I have now released my full Mindful History course on my Learnworlds academy.
I am offering a special introductory price of $49 for this course, in which you will get three hours of video content and some great resources, including a simple five step process to apply history to decision making in your life.
In addition, as a member of the Burning Archive community you can also enter the coupon code ‘“Burning23” and get the course with an extra 30 per cent discount.
In the course, I discuss the power of stories in making sense of the past. Stories are complex cognitive machines, and we, humans, are a narrative animal. The first step I set out in my five-step framework to use history when making a decision is to ask, “What is the story?”
Stories yield insights; but they also lure decision-makers into traps, especially if they fixate on a simplistic story that does not grant reality to all the forces and players and chaos of real history.
Historical narratives have lured the American leadership class into such thinking traps in their war in Ukraine, just as they did European elites before World War One, and any number of elites around the world on other occasions. There are some powerful narratives about history that mesmerise and mislead people. For example, Ukraine is fighting a war of national liberation, like a replay of the American war of independence. Russia is an evil empire run by inhuman dictators, like a replay of Stalin or Ivan the Terrible. America is the apotheosis of freedom, democracy and Western civilization, like Rome or Athens in its heyday.
My course will help you make up your own mind, and to avoid such thinking traps, through curiosity, empathy, intuition and judgement. Check it out.
And why not also join my free weekly newsletter at jeffrich.substack.com