NO CRYING IN CONTRACTS JOURNAL #1
Hi Everyone,
Thank you for signing up for the No Crying In Contracts Journal! I hope to entertain and give you new ideas to think about through updates of things I’m working on, reading, and thinking about. I’m always working on essays covering a variety of subjects, usually business, law and history. I will share new essays every few weeks.
These newsletters and essays are the result of a writing course I took called Write of Passage (aka WOP). On the surface it’s a writing class, but beneath it is a way to synthesize information. Nothing forces me to distill ideas more than writing them down and sharing them with others.
Why Is This Writing Project Called “No Crying In Contracts”?
I stole this line from my Contracts professor. He used it to make a technical point about damages in contracts lawsuits. (If you want more on that subject, be careful what you wish for.)
I adapted the concept in my practice to push business owners to thoughtfully draft contracts. All business owners want certainty about their future. A well-written contract is a roadmap that gives them all the certainty they can hope for.
Also, almost nobody understands how much judges hate people who end up in court due to sloppy contracts. If you cry about it to a judge, in the words of my grandmother, the judge will give you something to really cry about.
What Have I Been Up To?
Rosylyn and I finally took a honeymoon trip. We kept it simple with a mini tour of Canada. Three days in Montreal, two days in a cabin in rural Quebec, and two days in Toronto. The highlights of each place were (in order): escargot, a giant beaver dam, and sushi.
Caption: Escargot at Joe Beef.
Caption: A major league beaver dam. The beavers were asleep inside, thankfully.
What’s On My Mind?
Finding The Underground River
In my last WOP essay I explained my struggle between writing about legal subjects versus other ideas that interest me more. Focusing on one topic in isolation might make me feel like an expert, but my drive to make wiser decisions exceeds professional vanity. I would rather explore an array of subjects to find the underground river connecting them all.
An underground river is unseen, powerful and dynamic. It persists unaffected by changes above the surface. It quietly gives life to everything above it.
Random ideas constantly spring to the surface of my mind. I don’t know how they are connected, but I feel a common current between them.
Studying - even daydreaming about - disparate subjects like financial history, maps, and animal behaviors can reveal universal lessons. Finding those connections will help me make better, bolder decisions with less hesitation.
Old Maps
Imagine for a second that you and your family all drew a map of your hometown. Every one of you would draw something different based on your experience. Every place you name is there because there is some story behind it. There is no right or wrong way to draw the town as it appears in your own memory.
As a kid I loved studying maps, looking for names of places I had been to and imagining places I had never seen. Sometimes I would see my small hometown and wonder how the mapmaker heard about it.
I’m even more fascinated by maps now. A map is the visual manifestation of the mapmaker’s knowledge of the world at the time it was drawn. I love thinking about the creativity the mapmaker used when deciding what details to include and what to leave out.
The journey along my underground river will include lots of old maps. As my first cool old map, here is one that I first stumbled upon at the Houston Museum of Natural History (the 1774 original!!). I later found a digital version on this awesome website with thousands of old maps.
The detail that wowed me the most was that this mapmaker in London marked a spot exactly where Eastern Kentucky would later be. He didn’t mention names of any communities, but he did write “Mines of Coal,” almost as a placeholder. (Here is a link to the zoomed-in area.)
The history of Eastern Kentucky is the history of coal, a theme that is still part of political conversations now. Somehow a guy in London knew about this in 1774?! My imagination runs wild to think of how that tiny bit of information made it to the mapmaker’s desk. Whether through a story, survey or letter, the news had to travel across hostile frontier land, across the Atlantic Ocean, then through the clamoring streets of 18th century London. Simply wow.
Enough For Now
Thank you for taking the time to read this far. Any thoughts or feedback you’d like to share, please let me know! I will always be calibrating this letter to balance details I find interesting with those you enjoy reading.
If someone forwarded this article to you and you would like to read more, check out No Crying In Contracts, or subscribe here.
Credits: I owe a huge thank you to Charlie Becker for his thoughtful editing advice. Thanks a million!