Three things I learned writing my first book
In March this year I published my first book Problem Hunter.
Writing a book is like solving a puzzle that has a thousand problems that you discover one after the other. At times it felt like I was Indiana Jones battling traps and challenges to find clues to reach a buried treasure. A treasure buried deep within my mind.
Here's three learnings that stood out most to me on the journey to publish my first book:
1. Your mindset needs daily maintenance
Eighteen months planning and writing. Six drafts. Over 400,000 words written to get 70,000 I was happy with. Each false start or rewrite felt crushing until I shifted my perspective. Early on, the rewrites I made felt like failures because they set me back from where I planned to be.
I had to learn to resist the temptation to descend into self punishment by reframing each rewrite as a diversion not a defeat. Each dead end just gave me data that helped me inch closer to completion.
When you're creating something meaningful with no simple formula, the path will never be straight to the finish line.
To maintain a positive mindset while writing I created a journal practice each morning that reminded me of this.
I wrote, “Each word has either a purpose or a place.”
I’d reflect on the words written the previous day and which bucket they fell into. If some words written didn’t end up in the book, their purpose was to help me find the words that did.
2. Fixed expectations are productivity killers, switch them for intentions
I started with incredibly high expectations and put a lot of pressure on myself to create something special. But I hadn't written a book like this before. I also had to learn how to write.
Writing doesn’t come naturally to me. In my last year of high school, I came dangerously close to failing English in my final exams. I had no idea how to structure my thoughts on a page. This experience created a belief that I couldn’t write. As a result I spent much of my career avoiding doing a lot of writing.
Each time I opened the manuscript to work on it in the first few months, my mind and spirit felt heavy with the weight of expectations and limiting beliefs. It made each day of writing feel like a slog.
What I learned from this was the steeper your learning curve, the lighter you need to be to travel it.
High expectations and limiting beliefs are heavy weights that make learning harder. They slow you down, cloud your judgement, and steal your creativity and joy.
After a conversation with a close friend, I realised my expectations and beliefs were holding me back, so I chose to let them go and replace them with a simple intention: to create the most valuable book I could for the reader.
Having intentions, not expectations, made me feel lighter and more free to climb and explore through the unknown. I had the same direction, but felt less of the burdens to make the journey.
3. Write to gift your reader a better future, not yourself
Sounds simple, but I fell into this trap hard at first. My early drafts were ego dumps, everything I knew, poorly organised and badly written.
The breakthrough for me came when I stopped asking "What do I want to say?" and started asking "What does the reader need to hear or know to make their future better?" If readers had a better future, then I will have succeeded.
Each word, each chapter title, each metaphor and story was run through the filter of “Will this help create a better future for the reader?” If it didn’t, then the words written served the purpose of finding those that did.
Writing Problem Hunter was a life milestone for me. It may not yet be a best seller, but that's not the point.
The journey of writing and publishing a book has reshaped who I am and how I approach this short life we live.
And that is the true gift of creating.
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