I finished the first draft of my book

This week, after spending 10 months choosing a topic, four months outlining, and more than two years writing, I finished the first draft of my book.

The result is what you see in the following photo: 525 pages, or 210,000 words, about Salesforce careers. To put that in context, a standard nonfiction book is 50,000 words.

Getting here was no easy task.

It started in March 2020 when Tucker Max, an author and publisher I have followed for many years, sent an email to his subscribers essentially saying, “You want to write a book. The world shut down. You cannot go anywhere or do anything. Why not write your book now?”

Tucker made a good point. Since I had no interest in baking sourdough bread like the rest of the known universe, I committed to writing a book and joined Tucker’s book-writing course later that month.

To be clear, I did not, all of a sudden, decide to write a book. I had thought of writing a book for many years. I had read books and articles on writing, taken online courses on writing, and talked to writers about writing, but I had never written a book or even started an outline.

I had done everything related to the thing without doing the thing itself, like a person who reads books and articles about exercise, buys exercise programs, and talks to other non-exercising people about exercise but never exercises. Ronnie Coleman, 8x Mr. Olympia, once said, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder but don’t nobody wanna lift no heavy-ass weight.”

Writing is no different. Everybody wants to be an author; nobody wants to write a book.

Think about how this applies to your own life. How many times have you wanted to do something yet not done it? What is something you want to do now yet have not started?

Our tendency to want yet do different things is universal and eternal. Almost invariably, the reasons boil down to fear. What will people think? What if I fail? What if I succeed?

Baltasar Gracián, a 17th-century Jesuit priest, wrote in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, “Without courage, wisdom bears little fruit.”

Gracián was right. Reflecting on it now, I did not need knowledge and wisdom about how to write a book so much as I needed the courage to write a book. I did not write a book because I did not know how to write a book. I did not write a book because I was afraid, deeply afraid, of writing a book.

I still am.

I am more afraid, however, of dying with what I have to contribute to the world still inside of me. Because of that, I will carry on despite my fear and finish this damn book if it kills me.