Welcome and thank you for checking out Optimise Me, a monthly newsletter sharing research-backed, practical tips to help you optimise your self-growth and personal productivity. Happy New Year folks! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I certainly have - it was full of rest, reflection, and a whole bunch of learning. Being super transparent with you, I lost a lot of steam towards the end of the year. Man, I was tired, burnt out, and hadn’t realised I was just going through the motions.

I got the crazy idea to compare the bestselling books of all time with the bestselling books last year. Curiosity rabbit hole. Well, cripes. First thing I found was this. According to Guinness World Records, the Bible is the bestselling book ever written. As of 1995, 5 billion copies. Up next are other religious texts. 800 million copies of the Qur'an and 190 million copies of the Book of Mormon. They don’t know how many copies of the Bhagavad Gita have been sold, but they know one publisher alone sold 140 million.

Nicolas Cage is probably the most interesting living American actor (close second: Laura Dern), because he treats his gifts so lightly. I understand there’s the whole thing with his taxes, which to all available evidence has forced him over the past decade to make a string of low-budget Redbox Special schlockfests with names like Primal and Vengeance: A Love Story and A Score to Settle. But with the success of films like Mandy and now Pig, these movies begin to fit into a larger arc.

It’s Thursday afternoon and I’m back with a new advice column. If you’re new to this newsletter, this is a recurring feature where I answer love and relationship questions from lesbians and other homos. Some past editions include an important missive from a MILF lover and ”I'm a 33-year-old dirty slut who loves to be alone and go to bed at 10 pm.” Also, "It's so rare that I find someone that I'm interested in, and when I do, it's never great.

Last week, was the 65th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. I want to talk a bit about the tragedy of dying young this week. But before I get to that, I want to remind everybody that each month we do a mailbag edition of this newsletter where I answer reader questions. The next mailbag is coming up in a few weeks. Click the button below to ask that nagging musical question.