Sales Badassery

Acknowledgments

Every time I sit down to write a book, I think, “Oh, this will be easy. I’ve done it enough times before.”

Inevitably, that is rarely the case. Starting a book is a lot like going to the gym. After a long time off, say for several years after relocating to Dallas, getting back to the gym took forever. As in over a year. That’s because no one wants to go to the gym for the first time.

But once I’m in, I transform into a beast. I can’t get enough. I have to literally put up a fight with myself to keep from going to the gym too often, which would result in overtraining. (I’m going there as soon as I put this down.)

With a book, it’s the same. Once I can get myself to sit down and just do it, it begins to flow. And pretty soon it’s like the gym; thoughts will pop into my mind and make me want to drop everything I’m doing and get back to writing, which usually isn’t possible. Thankfully I learned a great trick from the great Jeffrey Gitomer: I simply text those ideas to myself. That way they cannot get lost.

It was a thrill to work, once again, with the same one-two team who hand-held me through my first published book and its subsequent follow-ups: Matt Holt and Shannon Vargo at John Wiley & Sons. And just as many thanks go to Kelly Martin, who is now a part of that team (a trio?) and has been tremendously kind and helpful. The crew at Wiley truly are a pleasure to work with, in a world where problems and stress never seem to stop coming at us from all directions. ...