I'm writing a book

I’m writing a book.

There. That’s the hard part done, because one of the chapters in it is about how your word is the most valuable thing you own - say what you’ll do, then do it. Which makes announcing this a slightly uncomfortable thing to be doing, and that’s rather the point. It’s a lot easier to abandon something nobody knows about.

What it is

The working title is Being a Person, the plain truth about living, loving, working, and dying.

It’s a guide to being a person. Not a system, not a religion, not a set of rules to obey - just the things that tend to be true about living, written as plainly as I can put them. No jargon, no framework with a clever acronym, nothing you need to buy a course to understand.

It started as something for my sons. The stuff I’d want them to have written down somewhere in case I’m not around to say it, or - far more likely - in case I am around and they’re at an age where they’d rather hear it from absolutely anyone else. Then it got away from me, because it turns out almost none of it is specific to my kids. It’s just what being alive is like.

The bet the whole thing rests on

Here’s the premise, and if this doesn’t hold up then the book doesn’t work: most of it you already know.

Somewhere underneath the noise you already know that avoidance costs you. That your word matters. That the people you love won’t always be here. I’m not trying to install anything new in anyone. I’m trying to say the quiet things out loud, clearly and plainly enough that you can actually see them and act on them.

That’s a much less impressive claim than most books in this space make, and I think it’s the honest one.

What it’ll look like

Short chapters. Very short, some of them - a page or two, one idea each, said and then finished with rather than padded out to justify a hardback.

It’s in parts, roughly: the foundations everything else stands on, then the personal stuff (happiness, fear, grief, purpose, the body, the ways we sabotage ourselves), then relationships, then work and money, then the spiritual end of things, and finally a part that ties it together.

It’s built to be used as a tool rather than read once and shelved. Front to back if you like, or open it at random. It’s written for everyone at all stages of life, which means not all of it will apply to you at once - take what’s useful now and leave the rest, it’ll be there when you need it. Some chapters will land like they were written about you specifically. Others won’t make sense until a particular thing happens to you, and then they will.

A few threads run through all of it:

• You are going to die - and that’s a gift, not a threat. It’s the most useful lens you have for looking at your life. It puts everything in its right size.
• You have to face yourself eventually, and the sooner you do it the cheaper it is.
• Almost everything worth having sits on the other side of something uncomfortable.
• In the end it all comes back to connection - with yourself, with other people, with something larger than you.

A rough piece of it

Here’s a whole chapter, to give you the flavour. It may not survive to the final draft, but this is the register I’m aiming for:

You cannot win them all - 51% is all you need

You will not get it right all the time. This is impossible. Some days you’ll eat badly, skip the gym, handle a conversation poorly, or make a decision driven by fear. And that’s fine.

The question isn’t “am I perfect?” It’s “am I getting better? Am I heading in the right direction more often than not?”

Perfectionism is a cage dressed up as ambition. It says anything less than flawless is failure, which means you never start, or never enjoy what you’ve done. Aim as high as you like, but 51% is enough. Just get it right slightly more often than you get it wrong. Over time, that slight edge adds up to a life well lived.

That’s the whole chapter. If that’s the sort of thing you’d read, you’ll probably like the book.

Where it actually is

Early. Genuinely early.

There are a lot of chapters in rough shape and a lot of holes between them. The title might not survive. There’s no publisher, no date, and no idea yet whether it ends up as a proper book or something I put out myself. I fully expect to rewrite the whole thing at least once, because that’s how this works - you almost never end up where you started heading, and that doesn’t make the journey a waste.

I’m also very aware of the obvious risk with a book like this, which is turning into a guru. I’m not one. Nobody has this figured out, including whoever wrote it down, and if the book ever starts sounding certain about things it has no business being certain about, that’s a bug to be fixed.

You’ve already been reading bits of it

If you’ve been around this blog a while, some of this will look familiar. The learning journey is in there nearly as it stands. We create our own drama is a piece of a chapter about why you are already happy and spend most of your energy insisting otherwise. A few of the half-finished drafts sitting in my folder turned out to be chapters wearing a disguise.

So this blog is going to be the workshop. I’ll keep putting pieces up here as I go, partly because writing in public makes it better, and mostly because it makes it much harder to quietly stop.

If there’s something you think a book like this has to cover, tell me. I’d genuinely like to know what’s missing.