Want to Write A Book? Here's How I Did It Without Driving Myself Insane

“When are you going to write a book?”

People have asked me that for years. I also asked it of myself. And yet, I always had an excuse that boiled down to: I don’t have the time.

Know what? That’s a bad excuse. Nobody has the time for anything; if it’s important enough, they make the time. As I’ve written before, time expands under pressure.

Eventually, my hand was forced. Covid changed everyone's lives and businesses and I had spent years gathering insights on how people can navigate change — so the opportunity was ripe. I needed to write the book. I needed to do it now.

I just needed to figure out how.

And I did! It took me eight months — and today, I want to tell you how I did it. Because it’s not just a lesson in writing a book. It’s a lesson in fitting any major project into your already busy workload.

But first, let’s make it official:

Today, I’m officially announcing my book Build For Tomorrow. Yes, fine, I’ve teased it on this newsletter before, but now it’s REAL!

It’s out in stores on September 6, but you can pre-order it now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Target, and many more.

This book is designed to help you navigate any moment of change in your career or life, and to help see disruption as opportunity. It’s based on my belief that change happens in four phases:

1. Panic

2. Adaptation

3. New Normal

4. Wouldn’t Go Back

Wouldn’t Go Back is the whole point of it all. It’s the moment when we say, “This new thing is so valuable that I wouldn’t want to go back to a time before I had it.” And how do you get there? By understanding the panic. By seeing gain where others see loss. By identifying your core mission. By "working your next job." By changing before you must. And much more.

The book is full of exercises, guides, insights, and lessons from brilliant entrepreneurs and the history of innovation. I hope you love it. I’ve poured everything into it.

So, how’d I write this in eight months?

I used these two tactics.

1. Leverage Yourself

Everyone works differently. Some are brilliant at night. Some are best in short bursts. Some need to carve out hours of deep work.

Here’s what I’ve learned about myself: I work sharpest and fastest in the morning. It’s why I never take meetings before noon, and try to spend that time writing and creating. Anything I write at 10 am would take me twice as long at 4 pm, so why be inefficient?

So once I had a book contract, I made a rule: I will devote the first hour of every day to writing this book.

That’s it. Just one hour. This way the task never felt overwhelming, and it fit into everything else I do. After an hour of writing, my brain was ready for a break anyway — so I was happy to put the book down and switch tasks.

In writing this way, I was leveraging myself: I know how I work best, so I could organize the project in a way that maximizes my efforts. Why be inefficient when you know a better way?

2. Work Without Working

I believe that some of our best work happens when we are not working.

I’m sure you’ve experienced this yourself. Say you’re stuck on a project, wasting hours staring at a blank page. Finally, you give up and walk away — and as you do something completely divorced from work, that is when inspiration strikes. Why? Because you allowed your brain the space to wander, and to create the connections you cannot simply force.

I believe the same is true for writing — and for that matter, speaking.

A lot of what I write in my columns and say on stage are versions of things that I simply refined during conversations. I’d tell someone a story, for example, and see how well it engaged them, and then tell the story again to someone else. After enough of this, the story becomes crisp. The takeaways become clear. I am creating while not creating. It requires no practice, and no wrestling with blank pages.

I did the same with this book. I said I wrote the book in eight months, but the book isn’t really the product of eight months of work. It is the result of seven years’ worth of thinking and talking and meeting with very smart people.

You do not start the work when you “start the work.” You can and should always be developing ideas. Give them the space and time to evolve. Then, when it’s time to put them down on paper, your ideas — and you! — are ready.

I’ll be sharing more as the book release gets closer, but for now: I would be honored if you pre-ordered a copy of Build For Tomorrow.

And if you do, please let me know so that I can thank you personally.

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