Years ago, back when he was practicing law, Walt sat behind the steering wheel of our Subaru, phone to his ear, getting more exasperated by the minute with a client.
She was a young woman who’d hired him to win sole custody of her baby. The father was, by all accounts, an absolute crackpot. And yet she kept ignoring Walt’s sage legal advice. Namely, she kept sleeping with the guy—in the middle of a custody battle! She felt guilty, she claimed, about dragging him into court and wanted to smooth his ruffled feathers before she did so. To make matters worse, if you can get worse than that, she second-guessed every single decision, then called her lawyer, namely Walt, to second-guess it some more. Eighteen times she called Walt. All while he—read “we”—was on vacation.
Poor Walt couldn’t grasp what was wrong with her. An intelligent woman like that acting a fool.
Me? I understood her completely. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life thinking exactly the way she did. She wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t crazy. She believed it was her job to manage everybody’s feelings, including the feelings of the man she was suing. She believed she couldn’t make a move until he agreed with her reasoning. That way things wouldn’t devolve.
Walt was born with boundaries. To him, there was no logic to follow, so he couldn’t see hers.
Here’s what struck me, sitting in that car. Walt is brilliant at what he does. He knew exactly what that woman needed to do, saw it as clear as the rest stop sign on I-95. And he couldn’t get her to do it, because he had no idea how she’d gotten to where she was.
So happens, every expert walks into that same trap the minute they position themselves behind a keyboard to write a book.
You know your stuff so well you’ve forgotten you ever had to learn it. The steps feel ridiculously obvious. The logic feels… self-evident. You leap from A to D because B and C stopped being steps for you eons ago. They’re just how you think.
Your reader, unfortunately, doesn’t think that way. That’s the whole reason they picked up your book. (For fun, we’re going to assume you wrote the and didn’t weenie out.). They’ve got a problem they can’t solve, and what’s standing in their way usually has less to do with missing information than with a buried belief. A habit of mind. A myth they’ve lived by so long it feels like a stone-cold fact.
The writer’s job, and it’s a doozie, is to drag everything you take for granted out into the sunlight and get it down on the page. Every step. Every assumption. Every “well, obviously!” So someone standing exactly where that young mother stood can follow the bread crumbs out.
Figuring out how other people think is slow work. Nobody hands you a list of your clients’ mistaken beliefs. (If they have, you should pay them. A lot.) You collect them one fascinating conversation at a time.
You hear the same question for the twentieth time and finally notice it’s the wrong question. You watch three different clients make the same “reasonable” decision, and you watch it blow up in their faces every time. You realize the thing you’ve been explaining for years keeps falling flat because you’ve been answering the question on the surface and missing the one underneath.
That young woman understood custody law just fine once Walt explained it. What tripped her up was a belief about whose feelings she was responsible for. No amount of legal advice was going to touch that.
I’ve been doing this work for over a decade, and I still hear new versions of the old myths every month. Seeing them takes time. There’s no shortcut.
This is why so many newly minted experts have a bear of a time writing a useful book.
They may well have the answers. They’ve done the training, earned the certification, maybe solved the problem in their own lives. What they haven’t done yet is sit across from enough people who are stuck. They haven’t answered enough questions. They haven’t heard all the strange, specific, knuckleheaded reasons people give for staying exactly where they are.
So the book comes out tidy, correct, and weirdly unhelpful. Here are the five steps. Do them. The reader nods along, closes the book, and goes right back to sleeping with the crackpot.
The seasoned expert writes a different book. She knows the reader will balk at step two, so she deals with it before the reader gets there. She knows which myth the reader is carrying, names it, and takes it apart. She sees the “yeah, but” coming because she’s heard it four hundred times.
That’s what makes a reader feel understood. And a reader who feels understood is a reader who picks up the phone and calls you.
You can’t write down what you can’t see. So go looking for it.
- Mine your inbox. Go through client emails, DMs, and the questions people ask after your talks. Write down every question you’ve answered more than twice. Those are your chapters.
- Collect the “yeah, buts.” Every objection, every reason a client gives for not doing the thing. Each one points to a belief your book has to deal with.
- Name the myths. List what your readers believe that isn’t true. “If I say no, they’ll leave.” “I have to get him to agree first.” Take each one on, by name, in the book.
- Record yourself explaining it. Walk a client through your process on a call and get the transcript. You’ll catch yourself filling in steps out loud that you’d skip on the page.
Newer to your field? That’s no reason to wait. It’s a reason to talk to more people before and while you write. Run a workshop. Take on a few more clients. Answer questions in public. Every conversation shows you something about how your reader thinks that you never would have guessed.
Walt, of courseeee, was right about everything he told that young woman. It didn’t matter. She couldn’t hear a word of it, because he never once spoke to the part of her that kept picking up the phone.
Your reader is that young woman. She’s smart. She wants out. And she needs you to meet her where she actually is.
So write down what you know. Then write down what you know so well you forgot you knew it.
That second list is the book.
