Certain works of art revitalize your future. García Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude is one.
100 Years of Solitude features a narrative technique— Poetic History— that revitalizes your brain's sense of your future.
In the novel, García Marquez continually reintroduces familiar objects as if they were new.
The rediscovering begins with the novel's surprising first sentence:
“In a flash, I realized: I had to tell the story the way that my grandmother told hers, starting from that afternoon when the boy is taken by his father to discover ice.”— Gabriel García Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude
How do you discover ice when it's already known? The future suddenly brims with possible secrets, familiar ones, waiting to be rediscovered.
A common real-life example? Attending a wedding as a married guest.
The joy unfolding before you prompts your brain to recall the happiness of your own wedding day. An experience that reconnects you to your partner.
So you get better at identifying what you feel and why.
So we have a reference library of literary works to help you alleviate hard feelings when they hit and to flourish by building up stores of positive emotions.
You can learn more about the narrative technique that revitalizes your future in chapter 20 of Wonderworks.
03. Commonsense
How to Keep Your Customers Happy
Imagine that you’re a potter born into a long line of potters. A bum knee keeps you away from your wheel for long stretches.
You spend your convalescence periods studying new glazes and composites.
Through trial and error, your study pays off. Your work looks like no one else's. You've cornered the market.
You go on to pioneer modern marketing techniques: creating urgency for your wares among the aristocracy and producing lower-priced versions at scale to satisfy everyone else.
Then you hit a wall.
You design something new, inspired by something ancient.
Classically-shaped stoneware cast in rich new colors, stamped cameo-style with ancient gods and deities.
Naked gods and deities.
Your Victorian audience finds them a bit “too warm” for their liking.
If you chose option B, you have the kind of commonsense that could make you as successful as Josiah Wedgwood.
Commonsense is matching the newness of your plan to the newness of the situation.
Wedgwood was an artist, scientist, and marketer, one who never forgot that his success depended on knowing his audience.
He knew his customers were newly enamored by Roman antiquities: the ruins of Pompeii had just been discovered and British interest in classical art was surging.
He also understood that Victorian morals made nudity a no-no.
So Wedgwood draped gowns and figs over the offending body parts in his new product line.
Original Jasperware is now coveted by collectors and museums. The line remains in production today.
Fun fact— Wedgwood's extraordinary success funded the work of another British scientist: his grandson, Charles Darwin.
Why do we do this exercise?
The more you familiarize with real-world, commonsense decisions of the past, the more you improve your own ability to calibrate your response to the challenge at hand.
Missed an issue? They're all available in our archive.
