I Am Writing A Book(s)

I just finished the first draft of my first book, and I am excited! I thought I would put some of my thoughts as to why I am doing this and how it came to be.

It started with the simplest reason, the one underneath all the others. I love to read, I always have, and somewhere along the way the reader in me wanted to become a writer. I remember as a kid I started writing a fictional novel (one day I still want to release that). I was in an English class in high school and wrote an essay i was really proud of. That lead me to start writing an expanded version into a book. Like most high schoolers, I didn't have the discipline to finish it. That's probably the seed that was planted that I eventually wanted to write a book one day. At the heart of it, I am a person who has spent his whole life on the receiving end of other people's books and finally wanted to put something on the shelf going the other direction.

But a wish to write a book is not the same as knowing what to write. The subject found me. For years now people have been asking me career questions, and not the abstract kind you'd put to a professor. Real ones. Should I go to college or skip it. Should I take the job at the big company or the small one. How do I write a resume that doesn't sound like everyone else's. I have a review coming up, how do I ask for the raise. I'm bored and stuck, do I leave or do I stay and fight for something better. I'd answer these questions in person or on phone calls. After enough of them I started thinking I should collect and organize my thoughts better and put them into a book. Instead, I looked for the book I could just hand people but surprisingly it wasn't there.

Here is what I found instead. The career section is full of books written by entrepreneurs telling you to bet everything on yourself, or by academics writing for other academics, or by specialists who go deep on one narrow thing like how to set a goal or how to network a room. Useful, some of them. But none of them walk you through the actual arc of a normal working life, the one most of us are living, from the very first decision of whether to go to school all the way through choosing a field, getting a job, and how to be a good manager. Nobody had written the whole map. They'd written individual streets.

I think I'm in a fair position to draw that map. I started as an intern at a small company called GPS Capital Markets while I was still in school, and a little more than a decade later our team sold the company, and somewhere in the middle of that run, inside of six years, I went from intern to CFO. GPS was a little company most people have never heard of, which is exactly the point. It was quietly, seriously profitable, and had a very successful exit, and I got to climb the whole ladder inside of it and then help carry it out the door. I'm not writing this from a mountaintop of fame. I'm writing it from the much more useful place of having actually walked the path I'm describing, rung by rung, recently enough that I still remember what each rung felt like under my foot. My lived experience, plus the large amount of books I have consumed, there has to be something there I can share.

I sat down to write all of that in one book. It would not stay one book. I wrote about 250 pages and still had a lot of chapters ahead of me when I decide to split them up. The first one is about getting the right job, and even that single phrase turned out to contain a lot of real chapters, whether to go to school, how to pick a field, how to write the resume and survive the interview, how to land the first job that's actually right for you, and then the questions that don't stop once you're employed, like when to switch roles inside your company and when to leave it altogether. The material kept growing under my hands until it was obvious that one book could not hold a whole career. So it became a series. This first one gets you in the door and moving. My favorite chapter in this first book, the one I'd point you to first, is the last one, on how to take the job you already have and turn it into a job you love. Most people think the only move is to leave. It isn't. The one books after it deal with becoming a great employee and with managing people. There might be more on top of that, like how to be an executive or how to be an entrepreneur, but I am not sure I have the insight there or will want to stay writing this series as I have other books, I am more excited to write.

The book got written because of a hike. Last November I had already started writing every day, just for myself, nothing grand, and I'd noticed something. In about fifteen minutes I could put down a page. Out on the trail with time to think, I did the small math. An hour a day is four pages. Four pages a day, held steady over a few months, is a book. An hour is not a heroic amount of time. It's a TV episode you didn't watch. So I started, and I have not stopped, an hour a day, most every day since, and the pages turned into chapters and the chapters turned into a draft. A small effort, repeated long enough, becomes something you couldn't have built in one heroic push. Trees grow that way. So do careers. So do books.

In todays age I want/should tell you that I wrote this myself. The words are mine, written by hand, one hour at a time, not generated by AI. Depending on how well I reads, that may be a pro or a con. I did use AI the way you'd use a research assistant or a good librarian, to chase down a fact, to check a story, to make sure I had a date or a name right, and I'm grateful for that help. But the sentences are mine. I mention this because we've entered a strange moment where some readers will assume a machine could have done it faster and cleaner, and a few might even think it should have. Maybe a machine would be smoother. I'll take the trade because I like writing, and importantly, the process of writing is pulling disjointed thoughts and lessons, sorting through them, organizing them, and then painfully putting them onto paper. It is something I am proud of. What you get from me is a real person who lived this, thought it through slowly, and chose every word, and I believe that will come through on the page in a way that polish alone never does.

Now the part that matters a great deal to me, because it's the reason the books carry the spirit they do. The common analogy about work is to compare it to war. Claw your way up, beat the person next to you, win the title, stack the money, and let that be the scoreboard. I don't believe that, and I'm not going to write it. You can absolutely get the raises and the promotions, I did, and I'll show you how. But there are things far more important than what sits on the signature line of your email or the number on your paycheck, and a career that costs you your character, your faith, your family, or your decency is not a good career no matter what it pays. In my career, I paid more from my health and family than I wished I had. Part of this book is a message I wish I would have had. You can climb and stay whole. You can win without turning into someone you wouldn't want your kids to become. That conviction runs through every chapter. Some very successful people will disagree with points I make, and that is okay. This is a book geared towards the average person who wants to do well in work, but more importantly they want to have a life they are proud of living. There is not a book out there for people like us. There are plenty of books on how to become the next Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.

You can read this book straight through, front to back, and it will walk you along the natural arc of a career in the order most people actually live it. But it's also built to be pulled off the shelf one chapter at a time, the way you'd grab a manual when something specific breaks. If you're staring down an interview next week, go to the interview chapter and leave the rest for later. If you're sitting on an offer from a big company and an offer from a small one and you can't decide, there's a chapter for exactly that. If you've gone stale in a job and you can't tell whether to leave or to fight for something better right where you are, start there. That's by design, because the questions don't all arrive at once, they show up one at a time across the years, and the book should meet you wherever you happen to be standing. It's for the person just starting out who doesn't yet know what they don't know. It's for the person ten years in who hit a wall they didn't see coming. And it's for the person who has someone they're trying to mentor, a kid, a younger colleague, a friend who keeps asking, and wants something solid to hand them instead of trying to remember all of it over lunch. 

A word on what comes next. I'm self-publishing, and I'm taking my time. The draft is done, but a draft is not a book yet, it's the raw material a book gets carved out of, and the editing is going to take real work and real money and real patience, and I'd rather do it slowly and well than fast and embarrassing. I'm also, somewhat against my own nature, thinking about sharing pieces of it as I go. I'm not a social media person. I dont like it. But I have ideas in here I believe in, and putting a few of them out into the world, a concept at a time, might be how some of you find the book at all, so I may start doing that.

I'm under no illusion that this is a runaway bestseller in waiting. That would be a fine surprise and I wouldn't send it back. But it is not the goal. The goal is the thing itself, a book written, a real one, finished and true. I'll count myself fortunate if I can just get my wife to read it. And more than that, I'm writing it so that one day my kids, when they're standing at the start of their own working lives, they will have something to reach for that was written by someone who loved them and walked the road first. They will have something that can help orient themselves to have a good wholesome career, and not fall into common work pitfalls. If it helps you too, and I hope it does, that's a gift on top of a gift.

So that's why. I love to read. People kept asking. The book didn't exist, so I'm writing it, an hour at a time, by hand, on my own terms, for reasons that have a lot more to do with leaving something good behind than with anything I'll ever sell. I'm excited about what's in here.