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Notes -
A random selection of old moralizing history books with salient and exaggerated examples of the consequences of leadership. Start with Roman histories and go through medieval histories, only using the best anecdotes selected with wisdom. Like passages from an old book on Napoleon that specifically relates his personality deficits and biases to his campaign failures, with none of the irrelevant factoids that modern historians wrongly believe should be in history books. They must internalize the Great Man theory of history writ as large as possible. They should have an idea of which Byzantine emperors resulted in their people being overrun by Ottomans, and also which Muslims were able to conquer so much territory and with what means, etc etc.
Large-scale history is important because an ambitious man should see that wasting his talent selling overpriced shitty sneakers will eventually — over many iteration of souls — result in the complete destruction of his nation, and means that all of the efforts of his people were for nothing, which history proves time and time again. If the people/nation do not have the right hierarchy and orientation, that’s problem #1 to solve. History teaches that well. The riches of Baghdad meant nothing when one of their leaders decided to insult the Mongols. Who remembers the wealthiest Iroquois? Where are the riches of Mansa Musa?
Great Man theory is essential because it’s the most effective method for information internalization. Man is a social creature who naturally comes equipped with disk space that is only allotted for social information. Our memory for other people is naturally superior than other memory for statistics and rules. And so what you do is you represent human nature as people, dramatized, so that a reader can store as much information as efficiently as possible, imitating and revering some examples, afraid of other examples, and so on. Great Man Theory is the only cognitively correct way to study history for a leader. Academics are too dumb to realize that. It’s something like 1000x more useful to know the narrative of Napoleon in relation to his personality and those of his advisers and foes than to know any date, or any location, or even how to spell his name. At the end of the day what we aim to take away is something that can be applied in our own lives.
So after the highest hierarchy of history, you can move down to lessons about companies and how companies thrive and fail. Because this is probably where an ambitious young man will end up, anyway. So like, essays or passages from essays on IBM, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then I’d suggest an “inoculation against liars”, so some readings about how mainstream news lies about stuff, how to glean truthful information.
Lastly, readings from the Bible and readings from psychology
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