The Solo Pro…gress
This is what The Solo Pro looks like so far. Even though I’ve been writing it for a couple of months, right now it’s just 2450 words in a mind map.
I do it this way because—of the strategies I’ve tried—this is by far the fastest way to turn your expertise into a book.
Lots of people advise you to “just start writing”, “get as many words down as you can and edit it later”, and whilst I think this is a better strategy than doing nothing, I also think it’s mostly a logical fallacy driven by what Jason Fox would call ‘the delusion of progress’.
I actually think that having lots of words written down makes it harder to explore the taxonomy of your ideas, and makes it harder to find the thread, the theme, the context, the big idea, the connecting tissue, the essence, than if you work instead with a bare minimum of words in a format where they can be moved around and manipulated easily, like a mind map. (Post-it notes are also excellent for this if you’re not a digital native).
This mind map isn’t perfect, I think it’s about 80% right, and at this point the pareto principle kicks in and I think spending any more time finessing it is going to deliver diminishing returns, so I’m going to dump it all into a Pages document (pre-formatted to be print-ready, thank you past self!), set up the automatic Table Of Contents, and start expanding out the headings and topic sentences with the fully articulated ideas, stories and examples.
So, now it’s time to get it done. Would you mind being my accountability buddy? From now until the day it’s finished, every week here in The Fink Tank, I’ll update you on the word count.
Help keep me on track, would you please?
If you’ve already written a bunch of a book and you need help untangling the essence of it to create a book you’re truly proud of, get in touch with Hambone Publishing and my wife, Mish. She’s an absolute wizard at finding the structure hidden in the morass.
If you’d like to learn how to turn a well thought-out mind map into a book in record time, check out thevideo series I created on the process.