Yesterday, my friend Sam wrote me that he had downloaded the presidential debates so he could watch the bloodshed.
This morning, my friend Peter forwarded me a New York Times editorial that’s calling for Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his “inadequate performance in the debate.”
And then this afternoon, I met my friend Olga, who spent much of the day in bed, and who said the only thing she has done today is to watch the presidential debate.
Olga told me her impressions of the debate. And then she said, “Maybe the debate’s something you could write about in your newsletter.”
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, the following will not be any kind of shock:
I am completely out of the loop. Permanently. Always.
I didn’t even know there was a presidential debate until friends started chattering to me about it via text and in real life.
I most definitely have not watched it.
And as for writing about the top news of the day in this newsletter… as I told Olga, I would never do that.
Well, obviously I’ve broken that vow with this email. But I didn’t know how else to get the following point across.
My theory is that you gotta pay the piper somewhere.
If you decide to talk about the immediately available stuff, the stuff that hundreds of millions of people are talking about right now on TV, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Reddit, among your friends and family, then you gotta try really really hard to have something unique and clever and hot-takey to say.
And even if you try really hard, and even if you expose yourself to looking like a tryhard, odds are good that most days you will fail to say something that hasn’t already been said, better, by a hundred other people, just a few minutes ahead of you.
That to me is an inadequate performance.
On the other hand, if you choose to spend your time and effort reading and watching less available stuff, stuff that’s not being talked about today, or yesterday, or last week, then you have a green, untrammeled field to play in.
For example:
Did you know that the problem of bloody, hateful, two-party elections was solved 2,500 years ago?
Two opposed tribes lived together inside one city’s walls.
They were highly suspicious of each other.
Each had a strong us vs. them mentality.
The city was ruled by a king from one tribe, who favored his own and harmed those from the other tribe.
Then the king died, or more correctly, he was made to disappear after he showed signs of serious cognitive decline.
How to choose a new king without devolving into civil war?
It didn’t look promising.
Each of the two parties was horrified by the leader of the other side.
Each party absolutely refused to accept the other side’s leader as the new king.
Tensions were rising. Weapons were starting to jangle.
So what to do?
Simple. It was the old, “you cut, I choose.”
Specifically, it was decided that the Romans, the party that had just lost its king, would choose a new king from the other tribe, the Sabines. The Sabines could not veto or influence the Romans’ choice.
The Romans chose a quiet, reserved man from the Sabine tribe, named Numa Pompilius.
At first, Numa refused to take command of the city. He liked his quiet life. But after being persuaded that Rome would devolve into civil war without him, he agreed to become king.
Numa reigned for 43 years in peace and prosperity. He founded some of Rome’s most important institutions, such as the pontifex maximus, the 12 month calendar, and the cult of the Vestal Virgins.
Two thousand years later, a clever politician, Niccolo Machiavelli, said Rome owed a greater debt to its second king, Numa, then it did to its first king, Romulus.
Good Lord this has turned into a long email.
Don’t write emails like this. Or do. It’s up to you.
If you do choose to write emails like this, I have something that might help. It’s my Insight Exposed course, about my notetaking, journaling, and media-consumption process.
I don’t normally sell this course, for reasons of my own.
But since I’ve already broken one law today, I might as well break two?
If you want Insight Exposed, the order form is below. I will close it down in exactly 24 hours, tomorrow, Sunday, at 8:31pm.
And if you have questions or doubts if this course is right for you, write me before you buy.
Here’s how to read stuff others are not reading, and make it useful for your marketing and your life: