• Jesus Christ…never wrote down a word, the Apostles (like Paul) did. • Buddha never wrote any of his teachings, his disciples did. • Marco Polo told his cellmate about his travels while they were in jail, and his cellmate (who was an actual scribe) wrote them down. • Dostoyevsky dictated his novels to his wife, who wrote them down. • Winston Churchill dictated most of his writing to his secretary. • Malcolm X dictated his iconic autobiography to journalist Alex Haley. For thousands of years, writing was a specific job, different from thinking. People who did the writing were called “scribes,” and they were not themselves the esteemed thinkers and influencers of their era (what we would now call a “thought leader”). They were considered artisans with particular skills, like those of lawyers or mechanics. Take one of the most prolific authors of the Roman age, the great Julius Caesar. He used scribes to record almost every single line in all of his letters and books. Why did he use scribes instead of writing them himself? For the obvious reason: his time was too valuable to be spent mas- tering the skill of writing words so they read properly on the page. Julius Caesar spent his time thinking and doing things, not writing. Caesar had scribes record his thoughts as he spoke them out loud, and then he signed his name to them. His volumes of letters and correspondences are all rightly authored by him, yet he “wrote” none of the actual words down. That’s why we advocate the scribe process for some people: it 152 · ThE SCriBE METhOD