Stranger in the bar said, “For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”
Difficult as it may be to accept, it might be true. Whether it is true or not doesn’t matter so much because I think the exercise of boiling down a subject to two sentences is tremendously valuable.
Glen Whitman, an economist who has compiled a list of two things ever since he met the stranger in the bar, says, “The “two-ness” is crucial. Three things wouldn’t demand such disciplined thinking; one thing wouldn’t give a truthful picture.”
The list hasn’t been updated for quite sometime.
Akshat Rathi 