Ask the Author: Michele Wucker
Answered Questions (5)
Michele Wucker
Actively seek out and be open to feedback. You may not like it but often the stuff that hurts the most is the most valuable for making your writing stronger. I can't tell you enough how much good editors appreciate gracious writers who incorporate thoughtful feedback in a way that makes a piece stronger.
Michele Wucker
The best thing about being a writer is when someone who's read your book tells you that book has changed how they think about the world, understand something they didn't before, or even better, how they behave. When words don't just exist on a page but shape someone's life, that's how the pen becomes mightier than a sword.
Michele Wucker
I got the idea for the main question in THE GRAY RHINO after sounding an early warning in 2011 that Greece's creditors needed to learn from the opportunity that Argentina had missed a decade earlier to write off some of its debt to avoid a chaotic default. Private creditors came to an agreement with Greece just in time to pull it back from the edge and avoid tearing apart the euro. So I wondered: what made the difference between leaders who saw a crisis coming and acted in time to keep it from getting worse, and those who didn't. The title came when I was describing to a friend the idea of a giant, scary, dangerous threat coming right at you, and the image of a rhino popped into mind. It was perfect. Then he joked that it had to be a black rhino -a reference to Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Black Swan," describing highly improbable, high impact risks. I knew there was such a thing as a black rhino, and white rhinos too. When I looked them up on Wikipedia, it struck me that black rhinos weren't actually black, any more than white rhinos were white: they were all gray. The real color was so obvious, but because of the misleading names, it was easy to overlook that rhinos are gray. So the rhino was an even more perfect metaphor when I added the color in.
Michele Wucker
I used to beat myself up for starting to clean the house, rearrange papers, sort my sock drawer and the like instead of writing. But then a friend with a background in psychology completely turned it around when she corrected me. You're not procrastinating, she told me: instead, this was a ritual to get me started writing. Once I figured that out, I cleaned away which got me going writing. No more writer's block, and a really clean house. The other thing that helped was learning to take a break. When I started fostering dogs, who were very good about reminding me when I had been sitting at my desk for too long, I took long walks in Riverside Park and that's when a lot of breakthroughs happened, so that when I got back to my desk I was much more productive.
Michele Wucker
I'm putting the final touches on my newest book, THE GRAY RHINO: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore, coming out from St Martins in Spring 2016. This is the most exciting part of writing a book, when the slogging as done and it's now polishing and watching it come to life.
The Gray Rhino is like the Elephant in the Room, only a lot more dangerous. We're terrible at dealing with the highly obvious problems in front of us that we know we have to deal with, but neglect anyway: from day-to-day challenges like changing your diet before you have a heart attack, to business issues like cybersecurity or disruptive technologies, to economic policies and global issues like climate change. This book helps us to recognize why we're so bad at recognizing the obvious. It also shows how to use that knowledge to not just avoid being trampled but also in many cases to identify and profit from new opportunities created by solving those problems.
The Gray Rhino is like the Elephant in the Room, only a lot more dangerous. We're terrible at dealing with the highly obvious problems in front of us that we know we have to deal with, but neglect anyway: from day-to-day challenges like changing your diet before you have a heart attack, to business issues like cybersecurity or disruptive technologies, to economic policies and global issues like climate change. This book helps us to recognize why we're so bad at recognizing the obvious. It also shows how to use that knowledge to not just avoid being trampled but also in many cases to identify and profit from new opportunities created by solving those problems.
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