Make Good Choices
August Newsletter · 2026
This month's letter
The only opinion of my life that matters is mine.
August was about connection — with people, and with the parts of myself I used to argue with. This month: what landed, why kindness to strangers actually works, and something I'm genuinely proud of.
A note from Mik
Hey,
August has been about connection for me. With mates, with family, and (maybe the harder one) with the parts of myself I used to argue with constantly. I got flattened by a cold twice this month, which felt like a personal insult more than an illness, and I spent more nights than usual on the couch feeling sorry for myself.
But underneath all that, I'm in one of the steadiest places I've been in years. Not because anything huge changed. Because I stopped waiting for permission to live the way I actually want to live, and I let everyone else keep their opinions about that. Turns out that's most of the work right there.
What landed this month
A few things I put out this month kept coming back to me in the comments and the DMs, so I want to sit with them a little longer here.
- Letting people think what they want about you. I spent years — genuinely years — managing how I came across, adjusting who I was depending on who was in the room, trying to be palatable to everyone. It was exhausting, and worse, it didn't even work. Letting that go has been one of the kindest things I've ever done for myself, and it's shown up in the content this month more than anything else.
- Simple tools for sparking joy. A run of posts on small, doable things you can actually do on a Tuesday — not some big, life-overhaul way. Naming one good thing before you check your phone. Doing something kind for a stranger with zero expectation of it being noticed. Joy doesn't need to be earned or scheduled. It just needs a little room.
- The "You Are Extraordinary" posts. They keep landing hardest of anything we make, and I don't think that's a coincidence. People are hungry for a reminder that they don't have to earn their place here. You're extraordinary because you're here, doing the work of being human, same as the rest of us.
Why kindness to strangers actually works
I want to back up what I've been saying this month with something other than my own opinion, because it turns out the research holds up.
In 2018, Oxford researcher Dr Oliver Scott Curry led a review of 21 studies looking at whether being kind to other people actually makes us happier. The answer was yes — modestly, but reliably.
"Performing acts of kindness will not change your life, but might help nudge it in the right direction."
— Dr Oliver Scott Curry, University of Oxford
It's not a miracle cure. It's a nudge. That's a very MGC finding, if you ask me — we're not chasing life overhauls here, we're chasing nudges.
Here's the part I didn't expect. The 2025 World Happiness Report tracked how often people around the world help strangers, donate, and volunteer, and compared it to how happy their countries are overall.
We're a genuinely happy country that's a bit shy when it comes to looking after people we don't know. The same report found something worth sitting with: expecting kindness from others predicts your happiness more strongly than actual hardship does. Believing the people around you will show up for you matters more than whether bad things happen. That's not naive positivity — that's measurable.
An Australian study by McCrindle Research backs this up close to home. It found we're about twice as likely to be kind to people we already know than to strangers, even though 62% of us reckon our national culture of kindness beats the rest of the world's. We talk a good game about being a kind country. The gap is in the stranger bit — the harder bit, the bit that doesn't come with a relationship attached.
There's a physical side to this too. Harvard Health research links kindness to lower cortisol (your stress hormone) and lower blood pressure, plus a real drop in loneliness for both the giver and receiver.
"A propagation effect — when someone's kind to you, you're measurably more likely to be kind to the next person."
— Tyler VanderWeele, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Kindness moves through a room like that. One card left on a café table, one person let go ahead of you in the queue, and it doesn't stop with the two of you.
None of this is about forcing positivity or performing niceness for an audience. It's about a genuinely simple, backed-by-evidence truth: the smallest gesture toward a stranger changes something measurable in both of you, and it costs you almost nothing to try.
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."
— Aesop
If you want somewhere to start, this is exactly what our Kindness Cards are built for — leave one somewhere unexpected this month and see what happens.
Try this this month
Next time you catch yourself adjusting who you are for someone else's comfort — softening an opinion, laughing at something that wasn't funny, shrinking to make a room easier — pause and ask yourself one question: whose opinion am I actually protecting right now? Nine times out of ten, it's not even a real threat. It's a habit. You don't have to fix it today. Just notice it. That's enough.
Something I'm genuinely proud of
I want to tell you about something bigger than a single post this month. MGC is teaming up with my friend Ali Orchard for the launch of her first book, The In-Between.
Her movement, "I Belong", is built on the same foundation we are: believing in who you are, especially after life has knocked you around a bit. Her book is a raw, honest look at divorce, being a single mum, family struggles, and the slow, unglamorous work of finding your feet again and learning to believe in yourself as someone worth backing. It's not a polished redemption story. It's real, and that's exactly why it matters.
If any part of that sounds close to home for you, you're not sitting with it alone. If this brought something up, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636 — both are there, day or night.
To mark the launch, Ali and I made something together: the I Belong x Make Good Choices tee. It carries both brands, including MGC's new woman's face logo alongside our original mark, which is its own small milestone for us. But honestly, it was never really about the shirt. It's about two people who each built something meaningful out of hard chapters, choosing to stand next to each other and say "us too."
That's what this whole community is, when it comes down to it. Not a page you follow. A place where people who've had hard chapters get to stand next to each other.
Thank you for being here, for reading this far, and for making your own good choices even on the days no one's watching and no one would know either way.
Be gentle with yourself this month.
— Mik