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Monday Morning Memo

This is a really interesting interview (below.) Elton John tells the whole story about how he was rocked by Leon Russell on piano when he was young and then what happened to them both after that… I think you’ll enjoy it. When the interview is over, get yourself a pimp hat and find the courage to wear it in public. It’s a transformative experience. You’ll either learn not to care what other people think and become truly free for the rest of your life, or you’ll fold like a poker player who’s an easy sucker for a bluff and go back to being average. 

Send me a photo of yourself in your pimp hat in a public place where you DO NOT know the people around you. Someplace like the grocery store or the mall. You have to wear your pimp hat all the way from your car to the public place, walk around for at least 10 minutes, then have your photo taken before wearing it all the way back to your car. Then and only then can you take it off. You can define “pimp hat” any way you want, as long as it’s ridiculous. Send the photo to Della@WizardAcademy.org  

I promise you’ll be glad you did. – Indy 

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Download the PDF "Dictionary of the Cognoscenti of Wizard Academy"

Random Quote:

“

  1. Reverse-engineer what you read. If it feels like good writing, what makes it good? If it’s awful, why?

  2. Prose is a window onto the world. Let your readers see what you are seeing by using visual, concrete language.

  3. Don’t go meta. Minimize concepts about concepts, like “approach, assumption, concept, condition, context, framework, issue, level, model, perspective, process, range, role, strategy, tendency,” and “variable.”

  4. Let verbs be verbs. “Appear,” not “make an appearance.”

  5. Beware of the Curse of Knowledge: when you know something, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like not to know it. Minimize acronyms & technical terms. Use “for example” liberally. Show a draft around, & prepare to learn that what’s obvious to you may not be obvious to anyone else.

  6. Omit needless words (Will Strunk was right about this).

  7. Avoid clichés like the plague (thanks, William Safire).

  8. Old information at the beginning of the sentence, new information at the end.

  9. Save the heaviest for last: a complex phrase should go at the end of the sentence.

  10. Prose must cohere: readers must know how each sentence is related to the preceding one. If it’s not obvious, use “that is, for example, in general, on the other hand, nevertheless, as a result, because, nonetheless,” or “despite.”

  11. Revise several times with the single goal of improving the prose.

  12. Read it aloud.

  13. Find the best word, which is not always the fanciest word. Consult a dictionary with usage notes, and a thesaurus.

“

- Steven Pinker

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The Wizard Trilogy

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