Welcome back to the ‘A Little Wiser’ newsletter. In this issue we explore psychology, business, and astronomy. Grab your coffee and let’s dive in.

Walk into any classroom and you can already hear the myths forming that some children are “naturally gifted,” while others simply “aren’t the type.” But modern research, from cognitive science to sports analytics, paints a far more interesting picture. Talent is not a lightning strike granted to a lucky few but a slow-burn chemical reaction between environment, effort, mindset, and timing. Children who become exceptional typically begin with tiny advantages: a curious temperament, a supportive adult, or early exposure to a craft. These advantages compound. A child who practices a little more improves a little faster, which makes practice more enjoyable, leading to even more practice. From a neurological standpoint, this practice works by wrapping the relevant neural circuits in a fatty insulation called myelin. It acts like speed-boosting cable sheathing, making the thought-to-action signals faster and more accurate over time. What begins as inches quietly becomes miles.

Genetics matters, but not in the way myths suggest. Twin studies from the University of Minnesota show that traits like grit, curiosity, and even musical rhythm are partly inherited yet none of them act alone. Environment amplifies or silences whatever strengths children possess. The famous “relative age effect,” documented in youth sports across Europe and North America, shows that children born just after the school-year cutoff are up to four times more likely to become elite athletes. They’re a little older, a little more coordinated, and therefore a little more likely to get extra coaching and encouragement. Early advantages compound, creating what researchers call “the Matthew Effect”, those who have more, get more. Of course, hard work alone doesn’t explain Mozart, Serena Williams, or Marie Curie. What separates high performers is the way they practice. Psychologists call it deliberate practice: focusing on weaknesses, repeating skills just beyond current ability, and receiving timely feedback. This is where good coaching becomes decisive as a young athlete with the right mentor learns not just techniques but how to think about improvement itself.

However luck is the invisible engine behind many extraordinary careers. A Princeton study analysing thousands of high achievers found that early encounters with a great teacher, a local coach, or even a random after-school club can redirect the entire trajectory of a child’s life. The economist Raj Chetty showed that moving a child to a higher-opportunity neighborhood before the age of 13 increases adult earnings by 31%, reshaping not just talent but life outcomes. Greatness, it turns out, is rarely born fully formed. It is assembled from practice that stretches ability, encouragement that reinforces effort, and moments of pure accident that open a door at just the right time. The recipe for talent is neither nature nor nurture, but the unpredictable chemistry between the two.

Long before Red Bull logos adorned Formula 1 cars and extreme-sports helmets, the energy drink existed as something far humbler: a Thai roadside pick-me-up for truckers and market traders grinding through night shifts. In 1976, Chaleo Yoovidhya created Krating Daeng, a sweet tonic sold in squat gold and red bottles. Thailand was industrialising at breakneck speed and workers needed something to keep them awake throughout the night. Chaleo's formula of caffeine, B-vitamins, and taurine spread across Southeast Asia not through glossy advertising campaigns, but through word of mouth among those who needed it most. It was functional, unglamorous, and utterly essential to the engine room of Asia's economic boom.

In the mid-1980s, Austrian salesman Dietrich Mateschitz tried Krating Daeng during a business trip to Thailand and discovered it completely eliminated his jet lag. Suddenly, he saw what no one else had: a missing category in Western markets crying out to be filled. He returned to Chaleo with an audacious proposition of a 51/49 partnership to bring the drink west. To make it palatable to European tastes, Mateschitz doubled the price, carbonated the liquid, and swapped the gold-and-red bottle for a sleek silver-and-blue can. When focus groups tasted the redesigned concoction, they declared it a disaster, predicting it would "fail immediately." Mateschitz ignored them entirely as he understood something marketers consistently miss, you don't sell a product, you sell a mythology.

What followed was extreme and unconventional guerrilla marketing. Mateschitz paid students to hand out free cans at clubs and ski slopes and told them to strategically abandon empty cans outside exclusive venues and on expensive cars. This created an artificial scarcity that screamed high-status. An early urban myth that taurine, derived from the Latin taurus, came from bull testicles added a layer of edgy mystique the brand did nothing to dispel. Red Bull didn't advertise itself as a drink; it advertised an adrenaline-infused lifestyle. The company built entire sporting ecosystems, bought football clubs, launched media studios, and eventually put a man in a spacesuit to jump from the edge of space. Each stunt reinforced the same message: Red Bull wasn't selling caffeine rather it was selling capability, courage, and the belief that limits are merely suggestions. By 2024, the company was shifting over 12 billion cans a year. It outgrew the beverage category entirely to become a global marketing machine, powered by a Thai tonic invented for night-shift workers who just needed to stay awake.

Below - The 2012 Stratos jump by Felix Baumgartner was arguably the greatest marketing stunt in history. It delivered an estimated $500 million in earned media, making the 5 year, $100M investment in it look like a bargain.

Around 13.8 billion years ago, space, time, matter, and energy was compressed into an unimaginably small, hot, dense state. Then an expansion of space happened. In the first fraction of a second, the universe ballooned in size during a process called inflation, smoothing out the cosmos and setting the stage for every galaxy, star, and planet that would follow. Just minutes after the Big Bang began, the universe had expanded and cooled sufficiently to allow the initial super-heated quantum plasma to solidify into the first, stable building blocks of atomic matter.

As the universe expanded and temperatures dropped, matter slowly assembled itself into structure. Hydrogen and helium, born in those first minutes, clumped together under gravity, igniting the formation of the first stars a few hundred million years later. These early giants burned fiercely and died violently, forging heavier elements like carbon, oxygen and all the ingredients that would eventually make planets possible. Galaxies formed, collided, and evolved as The Milky Way started to take shape. Around nine billion years after the Big Bang, on a small rocky world orbiting an ordinary star, life began to write its own improbable story.

The evidence for this cosmic origin is remarkably robust. In 1929, Edwin Hubble peered through his telescope and noticed galaxies weren't standing still but rushing away from us, and the farther away they were, the faster they moved. The universe, it turned out, was expanding. Then in 1965, two radio engineers stumbled upon a faint, persistent hiss in their equipment: a background whisper permeating all of space. What they'd discovered, quite by accident, was the cosmic microwave background. This is the cooled remnant of the universe's fiery birth, still echoing across the void. Add to this the precise abundance of light elements like hydrogen, helium and lithium which matches exactly what Big Bang physics predicted and the picture becomes compellingly clear. The Big Bang doesn't tell us what, if anything, came before that first moment. However, it does give us an elegant, testable framework for understanding how the universe evolved from a microscopic flash of energy into the vast, star-strewn cosmos we inhabit today.

We hope you enjoyed today’s edition. Thank you to everyone reading, sharing, and helping A Little Wiser reach new people every week. We value every reader so please reply and tell us a lesson you’d love to see soon!

Until next time…. - A Little Wiser Team

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