I have a client — well, sort of a client — who I’ve been talking to since last September.
And when I say talking, I don’t mean a quick 20-minute Zoom. I mean long, sprawling two-hour conversations that kicked off in the fall, meandered through the holidays, and finally wrapped up in late February. We’re going on six months of these things.
Mind you, the guy is no slouch. He’s smart, genuinely smart. He’s passionate about his work and has the kind of hard-won expertise that makes you lean forward in your chair. He has a burning message, the kind that keeps him up at night. His potential book? Real, and needed.
And yet. Not a single word has been written. Not one.
Because first, there were the existential concerns that come with the territory. What if he says something that lands him in hot water with a former employer? What if there are already too many books on his topic — and honestly, aren’t there always? What if his ideas aren’t that original? What if today’s market has moved on?
Normal stuff, all of it. The standard-issue insecurities that show up like uninvited relatives at Thanksgiving. You expect them. You acknowledge them, you move them along, and you get to work.
Except then came the questions. So many questions.
How should he publish? (A genuinely good question, by the way — if you’re writing prescriptive nonfiction and you want traditional publishing, you need a proposal, not a manuscript, and knowing this upfront saves you a world of pain.) Which book idea deserved his time and energy? Should he write it himself, with a developmental editor guiding the ship, or would a ghostwriter serve him better? Who should he work with — and how do you even know? You’ve got to meet with everyone who wants the business, figure out who’s the real deal, who you actually click with, and who’s just going to take your money and produce schlock.
All reasonable questions. Important questions, even.
And then, the last time we spoke, he’d added a new layer: branding. Publicity. Who could get him on big stages? Were there people who packaged book coaching with speaker development? Was that the smarter play?
By the time he finished talking, my head was spinning. And I do this for a living.
No wonder he hadn’t written a word.
I once read something that has stuck with me ever since: success is limited or accelerated by one’s ability to make choices.
I think about this constantly.
If you’re the person at a restaurant who’s still reading the menu when the server circles back for the third time, that’s worth paying attention to. Not because choosing an entrée is high stakes — it isn’t — but because indecision is a habit. It’s a way of moving through the world, and it follows you everywhere.
I’ve watched people in workshops nearly break a sweat over an exercise that asked them to place themselves in a single category. You’d think they were being asked to sign away a kidney. The exercise was designed to take thirty seconds. It took thirty minutes.
The tragedy isn’t that they made the wrong choice. It’s that they couldn’t make any choice at all.
Here’s the thing I’ve come to understand about the book-writing process: there is no single perfect choice waiting for you, hidden somewhere in the pile.
You will not find the One True Path if you just research a little more, ask a few more people, or sit with the options a little longer. The perfect choice is a fiction we’ve invented to explain why we’re not moving. It’s the most respectable-sounding form of staying stuck that I know.
What there is — what actually exists — is a good choice. A reasonable choice. One made with the information you have, followed by another reasonable choice, and then another. And if you string those together with any consistency at all, you’ll produce something of enormous value. To your readers, and to yourself.
But you have to choose.
You have to isolate the decisions — publishing path, topic, writing approach, collaborator — and move through them one at a time, leaving the other options behind. Like all the lives you could have lived but didn’t. The ones you didn’t live weren’t failures. They were just not the path you took. There’s a difference.
Narrowing your choices isn’t a loss. It’s the only move that actually gets you anywhere.
So if you find yourself doing what my almost-client has been doing — adding new considerations to the pile before you’ve acted on the ones already there — I want you to hear me very clearly…
Stop it. Just stop it.
Do your due diligence, absolutely. Talk to people. Get information. Then pick a direction and go. No more laps around the parking lot. No more second-guessing what you haven’t even started yet.
The book you’re supposed to write is waiting. It is not waiting for you to figure out every variable in advance. It is waiting for you to decide.
So decide.
