CEO. Chief. Boss.
I had not always explicitly aspired to be the number-one leader, but my whole life had been building to it.
“I’d work for you,” peers told me when I was early in my career.
“You’re wise beyond your years,” I’d been told for decades before that.
When a CEO role came my way after nearly a decade as a health care marketing executive, I jumped on it. I even burned some bridges to get there.
When that job ended two and a half years later when the company got acquired, I did not aggressively pursue another.
I retreated to my home office to recover. Learning to be a CEO in an intense turnaround situation had drained me. I focused on recharging.
At the end of a job interview process I had opportunistically entertained, the recruiter called me. “It’s you. They want you.” But I didn’t trust that I had the reserves I would need or the energy to handle the role’s challenges. And I knew enough to know that there’d be challenges. There always are, even in the best jobs.
Instead of jumping in to someone else’s challenges, I tended to myself. What did I care most about? What would I regret not having done with my career?
I started interviewing people about what Obamacare had meant to them. I published my first op-ed about it on my own.
I remembered how much I love doing consumer research. And writing about it.
“I think I may have a book in me,” I said quietly to friends who were asking what I was up to.
“Great!” my best friends said. “Do it.”
Still, I kept that voice quiet. I pursued a quasi-academic appointment to give myself time and space – “a playground” one mentor called it – to develop my own ideas. To listen to my own voice.
Once there, I questioned myself. “I don’t know how to do academic research,” my inner doubts said. “You’re doing it wrong!” a more critical inner voice screamed from time to time.
“Shhhhh.” I had to ignore that voice and move forward with what I did know how to do: consumer research.
I interviewed anyone who would talk to me. I amassed dozens of consumer stories. My brain lit up with excitement, empathy, and ideas.
“You do sound like you have at least one book in you,” said an agent I reached through a close contact. She told me to send my proposal when it was ready.
I bought a book about writing a book proposal. I kept interviewing consumers. I learned countless new tools to support my research. I navigated the Institutional Review Board process, set up a new conference line to record phone interviews, researched and selected a transcription service. I found a qualitative research tool that cost $12.95 per month instead of $2,500 a year. I took a workshop on writing for social change.
Nine months after that first conversation, I sent the agent my proposal.
A spate of lovely rejections came from publishers. “This is an important topic” or “She has a great voice” they said, but all ended the same way: “It’s just not for us.”
Will the agent lose faith in the project? I fretted.
Then, in early January, I got an offer. Not the best proposal, but nonetheless, an offer to publish a book. My narrative had shifted from “I may have a book in me,” to “I’m working on a book.” Now, again, I shifted to “I am writing a book.”
That confident reframe gave way over and over to self-doubt and frustration. “Writing a book is a journey of loneliness and heartache,” a writer had told me in the earliest stages of my inquiry. I grew to understand her point.
But along the way, stripped of any sense of expertise or mastery that I had built over my two-decade career, I learned to be new again. I didn’t just learn how to do things – craft a book proposal, read a publishing contract, or ask better questions to elicit more interesting stories.
I learned that even in middle age, I can learn new things. I can start something new and finish it. I can set my own priorities, frame my own questions, and pursue my own answers. I also learned that I can always crack open my laptop and write.
“So you’re an author?” a young woman in a Kyoto cooking class said last summer when I told her I was writing a book.
“Well….” I hesitated.
I did not feel like an author. I had certainly not mastered the craft or the business of writing. But I saw myself for a moment through the eyes of this young professional, just starting her career.
I answered the most honest way I could.
“I’m working on it.”
