Blog… the unwritten chapters

Have you ever created something for one reason, only to discover later that its real purpose was something else entirely?

That appears to be what happened with Skiing Uphill.

I wrote the book in twenty-seven days. Not because I had some lifelong ambition to become a business author, but because I had recently discovered that I actually enjoyed writing.

Blogging was another matter.

Definitely not in my DNA.

Yet having started incub8ideas, I knew I needed to share some of the thinking behind it. Sitting down every week and somehow manufacturing something worthwhile to say felt completely unnatural, so I approached the problem in the way I tend to approach most things.

I created something.

Skiing Uphill: The Innovation Black Run became twenty-seven innovation insights, written in twenty-seven days, deliberately giving me a body of thinking I could continue to draw upon.

Twenty-seven days of focus creating, potentially, years of output.

That was the plan.

Towards the end of writing it, my wife Kay asked a deceptively simple question:

“Have you just become a writer because you enjoy it… or does it have a purpose?”

Fair question.

At the time, I had plenty of answers. The book could underpin workshops, help potential clients understand how I think, give me something real to share and, importantly, get me blogging.

Job done.

Except it wasn’t.

Because after the book went to print, something unexpected happened.

Rather than occasionally dipping into it for another piece of content, I started seeing its fingerprints across almost everything I was doing.

Ideas from the book evolved into practical tools. Those tools helped shape my Resource Hub. Thoughts written from experience were being tested again through real projects and conversations.

Some stood up exactly as written. Others moved on. A few revealed thoughts I clearly hadn’t finished thinking.

That was when I realised the book hadn’t actually ended.

The printing had. The thinking hadn’t.

A printed book has to stop somewhere. Eventually you reach the final page, send it off and resist the temptation to make one more change.

Thinking has no such constraint.

Perhaps I should have seen that coming because the process of writing Skiing Uphill deliberately mirrored the way I develop products.

Start with an idea. Create a framework. Build something. Share it. Listen. Refine it. Launch.

Idea commercialised.

But anyone developing a product knows launch isn’t really the end. It is simply the point where reality joins the party.

The same has happened with the book.

Take the Resource Hub. Many of the tools now sitting there are simply the thinking from Skiing Uphill put to work. And once you start applying ideas to real projects, they rarely stand still.

Perhaps that is why blogging has started to feel natural.

Being named Most Insightful Start-Up Consultant probably nudged that thinking along too. The award made me reflect on what being “insightful” actually means, which became the starting point for this series of articles.

I’m no longer sitting down wondering what I can write about. I’m noticing what I’ve been thinking about.

That feels less like content creation and more like curiosity.

It also removes another slightly daunting prospect.

The sequel.

Writing Skiing Uphill in twenty-seven days was empowering. Deliberately sitting down to write Skiing Downhill feels considerably less so.

Another twenty-seven insights? A fourth peak with a blacker run?

That rather defeats the point.

So perhaps I don’t need to write a sequel.

Perhaps the blog is it.

A collection of unwritten chapters that appear when experience gives me a reason to write them.

There is probably an innovation thought in there too. We can become very attached to what we intended something to be, when sometimes its real value only becomes clear once it is out in the world.

Skiing Uphill was written partly to make me blog.

Instead, blogging has become one of the ways I continue writing Skiing Uphill.

Twenty-seven days produced the book.

Everything since is essentially the unwritten chapters.

If your own idea still has a few unwritten chapters, perhaps we should compare notes. Connect with me