As many of you know, I have begun writing my second leadership book. Before getting started, I reflected on the writing process I used for my first leadership book. In that assessment, I remembered that I drafted a leadership article on this topic shortly after publishing “Strategic Pause”. The 4-year-old draft was consistent with my current assessment. There are five lessons that stand out and have application beyond writing a book to leadership and personal productivity. Here is the leadership article with minor edits.

One of the fundamental concepts in my first leadership book is that leadership is a process and not a destination. Your learning and evolution should be continuous. Here are five lessons learned and/or reinforced from writing “Strategic Pause”:

When I took my professional pause (2019-2020) to write my book, I could visualize it. My leadership model was 100% set. I had 80% of my outline. I thought that 50% of the actual writing would come from my 70+ leadership blog posts. That’s what I thought.

My leadership book looks considerably different than when I started the writing journey. The increased and dedicated focus drove insight after insight. It would happen while I was writing, in the shower, hiking, walking the doggies, and riding my bike. I found that I could make concepts in my model and book even more explicit and simple. The framework that had not changed for five years was enhanced. The primary principles and methods largely stayed the same but many of the labels did not. Overall, the articulation, organization, and packaging greatly improved.

No matter how good you think something is, it can probably be better. But, that is not possible without keeping an open mind.

I initially approached writing my book like a project. I am at point A, the destination is B, and the steps are 1 through 5. I started with establishing a writing discipline. I had the outline and simply needed to fill it in. I decided I would write at least two hours per day even when I was not feeling it. I forced myself to write. In every single instance, I had to rewrite the sections I forced. If I wasn’t in the flow (or “flow state”), the quality of my writing was simply not worthy of representing my passion.

Establishing a writing discipline does have important benefits. I had a writing discipline for years through tweeting three times a week on leadership and personal productivity and posting an article to my leadership blog (on tumblr and LinkedIn) once a month. By doing this, my writing improved. I began to view myself as a writer. And, I increased the probability that I would get into the flow when I did sit down to write.

However, when it comes to your passion project, your flow may not follow your writing discipline. You simply need to accept that. So, I applied my “10 Minute Rule,” which is in my book, every day. Every day I would try. I would focus for 10 minutes on my book. If I could not get into the flow, I stopped and tried again the next day. Sometimes it took one day or even a week to get back into the flow. My book was 100% written when I was in the flow.

You need to respect the flow. When you are in it, you need to run with it. Sometimes I sat down to write for an hour and ended up writing for four hours. When you enter that zone, maximize it.

Disruptions, no matter how small, can kill the flow. I had it happen many times. I forgot to turn off my message notifications. I decided to take an incoming call because I thought it would be quick. More often than not, the flow decided that it must be done for the day.

If the task in important, explicitly shield yourself from disruptions. Respect the flow and the results will come faster and be better.

I consider myself a fairly technical and capable person. When I decided to take the self-publishing route, I figured I could do most of it. This included editing, beta reading/feedback, cover design, and interior formatting. In each of these areas, I had to learn the same lesson.

Yes, I had the technical capabilities to do those things. But, as I went deeper, it was clear that there was way more to each of those areas than I realized. I could quickly acquire the technical skills but not the experience. Eventually, I embraced one of the primary principles in my book.

Empowerment is maximizing your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses. My focus belonged on the concepts, outline, and writing. The editing, cover design, and interior formatting was best left to the professionals. Further, this was very consistent with casting my passion in the best possible light.

In today’s connected world, finding help is easier than ever. I was able to find excellent partners very quickly. It also demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing. I decided to hold a contest on a design website for my cover. For what I consider to be small money, I got over 150 initial design submissions! I ended up picking a designer on the other side of the globe. Amazing.

My experience managing projects and programs was critical in making “Strategic Pause: Stop. Think. Lead.” a reality. However, it took me some time to realize that writing a book is not a linear process like a project. It is an iterative process.

I wanted to hold myself accountable for making progress, so I set expectations that were visible to my network. In working through it, as I hinted above, I consistently underestimated what it would take. As a result, I had to reset expectations on the publish date three times. That was tough for me to take. In the professional world, I took pride in consistently meeting and exceeding expectations.

I underappreciated that I was in very unfamiliar territory. I should have set expectations much farther out. Even better, I should have adopted the approach of sharing hard milestones and leaving the publish date soft.

When you are in unfamiliar territory, initially set expectations farther out than normal. There will be unknowns you have not considered. The worst case is that you can pull in the expectations. That is always better received than pushing expectations out.

Thank you for reading my leadership blog post. I hope you found it interesting and thought provoking.

Check out “Strategic Pause” on Amazon. Follow me on X (@DonThinks).

© 2025 Don Graumann. All Rights Reserved. Other than personal sharing, please do not redistribute without permission.