Life has been eventful these past few weeks. My wife and I moved to Ocean City, NJ, full-time and I saw snow on the beach for the first time. The Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl, not just won, but completely dominated, and a mere two days later, my younger daughter got engaged! The Super Bowl win was special, but nothing compares to the happiness of family. She knew the proposal was coming, but her boyfriend, now fiancee, totally surprised her! He's a pretty special guy. Welcome to the family!

And to you, the reader, welcome to my book family!

Writing my first book

I am a few months into the book-writing journey and it's been quite the adventure. Writing a book is something I always imagined, but the timing was never right, nor did I know what to write about! I do a lot of writing for work, the usual stuff - blogs, white papers, presentations, policies, and proposals. Business writing. Short, to the point, no fluff. Get to the point and move on, but a book?

My mindset has always been that I'll write a book when I retire, but that's so far off. It's easy to push the idea down the road. I'm too busy. I don't know how. What do I write about? Where do I even start? Writing a book is a daunting task, but so is racing an Ironman Triathlon, but I did that. So why now? I was introduced to the Manuscript's Modern Author program. It's a hybrid book publishing model. Manuscript provides training, structure, accountability, and lots of editors. I pay them a set price to provide these services and they publish the book. The key for me is that I retain 100% of the rights to the book. In the typical publishing model, the publisher owns the rights, and the author get a small percentage of sales. In this model, I get 100%. I pay for the printing costs, but that's a much smaller percentage. It's a compelling model. It's easy to self-publish these days on Amazon, but you don't have the help of publishing professionals, so this is the best of both worlds.

The next challenge was what to write! A much more daunting task. With Manuscripts, I have the path to publishing and the people to help, but I had to come up with the idea. My original idea was around constraints and how they hold us back, but can be beneficial when used correctly. I just wasn't feeling it.

What was the thing that I could be passionate about enough to dedicate the time, energy, and focus to undertake a journey and write a book? In that thought, came the glimmer of an idea.

I have a lot going on in life. I co-founded a digital health custom software, data, and AI company in the early 2000s that's still going strong. At Estenda, we help companies build solutions that improve the health and well-being of our fellow humans. Over the last two decades, I finished an MBA, started a baking company and a second diabetes management software company, lost fifty pounds, ran multiple marathons and adventure races, and completed an Ironman Triathlon. We ultimately closed down the baking and diabetes companies (long stories), but my girls, who were younger at the time, loved being taste testers! Today, I regularly race triathlons in the summer months and competed in the USA National Triathlon Championship last year.

As I reflected on this, I realized two things. One, I have a great support network. My wife is my biggest champion and supporter. None of what I accomplished could have been done without her by my side. Two, I have had to continually work on being productive, but not through traditional time management principles. Time management techniques are often the goto answer to being productive, but they often fail leading to burnout. To be productive, you need to think about energy management. You need to reach a state of Productive Harmony.

And an idea was born.