True Greatness is Always Complicated

February 25, 2020 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

After my post about Kobe Bryant two weeks ago, I heard from a number of you who couldn’t get over the accusation of rape that still metastasized in the middle of his legacy.

I’d acknowledged that Bryant was an introvert who still needed to tell his story about the struggle between good and evil inside him—and, by implication—how laudable that was. But as I read it again, the shortness of the piece didn’t do justice to the darkness in him, at least in part because so many of Bryant’s mourners didn’t seem to be grappling with his dark side at all. They were fans who had lost a hero, and for them the “Mamba” in him was mostly, if not entirely, a good thing given the adolescent ways we think about winning and sum up complicated lives while the grief of loss still stings.

So I’ve poured over the memorial articles about him, including those that Longreads (an on-line curator of stories) assembled into “The Ugliness of Greatness Reading List” about his life, his passing and our reactions to it.

After he retired from his obsession of playing basketball better than anyone, Bryant reverted to an even deeper preoccupation, making it (along with his family) into his fulltime projects. Since his retirement from basketball in 2016, a big part of his life work became telling the story that had always interested him most, so that he could profit (and others might too) from his portrayal of struggles like the ones that were inside of him. Stories about competition and the pursuit of excellence and falling along the way. Like his storytelling heroes created Darth Vader, Voldermort and Jaws, Bryant would tell stories that spoke to his alter-ego and how to hold him in check.

I thought it a worthy encore career for him (or for anyone, really), but again the short-form of my research and subsequent post didn’t remove the suspicion that this might be a marketing proposition for the Kobe Bryant product line instead of the kind of soul-searching that could impact the ways that we saw ourselves too. So I wanted to read more, and by seeing him through others’ eyes, decide whether I’d been right in concluding that there are deeper lessons in his life, in his death and in what we seemed to be taking from them.

What follows are excerpts from articles that were written about Kobe Bryant after his helicopter fell from the sky and his story risked getting lost in the shuffle of our grief. My job was easier because the Longreads editors gathered so many terrific stories, with the haunting (but unattributed) photograph up top coming from one of them: Jeremy Gordon’s “Two Things Can Be True, But One is Always Mentioned First” in The Outline.

I brought three questions with me while I read, and I’ve grouped what I discovered about Bryant and the troubling ways we process the passing of conflicted heroes under them.

What set Kobe Bryant apart?

First off, it is useful to recall the range of his excellence as an athlete. In his article in The Outline, Gordon says of Bryant:

He exemplified excellence as grim-jawed killer instinct (murder your opponents on the court), relentless hard work (practice for hours, because the sport demands it), blunt honesty (if your teammates suck, call them out), and beatific monologing about loving the game, which to him was a way of life.

Of course, as it turned out, “his way of life” was what he wanted to tell us about most. Writing about Bryant in The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas beautifully observed:

It seemed, for a while, that he only saw himself as a winner, but it turned out that he saw himself as a storyteller. At times, this quality could make him seem a little slick, aware of his own personal mythology. But as his career progressed—and as he fought back from injury after injury—he became more expansive about the narrative power of sports, its ability to transform an inner struggle into an outer one. He didn’t hide the fact that he was angry, that he could be selfish, that he was warped by his overwhelming competitive instincts. In a 2014 [New Yorker] profile by Ben McGrath, Bryant, in discussing an outburst by the football player Richard Sherman, talked about the “ugliness of greatness.

Part of it, surely, was because Bryant’s focus was narrow, inwardly focused and relentless. In his piece “What Made Kobe Different” Jonathan Abrams began with Bryant’s own words to describe his careers as a basketball player and more recently:

I have such a narrow focus. As you can see, I didn’t have much time to socialize at all. When I wasn’t training, I was writing and I was studying the art of writing, of filmmaking. My days were booked. It wasn’t that I went out of my way not to be social. It was just that I was busy preparing for what I’m doing now.

Abrams quotes Del Harris, who was Bryant’s first NBA coach, to similar effect: about his player’s isolation from others and his mesmerizing obsession with doing his best. That he was so unsocialized may also help to explain his troublingly anti-social and often predatory side.

[Bryant] never paid attention to any outside activities that I could tell. He never went out. Of course, he was only 18 and 19. On the airplane, he never had any particular fun—no cards, no video games. He was always looking at basketball things on his computer. In those days, we did not have the DVDs of games to take with us right after the game, no iPads, etc. But he had plenty of DVDs from our earlier games, or of the next team or of [Michael] Jordan. He was a total student of the game.

And, Abrams might have added, to the contributions that he wanted to make and ended up making as a positive role model, but Bryant knew there was more to his story than that.

Around the time he was charged with rape, he started talking about Black Mamba. As he explained in “Muse” (a documentary about his life), Mamba personified his attempt to channel his mean, relentless rage more productively both on the court and off of it, vividly incorporating the serpent into a personal struggle that made sense to him, and maybe to those who were watching too.

The New Yorker’s Thomas brings that story down to today as Kobe Bryant worked with his customary diligence and single focus to continue writing it.

After Bryant retired, in 2016, he made an animated movie that won an Oscar. He launched podcasts, movies, television shows. Many of them were about why he was set apart from the world, even as he tried to connect with it…Bryant’s stories involved rage and self-discipline and anger and, yes, greatness. By all accounts, he was as involved—and even obsessive—with those projects as he was with anything else.

Bryant’s need to write his story was far more than a marketing angle for an encore career. It was like he was fleshing out his character in his own morality plays.

How does public grief reduce greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place?

In my prior post, I should have set out more of the facts about the rape charges against Kobe Bryant. Here are some of them.

In 2003, Bryant was accused of aggravated assault by a 19-year-old hotel worker in Colorado. She later told the police, “Every time I said no he tightened his hold around me.” A week after he was charged, Bryant gave a tearful press conference where he confessed to cheating on his wife Vanessa, but vehemently denied the assault allegation. What happened next was all too predictable for its time. Jeremy Gordon recounted what was happening in both the courthouse and in the court of public opinion:

Over the next year and a half, his lawyers attacked the accuser’s credibility by pointing out she’d had sex with another man in the week before the alleged assault, that she’d attempted suicide in the past, and that she had been initially excited to meet Kobe. (Her identity was also leaked.) Predictably, NBA fans took his side. I — and almost every other casual basketball observer from that era — can remember multiple conversations about whether Kobe had really done it, most of which concluded that he had not. (A popular line of logic: ‘Why would someone as famous as Kobe Bryant need to rape someone?’)

In 2004, the assault case was dropped by prosecutors after the accuser decided not to testify at the trial. Following the dismissal of criminal charges, Bryant made the following statement:

Although I truly believe this encounter between us was consensual, I recognize now that she did not and does not view this incident the same way I did. After months of reviewing discovery, listening to her attorney, and even her testimony in person, I now understand how she feels that she did not consent to this encounter.

While Gordon read this as Bryant’s “literally admitting” his sexual assault, Ashley Reese in her “How to Talk About Kobe Bryant’s Legacy” saw it differently. To her:

This came off as a non-apology. Sure, he acknowledged how she felt, but it still read as if her interpretation of the night diverted from reality—namely, his experience. But over 15 years later, the allegations are just a blip in Bryant’s legacy.

While they interpreted Bryant’s statement differently, both Gordon and Reese agree that everything seemed to shake out in Bryant’s favor at the time and both find it unacceptable to treat it “as little more than an aside” in his story now. When Bryant was killed in that helicopter crash, Gordon lamented the two divides that seemed inevitable on social media, between:

those who cared that Kobe Bryant committed a brutal sexual assault, and those who did not, at least not right now, but probably not ever. In a world in which the creative bodies of numerous public figures — some more talented than others — have recently been invalidated because they (allegedly or not) committed sexual assaults, I knew that Kobe was going to receive an infinite number of gauzy, heartbroken tributes from strangers glossing over or even ignoring the worst thing he’d ever done.

Gordon went on to describe the “acceptable” trade-off for too many people this way: “what’s one maybe-rape measured against 81 points in a game and five championships? What’s the private pain of one anonymous person against the public joy of millions?”

Ashley Reese argues that the consequences extend beyond these false equivalents, recounting the experience of Felicia Sonmez, a journalist at The Washington Post, a few weeks ago.

After Bryant’s death, Sonmez posted to social media a link to a 2016 Daily Beast story titled, “Kobe Bryant’s Disturbing Rape Case: The DNA Evidence, the Accuser’s Story, and the Half-Confession.” For doing so and triggering a thundering backlash across the internet, she was subsequently suspended by the Post. The newspaper’s argument was, essentially, that her doing so was poor timing while people were still coming to terms with their grief.

In an argument that says a great deal about our inability to hold two conflicting thoughts in our heads at one time and our rush to black-or-white judgments, Reese wrote:

People who work at news outlets are going through these same emotions, but they have a responsibility to tell the truth. It can be hard to tell the truth sometimes—especially when it diverts from the legacy we want from a celebrity; especially one who died tragically and young, one who a city revered, one who his daughters loved and who he loved in return, one who fellow athletes looked up to. But someone has to do it, and while it should be done with care, it must be done. The fact that it cannot be done without death threats as a result speaks volumes, but none louder than when a publication that prides itself on defending the truth acts complicit in that violence.

When our public storyteller’s tell an incomplete story about a hero, they effectively reduce his greatness by oversimplifying the conflicts that produced it in the first place.

Did Kobe Bryant’s full story matter to him and to those who lived (and will continue to live) in the arms of his legacy?

The strength of Bryant’s legacy depends on what you end up believing about him, but one set of beliefs risks losing the almost Greek sense of tragedy in it.

In his Esquire farewell Charles P. Pierce talks about “the terrible irony that he died in a fall from the sky,” because (I think) Bryant’s death speaks to both the lightness of his air and the pull of his gravity. Every mythic figure like him is caught in between, inviting us to look, to never stop looking and to judge him on how he met or failed to meet his internal conflicts head-on. But those judgments are never easy. According to Pierce:

There was no way to work that night in the Colorado hotel into the biography that unspooled thereafter and came to such a sudden end on Sunday. In Massachusetts, for decades, political writers wrestled with where to place Chappaquiddick into the saga of Ted Kennedy, and too many of them gave up and erased the event and Mary Jo Kopechne. But it is 2020 now, and Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Harvey Weinstein is in a New York courtroom, and erasing a female victim is no longer a viable moral and ethical strategy [if it ever was]. Kobe Bryant died on Sunday with one of the young women in his life, and how you will come to measure his life has to be judged by how deeply you believe that he corrected his grievous fault through the life he lived afterwards, and how deeply you believe that he corrected that fault, immediately and beautifully, and in midair.

I don’t think Bryant corrected his faults with the stories he’d already told or in a sacrificial fall from the sky. But I do believe he was still seeking redemption through his stories, bringing the obsessive introspection–that only someone like him could muster–to working through his torments and relieving his soul.

My intuition a few weeks ago was to believe in the earnestness of that quest and the more I discover about him, the more I believe that Kobe Bryant would have attempted to reconcile his demons and angels for his benefit and for ours for as long as he walked among us.

The real tragedy is that he won’t be here to keep trying to tell that story. Elemental struggles like his belong to all of us, whether we grapple with our own versions of them or not.

This post was adapted from my February 23, 2020 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and the contents of some of them are later posted here. If you’d like to receive a weekly newsletter (and not miss out on any), you can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

April 7, 2019 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What is most exceptional about Barry Lopez is his perspective and how he manages to involve us in it.

The remarkable prologue to his new book “Horizons,” finds him in the last place we expect to find him. For an author who has brought us with him to the most remote corners on earth—the iron mines of Aboriginal Australia, the unfathomable expanses of Antarctica, an archeological site on Skraeling Island, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, Cape Foulweather’s “ghosted landscape”—Lopez is reclining on a beach chair at a Hawaiian resort, playing with his grandson in the shallow waves, swimming off shore to show him the sunken battleship Arizona, remembering an odd encounter with John Steinbeck when he too was young and thinking about writing, watching “the pool water shatter into translucent gems” after a tourist’s spontaneous, arcing dive. They’re the reveries of a summer day. And then this, as he looks out from the dreamlike circle of his life and family:

I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

Until now, Barry Lopez’ most acclaimed book was “Arctic Dreams.” It is part travelogue and part meditation on the fragility and resilience of a particular landscape, along with its wildlife and people. Since it came out in 1986, he has written hundreds of articles, along with fiction and essays, but “Horizons” is “Arctic Dream’s” non-fiction companion and successor. It took him more than 30 years to recast what he had to say back then in the face of the profound impacts humanity has had on the earth in those ensuing years.

Robert MacFarlane remarked recently about the strangeness of calling what Lopez does in both of these books non-fiction, thereby defining them by “their negative and restricting relation to fiction.” Lopez breaks open the possibilities of non-fiction for me in the ways that he does for MacFarlane: with often gorgeous prose that is “stylistic adventure,” “ethical address,” and “secular spirituality” where land, wildlife and the traditional knowledge of ancient people are “tutelary presences.” Lopez is the medium that gives them voice when we can’t hear them for ourselves.

In his own writing, MacFarlane lets us feel the land, its wildlife and people too, using “the particular words” that conjure their essences and interactions most evocatively in an age when we’re losing “the language” that we once used to talk about them and therefore “the descriptions” that helped us to connect more deeply to the world around us. Out of MacFarlane’s concern about the loss of these words and memories over the same 30 years, he sees Barry Lopez’ own “life journey” as one “from hope to doubt.”

What I found most fascinating about “Horizon” are the contours of Lopez’ doubt today and how he involves us in the only outcome that seems possible given the uncertainties.

How can you warn us on our lounge chairs without disabling, through a sense of hopelessness, those you are trying so hard to engage?

1. Thirty Years Ago – 1986

The Lopez of “Arctic Dreams,” and much of what he recalls about his observations since, come from his being a fieldworker, meaning that his approach to the places he has visited are those of “attention and interpretation.” This is what MacFarlane has to say about Lopez’ well-honed conjuring tricks in his review of “Horizon”:

In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, Lopez recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Lopez always seems to have believed that if he describes what he’s experienced well enough, his readers and listeners can experience it too, trusting them to draw their own conclusions and to decide on how they’ll respond. In other words, Lopez invites a state of mind where decision-making becomes possible.

The last time I wrote about Lopez here, he talked about one way that he’s thought about it.

I gave a talk once at the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, and I asked the man who was my host, what is it that Emerson and all of these people did on a Sunday afternoon at the Athenaeum? Did they talk about politics, or did they talk about science, or did they talk about sports? What was it that made these talks so much a part of cultural memory for us? And he said they just elevated — they brought the level of the conversation up. And I reflected on that and thought, well, that’s what I want [to do].

On his own page, Lopez describes the conversation partners he’s after in unusually intimate terms: my “family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues—to whom I feel most beholden.” They are “people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.” For them, as he elaborates in “Horizon”: “You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home, that what you’ve found are not your things but our things.” It’s deeply personal sharing–like you’d do around a campfire–while reimagining the possibilities that are ahead of you together.

As the younger man of “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez was concerned about the environmental destruction and loss of habitat that he saw on his travels but challenged those who feared extinction was inevitable, believing that we had enough courage to reverse our course, even if our actions might not bear fruit in our lifetimes. Some of it may have been trusting too much that the conversation he had elevated would spur all those others to follow through. As he writes in “Horizon”:

Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life [my role?] so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?

The long road that Lopez took to “Horizon” involved going back to many of the places he had visited over the years to see what he had missed and to discover how the hope of “Arctic Dreams” could evolve into something sharper, with greater urgency and far less certainty.

2. Today

Lopez talked about this 30-year journey at the Free Library here on Tuesday, and during the hour and a half that he filled with his stories, I tried to track the emotions underneath them and how they have changed his role as an observer, interpreter and catalyst for those who are listening.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday night

I didn’t think that I’d ever get the chance.

As recently as a year ago, I’d heard that Lopez was gravely ill with a particularly aggressive cancer so I never thought I’d see him read from his work or sit in the same room with him. In addition to being something of a miracle, his appearance here this week was also a statement about his own resilience, the personification of survival in the face of his body’s self-destructiveness. He never talked about his illness, but his message was more intertwined with his own survival now and you could feel it.

Lopez is a tough old bird who’s been a relentless wanderer, a describer of all the shades of purple that the light reveals in a remote canyon, a professional diver, a chronicler of “the shock wave” of the Middle East, and the pilgrim who made his Pashtun guides take him to the empty niches at Bamyan where monumental statues of the Buddha carved from the living rock 1600 years ago had been blasted into oblivion by the Taliban–why?–because their voids called out to him. Voids like this are far more fixed in his vision today than they were 30 years ago.

It’s why MacFarlane describes “Horizon” as “a deeply wounded book” about “the throttled Earth.” Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still includes his “family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues” but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided “heroic communities” of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

When you face your own death and the death of the world you have lovingly observed and interpreted, there is far greater urgency in your message. From MacFarlane again:

The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, [writes Lopez,] the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.’

At the Free Library, Lopez talked repeatedly about the centuries of practical wisdom that enable traditional societies to repair themselves, to “go on,” whatever knocks them down. Instead of our Western view of progress—the confidence that things will always get better—he counters that the health of the world is following a very different path and that our only hope rests with those who already have (or are willing to nurture) the ability to start over again, to survive, even when they find themselves in the darkest places.

As I listened I found myself wondering: when is the last time that anyone I know had to figure out a way to survive from one day to the next?

And as with MacFarlane’s lost “words” and “descriptions of nature”: how much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly “throttled” world?

There were glimmers of anger, impatience and disgust in Lopez’ uncertainty on Tuesday night, but only briefly and they quickly disappeared behind his refusal to despair. In a recent interview, Lopez acknowledged these judgmental tendencies when he talked about why it took him so long to follow up on “Arctic Dreams”:

I think I had a greater tendency when I was younger to judge, to maintain states of anger. I had impatience. And I had to bleed all that off before I wrote ‘Horizon.’

In their place, this new book and his coming out to talk about it is more like one of the prophet Jeremiah’s Old Testament lamentations. Particularly in his fifth lamentation, Jeremiah tells of how the people of God lived through the destruction of Jerusalem but in the end stubbornly refuse to abandon their hope despite a deep uncertainty about their deliverance.

Lopez sounded like an Old Testament prophet when he said of himself a couple of years ago: “It is necessary to have people out on the edge calling back to us about what’s coming.”

Like others who have cried out to be heard from the wilderness, his perspective today is forged by his own survival, his willingness to look at the voids that chronicle our race towards destruction, his urgent recognition that we have limited time to turn the tide, and his refusal to despair because so many of those he has encountered as he’s wandered this earth have also found dignified ways to survive.

Without hectoring or drama, the prophetic perspective in Lopez’ current stories invites us to re-imagine the future in ways that—quite frankly–seem impossible for us to ignore.

This post is adapted from my April 7, 2019 Newsletter. You can subscribe here and receive it in you inbox every Sunday morning

Writing Your Thinking Down Enables High Level Problem-Solving

February 10, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Gathering your thoughts, working them out on a page, and sharing that page with others is the spur for high level, creative problem-solving and the best (most productive) conversations. Instead of “winging it” by making up what you think, want and propose as you go along, the discipline of writing your thinking down first makes a remarkable difference.

It’s more than laziness that gets in the way of our doing so, although laziness and the smug belief that our wits will be enough is certainly a part of it. There is, after all, a long tradition of not thinking too much “while going with what we believe and feel” in American culture. The great historian Richard Hofstadter wrote AntiIntellectualism in America in 1964, and others like Susan Jacoby in The Age of American Unreason (2008) have picked up the thread more recently. Anyone viewing the political maelstrom today can see a ton of beliefs and emotions for every ounce of careful thinking.

So our reluctance to think through the issues beforehand is nothing new. And our suspicion of “intellectuals” who actually do helps us to confirm our general unwillingness to read about, consider, write down our thoughts, learn how to dissent from others’ thinking, and really converse with one another. There are several contributors to this reluctance, and I guess I’m working my way back through the list, having already discussed the emotional bars to political conversation (or how “The Danger of Absolute Thinking is Absolutely Clear”) and the generative quality of dissent (about Charlan Nemeth’s book In Defense of Troublemakers) on this page.

So what does writing down our thoughts before sharing them with others have to do with living and working? As it turns out, quite a lot.

As a group, Americans clearly don’t believe that the act of thinking (for itself) is as great as all those intellectuals keep telling them it is. As a people, our reaction is kind of: show me what’s so good about it and then I might try thinking-about-it-more if I’m convinced that it might actually be useful.

Among other things, this skepticism was the subject of another recent post about Robert Kaplan and his Earning the Rockies. Kaplan notes that Americans “washed” all the philosophizing that had trailed them from Europe in their vast frontier, reducing that thinking and ideology into something that they could actually use to build a new way of life. “Show me how all of these ideas can help me to solve the problems I face everyday, and then, maybe I’ll take them seriously.”  It’s no mistake that Missouri, the gateway to the American frontier, is also called the Show-Me State.

What Americans found on the frontier (and translated into a national way of life) was that ideas are useful when they help us to improve our hard-working lives and, in particular, to make more money while we’re at it. I suspect that this makes us unique as a country and a people. Unlike the intellectual elites of Europe who argue ideas, our favorite “intellectuals” are of the practical variety. They show us how to live and work better (entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk) and to make more money while doing so (Warren Buffett and Vanguard’s Jack Bogle).

Which is where Jeff Bezos comes in.

In a week that saw him fighting with the National Enquirer about nude pictures that he exchanged with his mistress—more on that later—we also know Bezos as the founder of Amazon, which has become one of the largest companies in the world and made him the world’s richest man in only 20 years. Like Jobs, Musk, Buffett and Bogle, there has been a great deal of intellectual rigor, with highly practical outcomes, behind Bezos’ and Amazon’s remarkable success.

While I’ve been talking for months about Amazon’s anti-competitive and job-killing behaviors, it also seems fitting to recognize one of the insights that Bezos has used to drive Amazon’s dominance–and how you might profit from it too.  All that is necessary is overcoming the laziness of easy answers and some of our native suspicions about thinking too much.

1. On Writing Your Thinking Down Before You Share It

To build one of the largest companies in the world in two decades took several really good ideas, and even more importantly, several really good ways to turn those ideas into solutions for the legion of problems that every new company faces. Many of those solution-generating approaches were applied by Bezos, and one of them, in particular, has been a key to Amazon’s supremacy as an on-line retailer and to its leadership in related industries, like cloud-based data solutions.

In his excellent 2-5-19 post on what he calls Bezos’ “writing management strategy,” Ben Bashaw gathered the underlying documentation and made several of the observations that I’ll be paraphrasing below. He starts off by noting:

There’s probably no technology company that values the written word and produces written output quite as much as Amazon….

Bezos is Amazon’s chief writing evangelist, and his advocacy for the art of long-form writing as a motivational tool and idea-generation technique has been ordering how people think and work at Amazon for the last two decades—most importantly, in how the company creates new ideas, how it shares them, and how it gets support for them from the wider world.

(How, how, how instead of why, why, why are questions that practical intellectuals ask.)

As a manager, Bezos grew impatient with meetings as brainstorming sessions early on. He came to appreciate what the behavioral research tends to prove: that individuals are better at coming up with new ideas on their own, while groups are better at recognizing the best ones and deciding how to implement them.

But he also appreciated that for groups to engage quickly, a new idea needed to be delivered “in high resolution detail” by the individual who had come up with it. The insight led to a June, 2004 email that banned the use of powerpoint presentations at Amazon and insisted that people with ideas tee-up the meetings that would receive them with tight, well-structured and reasoned narrative texts.

The reason writing a good 4 page memo is harder than ‘writing’ a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas.

Bezos banned powerpoint presentations company-wide because he knew that to generate new ideas consistently, a business needs better processes it can repeat every time. He was also convinced that writing your ideas down clarifies your thinking about them and improves the chance that your ideas will be good ones because you’ve thought nearly everything through beforehand.

When composing a detailed narrative, logical inconsistencies are no longer hidden but acknowledged and (if possible) addressed. To set up “a deep debate of the idea’s costs and merits,” these 4 pages are designed to be “a full logical argument” by the idea’s sponsor that includes a narrative about the issue; how others have attempted to address it before; how the sponsor’s approach differs; the advantage of the new idea to the company; a defense to potential objections; and attachments that include the relevant data. In other words, in drafting the memo, the idea’s sponsor has considered it from every angle he or she can think of before it’s presented.

A link that Bashaw includes in his post references first-hand group responses at Amazon after the sponsor provided his or her written narrative. Discussion is “very focused” around the proposal; meeting participants are “incredibly sharp” and “you can expect the meeting to be among the most difficult and intellectually challenging that you will ever attend”; “data is king” and had better be well-researched and assembled; and how Bezos would “consistently surprise” the idea’s sponsor with at least one question about “the big picture” that the sponsor had never considered before. No more rambling brainstorming meetings where powerpoints create the illusion of depth but fail to engage the participants productively. It is one practical reason why Amazon has grown as quickly and boldly as it has.

What may be most interesting here is how drafting a tightly written narrative that contains your full logical argument can stimulate engagement with groups and others that you need to engage on any issue that is truly important to your life and work. It is taking a full stand about something, declaring yourself in a way that immediately invites respect and collaboration. It is a demonstration that you’ve thought about everything you can think of already—including what these others stand to gain—on whatever issue you are raising. The work that you’ve put behind it makes you an immediately credible partner to explore the next steps.

In an aside to this basic wisdom, it’s hardly surprising that Bezos used his customary approach to narrative writing when he accused the National Enquirer of blackmail this week. The Enquirer threatened to publish nude pictures that Bezos took of himself during an extramarital affair if he refused to abandon prior legal claims that he had against the gossip page. (If you have not read Bezos’ refusal to bow to these threats because–as it turns out–he was willing to publish the photos himself, here is the link to “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker”.)

What I found interesting enough to share with you was the following: (1) how many other people, both in and outside business circles, take Bezos’ writing seriously and (2) how one subsequent commentator actually provided a tongue-in-cheek critique of his “think of everything” writing style a couple of days ago. Jenni Avinns, a writer for Quartz business news, led off with the observation that Bezos’ post “clocked in at fewer than 1500 words” or, by my calculation, the four pages that launch all good ideas at Amazon. Then she gave some additional observations on how Bezos writes down his thinking, including his willingness to:

Embrace the poetry
If pictures of your penis are at the center of the confrontation and the person threatening you is David Pecker, don’t shy away. (Even if your blue-chip private security consultant is de Becker and it rhymes.) Put that Pecker right in the headline. Put a “Mr.” in front of it to emphasize the indignity: “No thank you, Mr. Pecker.” …

Make up Words
If the English language isn’t complex enough to provide the word you need to describe how your ownership of a national media outlet complicates your dealings with other powerful people [including the President], make one up. “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” People will know what you mean, and even appreciate that you didn’t permit a tedious copyeditor to question you, though you clearly employ some.

Make fun of their words with “scare quotes” and repetition
“Several days ago, an AMI leader advised us that Mr. Pecker is ‘apoplectic’ about our [i.e. the Post’s] investigation” of his company’s relationship with the Saudi government, wrote Bezos. Apoplectic is a strong word, and honestly makes this person sound kind of hysterical and unhinged. If someone says they’re apoplectic, turn it around and say it again, like it’s a medical condition: “A few days after hearing about Mr. Pecker’s apoplexy, we were approached, verbally at first, with an offer. “ …

Just [provide] the facts: I’m Jeff Bezos, and you’re not
If someone attempts to question your business acumen, school them:“ I founded Amazon in my garage 24 years ago, and drove all the packages to the post office myself. Today, Amazon employs more than 600,000 people, just finished its most profitable year ever, even while investing heavily in new initiatives, and it’s usually somewhere between the #1 and #5 most valuable company in the world.”

But act relatable
… “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”

Once again, great narrative writing skills always translate when you are trying to solve important problems at work or in private life. Unfortunately, they can rarely explain away incomprehensibly poor personal judgments. Perhaps it’s no accident that the last time I imagined pictures like this, they were taken by somebody who was (improbably and poetically) named Mr. Anthony Weiner.

On the other hand, and practically speaking once again, whether his post succeeds in solving Mr. Bezos’ immediate problem with the Enquirer is something I guess we’ll all just have to wait and see.

An Image of How Tight Narrative Writing with High Resolution Details Might Actually Look

2. How I’ve Used This Kind of Narrative Writing Recently

An important problem ahead of me is attracting interest in my first book.

I want to make sure that its disparate parts (arguments, short stories, etc.) hang together; that they reinforce one another nicely and enhance the freshness of my thesis; that likely questions about the approach I’ve taken are asked and answered by me; and that the benefits to readers in my approach are clearly in mind throughout.

Moreover, these problems are closely related to another one, because what will attract a publisher most is a well-considered and organized book with fresh ideas that meets readers’ needs to take more satisfaction from their work.

These are precisely the kinds of problems that “tight narrative writing with high resolution detail” can package for everyone who faces me down the line, including agents, publishers, retailers (like Amazon) and, of course, the readers themselves. In other words, it’s not just about your book but how you tell the stories that need to be told to others about it.

For the past several months, I’ve been working on the written materials that serve up my book to everyone outside of my book writing process. Without handing out the book itself and expecting people to read it, these are the shorthand essentials: descriptions of key concepts and how they operate, along with demonstrations of my ability to persuade with an argument, tell a good story and understand who might be interested in them. In other words: tight narrative writing with high resolution detail.

Quite frankly, it has been a lot of work, but its almost done. I’ve been amazed by the foundation it has provided to promote my book and how much the book itself has changed (and improved) from my efforts to capture it in its own narrative.

I had also taken this approach before I learned that Jeff Bezos had been taking it at Amazon too. It’s a great idea that’s long been out there waiting to be picked up and put to good use. But best of all, anyone can take the same approach to face a challenging and skeptical world with a maximum of confidence when trying to solve an important problem.

This post was adapted from my February 10, 2019 newsletter