I’m writing a new book.
Getting here took three tries, and 120 pages that I ended up deleting.
If you’ve never been through it, here’s how traditional nonfiction publishing works. You don’t write the book and then go looking for a publisher. You sell the book before it even exists.
To do that, you write a book proposal. It’s a 60-page document with a detailed breakdown of the book, an outline of every chapter, and a marketing plan. It’s the blueprint. Publishers read it and decide whether to bet on a book that still lives mostly in your head.
A year after Awaken Your Genius came out, I wrote my first proposal for the next book. Sixty pages, every chapter mapped out.
But something was off. I couldn’t tell you what. There was no flaw I could point to. Just a quiet sense in my body that this wasn’t it.
The old me would have overruled that feeling. I’d have demanded a reason, and when none came, I’d have sent the proposal out to publishers anyway. Or I’d have interrogated the feeling until it coughed up an explanation.
But intuition doesn’t come with a slide deck. It won’t build you a clean, rational case you can defend to a skeptic. It just knows. And the moment you try to translate that knowing into language, you don’t capture it—you distort it. Friedrich Schiller said it best two centuries ago: When the soul speaks, alas, it is no longer the soul that speaks.
I scrapped the proposal and wrote another 60 pages from scratch.
That one didn’t feel right either. Same quiet no.
Two years passed like this. I didn’t know which direction the book was going to take. The itch was to do something—to pick a direction, manufacture momentum, turn the uncertainty into a problem I could solve. Instead, I waited and trusted the answer would come when it was ready.
You could call the first two proposals a waste. All those hours, all those pages, straight into the trash.
I don’t see it that way. I couldn’t have found the right book without the two that came before it. The discarded pages weren’t detours from the path. They were the path.
When the book finally showed up, it didn’t come with a reason either. It was the same knowing that had been saying no all along, the same quiet feeling in my body, except this time it was saying yes. The framing, the title, everything clicked. Oh wow, I thought. This is it.
Then I sat down and wrote the third proposal.
It went to a competitive auction, with publishers bidding against each other, and landed at a publishing house I’m thrilled to be working with.
Now I’m writing it. And the writing feels different this time.
For years I wrote books the way I did everything: by force, grinding toward a daily word count. The work got done. It just didn’t feel alive.
Over time, I stopped pushing and started following the pull. What I used to call discipline has started to feel more like devotion.
I treat writing the way I treat surfing. I still show up every day—not by forcing myself, but by remembering what it feels like when a sentence finds its rhythm, or when an idea I’d been chasing for weeks finally lands.
Some mornings I sit down and the sentences are there, the way the waves sometimes are, and I ride them until they’re gone.
Other mornings, I sit in front of a blank page the way I sit on a board in flat water. Nothing comes. So I close the laptop.
I’ve stopped trying to manufacture a wave by sheer force. I’ve stopped thrashing at dead water and calling it discipline.
The old me would have called that falling behind. Now I call it trust.
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Bold
