Lessons are for kids, themes are for adults. We want to build highlighters into themes…
What are the concepts, highlighters, principles, and messages that we want to focus on? What are the "tools" we are passing along through our content?
Firstly, it is worth mentioning that we should judge which highlighters to use based on two verticals:
What is a “highlighter” specifically? A highlighter is a simple, effective point that we wish to make. They’re articulated concisely (or visually represented quickly) in consideration of the pacing we require for our videos.
Highlighters can be:
Overall, highlighters are points that (we believe) when understood by a large percentage of people (our viewers), will help them to re-orient their perspective of the world and engage with it in a more critically minded way.
To use the well-known metaphor - "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime."
Our goal with highlighters is to take a popular geopolitical scenario, which gets attention. And then provide a highlighter that doesn’t only relate to the geopolitical scenario (e.g. war), but is a lesson a viewer can use when looking at any other scenario (e.g. war).
Making a person wiser not about 1 conflict, but all future conflicts. A wiser person to all their systematic decision making in life.
Daniel Schmachtenberger: Ultimately, if our videos’ themes/highlighters were mostly focused on conveying what Daniel has shared in podcasts he has done (example), then I would be very content. In many respects, I want Telos as a company to be disseminating ideas similar to what Daniel is sharing.
A lot of the below is ideas not directly that Daniel talks to, but they’re on points he touches on. He makes other points in podcasts worth listening to. Here are some good snippets to check. Listen to this for 30 minutes and you might feel differently about the world!