#7: The bad judgment hormone 💊

Happy Friday! 🎉 This week I’ve been in full headless chicken mode working on the courses and career workshops I have coming out soon, and soliciting partnerships for The Friday Fix and TLDR Weekly.

Speaking of partnerships, I’m seeking partnerships/sponsorships for this newsletter and TLDR Weekly, so if you have any leads, hit reply, and let’s be friends 🤗.

This headless chicken somehow manages to chase paper and your heart as I talk about love this week ❤️.

Let's get into it 🚀

🧹 But first, some housekeeping…

Last week’s post if you missed it.

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💡 1 thing I've learned this week

It’s the week of love, and a young fellow got rejected after a public proposal so you damn sure know I’m talking about love.

We’re all adults here, right? Right?? 😅

Okay, good.

As a young curious adolescent with raging hormones and sprouting beards, I was excited to have sex. Of course, even though I postured as a pro, I had no idea what I was doing.

But that’s a story for another day.

One of the main problems I faced was deciding whether or not I wanted to be in a relationship with the person (or people 🫣) I was “relating” with at the time.

Do I like you or do I like making out with you?

While talking about the red flags to avoid in relationships on his podcast, Jay Shetty mentioned something about sex and the hormone, oxytocin that I learned (too) late in life but couldn’t articulate well.

But now I can.

Oxytocin, aka the bonding hormone, aka the hormone of bad judgment, is responsible for the chemical romance you feel when you’re intimate with someone.

If you’re uncertain about your feelings for someone, having sex with them brings confusion, not clarity.

Sex distorts our perception of love because oxytocin, at least temporarily, makes us feel closer to that person. Worse still, if you’re in a toxic relationship and you’re thinking about leaving, sex—by way of oxytocin—can make you temporarily forget the red flags that made you pack your bags.

I wish someone told me this before I accumulated battle scars on the field of love as a strapping young man with chin whiskers.

I’m not telling you to abstain; that’s the job of a delusional Catholic Church.

By all means, get your socks off.

I’m telling you to be more aware of the choices you’re making and the reasons you’re making them.

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🙏🏾 1 thing I'm grateful for

My friends.

My greatest privilege is my relationships. I’ve made A LOT of friends in this life who help and support me.

I started the week pondering possible locations for my upcoming career workshop and as I write this, I have a nice shiny venue that’s more than I need…FOR FREE!

When I get rich and appear on the cover of a pretentious magazine with “self-made billionaire” splashed above my staged heavily photoshopped pose in BIG BOLD ATTENTION-GRABBING magazine font, stop whatever you’ll be doing at the time and call me out.

The fame and fortune would’ve gotten to my head.

I’m nothing without my relationships.

🚀 Pro-tip

Autosum in Excel

How do you quickly add up figures in a list in Excel?

Basic people: Use the SUM function or worse still, manually add them up with plus signs 🫢.
Effective, but you can do better

People like you who read this newsletter: Click the cell directly below the list of numbers you want to add up and on a PC, hold down Alt =. On a Mac, press ⇧⌘T.

🧩 Riddle me this

Q: If a zookeeper had 100 pairs of animals in her zoo, and two pairs of babies are born for each one of the original animals, then (sadly) 23 animals don’t survive, how many animals do you have left in total?

Answer below

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❓Riddle answer

977 animals (100*2) + (200*4) - 23 = 977

Have a great weekend,

— Shem

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