Writing a book is like climbing a mountain

The summit of Mount Rainier, 2004.

I climbed Mount Rainier many years ago with three of my best friends. When we look back on that year, we all agree the best part wasn’t the actual climb but all the training. The time spent together, attacking steep trails on weekends with backpacks full of practice weights made the experience truly special. Reaching the 14,411-foot summit is a memory I will always cherish, but the process during the six months that preceded it was actually the best part. 

One year ago The Butterfly Impact hit the Amazon store. Realizing that, I immediately thought “what have I learned?”

Looking back it was the perfect pandemic project for me. My early morning writing sessions were energizing. There’s a saying that if you want to learn something, teach it. Same with writing a book. The research, the reading, the organizing of ideas and concepts fueled a fire that I found truly invigorating. 

And then I started talking to people. 

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I canceled seven trips (four work trips and three personal). Without travel and in-person connection, work Zoom calls were not doing it for me (I know I was not alone on this). By mid-summer I had started reaching out to people I knew, asking if I could interview them for my book project. Some of those people I hadn’t talked to in months or even years. Because of the pandemic, everyone was available! Several of them introduced me to new people that are now friends and colleagues. I talked to more than 100 people in less than nine months and compiled 90-some pages of notes. What I learned from those conversations can’t be measured. I would do it over again in a heartbeat if I could. 

I also invited a small group of people that I barely knew to help serve as an ad hoc advisory board, helping me review drafts and offering feedback and suggestions. We did monthly Zoom calls for almost a year and, like the training before climbing Mount Rainier, these calls were the best part of the book-writing process for me. Hope McCorristin, Erin Griffin, Jason Potts and Forrest Lindekens served as my sounding board, my support group and my inspiration to keep grinding through multiple drafts and thousands of edits. They didn’t know one another when we started but found a bond that likely would only happen in a pandemic. It was pretty freaking great, nonetheless. We did a “reunion call” this week and the genuine camaraderie felt palpable. (We agreed to do a reunion call every year, just to keep the connection.) 

I started this book project to see where it would take me, personally and professionally. But that’s not what people ask me or presumably any other author. “How is the book doing? How are sales?” Given some incredible stories of self-published authors rocketing up the charts and with astronomical sales, I had those fantasies, too. It’s hard not to. Reality is quite different, however. But even though the book hasn’t reached any bestseller lists, I have zero regrets about the hours I spent working on it. 

While it hasn’t been a smashing sales success, the investment of my time is paying dividends for my “day job” as a consultant working with TV stations and media companies. What I couldn’t have known in 2020 is that “The Great Resignation” would dramatically change the working landscape and organizations would need help navigating this new world of work-life balance and flexibility in the age of employee empowerment. Research, insights and lessons learned from my book appear daily in my consulting work; the graphics from the book are in PowerPoint slides I present and observations from the interviews influence my conversations and outreach to clients. 

In addition, the direct feedback from dozens of people who read the book tells me it has helped. That was the original goal. I wrote it to help myself; I published it to help other people. 

And, just like climbing a mountain, I loved the total experience and would do it all over again if given the chance. I might make different decisions in publishing and marketing (I’ll go into this in a future post), but the interviewing, researching, developing and writing the book is a process and experience that will always live in my mind – right next to the summit of Mount Rainier.