Planting Seeds
I have set up this week to be a getaway week because I will be traveling next week. It is always more relaxing if I do not have too much hanging over my head when I am undertaking a road trip. That isn’t an unusual sense and many would share that preference, but being the high-focus person that I am, it is an especially important alignment for me. I am one of those “cares too much” people that takes too much to heart rather than shrugging things off. This goes way beyond primary work and family obligations and extends to almost anything I undertake. I have been previously described as a dog with a bone that must bury that bone before doing anything else and cannot get past that act until it is done. Lucky for me, I have had a very productive week of burying bones.
I am already mixing my metaphors by talking about burying bones and planting seeds, but this story is less about the process of putting things in the ground than it is about the thought process involved with taking on tasks and projects and being patient about where they go. Just this week I can say that I have come to a watershed moment on two writing projects and I have heard of three other work/investment projects that have reported progress that is not unlike admiring the new growth of spring on a plant that you put in the ground or pruned before the winter. And that reference requires me to add to my seed or bone inventory the household projects that are coming to fruition and the actual plantings that are showing signs of a new spring.
The writing projects are in the form of the two books that I “finished” this week. The first is the military history stories with the working title War Games that I have been writing with my old pal and colleague Andy. He contacted me in early February and asked me if I would help him write a book that he was itching to publish. He had teamed up with another fellow veteran of a similar age and they wanted to feed me fully developed stories to put into a book format (they had gone through the process of talking about various other publishing forms like TV series and/or movie scripts). I explained that the book format was more to my experience and that I would take on such a task. Andy has been more focused on the business arrangement than I tend to be. I prefer to work on getting far enough into a project to understand that there is, indeed, a viable project before wrangling over the ownership rights. Nonetheless, I thrust forward the preference that I do the writing work for a 30% economic interest in the project with the understanding that while I would not require any out-of-pocket payments, I would also not be an investor in whatever costs were associated with getting the project to market. My own experience at publishing has led me to feel that I am not terribly sanguine about economic rewards for my writing (though I still hope someday to get a positive surprise in that regard).
The War Games manuscript was more challenging than other books I have “ghost written” in that there was no structure and only a few stories to work from. The first funny thing that happened was that Andy’s other veteran pal came in, went out, came in again and went out again. The first time he did so with some concern about working with me due to something he read about me online. That was an interesting thing for me to react to. He seemed to apologize for that and from then on only communicated directly with Andy, presumably because he was uncomfortable with communicating with me due to his outspoken personal attack on me. His second coming and going was for reasons I cannot identify, so it serves to make me feel that he may just be a flaky guy. It makes for a curious vignette, but it had little impact, good or bad, on the project trajectory. Meanwhile, I was left to formulate and compose a structure for the book as well as a full slate of characters and added stories (probably about a third of them from scratch and then also fleshing out almost all the other from their bare bones). I did what all writers tend to do and I drew on my own experiences and people I knew, even though they are generally younger by a dozen years that the timeframe of the book would generally imply. Nevertheless, I was able to forge a narrative arc for the book, somewhat develop the characters and find a way to drive that arc into a proper ending. I am pleased with the product and got some feedback from a college friend, Mike, on whom I loosely based one character (the flight surgeon). He was complimentary about the book, which, naturally, made me feel good. I hope this finds a wider audience.
The other book is the rewrite of the business memoir of my other friend, Frank, that has been sitting idle for the last three years. The path of that project has been much more labored because it went from a personal biography to a reshaped biography (based on editorial commentary) to now a business memoir that has had a 35% redaction by me this week, taking out most of the personal and tangential references that are part of all biographies. I feel very good about that project status because I always thought it needed trimming and this time the editorial commentary was spot on with the areas that I thought all along needed to be redacted. Cutting a 142,000 word manuscript down to 93,000 words is both harder and yet somehow easier than I thought. I believe it is a testament to all the practice I have from writing every day and all the work I did three years ago on this manuscript. The work this week caused me to reread the entire text and I must admit that I am very pleased with the product and feel there are many valuable lessons for readers about how a successful business leader and entrepreneur made a success of his life. The best part of the story is the pathos that comes along with the failures that every career endures. I have put a working title of The Uncomfort Zone on this book because I feel it shows the uncomfortable decisions involved in taking on challenging assignments and the uncomfortable reality when projects of passion fail. I feel this is a book we will see on bookstore shelves.
Beyond the writing projects, I have also seen this week as several prior investments (of time, effort and/or money) seem to have small green buds on them. One is a venture fund that I sponsored and became a general partner in. It seems they now have two unicorns in their portfolio, which means that they are doing quite well and should return a healthy profit to those of us who invested in the enterprise or have a stake in it. The other is a project that I have helped and “seeded” by putting a friend into a leadership position. He has retained me to be a financial advisor to him and from the sound of the update I got yesterday, he has done a marvelous job of turning this opportunity into something that may very well succeed. While I can claim some modicum of pride in finding the project and connecting him into it, the real pleasure comes in seeing that he has taken it to a whole new and improved level that may well succeed famously. It is the sort of influence that is both harder to expect and yet more likely to be the sustenance I derive at this stage of life. It is like the teacher that watches a student rise to prominence. The teacher cannot claim responsibility for the success but can take pleasure in knowing that he was part of creating the environment or foundation for success. That too is a form of reward and in this case, it may also have a financial benefit.
So, the moral of my story is simple…never refrain from planting seeds. Nothing beats seeing the blooms of spring.