Timely and highly recommended reading to remind us of the zenith while we are at the nadir today

Basically, what I was doing was a deep dive.

Fittingly, Lincoln’s own education was itself a kind of lifelong series of self-directed deep dives. He got his start in law, for instance, when he met a lawyer named John T. Stuart, who allowed Lincoln to borrow some of his law books. “If you wish to be a lawyer,” Lincoln would later tell a young man, “attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.”

His campaign against slavery, too, began by going deep. “He searched through the dusty volumes of congressional proceedings in the State library,” William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner, recalled, “and dug deeply into political history.” His way, Herndon observed, was to dig up a question by the roots and dry it out by the fires of the mind, until he could see it for what it was.

Nowhere was this ability to see things plainly more evident than in the Gettysburg Address, which was just 271 words long. You might think such a short speech was easy to write, in fact, it was the descendent of a decade-plus-long deep dive into language, elocution, rhetoric, history, law, politics and the founding ideals of the nation – a word he repeated in the speech five times. It was an expression of the work Lincoln did to get to the “nub” of a subject, as his law partner said. As Wills writes in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America, Lincoln was able to, as a result of his masterful understanding of the issues and opportunity at hand, to effectively redefine and refound the nation in a single speech, in a way that two and a half years of war had not been able to.

https://ryanholiday.medium.com/do-you-know-how-to-do-a-deep-dive-b05d7d104411