It’s been three days since I wrote an email about the 40th anniversary of the first broadcast of The Day After, which happened on November 20 1983.
A reader wrote in to ask about that:
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Beautiful story…but where do you find this kind of story?
Do you google the events for this day or something else? I’m really curious.
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The short answer is that, like Curious George, I’m a good little monkey, and always curious.
In the particular case of The Day After email, the sequence of events was as follows:
1. A few months ago, I was reading an email by Lawrence Bernstein. Lawrence was talking about how he managed to delete his entire email list. As he put it, “Sunday morning felt like one of my favorite dark films from 1983, ‘The Day After.'”
2. I had never heard of The Day After so I made a note of it in a list of “movies to watch” that I have been keeping for years.
3. Some time later, I watched The Day After, without knowing anything about it except that Lawrence likes it.
4. After watching the movie, I was curious to find out more. So I read up on it. I was impressed to find out all the stuff connecting The Day After to Ronald Reagan and the Soviets and nuclear war averted.
5. A few days later, the thought popped into my mind to check when exactly The Day After was first broadcast. It turned out the 40th anniversary was coming up in a few weeks’ time. I thought it might be cool to write about it on the actual anniversary. So I made a calendar entry telling me to write an email about it on the day of.
6. The calendar notification fired a few days ago. So I wrote down an outline of what I remembered about the movie. I plumped it up with some details taken from Wikipedia and ¡tachán!
The particulars of how I wrote that email are probably completely useless to you.
But there are a few underlying principles which you might profit from. Such as for example:
Keeping extensive notes and having lists of everything you might care about…
Digging in when you come across an unfamiliar reference from somebody you respect…
Or using your calendar app to make your life easier and to make sure stuff gets done when it should.
Over the past few years, I’ve come up with a handful of such processes to make sure I never forget a good idea, never fail to draw a valuable connection, never miss out on a profitable opportunity.
Of course, it doesn’t work all the time. Or even much of the time.
Even so, these processes have been incredibly valuable to to me for daily email writing, previously for client work, futurely for new projects I am starting up.
This stuff has become such an integral part of how I work that I created a course, Insight Exposed, all about how I keep notes, and write journals, and process all of the ideas and information coming at me so I can turn them into something productive and profitable.
I released Insight Exposed back in February for a few days. But I haven’t been selling it since.
I will release it again soon, after I’ve polished it a bit. But more about that in its own email.
For now, let me just share something valuable that I’ve kept track of thanks to my Insight Exposed system.
It’s an article I came upon back in September. It was published in the lying New York Time, but in the opinion section, so maybe it’s true.
In any case, I found it insightful, so much so that i took note of it, processed the note, and put it into long-term storage, so I could share it with you today. In case you’re curious:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/17/opinion/sports-zen-mental-subtraction.html