A Broader Spectrum

When you’re writing a book, the first thing you think about is the book. Literally—every morning, you get up and it’s the first thing on your mind. Even before your hand reaches for the coffee cup in the cupboard. Writing a book is a daunting, all-encompassing task. It suddenly becomes a full-time job, and for once, the sunk cost fallacy works in your favour. You just want to get the thing done and out.

You think about the catchy book title you finally landed on, after discarding two dozen others. You think about the promise that title makes, and how you’re going to fulfil it. But beyond that, all your thinking revolves around topics that become chapters, and ideas that become paragraphs. It’s a bit like assembling a giant puzzle you’ve never seen the picture of.

Over time, the book takes shape, and you become more and more satisfied with what you see. But you know you’re not there yet—and the closer you get to “finishing it”, the more it feels like you’re running out of air.

When I wrote Be Smarter With Creating Products, I thought it was a clever title that carried a promise: open it and find out how. It was the sort of title for the sort of book I’d want to read. And that’s what most authors do—or should be doing: writing books they want to read.

Now several months have passed. More than half a year, I think. And I’ve gained distance from the book—which is good. It’s helped me see a broader picture, to understand how this book fits into the landscape of others like it. Written by other authors, on different topics. But there’s always a similar direction: Show me the way. Tell me how it works. That resonates with me deeply, because I’ve always loved learning—and if I ever couldn’t learn anymore, I’d probably die.

A book is like a tree. Once you’ve planted one, you want to plant more. A cluster of trees on a hillside, or maybe even a tiny forest. And I think Be Smarter could become that cluster. One book about product. One about health. One about love. One about starting a business. Just thinking about it, I can come up with a dozen titles on topics people want direction for. We all want manuals for life, because – as we’re sorely aware – life didn’t come with one. (And even if we wouldn’t always read the f-ing manual, we still want to know it’s there, just in case.)

That’s where these books come in. ChatGPT thinks it’s a huge, enormous market. I’m sure there’s something to it. But what I’ve found so far isn’t really huge—let alone enormous. Still, I know there’s something. And I believe my voice has something to offer, to add to it, in form of a podcast, short videos, a newsletter.

So instead of jumping straight into the next book – which could take four to six months, depending on the topic and how much else is on my desk – I’m going to start working in the open, here, in this blog and newsletter. It’ll be organised into topic groups: being smarter with mental health, love, family, business, entrepreneurship, creativity, and anything else I come across that shows potential.

This journey, I hope, won’t just be my own. I hope you’ll come along for it. Because you can guess what happens when you do: We will be smarter.