A writer’s journey is one of self-discovery. This, of course, sounds self-indulgent and were that to actually be the case then, my guess is, that writer would have few readers the same way self-indulgent people become isolated and feel lonely.

This is something I covered in more detail when I wrote about the many faces of the writer so I won’t waste your time by going over it again. This post, instead, is about something every writer agonizes over even as they are busy writing: the question of “what’s next?” Whether you’re working on a book, an article, a blog post or even a social media part of your mind, as a writer, is busy stitching together your next step.

The reason you need to think like this (if you’re not doing it already) is that the active process of writing a book opens up potential opportunities for your next one which you may otherwise miss. My writing evolution, so to speak, started with the earliest reincarnation of SEO Help back in 2010. I then wrote about social media in The Social Media Mind. From there, it was just a short step to writing Google Semantic Search which, quite naturally, led to me researching and writing about trust in writing The Tribe That Discovered Trust which became the natural stepping stone to decision-making and The Sniper Mind.

In writing Intentional all I did was follow my ‘True North.’ I let my growing knowledge and interest guide my footsteps. But this inevitability of broadening, deepening subject matter is only inevitable in retrospect, which is why it’s important for me to detail it here. It makes sense, for sure, but at the time of my writing The Sniper Mind it was anything but. I was deep in research in subjects that fired up my curiosity and absorbed my attention, and I was also drawn, in the external world in many different directions at the same time.

Coming up with “the next thing” when you are that deep in the woods is a process. You start to think about what you would like to tackle next, in the knowledge that it is going to absorb at least three years of your life and the writing of hundreds of thousands of words.

This struggle is the same even if you’re writing fiction. So, how do you resolve it? The same way you resolve any dilemma you face as a writer. You ask yourself two key questions. First: What question does writing this book answer? And second: Who would benefit from this answer?

The first question boils everything down into its most essential parts. Your research, the writing, the plot devices you use (if you’re writing fiction), the characters you create, the format of your book’s construction, all of this artifice, falls by the wayside when you condense everything into a one or two-line answer. The second question shows you if your writing journey is going to have value for anyone beyond yourself.

Writing may, indeed, be a journey of self-discovery for the writer but it is a journey of discovery for the reader. If the reader can’t see benefits, if they cannot feel themselves change and grow as a result, then the writer has failed them. These two questions are the tools we use to make the decisions we must as writers. By being honest in our answers to them we also learn to be honest with our self and honest with our readers. And that is what makes the proposition of a new book valuable.

So, Intentional grew out of a question that formed at the back of my mind as I was writing The Sniper Mind. If you can learn to make better decisions, the question went, how can you make sure that those decisions serve your life, your goals, your vision of who you are? There was no clear answer I could give at the time. I understood that snipers, who formed the core of my interviewees during the research and writing of that book, were not just tools to be pointed in a specific direction. Nor, were they proxy fingers poised to press down on a trigger.

Instead, they learnt to make decisions that became indicative of who they were as people. Their choices and their actions, reflected their deepest beliefs and their dearest values. Delving into how they created that sense of self that made them into whole people, capable of exercising their will and acting in an entirely intentional manner was what made this book, inevitable.


Intentional: How To Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully