One Sure Way To Be Happy, Loved And Remembered Is To Write a Book
I’m speaking with my acim this morning and he tells me he’s been on admission in the hospital for about a week now. In addition to the usual malaria and typhoid, he tells me, he has “BP”. He’s about 36.
A few days ago a friend told me she lost her senior sister last December to “BP”. She was 35. She’d lost her bank job five years earlier and suffered mild stroke three years later due to high “BP”. She passed away five years from the day she lost her job.
Charlie “Tremendous” Jones once said, “Of all the things in this world only two will have the greatest impact on your life, the books you read, and the people you meet.”
Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying, “If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth writing.”
The people we most admire are those with strings of books behind their names, whether fiction or non-fiction. Names such as William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Maya Angelou, Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, Susan Cain, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, J. K. Rowling, and Stephen King, readily come to mind.
Indeed, there is no feeling more exhilarating than stumbling onto the world’s most iconic airports, libraries, shops and websites and finding your book displayed alongside those of the planet’s most revered authors and icons.
Writing a book, just like any other serious project, looks intimidating at first glance when you look at all the moving parts at the same time: writing, designing, proofreading, editing, publishing, pricing, distributing, marketing and selling. But when you break the project down to bite-sized pieces, you discover that it’s an endeavour you can tackle with ease if you have a little guidance.