I never really answered the question about whether people would want to read my thoughts on old books. It's probably not something people would seek out, but if the content is worth their time, a few people will stick around to see what else I have to say. It's not a topic with broad appeal, but hyperfocusd, single topic micro publications are the super power of sites like Substack. Would it be interesting? Would it tell people something they wanted to know? I like to read things that help me understand the world. People who have a perspective and share their lens for viewing the world will draw an audience. Their voice has to be authentic. You can't pretend to be something that you are not. Maybe you can be something you always wanted to be but didn't pursue for a whole bunch of reasons but now the tools of the internet allow you to capture a little bit of that lifestyle?
In my fantasy life, I get to spend my days in serious study of some deep and profound topic. I could be writing a novel or some academic paper. The activity or the topic is secondary to the association with study and gaining insight into how some aspect of our reality works. It's about answering questions without easy or obvious answers. Life as a professor has too many unappealing features for me to have ever seriously considered that path, particularly the idea of begging the government for research funds as a physical scientist, but some kind of self-supported thinker writing books or thought pieces would not be the worst way to spend my days. Some of my other little side projects were my attempt to get a taste of that life. I was reviewing Pitchfork's top 100 albums. I flirted with some kind of personal development theme for a more focused blog or book (it was just an exercise to see how hard something like that could be, it was never something I really intended to pursue in earnest). I did submit a request to participate in a workshop with Seth Godin to develop my ideas into some kind of serious project for a big audience. That was back in 2011. What was I even doing back then? My law school blog project was a mini-project to do something and share the outcome with the world. The blogging part of that process was my primary motivation through that entire project. I can look back at that and know that I never really wanted to go. to law school, but that entire process was fun. It was super selfish given how old my kids were at that time and I did think that there were some advantages to pursuing a legal career (if I had had the courage to believe in my system to just go with A for any logic puzzles that had to be worked out in detailed steps, I would have had a 170+ LSAT score and acceptances into schools that would have been hard to turn down). It was also me trying to find a way to be a thinker or at least someone who shared thoughts and experiences with an audience.
I haven't thought about that Seth Godin Medicine Ball session thing for a long time. I applied just to see what kind of response I would get. It was kind of a low risk way to see if I maybe had the chops to really work on building something online that could be more than just a diversion or fun hobby. That's the kind of thing I wanted to do, the kind of thing I was struggling to find the right words for at the start of this post. I wanted to build an idea into a thing that people could hold and share. A book. A blog that is more than a diary or journal. A produced thing that I had shipped into the world. Something I thought up, generated, and finished so I could share it with others.
Is my idea to use obscure books published decades ago to explore the world we live in now the next little project for me to try? Seth Godin would say yes. When I was reading him, he was all about shipping. Get an idea, develop it, get it out into the world. I'm taking some of those steps already. I stopped in Book Rescuers just to see if I could find an old book that fit my project. I looked for a few that AI had given me when I asked for obscure old books. I found a few by one of the authors, but not that specific book. I decided to just start looking for books that had that old book appearance. I found one. Under the Eye of the Storm by John Hersey. It was published in 1967. The physical book has some interesting features. The book has 10 reviews on Goodreads. It's not very long, about 250 pages. I plan on reading it right after I finish this book I've been reading about a sex cult. We'll see what I make of it. I plan on having posts for a few books ready to go before I do anything on Substack so it will be an interesting experiment.
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