Matt Levine is the Bloomberg columnist who writes the 4000+ word daily newsletter 'Money Stuff'.
I've written about his method with an example in #SOTD 55.
Context for that story: In early May-22, the Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal, had made a statement about the Twitter Board agreeing to the stake sale to Elon Musk:
A company CEO maximising shareholder value - that doesn't seem so surprising!
Matt Levine didn't think so. He went on to deconstruct why that statement was actually surprising given the current context.
Here's how I had deconstructed it:
And which is where I come to today's #SOTD.
In a recent interview on the Longform podcast, Matt actually revealed the method underlying his thinking/writing process.
In the conversation, the host makes a point that Matt's pieces seem to have two parts:
Matt thinks that there's not two, but three parts to his writing. Starting from about minute 10:01, here's how he puts it.
So Matt is saying - before you give your take about why something is surprising, you need to set the context, you need to set the norm.
It is essentially what I had written in the previous #SOTD - but cool to hear from Matt himself!
Also interesting additional perspective that he gives is - when you think of stuff at a deep, fundamental level, it clarifies your own thinking and enables you to interpret current events using the right lens.
#SOTD 89
Ravi
PS: Here is the context for #SOTD and the 'Ultimate Guide to Storytelling Techniques' framework I use - in case you joined this series late! Here is the archive of previous posts. Click here to subscribe.
A Storytelling Coach More details here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ravishankar-iyer/
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