards hard work.
This 1-hour interview with Jim Simons will teach you more about investing than a $200K MBA.
Most people will scroll past it.
That’s a mistake.
This is the mathematician who outperformed legends like Warren Buffett, George Soros, and Ray Dalio generating $100B+ with ~66% average returns.
And he didn’t do it the traditional way.
No predictions. No gut feelings. No TV opinions.
Just data, patterns, and relentless discipline.
Simons showed that markets aren’t about being right they’re about having a system that works over time. Small edges, repeated consistently, beat big bets driven by emotion.
He also flipped the idea of expertise. Instead of hiring finance experts, he hired mathematicians and scientists people who could see patterns others missed.
And perhaps the biggest lesson: remove ego from decisions. The moment you “feel” too strongly about a trade, you’ve already lost objectivity.
That’s why this interview is different.
It doesn’t make you excited about investing…
It makes you think differently about it.
Bookmark it. Watch it.
It might be the most productive 1 hour you spend this week.