There are sometimes things that we just can’t know.

📖📖 My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World is out now. The ebook is on a special launch week price of 99p/99c until the end of the weekend! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

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There are sometimes things that we just can’t know.

We will never be sure whether we were right to err on the side of coddling our children or whether we would have been better to err on the side of challenging them.

We will never know what life would have been like if we had stuck out that hard job for another 6 months, or what it would have been like if we had quit that other one a year earlier instead of sticking it out.

We will never know about what might have happened if we just hadn’t done that thing in that relationship that ended up being the final straw.

We will never know what the world would have been like if we had had 5% more courage, or 5% less.

Maybe better. Maybe worse.

I generally like my life. And so, as a science fiction fan, I’m always wary about wishing for things to be different.

I wouldn’t want to wake up like Marty McFly and find the world changed and Biff Tannen as my step dad.

I wouldn’t want to come back to the present, like Domhnall Gleeson (Charlie Weasley) in About Time, and find that my child is a different child because I changed something inconsequential in the past.

I wouldn’t want to change me.

And yet this sense of not knowing has been with me this week, as my new book, The Power to Choose, was released.

Nine years of work, on and off. Hundreds of hours. Maybe more.

So many people who have helped with it.

And then a decision a year or so ago: is it going to come out, or is it going to not come out?

(And if it isn’t going to come out now, it’s not going to ever come out.)

That question became important because this book felt like a creative blockage. Like it needed to be out of my system, one way or another, before other things could emerge.

But one of the things I’ve been wondering about in the last few weeks is the cost of all that time that I put into this book.

Remember, I believe in the power of choice.

I believe that saying yes to one thing is saying no to something (or should we say everything) else.

I believe we can’t get everything done, so we have to focus on doing more of what really matters.

And what are the business, creative, wellbeing, financial, relationship costs of this book?

And will they be worth it?

Which brings us back to: there are sometimes things that we just can’t know.

When I sat with that question a year or so ago, about whether the book would be published or deleted, I knew almost straight away where I would land.

Because 3 years ago I published another book: How to Share What You’ve Made.

It’s the least-read of my 12-Minute Method books, the shortest, the worst rated on Amazon… and - for me at least - the most important.

Because it tells me what to believe when I’m doubting the power of my creativity. It tells me that the work is better out than in - and if we don’t share it, then we’re making it impossible for it to do half its work.

Half a book’s worth - or that of any other creative project, or business - can perhaps be put to its impact on the creator. And The Power to Choose has changed me.

But if we keep it inside us, or inside our computer,, it stops that work from spreading, from having the other half of its impact. From being born and having its own adventures in the world, for good or ill.

And so like a parent with a child, wondering if maybe with just this child, I really can protect it from being hurt… in the end, we have to realise, that life isn’t life if the child never leaves the house.

And for a book, life isn’t life unless people are reading it.

None of that has really helped that much this week. Publishing any book, sharing any creative act, requires courage. But the sheer vulnerability of publishing this personal (although I hope also universal) book, which contains so much of me, hit me.

I haven’t felt that good.

But some part of me believes it was the right thing to do.

Because the courage might just lead somewhere, might change me, might change others.

Of course, there are sometimes things that we just can’t know.

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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now, and the ebook is currently on a special launch week price of 99p/99c… ends on Sunday! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.