23 Lessons from 2025 - #1034

**Chris Williamson** (1:04)
Hmm.
Hello, everybody, welcome back to the show. It is an end of 2025 episode, and these are some of my favorites. I get to go through some of the best lessons I've learned over the last 12 months, stuff from the newsletter and the podcast and everything that I've gone through. And before we get into it, I want you to say thank you very much for making Modern Wisdom the eighth biggest podcast in the world, according to the Spotify charts this year. Spotify Wrapped came out, and I'm still not too sure what to think about it. I'm just really, really grateful. So thank you everyone for supporting the show and me and gassing me up. It's unbelievable. So thank you. Also, it's nearly the end of the year, and you need to do an annual review process. You need to learn your lessons and set your goals. And the review that I have done every single December for the last nearly a decade is available at chriswillex.com/review. Hundreds of thousands of people have done it. And it's totally free. You can just copy it into your note app of choice and fill it in. And it means that you'll get to reflect and make some memories and understand what you're trying to do next year. And it's based on all of the best people that I've ever followed. And I've stolen all of their best bits and I've put it into a single process plus some of my own. And that's chriswillex.com/review.
All right, let's get into it. First one, the parental attribution error. We love blaming our parents. It's practically a rite of passage in modern psychology, but there's a double standard buried in the trend. We attribute what's broken in us to our upbringings while claiming that what's strong is ours alone. Call it the parental attribution error, like the fundamental attribution error where we blame others actions on their character, but excuse our own by pointing to circumstance. I cut that guy off because I'm late for work. He cut me off because he's a dick. It's a skewed way of assigning credit and blame. We externalize the bad and we internalize the good. You're quick to blame and slow to credit. You say you're anxiously attached because no one held you when you needed it, but isn't your ability to be alone with your emotions and to endure discomfort quietly also forged in the same crucible. You blame your parents for pushing you too hard in school, convinced that it made you perfectionistic and neurotic. But when was the last time that you acknowledged that same pressure gave you ambition and discipline and drive? You point to a childhood where mistakes weren't tolerated as the reason that you fear failure. But what about your meticulousness, your standards, your refusal to phone it in? You complain that no one ever asked you what you wanted growing up. But could that also be why you're so tuned in to what everyone else needs? You say your low self-worth comes from never being praised. But isn't that the same fuel that makes you outwork everyone around you? You trace your conflict avoidance back to all of the shouting at home. But isn't that also where your talent for de-escalation and emotional radar came from? You chalk up your hyperindependence to not being able to trust anyone. But isn't that also what made you capable, adaptable and calm under pressure? You say you're emotionally guarded because no one took your feelings seriously. But isn't that also why you're steady when the people around you fall apart? You've labelled yourself a people pleaser because you had to keep the peace at home. But maybe that's also where your social fluency and emotional intelligence were born. You blame your poor boundaries on parents who didn't respect yours. But isn't that also why you're so careful not to cross anyone else's? You say your fear of being a burden comes from being treated like one. But isn't that the same fear that now makes you reliable, disciplined and impossible to disappoint? You attribute your sensitivity to criticism, to all of the judgment that you grew up with. But that is also what makes you thoughtful, receptive and serious about getting better. You say your nervous system never relaxes because your home was unpredictable. But isn't that also why your perceptive, quick thinking and never caught off guard? The traits that you are most ashamed of are often just the dark side of something light. Your sharp edges didn't appear out of nowhere. They're often the byproduct of something useful. A strength turned up too high or a gift handled without guidance. Think about a sword. It's powerful, precise, designed to cut through resistance. But if it's double edged and most swords and strengths are, then sometimes it nicks you on the backswing. That doesn't mean that you throw the sword away. It means you learn how to hold it properly. Because most traits worth having come with risk. The truth is messier than a single cause. Because every trait that we have is entangled. Wounds and gifts often share a route. The self-reliance you're proud of might come from the same childhood where you couldn't rely on anyone else. The confidence you carry may have started as a defense against ever feeling small or dismissed again. Even your drive to succeed might be rooted in the fear of not being good enough. But this perspective requires maturity. It is simpler to cast yourself as the victim of bad parenting than to reckon with a complicated inheritance. It's easier to say, they hurt me, than to admit, they shaped me in ways that I'm still figuring out. The cultural narrative rewards blaming your parents more than it does understanding them. Therapy turns them into villains. Instagram makes them punch lines. But how often do you thank them in the same breath that you critique them? None of this obviously excuses abuse or neglect or dysfunction. But it does ask for honesty. If you are going to draw a straight line from your childhood to your flaws, you should trace that same lineage to your strengths. If you can't let your parents take credit for what's right with you, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to make them the villains for what's wrong. And I think that this is everywhere. It really is a rite of passage to lay at the feet of our parents, our shortcomings. And why would we want to own our own shortcomings when there is such an obvious germinator of it from our past? But I think just naturally there is this desire to own our successes and to outsource our failures. It is a kind of victim mentality, even for people who don't call themselves a victim, even for people who have alchemized stuff that was really off putting and a big setback and a huge hurdle to get over from their childhood. It's a complicated inheritance. I think that's the right way to think about it. The impact that your childhood had on you, that your parents, your upbringing, the way the kids in school treated you, all of those things are contributing in this big melting pot. It's an eye of newt and a month of being ostracized in gym class and a mum that didn't give you enough physical affection and it's all mixed up in this big soup. And then you don't know what it's going to turn into. And it's really hard to draw the line to work out where that lineage comes from. But I have seen in myself and in lots of other people, so many people on the Internet, this desire to blame their parents for their anxious attachment and the fact that they don't ever feel regulated and the reason that they struggle to connect with people or their low self-esteem or their inability to open up or whatever it might be. And you go, okay, but all of those shortcomings typically have something else going on which you're really proud of. And Ryan Long, Canadian comedian, sort of first got me thinking about this about a year ago when he was talking about how he writes these sketches and he's sort of completely obsessed and it totally consumes him and he's thinking about exactly how to perfect each different line and just to refine this bit a little bit more for his next stand-up on stage. And then it bleeds over into his personal life, into his friendships or his relationships or his family life or the way that he thinks about his apartment or whatever. Like, he doesn't get to turn off the obsessive, perfectionistic, hard worker, like that sort of hard charging mindset. Unfortunately, he can't exactly compartmentalize it only around work. So he has to contend with this complicated set of traits, which is the thing that he really values in one area can actually be a vulnerability or weakness or frustration in another area and that's an obvious one because that's the same thing. But sometimes it's different things. It's, well, your comfort with solitude, which is meant that you'll find to be an entrepreneur or take risks or travel on your own is something different in a different area of your life where you struggle to open up. The lineage between those two is a little bit harder to work out, but they still probably have a similar sort of route. And so much of this as well is fucking genetically predetermined. Like we look at our upbringings in an environmental standpoint and we say, well, this is something that could have been changed, but so much of it is just our predisposition genetically and that couldn't have been changed because if it was changed, you wouldn't be here. You wouldn't be you. It would be someone else. It would be the next sperm. By the way, if you're a guy who has performance anxiety and are trying for a baby with your partner, just so you know, every different thrust, if you finish on this thrust or the next one or three after that, it's a different child. Just in case there wasn't enough pressure on your performance already. And I don't know why I thought about that at some point this year. But ever since I thought about it, I can't not think about how precarious different people being brought into life are. Oh, you flipped around to a back for a while, but then you actually decided to turn it the other way. And that changed the entire course of your life and brought a different human into this world. So I don't know how I ended up on thrust contribution to human consciousness from parental attribution error. But anyway, that's the parental attribution error. Next one, advice hyper responders. There's a problem with how we all take advice when pursuing personal development, as far as I can see. Guidance doesn't sculpt us into something new. It exaggerates what we already are. The pattern is almost cruel. The people who least need the medicine are the ones most likely to overdose on it, while the ones who need it desperately are immune. So, another way to think about it would be advice doesn't land evenly. It finds the path of least resistance, and it tends to be absorbed by people who already lean in its direction. For instance, the post-MeToo instruction, Don't Be Pushy With Women, made conscientious and anxious men even more timid, while the guys that were steamrolling boundaries still didn't take any heed. The prescription to Just Work Harder is devoured by an insecure overachiever who's already bleeding effort into every crack of their day, while the genuinely lazy person coasts past it unchanged. The Men Should Open Up More lesson is swallowed whole by the sensitive, expressive guys, while the stoic boomer who equates vulnerability with weakness ignores it completely, and the call to Take More Responsibility encourages the ones who already think it's their fault to carry even more of the load, while the ones who constantly point the finger elsewhere never change. A TLDR would be, people who really need to hear advice often don't notice, while those who could do with the opposite message will take it as gospel. And you could call these people advice hyper responders, and history and myth are full of them. So Icarus was already reckless, intoxicated by freedom and glory, and his father Daedalus told him to keep to the middle path, don't fly too high or too low. But Icarus exaggerated the part that matched his impulse, the one that he already had. He soared higher and higher until the wax melted, and he fell into the sea. Don Quixote was already romantic, imaginative and desperate for purpose. When he read too many tales of knights, he didn't just enjoy them as fiction, he treated them as instruction. The lesson to be noble and brave was amplified into absurdity until he was charging at windmills and humiliating himself. Even the Buddha before enlightenment was already austere and obsessed with self-mastery, and as a young ascetic, he followed the prescription of self-denial so literally that he nearly starved himself to death, only later realizing the guidance had become poison and creating the middle way to correct course. Why does this happen? Well, people filter advice through their existing traits, so it amplifies predisposition rather than correcting imbalance. We've got this bias while already moving in the direction that we worked previously. We all want to be good, so we over-index the guidance that flatters our self-conception as conscientious, virtuous and hard-working. But maybe the most influential thing is the fact that instructions which bite deepest are the ones that match our inner fears. The anxious man doesn't just hear, don't be pushy. He feels that it confirms the fear that any move he makes is already too much. The sensitive man doesn't just hear, open up more. He feels it confirmed the worry that he's emotionally inadequate, even when he's already oversharing. The insecure overachiever doesn't hear, just work harder. He feels that it confirms the suspicion that he's never enough. The self-blamer doesn't just hear, take more responsibility. He feels it confirms the fear that he's guilty even when he isn't. The trouble is that good counsel, when misapplied, can be worse than bad counsel or none at all. The resistant ignore it, while the receptive overdo it. And the net effect is that imbalance gets amplified, not corrected. Self-improvement doesn't distribute like medicine. It distributes like alcohol. The ones who should abstain are drunk on it, while the ones who could do with loosening up don't even sip. The problem isn't a lack of advice. It's the inability to tell when guidance is seductive, because it confirms your existing tendencies, like your biases, your flaws and your fears. Much advice doesn't balance us. It exaggerates us. It makes the disciplined more rigid, the sensitive more fragile, the responsible more burdened. The trick is not discovery, but discernment. Not hearing more, but knowing when to stop listening. And this is one of the big problems, I think, with blanket advice. And it's one of the reasons why this year more than ever, I've caveated, I think, to a degree. I've learned the fallibility of one size fits all advice. There's some things that for more people are right. Being in bed for eight hours a night, having a consistent sleep and wake time, not drinking too much, having friends around, et cetera, et cetera. But when you get to, you should work harder or you should open up more or you should be less pushy with women. Well, that's actually really specific because I need to know a lot about your behavior to work out whether that's actually true. And if you are already doing a thing, it's likely that something which confirms your biases is going to push you to do it more. Oh, I knew I was right. That makes you feel good. Or you have a fear about a thing, which is usually the genesis of a lot of these feelings in any case. Oh, I knew that was too much for women. I shouldn't, I should not, I must not. Or you were shy, or you were timid, or you were already working so hard because you think that you're not enough. So something which reinforces you're not enough because you're not working hard enough. Oh, yes, I knew, I knew it was a piece of shit. I knew that I should work harder. It's vicious. And this is, it's not a universal rule. It's pretty fucking close. Advice hyper responders, I think, create a kind of like cognitive echo chamber of one, like just one person only letting in bits of advice and guidance, which reinforce their fears. And they are already predisposed to agree with because it backs up the sort of behavior that they've been doing all along.