Writing Your Own Book

So, yeah, so that's a lot of new and exciting stuff, books and all. Like after doing the book Boundless, which those of you watching on video, you'll see the book I'm referring to. I mean, it's literally like the bible of all things health, biohacking, better living through science and nature. Um, after writing that book, I would have like taken a 10 year hiatus of trying to write anything.

You always think that you, have you, have you written a book yet or.

Have you noodled on some of it? Yeah, process of it. Yeah.

Tell me more.

Well, I don't, you know, I don't want to give away the title of the book because for some reason it just feels like I shouldn't. But plus, plus it can get stolen.

Until you actually copyright it and buy it. This is true.

This is true. So, you know, holding that one close to the chest. But essentially, you know, Ben, it's been God now 24 years that I've been on this journey of spirituality and what we now call biohacking, which used to be just called being a health nut or into anti aging and stuff. And you know, along the way I have picked up a lot. But I think because I'm always learning from other people and especially having this podcast, sometimes I sort of discount the progress that I've made because when I started making content, as you know, I was coming out of the fashion industry, where all of the things I was doing in meditation and yoga and health and healing were all just kind of part of my private life. So I just considered myself a perpetual student and had neglected the fact that I'd actually learned a lot along the way. Having now been on a lot of other people's podcasts and spoken on a lot of stages over the past four years, I've realized, wow, shit, I actually know a few things myself. And so figuring out what the first book would be was a bit of a challenge because I think a lot of what makes my perspective compelling is that I have a really crazy past. And the arc of the hero's journey is pretty insane from where it came to starting in childhood into 20s and just living through mostly self inflicted hell and surviving to tell the tale. Not only surviving, but now thriving and carrying that to so many people. So the initial thought was, well, I guess it should be a memoir. This tale of triumph over one's difficulties and follies and that felt just too self indulgent. And frankly, I didn't think I'm famous enough to pull off a memoir like, okay, this dude Writes a memoir. Yeah, everyone's had a rough life, who cares Kind of thing. Cry.

Yeah.

And it just feels too, I don't know, self important or something, you know, So I struggle with that a little bit. But also just having a book that omits the story and is just like, here's lessons of life. Well, whose life and why? So so far, the book is shaping up to be kind of part memoir and part, you know, some tales, but also teachings along the way. So, you know, childhood trauma.

Yeah, the storytelling is smart, and I tried to do that with Boundless. I lead in every chapter, if the astute reader might note, with a personal anecdote, a personal story that is related to the topic of that chapter, whether it be about I had with MRSA or giardia for the immune chapter or hefty periods of stress that I went through, that I eventually tackled with breathwork practices and the stress chapter, et cetera. But the storytelling is important. I even tell my kids this when they're working on a book report at home every week. I let them select a book or I help them select a book that they write a book report on, with the general overview of that being that I figure if they have the mentality growing up that they can easily go through and assimilate one book a week, that's going to really train those muscles for them going into life, just being able to digest information at a reasonable pace and then be able to teach others that information. And I always tell them to weave their own personal anecdotes and stories into each book report because people don't want to read facts. What people resonate and connect with are stories. But I'll tell you, as you work on your book, probably the most difficult aspects, at least for me, of writing that you may find is a. It's hard to write an entire book while keeping everything that you're writing held, as you noted earlier, including the title, close to your chest. That is very difficult for me, which is why often when I am writing a book, I will take pieces and snippets and put them out as tweets or blog posts. Something that's just too good to wait for two years until it hits the bookshelves. I got to get this information out to the world now, giving yourself permission to do that, rather than thinking, oh, if it's been out there, and then the book gets published and it's already been out there, people aren't going to like the book. But taking some of the really important stuff and just giving yourself permission along the way, as you write, to put something as a blog post or an early draft of a chapter out, as, you know, a few paragraphs on Instagram, et cetera, I find that kind of fuels my fire, giving people an insider sneak peek of the book as I'm writing it. So that's one thing that I found to be helpful. And then another is there's probably two other things. One is.

The organization component, meaning that as you gather data, as you research, as you find articles, books, interviews, podcasts, etc. That are related to a chapter that you're working on or a chapter that, that you're creating a skeleton for. Because every, every chapter you must skeleton before you. You don't just sit down and write a chapter, start to finish, right? You're always bouncing around, typically laying out the framework, laying out the foundation for that chapter, but figuring out a way to assimilate all the data, all the research, can be very daunting. And so many authors will use a platform called Scrivener for that. And while that software is very useful for being able to organize what you're writing, the problem is it's not designed for cloud based interaction around anything that you're writing. If you have a scientific editor, if you have a research assistant, if you have a publishing editor, etc. Then they can't be seeing and editing chapters as you go. You can't just share a chapter in the cloud. So what I do when I write now is I start a separate Google Drive folder for each book, and that Google Drive folder has a folder for each chapter, and that folder for each chapter has all the links to research, all the links to interviews, the chapter itself, any revisions of the chapter as they're ongoing, so that previous versions of the chapter don't disappear and get deleted forever. And so I found Google with as much heat as they're getting today right now from the alternative health community based on selective censorship. I haven't found a more convenient solution than that yet. So organization, and specifically cloud based organization for collaboration and writing, I've found that to be very important. And then finally.

The last is that at some point, especially when you're writing a book about science or a book that might incorporate a lot of advances in, say, biohacking technologies or new research on things that might assist with supporting healthy immune system, or new compounds that have been discovered that might heal the gut, you get to a point where you simply have to say stop. You get to a point where even for your editors and your publisher's sanity if you're going through a traditional publisher, which is not necessary these days, but can be convenient for bookshelf space, you have to get to a point where you just say, okay, that's good enough. This needs to go in the sequel, or this is going to get added to the ebook, or the Kindle version, which is far easier to edit, or this is going to go in the special bonus chapter of the website. But that's the tricky part, too, is just fricking stopping and saying, okay, I'm done now. Hit publish and send.

Yeah, that's really good advice. And I'm seeing that come to fruition now as I'm pulling together all these different elements. You know, there is sort of a narrative of a story that's coming together, and then there's punctuation points throughout the story where huge insights or lessons have been learned. But it's almost as if each chapter could be its own book. You know, as I start to really dive in there, I'm like, oh, I'm 49 years old, man. So it's like, yeah, you know, even if I just went from the past 24 years since my awakening and thing, you know, when things really change and had this pivotal spiritual experience that just transformed everything, it was like I was born again at 26 years old. Even from 26 to 49 is a lot. So it's. It's. I think what I'm doing now is it's fun because I'm really. I'm in this sort of archeological dig where I'm just pulling everything now and just putting it where it needs to go. And then I think that what's going to happen is there's just going to be a lot of fat trimmed as I go.

I will definitely find that, and it will feel like kissing your babies goodbye. The way that I kept myself sane was I actually retained a full and complete version of each chapter in Boundless with everything that the editor cut. And I simply made a special hidden resources website. You go there and you type in your receipt number, your Amazon number, or whatever, and then it unlocks all. There's over 600 pages that I cut from the book that still live on or could be turned into additional books, et cetera. But I don't know if you fancy yourself as this, but I think I do. We are storytellers. There's probably a reason that we are drawn to podcasting, that I'm drawn to books, and that you're now in the process of writing a book. We perhaps would have been in ancestral times, the people who passed on either wisdom or stories or advice to future generations. I don't feel as though I would have been a gladiator or a warrior or up at night protecting the camp. I know I wouldn't have been doing that because I love to sleep. But sitting around the campfire sharing stories and finding out cool things and passing on wisdom, I think that being a storyteller is a fun thing to do, and I just feel incredibly blessed to be able to do that, whether it be a podcasting or writing or producing books or whatever the case may be.

I think this ability to be able to pass on wisdom to future generations and to current generations. If you want to call what I do wisdom, you might just call it random pieces of crazy biohacking knowledge. But.

I think it's a really cool thing to do. And I don't know about you, but I feel blessed just to be able to be in a position where I can, you know, in a very amateurish way of phrasing it, find out cool shit and tell people about it.

Absolutely.