February 10th, 2024: Happy Lunar New Year! We are planning on eating lots of great food today and feel lucky that my holiday season now runs from Thanksgiving to Lunar New Year. + Wilderness Retreat/Coaching: A couple weeks ago, I got to connect with Dom Francks in Boulder. As he was describing his work, his entire body was alive. I am always so inspired being around people like that. He’s doing something pretty interesting, connecting the virtual to nature. He’s launching his VIVIFY Regenerative Leadership Program, which is an online program that is taking applications for their summer 2024 cohort. This is a wilderness-based deep dive with built around a weeklong off-trail backpacking trip in the High Sierra in California. (Not sponsored)
big fan of the small book thread you're thinking about...a worthy project for you to figure out how to enable others to do it. So much of this is showing what's possible -- a good blog post would be to show a taxonomy of what exists in terms of small books (ie examples) and how what you are envisioning would overlap and differ from those examples
Love the n-page book idea. Reminded me of David Perell's podcast with Morgan Housel who said his publisher was freaking out about how short some of his chapters were and Housel was like, "I'm not just going to fill space for the sake of it. I will not disrespect peoples' time."
I like the small book hypothesis, so often non-fiction books start with the germ of a brilliant idea only for the fruits of that idea to get lost in the author's need to make it book-sized. I've just read a nice short book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett and then there are the books by Byung-Chul Han which are very small but so incredibly dense that you can only read a few pages in a sitting.
I love this idea Paul. I've been considering writing a book for a few years now but I'm always turned off by it because I think it's going to take too long. The success you've had with Pathless Path and the e-book model has inspired me. Why DOES a book need to be so long? Does that really gel with modern reading habits--including my own? So yeah, I'm feeling like this might be the spark I need to get going on mine. And not worrying so much about how long it's going to take.
So very useful Paul, the pathless book path. Every direction I turn there is another aspect of my old ways of looking at things that deserve to be challenged and reimagined. The book writing process is definitely one of them.
Thanks for the feature 🙏 got more thoughts on work coming in the near future, all new thoughts that I didn't have a year ago so I'm excited to dig in and see what emerges
I love and wholeheartedly agree with this idea. So many “self-help” books are filled with one too many anecdotes - they feel a little like an attempt to run up the word count! I’m all for concise, to the point reads.
Yes, they are, and the quality of the print version also matters! For an amazingly inspiring example of this, see the small book put out by the Steve Jobs archive:
short books. Continually excited about it. Continually dissuaded to write one because I worry it will slip through the cracks. How to ensure I don't work for nothing?
I wrote long ago that its the RISE OF THE SHORT BOOK. Its here to stay. If U cant tell a story/fiction in 25,000 words or less, stick with NON-FICTION.
big fan of the small book thread you're thinking about...a worthy project for you to figure out how to enable others to do it. So much of this is showing what's possible -- a good blog post would be to show a taxonomy of what exists in terms of small books (ie examples) and how what you are envisioning would overlap and differ from those examples
Love the n-page book idea. Reminded me of David Perell's podcast with Morgan Housel who said his publisher was freaking out about how short some of his chapters were and Housel was like, "I'm not just going to fill space for the sake of it. I will not disrespect peoples' time."
I like the small book hypothesis, so often non-fiction books start with the germ of a brilliant idea only for the fruits of that idea to get lost in the author's need to make it book-sized. I've just read a nice short book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett and then there are the books by Byung-Chul Han which are very small but so incredibly dense that you can only read a few pages in a sitting.
I love this idea Paul. I've been considering writing a book for a few years now but I'm always turned off by it because I think it's going to take too long. The success you've had with Pathless Path and the e-book model has inspired me. Why DOES a book need to be so long? Does that really gel with modern reading habits--including my own? So yeah, I'm feeling like this might be the spark I need to get going on mine. And not worrying so much about how long it's going to take.
Thanks Paul, I appreciate it! 💚 🥃
I’m looking forward to the podcast experiment. I love watching live coaching, especially Joe Hudson’s
So very useful Paul, the pathless book path. Every direction I turn there is another aspect of my old ways of looking at things that deserve to be challenged and reimagined. The book writing process is definitely one of them.
Got me thinking 🤔
Thanks for the feature 🙏 got more thoughts on work coming in the near future, all new thoughts that I didn't have a year ago so I'm excited to dig in and see what emerges
I love and wholeheartedly agree with this idea. So many “self-help” books are filled with one too many anecdotes - they feel a little like an attempt to run up the word count! I’m all for concise, to the point reads.
Yes, they are, and the quality of the print version also matters! For an amazingly inspiring example of this, see the small book put out by the Steve Jobs archive:
https://book.stevejobsarchive.com
Bought the book!
Have you read Amy Hoy’s Just Fucking Ship? That was written and published in 24 hours (v1 at least) and it’s brilliant too.
short books. Continually excited about it. Continually dissuaded to write one because I worry it will slip through the cracks. How to ensure I don't work for nothing?
I wrote long ago that its the RISE OF THE SHORT BOOK. Its here to stay. If U cant tell a story/fiction in 25,000 words or less, stick with NON-FICTION.
If by “small book” you mean pamphlet or treatise, it’s not anything new more a repeat of the past, which I’m all for.
novellas were what shorter novels used to be called, but I think books are becoming shorter in general