Is it Worth it to Bring a Book Into the World?

Is it worth it?

It’s a good question, and it’s a question a lot of people are asking right now from different points along their own personal life path.

Is it worth it to have a baby right now?

Is it worth it to buy that car I’ve always wanted even though it has an internal-combustion engine when ostensibly we’re all moving over to electric in a few years’ time?

Is it worth it to turn down a relationship with this dynamic, mind-blowing human whose age is a generation older / younger and who I probably won’t end up marrying in the long run, but who represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for adventure and growth?

No one has the answers to these questions, and you know as well as I do that if you sit on it and keep asking yourself, you’ll find yourself in the same spot next year, wondering whether it’s the right time and the right move.

Here’s why I say it’s worth it to bring a book into the world.

Reason #1. Writing your book will make you a better person.

One of my favourite clients shares his thoughts very frankly with people when they ask him for advice on writing a book.

“For about the first two weeks,” he says, “you’ll feel like you’re working on the book. But pretty quickly, the book will start working on you.”

Writing a book is an exercise in self-exploration. Nonfiction, memoir, fiction…doesn’t matter which genre. What is required in pinning your words to the page is the ability to defend them, which requires a deep understanding of them, which requires a lot of clarity around them, which requires answers to a great many questions, which requires those questions to be well formed. Which requires a great deal of consideration and contemplation.

It's not uncommon to head all the way back into childhood to make sense of something you’re trying to bring to readers now. Sometimes you’ll have to peel things right back to the level of belief, and that’s very deep work indeed.

Working your way through a book requires understanding your own needs well enough that you can anticipate the reader’s. It requires stripping away your tendency to hide behind generalities so that you can deliver the truth. It requires the courage to stand behind your truth, because damn, that thing’s going to be public and you better believe in what you’re saying to people. Writing a book demands that you accept criticism, whether that’s from your book coach or your editor, and ultimately from your audience.  

 Is it worth writing a book? Even simply for the fact that you’ll be better aligned by the end of it, it’s a solid yes.

Reason #2. The world needs your light. Now.

OK, let’s stay on this idea of alignment, because it’s related to purpose.

You’re probably not in your 20s, which means you’ve had to live a bit of life before you felt ready to take your stand and make your point.

People who want to write a book usually have multiple reasons for doing so, but in my experience as a book coach, there’s a singular universal why beating way down deep at the quiet, eternal heart of this chaotic, creative, difficult act.

We want to share our light with others.

Read “light” any way you like. Maybe it’s your message, or it’s reassurance, or it’s your gift of knowledge or experience. Light travels under many names, but what burns at the core of this thing you’ve decided to share, like an inexhaustible pulsar, is a deep and abiding love for other humans.

You want to make people’s lives easier. You want to tell a story that shows how it’s possible to triumph over terrible things. You want to delight readers with an unlikely love story. You want to show people a process that makes teams more effective and happier. You want to teach people how to lead from presence and not from fear. You want to guide people in how to deal with uncertainty.

You want to save them from the struggle that you yourself had to duke your way through in order to arrive at what you know now.

You want to save them from the pain that brought you to this place.

It’s worth writing a book for that.

Reason #3. A book gives your message the best reach.

Books have the longest tail of any kind of content, period. There’s no podcast episode, blog post, magazine article, billboard sign or course that can last as long as a book if it’s done well.

Books have the longest staying power. Even more than movies. If you tally up the number of old books people regularly refer to versus the number of old movies they refer to, you’ll see that we talk about books a LOT more than any other form of content.

There’s one exception, and that’s the ancient way of oral storytelling. Spoken stories passed through the generations indeed have staying power—for centuries and millennia. Especially in indigenous cultures, where stories are passed more through telling than by being recorded.

But given the realities of making your voice heard nowadays, in the current matrix, I would argue that writing your message down will give it a better shot than trying to say it all out loud and hoping that it travels.

A book gives you the space to unpack your idea fully, and it also gives you a format in which to deliver that idea to people. Multiple formats, actually, since your book can be experienced in electronic or audio format as well as the much-loved (and still most popular) print version.

That a book offers a long tail means you can build courses and newsletters and fandoms and webinars and speeches and giveaways and keynotes and consulting and workshops and retreats and podcasts and communities and workbooks off the back of it. That’s the stuff that drives sales. And you can do that for at LEAST five years after your book comes out. You can just keep hitting refresh, and new opportunities to engage people in conversation about your book’s topic will keep appearing. It’s like magic.

So is it worth writing a book now? If you want to spread a message into people’s hearts and have myriad ways of doing it, yeah, it’s worth it.

Reason #5. It’s going to bug you until you get a completion.

I trained with Katie Hendricks and Gay Hendricks throughout 2022, after having my worldview rearranged by Gay’s 2009 book Conscious Living, and I stayed on with the Hendricks Institute for a few years afterward, working on the support team for upcoming coaches-in-training, so I was able to enjoy 360 degrees of educational immersion in the way energy actually works.

I knew a lot going in: I understood that what we speak and write shapes our reality. I understood that we have 100% power to observe our thoughts, and just watch them instead of believing them. I understood that what we believe…ends up happening, whether we like it or not.

And I learned a whole lot more. Like your jaw is connected to your pelvis and therefore your sexual energy, and that if you have a tight jaw, you’re withholding or not speaking your truth.

Or that in order for something to change, you first need to accept it.

Or that you can slow down time, but only when you learn how to stop your body from acting as though there’s not enough.

In leafing back through my notes from Body Intelligence a few days ago, I came across many more such notes I’d taken from these mind-blowing sessions.

But here’s the one that matters right now:

“Life works to the extent you do a good job of completing things.”

That’s Gay Hendricks, all 78 years of him at the time, having unlocked greatness and joy in thousands of people over the course of his career. It’s one of the myriad head-bending, paradigm-shattering life truths that he and Katie just sort of shrug and drop in the course of teaching people how to recover the authentic, curious, powerful essence we were born with. The one that the outer world socializes out of us.

This truth—that life works to the extent that you finish things—is especially significant if you’ve started a book and have petered out midway because you can’t figure out how to make it work. Or if you’ve completed what writer Ann Lamott calls a “shitty first draft” and it’s just been chilling in your Dropbox for the last 13 years and you keep thinking that you should go back to it and try again, because every single day godsakes you see evidence that people desperately need the insights that are stored inside that little blue folder.

So get the completion. Share the insights. Give that gift to the people who need it—and free yourself. And move on.

It’s worth it.

And also? In case you were wondering.

Yes, there is room for another book.

And your voice DOES matter.