Remnant Review
The day of reckoning is a familiar concept. The penultimate day of reckoning is not.
"Penultimate" means "next to the last." It refers to your main legacy. It means your swan song.
Most people do not give this much thought. They have not planned their lives in terms of a primary goal that they hope will mark their brief presence in history.
Some people make their mark early: athletes, for example. In the world of novels, Harper Lee is notable: To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). She wrote her first novel in the mid-1950's. She let it get published in 2015. Big mistake. "Let sleeping dogs lie." She died early this year at 89. She was a two-trick pony who should have been content with being a one-trick pony.
Peter O'Toole never came close to his first performance in Lawrence of Arabia.
That would be a blessing and a curse. Better to have made a great impact once than never at all, but to spend your life looking backward is a curse.
One good reason not to retire is that you may make that one great sale.
You may set up that blogsite that influences some young person to achieve a great thing.
If you can afford to retire, and you still have a calling, that may be the arena for your penultimate day of reckoning.
MY PENULTIMATE DAY OF RECKONING
Mine begins on January 2. I realized what it would be in the spring of 1960. It has been a long time coming.
I must begin outlining my multi-step Christian Economics. There must be a short version for beginners, a 500-page version for teachers, and a doorstop-size version for leaders. This corresponds to my marketing strategy: shotgun, rifle, scope.
Anyway, that is what I have planned for 25 years.
This week, I realized this is incomplete. I must write a fourth version for economists. Let me explain.
An author is wise to have a specific audience in mind. Here is a universal rule for writing anything except a textbook: "Never write for a committee." The reason why textbooks are not worth reading apart from a course is that they are written to get through committees.
Once an author has targeted his audience, he should imagine a representative member of this audience. He must write for one reader. The hard part is to identify the crucial characteristics of the audience. Once he does this, he can image that representative reader.
I have struggled for years to determine who my audience should be. I came to a conclusion about five years ago: a 30-year-old man in a third world country. He has a job, a wife, a child, and another on the way. Why this man? Because he has inescapable responsibilities. He is grounded in social obligations. If I can get him to commit, I have made a serious convert.
Second, this project is all about evangelism. My target is not the university economist, who is an epistemological agnostic, a defender of value-free economics. He is a survivor of an academic screening process that screens out ethics. He is a low-probability convert. And if I convert him, what do I get? Someone who is paid to teach value-free economics out of a textbook or monographs screened by academic committees.
Why third world? Less first-world baggage. The masses are poor. They live in villages. They hope to move to a city. If they do, they will initially live in a slum.
How can I get to this man?
The Web.
Amazon, Google, and Facebook are competing to bring free high-speed internet service to India, China, and sub-Sahara Africa. I plan to be a free rider on their high-altitude vehicles.
Then there are cell phones. They keep getting cheaper. I believe in Moore's law. They will continue to get cheaper.
In 20 years, 80% of the world's population will have access to the Web through cell phones.
What about translation software? It's here. It will get better. No more Tower of Babel.
Then this hit me this week: these people will not have printers. Why hadn't I seen this before? This means that I must write in short bursts. I must write for cell phone screens, not flat screens on a desk.
I will also create my books in PDF's, but these will be for a select segment of my audience.
I have written in short segments for 50 years: subheads. I learned that from my editor, Paul Poirot. Either I put in the subheads or he did.
I must write in terms of pairs of links at the end of each web page/section: "next page" or "detailed discussion." The "next page" button is obvious: the next page in this volume. The "advanced discussion" link will go to the same section in the next volume up: from beginner to teacher, or from teacher to leader.
I must talk to the reader. I must use "you." Academic books never do this. But long-copy ads do. I write good long-copy ads. I will turn my books into long-copy ads.
Why? To get the reader to commit. That is what education should always be about: getting readers to commit.
Here is my five-point model for a speech, a sermon, or a verbal sales pitch.
Start with a text.
Stick with the text.
Get to the point.
Call them to commit.
Give them legitimate hope.
My goal is simple to describe but bigger than anything I have ever attempted: to be the Karl Marx of the third world in the 21st century.
Technology is on my side. The next Christendom is in the third world.
Economists ignore third world villages. I will get there first. I will set the framework of discussion. That is half the intellectual battle.
I will target a huge and growing market: Pentecostals. There were none in 1905. There are 300 million today -- minimum. My view: go where the market is growing.
I want to train activists. Here is my model: ex-Communist Douglas Hyde's Dedication and Leadership Techniques. You can download it here.
I am not interested in armchair economists in their tenured security. I am interested in recruiting people who will recruit people who will recruit people. I am interested in creating a non-profit downline.
But there is a gap. I want to show leaders that the economics that I teach is better than university economics. So, I must write a fourth volume: the third volume, but with footnotes, graphs, and the standard academic paraphernalia.
So, the writing project just got larger and longer. But it has to be done.
Basically, I saw this week what I must do. I finally visualized it: a Pareto pyramid. At the top of the income pile are Gates, Bezos, Buffett, & Co. There are 6,000 of them, according to David Rothkopf's book, Superclass. This is clearly not my audience.
In the section below them -- 1% -- are CEO's of large corporations and Nobel Prize-winning economists. Again, not my audience.
Next, the 4%: lawyers, physicians, and high-income salesmen. Too busy. They have it made. They want more of the same . . . except maybe a new wife.
Next, the top 15%: upper-middle-class salaried people. They have schedules to meet. Busy, busy, busy. Then a nightcap or two.
I want the bottom 80%. More than this: I want the bottom 40%, but what I call geographically impaired: villages. I am not after losers who are trapped by their own bad ethics. I want men who are looking for a way out and up, or at least up.
Rothkopf says that the top 1,000 members of the superclass have wealth equal to the bottom 2.5 billion people (p. 66). I will target the Christians in the bottom 2.5 billion.
Society is rebuilt from the bottom up, not the top down. Marx was correct about this. He identified industrial proletarians as the exclusive agents of change. Wrong. He called for violent revolution. Wrong. He had contempt for "the idiocy of rural life." I don't . . . if the farmers have smart phones.
My strategy: (1) Go where there is intellectual demand, but without money to back it up -- only a smart phone. (2) Keep the price of the information low: free. (3) Serve bite-size portions, but lots of portions. (4) Keep it simple at first.
I want committed people. They need not be the brightest people.
I want tortoises, not hares.
I want compound growth without leverage.
I want men on life's battlefields, not men in classrooms.
I want followers from beyond the grave.
This is my plan for my penultimate day of reckoning.
What's yours?
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