How do you know if you’re reaching the most valuable audience for your book?  I took a writing class a few years ago given by Malcolm Gladwell.  It was an on-line course where Malcolm shared his best tips on writing. If you don’t know Malcolm, he is the author of a number of best-selling books including  The Tipping Point, Blink, and most recently, Revenge of the Tipping Point. 

One tip I learned in that course was to write the ending first. This tip will help you stay on track writing your book in an efficient way because you know where you are going.  Once you know where you are going it will make figuring out the most valuable audience for your book easier.   

While I understand this tip, and it makes logical sense to me, I personally have a problem with it.  To understand my problem I need to explain what motivates me to write a book.

Unlike many authors, what motivates me to write a book is not knowing—rather than knowing– where I am going and what I want to say.  It is the “not knowing” that makes the journey fascinating and provides my passion for learning through writing. 

What makes this journey particularly difficult is the fact that learning does not come easy for me.  This is at least part of why I am so passionate about it.  I discuss this in Chapter 2 of my latest book, Human Resilience (https://shorturl.at/HGpyo).  I explain how I figured out a way to overcome, at least to a degree,  my learning difficulties. Toward the end of that chapter I say —

“I had become passionate about teaching during my college years largely because I had understood how difficult it had been for me to learn how to learn.  Now I wanted share what I had learned about learning with others. That passion for thinking, learning, and teaching has stayed with me all of my life.”

When I first started writing that book I not only didn’t know where I was going, I wasn’t even thinking the book would ever get published. I actually thought the only audience for that book was myself. When I was explaining this to my chiropractor, he told me that what I was saying reminded him of something John Lennon once said about the way he felt when writing songs. 

Despite feeling this way, I did give the book to a good friend asking him to read it and give me his thoughts. His initial feedback was that it sounded like a memoir and that no one wants to read a memoir about anyone who isn’t famous. His feedback confirmed my own thinking that I should  not publish it. However, that same friend also said he thought there was something in the book that others might benefit from and suggested I change the focus from a memoir to my passion for learning and how I overcame this difficulty.   That led to the 35 life lessons now in the published book. 

Initially many of these lessons were specific to running and I was thinking the right audience for the book, if I ever did publish it, was the running community.  But then I realized that most of the lessons could easily be generalized.  This is actually part of how I learn. I observe specific cases of how things work in the world, then see if I can generalize my observations by applying them to other areas.

Chapter 10 in my book is a good example of this process where I compare resilience in technical and human systems.   I have taken lessons we have learned in building resilient technical systems and applied these lessons to my running to help  me build a more resilient human running system.  In the start of that chapter I say–

“You may be wondering why anyone would want to compare resilience in technical and human systems. The answer is simply because there is something to be learned from the way we are building our next generation of technical systems that humans can use to help live more resilient lives.”

In closing this blog, I want to share one more example of something I learned by writing my latest book that I did not know when I started writing it. In the first sentence of the introduction to the book I ask the question,

“Why would anyone want to run 70 half marathons after reaching 70 years old?”   

When I started writing this book I honestly had no idea what the answer to this question was.  I had been running half marathons every few weeks for the previous 4 years, and was curious about what was motivating this strange behavior.  

One of my reviewers of a pre-released version of the book told me that question intrigued him and he read the whole pre-released version looking for the answer, but never found it. 

That comment caused me to reflect on the question, and it was only then that I realized the answer, and was able to add it to the  Epilogue just before the book was released.

When I started writing that book I thought the audience was only me.  Then I thought it was only runners.

My 35 life lessons are lessons that worked for me in achieving a degree of resilience in my life. My running stories provide examples of the “how.”  I share these stories with the hope that runners and non-runners alike might benefit from them.  If you find only one lesson that helps you, then I will have reached my most valued audience.

This blog post was motivated by feedback from multiple readers of my book during the first 8 weeks after publication who shared with me specific lessons they found valuable to their own life.

The book is now available in four different formats at (https://shorturl.at/HGpyo ), and has received nine 5-star reviews in the first 8 weeks after release. The ebook version is currently on sale for a limited time at 50% off.