No Apology: The Structure

ByJohn Brown

I posted my review of No Apology on a few sites the other day. I can understand how some folks might be skeptical that the book is nothing more than a PR puff job. But I’m surprised at how many refuse to even test their assumptions with ten or fifteen minutes of reading (or listening to a few minutes of the book on audio).

Too bad for them. They’re missing out.

For those who think they know Romney from what’s being reported in the press, I want to suggest you listen to or read Pat Caddell’s recent comments on 9/21/12 at the Accuracy in Media conference. Caddell is a Democrat, BTW. He is the founder of Cambridge Survey Research, a public opinion pollster, and an expert in analyzing public opinion.  He’s been working for democratic campaigns for a long, long time. He started with the McGovern campaign.  Then worked for the Jimmy Carter campaign, for Gary Hart, for Joe Biden, and Jerry Brown. His speech is titled “The Audacity of Corruption”.  Find it here: http://www.aim.org/video/pat-caddell-the-audacity-of-corruption/

Back in college I took this class on epistemology (how we know what we know). It was fascinating. One of the best classes I took. One of the things the professor taught us was that the first step in examining someone’s ideas was to capture them. So he’d have us research all sorts of stuff and then write a short paper in which we restated the ideas in summary form.

A few years later I read Steven Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Successful people. An amazing book. One of the habits was to seek first to understand, then to be understood. He pointed out that probably the best measure of whether you have actually understood someone is that you can restate their point in your own words to their satisfaction.

First seek to understand, then to be understood. Capture.

I’m going to try to do that here.

I’ll start by outlining the structure of the book.

CHAPTERS 1-3
Romney shares some interesting insights about the four main current geopolitical strategies being employed by major players around the world and the threats they pose to us. He also considers lessons from great nations in the past that have fallen—what were their mistakes and how can we avoid them.

CHAPTER 4
Romney discusses key ways we can grow American “soft power” and maintain our “hard power” abroad.

CHAPTERS 5-9
Romney discusses domestically what we need to do to remain internally powerful, and, therefore, prosperous and free. Topics include the economy and jobs (chapter 5), the entitlement programs social security, medicare, and medicaid (chapter 6), health care (chapter 7), education (chapter 8), and energy (chapter 9).

CHAPTER 10
Romney suggests that culture is a huge factor in the success of nations. He summarizes key values and practices he feels will promote a strong culture.

CHAPTER 11 – EPILOGUE
Romney provides a method for gauging how we’ll we’re doing—a set of national indicators—as well as a summary of all the things he discussed in the preceding chapters that he believes will make and keep America strong.

The central overarching theme of the book is that America will only remain strong if we follow certain principles. We’re at a point where many feel America is starting its demise. Romney rejects that must be the case.

In the next post, I’ll capture chapter 1 and make my few comments. I hope you join me 🙂

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  • Gun Runner wins Dragon Award

    ByJohn Brown

    I was very happy to receive news that GUN RUNNER, the novel Larry Correia and I wrote together, just won the 2021 Dragon Award for Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel.

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    As stated in earlier posts, the seed came from Larry’s eleven-year-old son, Joe.

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  • Good Stuff! Factfulness by Hans Rosling

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    Are things really bad as they seem on the news?

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    Do we actually have an accurate picture of what’s going on in the world?

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  • The MacFarlane (Tor), Correia, Hines Cage Match: Put It In The C Story

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    No Apology

    ByJohn Brown

    The Book

    Political TV ads can be fun. And annoying.

    Debates can be fun. And maddening.

    You can indeed learn things about the candidates from watching the ads and debates. But fifteen and thirty second snippets of information really don’t give you the full picture. And sometimes they actually hide the facts, producing nothing more than informational smog.

    Recently, I decided I wanted to really know what Mitt Romney thought.  What he was about.  What he hopes to accomplish if he wins the presidency. If Mitt was someone in my neighborhood, I’d go visit the man, and we’d have a chat.

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    Of course, I’d want time to consider our chat and determine where I did and didn’t agree with him. I’d want to hear what others thought. And I’d want to look into his history, his successes and failures.

    But the first step would be to go to the man himself and hear him out.

    I hate it when people put words in my mouth. I’m sure Romney, or anyone else running, hates that same thing. If I were running, I’d would hope folks would take the time to hear me out. They may ultimately disagree with me on many or a few things. But I’d hope, as they are gathering information, that they would take the time to actually go to the source and listen to what I myself had to say.

    Unfortunately, I can’t walk around the corner and knock on Mitt’s door. But he did write a book that was published in 2010, and it’s probably the next best thing to talking to Romney at his kitchen table. The book is called No Apology: The Case for American Greatness.

    I’ll admit I thought it was going to be a dry guide book explaining his position on every hot political issue. It’s not a guide book.  In fact, he leaves a number of topics out. Nor was it dry.

    I also suspected it might be a scathing attack piece on the Obama administration. It’s not that either.  Not even close. He does criticize some things where he and Obama differ, but he also commends him on a few things. Either way, Obama is a very small part of the book.

    So what IS this book?

    Romney states its purpose in the introduction: it’s “about what I believe should be our primary national objective: to keep America strong and to preserve its place as the world’s leading nation” and “the course I believe we must take to strengthen the nation in order to remain prosperous, secure, and free” (2). It’s about his ideas on how to make sure America does not falter as so many nations have, but remains wealthy, happy, and productive.

    I finished the book yesterday. I found it interesting, personable, sometimes surprising, and insightful.

    I found Mitt Romney to be a man self-deprecating humor.  He’s also a thinking man, one who likes to look at data to see what it shows. It’s clear he’s a man who does NOT think he knows everything or has a monopoly on every good idea, but he’s also a man who demands evidence.  I also saw a man who is kind.  He doesn’t talk much about his 14 years of service as a lay minister in his church in this book, but you can see how those years changed him as he discusses helping the unemployed, out-of-wedlock births, and single-parent families.  Finally, I saw a man who loves, LOVES, America and is convinced she can remain the hope of the earth, but only if we do things that foster our strength.

    This book outlines what he thinks those things are.

    The book is written in a conversational and easy style with many examples from his personal experience, studies, and history. Romney’s record of accomplishments demonstrates his skills and hard work ethic. This book explains to what end he would apply that skill and work.

    If you’re planning on voting this November for the president of the United States, I think you’ll find this book very useful.  You may end up agreeing with many things he says. You may end up disagreeing with him on many points. But before you can do either, you need to understand what Romney’s position actually is.  And the first step in doing so is to fully hear the man out, in his own words, from his own lips.

    As a result, whether you end up deciding he’s your candidate or not, you WILL come away with important insights into the issues discussed.

    What’s Next

    I want you to know that I do not worship George, Ben, Tom, Adam or any of the other guys who formed our constitution and started this nation.

    They put their lives and fortunes on the line for what they believed in. And I am immensely grateful for what they did.  I enjoy tremendous freedoms because of their courage, determination, and sacrifice. Those guys, by-and-large, rock!

    But I do NOT believe that their words are scripture nor that their ideas are sacrosanct—merely to be accepted and not to be considered and questioned and disagreed with.

    Even so, these guys were gutsy and brilliant. They attempted something everyone thought would fail.  Something that HAD failed every time it had been attempted in their recorded history. But they pulled it off and changed the world.

    These guys believed in the common man. They believed that the educated common man was the best person to hold the reins of government. Thomas Jefferson thought up a rhyme to make the idea easy to remember.  He said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

    I can’t argue with that.

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    Because I found No Apology so useful, over the next few days I’m going to summarize Romney’s main points, chapter by chapter, here. I’ll also point out interesting ideas and facts he shares as well as share any questions, quibbles, or disagreements I have.

    I hope you find it useful. More importantly, I hope you read the book and join in the conversation.

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  • The First Step to Being an Entertaining Storyteller

    ByJohn Brown

    What’s the first step to becoming an entertaining storyteller?

    In a recent ZOE Nutrition podcast, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, suggests the key to starting a new behavior, like telling entertaining stories, is doing four things:

    • Make the cue to the behavior OBVIOUS.
    • Make the behavior more ATTRACTIVE.
    • Make the behavior EASY.
    • Make the behavior SATISFYING.

    But what’s the FIRST step?

    It’s mastering the art of showing up.

    That’s it.

    What does that look like?

    He shared an interesting story in the section where they were talking about making the behavior easy.

    START

    Let me give you two examples that’ll probably help clarify. So the first one this is just a really simple tactic, a very actionable thing, that you can use for building better habits. I call it the two-minute rule, and it just says take whatever habit you’re trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do.

    So read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.

    Now sometimes people resist that a little bit because they’re like, okay buddy, you know I know the real goal is not to just take my yoga mat out. I know I’m actually trying to do the workout, so this is some kind of trick, and if I know it’s a trick, then why would I fall for it?

    I have this reader his name is Mitch. I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He lost over 100 pounds. So what is that? 40 or 50 kilos? And he kept it off for more than a decade. And he had this strange little rule for himself where he first started going to the gym, and for the first like 6 weeks he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than 5 minutes.

    So he would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, and drive home, and it sounds ridiculous. You know? It sounds silly. It’s obviously not going to get the guy the results that he wants, but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up.

    He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for 5 minutes, and this is a pretty deep truth about habits. Which is that a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.

    And so the two-minute rule kind of helps push back against that perfectionist tendency that we have sometimes, or against that tendency to try to do too much, and encourages you to master the art of just showing up.

    END

    That’s the answer!

    If we want to be entertaining storytellers, the first, most powerful identity we can adopt is being the creative who shows up every day to work on his or her entertainment. Or maybe it’s five days a week. Or six days, four days, whatever your number is.

    The first identity is that I’m the kind of creative that shows up to work. This awesome work of entertainment.

    So what’s a two-minute behavior that might go along with that?

    Here’s mine. After I come back from weighing myself in the morning, I set my writing session timer, open my writing document, read a bit of what I wrote in the previous session, and identify the task for this session.

    That’s it. Nothing more.

    That’s showing up.

    If I show up and do that, I’ve shown up.

    If, for some reason, I miss showing up. I identify the next slot in that day to get it done.

    I can master all the other parts of writing entertainment later. But I must master the art of SHOWING UP first.

    So tell yourself you’re the kind of creative who shows up to write entertainment every day.

    Make that your identity. You can expand that identity later. But let’s start here.

    Write your two-minute behavior. Get specific on the time and action.

    Then be like Mitch. Show up and celebrate showing up.

    And if, like Mitch, it takes you six weeks to master the art of showing up, then it takes six weeks. Big whoop.

    Writing fiction is a long-haul game. That means the name of this game is playing the game until you win the game. And to do that you first have to master the art of showing up.

    This is the key. When you master this, everything else is possible.

    “I am the kind of creative who shows up every day to create.”

    Tell yourself that. Repeat it when brushing your teeth. Make that your identity. Be that guy.

    If you have a two-minute action for showing up, share it.

    If you don’t have one yet, identify one and share it. And if your action doesn’t work? No biggie. Act like a scientist and tweak it until it does.

    NOTES

    ZOE Nutrition podcast with James Clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdzK8BOfBY or https://zoe.com/learn/podcast-how-to-master-healthy-eating

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2 Comments

  1. Enjoying this so far, John. And I’ll be picking up a copy so that I can follow along with these posts. I’m pretty sure that there will be areas that where I differ greatly with Mr. Romney-I’m not a Republican-but I definitely don’t like the way that the media twists a lot of what he does and tries ever so hard to make him look stupid when he’s obviously not. So, thanks for doing these and I look forward to the series.

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