Election Day question: Should we choose our leaders by lottery ? 🇺🇸🎲🗳️

Plus ... How to deal with winter, counsel your future self, and become a birding badass.

1. WHY NOT. What if the next member of Congress were . . . you? 🤔🏛️

It’s Election Day here in America. But instead of fretting the hours away (or checking citizenship options in friendly countries), let’s try something more productive.

Let’s think big.

In my latest Washington Post column, I explore an idea that’s been gaining steam: Make serving in Congress more like jury duty by getting rid of elections and instead randomly selecting citizen legislators.

Is this the radical fix America needs? Or is it a lunatic idea that will crater an already wobbly system? (Short answer: It’s both.)

You can read the column here or by clicking the image below.

Discover more about the Washington Post Why Not? project:

• Recent columns: Why not make ranked choice voting the norm, pay teachers six-figure salaries, and ban left turns on busy streets?

• Contribute your own bold idea. Readers have already submitted thousands of them. Share yours by using this WaPo link or emailing me directly at whynot@danielpink.com. 

2. PINK RECOMMENDS. AI magic, winter wonder, and “What will be on Pink’s tombstone?” 🧙‍♂️❄️🪦 

LISTEN: One of the most astonishing artificial intelligence applications I’ve encountered lately is Deep Dive audio in Google’s Notebook LLM. This otherworldly feature lets you upload any text — a long-form article, a transcript, a research paper — and immediately convert it into a podcast-style conversation in which two eerily human-sounding people discuss the main ideas. It’s hard to grok how extraordinary this is unless you’ve tried it. So check out this free, instantly created 10-minute conversation about the Post column I just mentioned.

TRY: Need a break from politics this week? Try a new app that’s truly for the birds. Merlin Bird ID is a free Cornell Lab app that uses AI to identify our fine-feathered friends by sight and even by sound. It’s pretty cool and perfect for Election Day stress relief.

READ: The end of Daylight Savings Time and the arrival of darker, colder days is something I’ve always dreaded. Then I found Dr. Kari Leibowitz’s book, How to Winter, which reframes this dreary season as a time of restoration, fascination, and awe. The book offers an array of science-based tools for changing our mindset to get the most out of shorter, chillier days. As Leibowitz writes, “Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavement sparkles.” (Amazon | BN.com | Bookshop | Public library)

WATCH: To my amazement, one evening last month I was a Jeopardy clue. My work here on Earth might be done.

3. FINAL THOUGHTS. This is how Peter Drucker says you can consistently improve your performance. 📘🧠📈

Our brains are prediction machines. We devote massive stores of mental energy to forecasting.

But we devote far less intention and effort to evaluating the quality of those forecasts.

As always, Peter Drucker has a solution — a technique I’ve been using for years: Write a set of predictions for your future self, put them aside, and look at them several months later.

It’s all this short video, which you can watch by clicking the image below.