This is the first post on writing I’ve written since December 2021. First, if you’ve been following this blog “I am sorry”. Yep, really I am because there was no conscious intention to abandon it for almost two years and no active thought to not write anything else for a while.

So, what happened? Why the gap? Well, yeah. Intentional came out and the workload associated with promoting it, doing interviews, answering emails and creating content suddenly soaked up all my available bandwidth. Great, but. As things started to ease off a little I discovered that life was simply great. I totally enjoy the freedom I have as a writer of well-received books to do what I like, pretty much and well, I did pretty much what I liked.

I started my days with coffee with my wife and walking my dogs. I put in two physical training sessions a day, seven days a week (making it about 21 hours of exercise each week), meditated, I caught up with friends, reduced the list of books waiting to be read by me, put out quite a lot of social media content about things I found fascinating or interesting or insightful, I improved my muscle mass, got more sleep and boned up on the latest neuroscience research on health, fitness and longevity.

Life became so amazing that it actually felt I was on a break. I wasn’t, in all that time I still worked on the consulting side of my business, I still etched ideas for books, I still put outlines together and read them for relevance and appeal, I still wrote on average 2,000 words a day. But I did it all without pressure, as stress-free as I was on holiday and completely forgot about this blog.

This is revealing it itself. I’ve made no bones in the past of the fact that I use this blog as therapy so completely forgetting about it could be taken as a sign that whatever was afflicting me and drove me to denude part of my soul here, was cured. But there is another theory to this that perhaps the figurative demons I’d encounter in my life as a writer which I’d then have to exorcise here were gone because I had stopped going out to look for them.

As it happens there is an element of truth to both these theories. Certainly, as I stopped travelling due to the pandemic and refused to re-start after it officially ended as a global public health emergency my stress levels remained low. Low, also, remained the stimuli that often led me to consider books and blog posts as solutions to problems I perceived. So in a sense I was ‘cured’ as in I became happier, calmer and more laid back. This also led me to stop digging deeper than I needed to in some things. I learnt to accept the face value of the reasons why we are inefficient, behave in mistrustful ways and refuse to cooperate until circumstances force us to.

I didn’t stop thinking about the issues themselves or the complexities of human behavior and human motivation but I did end up wanting to find fresh ways to make a difference, explore new avenues through which I could surface what I learnt and provide the answers to the questions I encountered in business and life, for others to read.

Without entirely meaning to I gravitated towards a “what’s next?” phase. I don’t want to write more books on SEO. Nor do I want to necessarily write another book on business.

The world is in a phase of deep transformation. Life is changing. The way we do business is also changing. There are fundamental elements to doing search engine optimization well, building trust and doing social media marketing that I have covered repeatedly in books, talks, interviews and blog posts. Repeating myself is boring to me. So I sort of stopped.

Books are born out of ideas. Ideas are answers to questions and insights (or solutions) to a problem. So this now let’s you know why I didn’t really come back here for such a long time. A book is an irritant in a writer’s mind. It itches at their being. Like a foreign object lodged deep inside them that must somehow come to the surface, it discomfits them.

Writers frequently talk about the ‘birthing’ process of a book. The moment of inception. The long gestation. Then the painful birth as they struggle to bring it to light. All of these similes are true. It totally feels that way. When a book is conceived it gains weight, life and power. It starts to take shape and form. And then it has to be written in a way that will make it valuable to the world.

A writer struggles with all of this, at every stage and the pain is real. Books come from exactly the right irritant finding the right writer. Over the last twelve months I’ve written no less than 100,000 words on a project that is not even halfway through. Obviously I will need to prune, tighten up, re-write, decide what to include and what to omit. Right now I am at that long birthing stage where the birth itself feels a little like a death each day. But that is a good sign. Books that are easy to write are, maybe, not worth reading.

So, I will be adding more posts to this blog now for sure. And if this one mystifies you more than it enlightens you remember: it’s here for my sake as much as yours. Probably more mine than yours.