Today I read Why You Should Write a Book, Now by Paul Millerd.
His quote from Nat Eliason sums his point up perfectly:
I’ll occasionally talk to a friend with a blog or newsletter who wants to write a book someday, and they’ll say:
“I just don’t feel ready yet.”
It always makes me a little sad to hear that, because the truth is you’re never “ready” to write a book.
In fact, there is no magical day when you’re “ready” for anything. You’re never “ready” to get married, to quit your job, to have kids, to get your health in order.
You either put it off until the last minute and stumble into it out of a sudden fear of your mortality, or you wake up one day and say “screw it let’s do it.”
Illusions of needing to “Be Ready” are just fear and procrastination in disguise. Writing a book is a long, hard journey, with an uncertain payoff, and it’s totally reasonable to be scared to start work on it.
But once you realize the desire to “be ready” is just fear, you’re one short step from the truth: You get ready to write a book by writing a book.
It’s interesting to compare this to the thoughts in No one buys books by Elle Griffin, which I read on 2024-05-24.
I am interested in writing a book. My editor, Chris Coffman, in Write of Passage Cohort 12 told me that my Core Idea essay (https://lesliemyint.substack.com/p/dont-ask-for-permission) had the makings of a memoir or a TED talk. It was praise that really surprised me, moved me, made me dream. But what specifically my book would be about, I don’t know. All of the writing that I’ve done so far—all the living I’ve done so far—I’m pretty sure that’s what I want to be part of that book because I feel like all those experiences are connected to an even bigger thing that could unite the book. Maybe its my #1 favorite problem right now: How do we save the world? How do we figure out what that even means?
As Elle Griffin wrote about in Who’s qualified to save the world? (which I read yesterday), everyone has a part to play in saving the world.
Maybe me writing this book would push me to embrace the lifestyle that I’d feel proudest of—one that integrates all of who I am and what I want. I wrote about in a daily seed a while ago that I thought about the tensions between n = 1 and n → infinity in my loves of data and statistics but also personal storytelling. I’d love a lifestyle in which I can chase down a story through data, and through deeply thinking about its context, as I teach my students to do, discover the world of the residual, the world of the error term, where the unexplainable becomes explainable as we connect with the n=1.