Some News: I'm Writing a Book!
After three years, 500,000 words, and 300 blog posts, I can finally graduate from "blogger" to "author." Not bad!
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It’s been a big week! On Monday, I accepted an offer on my book proposal from Penguin Random House’s imprint Portfolio, and I’m ecstatic to get started writing this thing. It’s been a goal of mine, for a while now, to write a book, and I would like to write several books before I’m dead. This week was a meaningful step in the right direction. For today’s blog, I want to share a few thoughts with you all on why I wanted to write this book, as well as what the book will cover.
(At the bottom of this piece, for premium subscribers, I’ve also included more details on what the book process looked like for me behind the scenes over the last few months. Additionally, once I’m a further along in the writing process, I’ll share some book previews with premium subscribers.)
Let’s get into it.
Why Write a Book?
New blogs, podcasts, videos, and social media posts bombard our phones and computers each day, and the shelf life of “content” continues to decrease as a result. Every “content creator” is competing with every other “content creator” for eyeballs in a cycle that will only continue to accelerate. How many blog posts have you read that you still forward to friends, months after the fact? How many specific podcast episodes will you recommend to your friends more than a week after listening to them? How many YouTube videos, tweets, or Instagram Reels published more than 72 hours ago can you recall? Not many.
Books, however, transcend the noise of our daily content diets.
You can put your phone away, pick up a book, and zone out from the rest of the world for hours. Even if you read on a Kindle (and I do love my Kindle), you are still isolated from social media, allowing you to focus on just the book. Between the reader’s heightened focus and the length of time it takes to finish a book, it’s no surprise that books stick with us far longer than other forms of content. A good blog post might stick with you for a week, but a good book stays with you for life.
The length of a book also allows the writer (in this case, me) to explore an idea with far more depth than they otherwise could. Blog posts are fantastic for conveying specific points and timely messages, but to really, truly, flesh out an idea with such detail that it hits a reader’s soul, you need more than 2,000 words.
Consciously, for the last six months, and subconsciously, for the last couple of years, I’ve had an idea that I couldn’t not write about. It’s an idea that I’ve hinted at in each of the blogs pinned on my home page, as well as in dozens of other articles that I’ve written over the last few years, and I’m excited to finally give it the attention it deserves.
That idea goes something like this:
I’ve long believed that, despite having access to more resources, more opportunities, and more money than any generation before, a lot of folks fail to do what they want with their lives. This isn’t the result of a conscious decision; it’s the result of a million small decisions that quietly compound over time, starting around the time we graduate from college.
Every 20-year-old has ambition plans for what they want to do with their lives, but real life gets in the way of those plans when we graduate. With bills to pay, the need to start making money supersedes everything else, so we accept a job offer somewhere doing something to alleviate that need. We probably had a vague idea of what we wanted to do, but come on, no one really knows what they want to do at 22. I certainly didn’t.
So you work for a year or two to land that first promotion, because a promotion means more money, and more money means more security. This cycle continues over and over and we progress through our careers. While we continue making decisions that represent a financial and professional improvement from our current situation, we never stop to think, “Is this (whatever ‘this’ is) what I want to be doing with my life?”
And then you blink, and you’re 50, and you think, “Damn, where’d the time go? And you can’t get that time back. You may have sleepwalked through a career that you never intended to pursue. Perhaps you ignored an entrepreneurial itch when you were young, for the sake of some ill-defined level of financial security. Maybe you delayed your dream to see the world, year-after-year.
When you’re young, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’ll get around to that thing (whatever it is) later, but you don’t realize that the window of opportunity to best take advantage of many of life’s experiences is smaller than we think. And once many of those windows close, they don’t reopen. We get so caught in our day-to-day routines that we don’t have a sense of urgency in taking control of the captain’s seat of our lives, so we remain in the passenger seat instead.
I consider myself fortunate that the pandemic hit when I was in my early 20s, as it gave me some time to take stock of where I was in life, and more importantly, where my trajectory was aimed. I was restless, I didn’t particularly like my job, and I was horrified that “this was it,” and I was just going to be stuck in this cycle until retirement. Thankfully, after some soul searching, I made major changes in my personal and professional life, and I’m quite happy with how stuff has played out this far.
Had I not had the opportunity to take a step back and reevaluate what, exactly, I wanted out of life, I would probably still be on that same track, with slightly more money and slightly more angst, a few years later. And that would have sucked.
My worst fear is that people sleepwalk from their youth to their graves without stopping to map out what exactly they want from life. My goal, with this book, is to warn folks of how life can pass them by if they’re not careful and provide some thoughts on how to avoid falling in that trap.
Put simply, I’m writing the book that I wish I had read at 23.
Now, a bit more about the book process itself.