Why I’m Writing a Book (even if no one reads it)

What is your motivation?

When I started my career I didn’t know what drove me.

I mean I thought I did - I wanted money, and I wanted to get promoted. 

And this is what I focused on for the first few years in the corporate workplace. 

But it was a vague ambition and I didn't enjoy the pursuit.

Then I figured that my motivation should be chasing happiness. 

But over time I realised that pursuit was also flawed. 

You can be very happy just sitting on a beach, but the novelty of that quickly wears off. 

There’s a difference between the quick and passive happiness you get from lying on a beach, watching TV, or buying fancy things, and the harder positive emotion of creation. 

Next I realised I needed some clear creative goals to strive for. 

I started a snowboard blog which ended up being the third most-read snowboard blog in the world (when blogging was a thing), but a bad accident took away my enjoyment. 

I cofounded a business and helped lead it through to an exit nine years later, when it was absorbed into a larger business, rebranded and I left.  

I was finding fleeting moments of great motivation that would eventually disappear leaving me to start from scratch each time. 

In each phase I was discovering additional factors that were needed to achieve it. 

I’ve now discovered that what I was seeking was PERMA. 

Psychologist Martin Seligman discovered that it takes a balance of five factors to grow your well-being: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishments.

And it also explains why I’m writing a book.

“Happiness is not something ready-made. It comes from your own actions.” – Dalai Lama

P - Positive Emotions

We’re all born with a natural level of cheerfulness (I was born slightly on the low end of the scale). 

Seligman believes that this natural level dictates most of your well-being, but there’s about 15% that you can change. 

He conducted research to show this is possible. 

Participants were split into two groups, one group did not change their habits, and the other group were asked to write down three good things that they had experienced, and explain why they went well, each evening for a week. 

After just one week, the ‘3 Good Things’ group “were happier and less depressed than they had been at baseline”, and the effect continued, “they stayed happier and less depressed at the three-month and six-month follow-ups.”

Why I’m writing a book: 

You don’t have to follow exactly the formula of that research to experience the benefits. 

Each week I write a little bit of the book, often considering and reflecting on positive moments from my life and career so it’s an extended version of the 3 Good Things test. 

Other factors matter too. 

For me the creative act of writing itself is fun, and it’s a good excuse to feed my curiosity. 

And all this builds up my positivity. 

E - Engagement

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

We’re at our happiest when we’re fully engaged in an activity that balances the level of challenge and our current skills.

This is what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ‘state of flow’. 

When we enter this zone, we lose track of time, our internal critic falls silent and is replaced by  a sense of joy and clarity.

The skateboarder Danny Way captures this feeling when describing his attempts to master his sport: “Skaters are willing to take a great deal of physical punishment. We’ll try something endlessly, weeks on end, painful failure after painful failure after painful failure. But for me, when it finally snaps together, when I’m really pushing the edge and skating beyond my abilities, there’s a zone I get into. Everything goes silent. Time slows down. My peripheral vision fades away. It’s the most peaceful state of mind I’ve ever known. I’ll take all the failures. As long as I know that feeling is coming, that’s enough to keep going.”

But you don’t have to be a professional skateboarder putting yourself through physical punishment, people experience this state in other activities, creative pursuits and life. 

You can seek it out and increase your well-being. 

Seligman tested this by challenging people’s strengths in a new way, each day for a week so that they’d experience flow.

He found that the intervention increased engagement and elevated happiness for six months.

Why I’m writing a book:

Being in a state of flow was the reason I loved snowboarding, and enjoyed the intensity of launching a startup. 

It’s also why I enjoy learning new things and writing creatively, like this.  

I’d superficially read a lot on topics like this in the past, but by adding the challenge of extensive research, wrestling with complex ideas and writing a book that matters, I’m stretching myself into a state of flow. 

R - Relationships

Humans are tribal.

We are hardwired for connection. 

So in life and work we naturally seek out and build positive relationships. 

In 1938 scientists began tracking the health of 268 Harvard students (fun fact: one of them was John F. Kennedy) and in the 1970s they added 456 kids from Boston’s poorest neighbourhoods. 

They’ve now been studying these groups, their spouses and their children for almost 90 years. 

Their biggest learning was that good relationships were the key to making us happier and healthier.

“When we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn’t their middle-age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old, it was how satisfied they were in their relationships.” says the current leader of the study Robert Waldinger, “The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80.”

Relationships improve our well-being in the long-term and also in immediate situations. 

The psychologists Frank Martela and Richard Ryan showed that when people engage in an activity designed to help others, it triggers an immediate spike in positive affect, meaningfulness, and psychological vitality. 

Why I’m writing a book: 

Looking back on my career so far the relationships have been the most rewarding aspect.

The gratitude I feel toward the people that have helped me, and the opportunities I’ve had to help others. 

This is a great opportunity to capture and codify some of the experiences I’ve had and provide me with the tools to help build future relationships. 

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.” – Mark Twain

M - Meaning

We need our lives to have a purpose.

If we have a clear ‘why’ for doing things it puts everything else into context.

At the turn of the millenium organisational psychologists studied a group of hospital cleaners. 

They found that there were two distinct groups.

One group was passive.

They felt their jobs had little meaning. 

They disliked cleaning, felt their job was low skill, they only put in the most minimal possible effort, and they interacted with as few people as possible. 

The other group was proactive.

They felt their jobs had meaning and saw themselves as a critical part in helping the healing process. 

They actively ‘crafted’ their roles by taking on more tasks, finding ways to engage with the patients, visitors and other staff, and timing their efforts to help the wards run smoothly.  

If you can link yourself to a larger prosocial outcome you’ll boost your well-being. 

"The meaning of life is to give life meaning." - Viktor Frankl, psychologist and Holocaust survivor

Why I’m writing a book: 

Meaning is what was missing when I was purely focused on money and ambition.

These days I seek meaning by finding roles that have a moral and visionary outcome. And I seek meaning from helping others to thrive and I hope this content is a useful tool to help others excel. 

I’ll be focusing on backing up each idea with proven psychology, management or leadership concepts, so it’s not just based on opinions and fleeting trends.

And I’ll use timeless stories where the history is settled and the moral outcomes are known.

History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. 

A - Accomplishments

"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain." - Roy Batty, Blade Runner

The final thing that adds to our well-being is striving for mastery and achieving success.

As we make progress towards a goal our well-being improves, and it’s a virtuous cycle because as our positive emotions increase our motivation to act grows.

Then, when we finally achieve difficult goals we enjoy the rewarding feeling of finishing something. 

A ten-year study tracked 5,693 people to measure the long-term emotional impact of completing major life goals and they proved that, “long-term goal striving is beneficial for well-being.” 

Why I’m writing a book: 

When my nine-year business rebranded, my seven-year blog vanished, and snowboard magazines disappeared from the shelves my sense of accomplishment was erased. 

A book is a tangible artifact I’ll always have to look back on a substantial task I tackled. 

I’ve broken it out into writing a series of weekly articles to give me that feedback loop of progress. 

And these weekly posts will ultimately be combined and edited into a book as the final goal.

The Secret of Success

The conventional wisdom is that hard work leads to success and success leads to happiness.

That's what I used to believe.

The reality is the complete opposite.

In 2005 researchers analysed 225 psychology studies that included more than 225,000 individuals.

They discovered that happiness is not the consequence of success - it's the cause.

Happiness consistently preceded measures of success that included; fulfilling work, satisfying relationships, and higher mental and physical health and longevity.

People with higher levels of well-being were more likely to succeed in job interviews, score well in job evaluations, be more productive and be better managers.

Happy people are more likely to seek out new goals, build resources, engage with their communities, actively explore, create, and confidently take risks.

They initiate behaviours that naturally cultivate success.

PERMA works.

Each of the five building blocks of PERMA reinforce each other and contributes to well-being. And well-being leads to success.

Which is why I'm getting busy writing a book.

“There’s only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” – Aldous Huxley

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Seligman, M., “Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier”, John Murray One (2011)

Seligman, M., Steen, T. A., Park, N., Peterson, C., “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions”, American Psychologist (2005)

Csikszentmihalyi, M., “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience”,  Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2008)

Waldinger, R., “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness”, TED YouTube (2015)

Harvard Study of Adult Development. n.d. “The Harvard Study of Adult Development”, Lifespan Research Foundation (Accessed 2026)

Martela, F., Ryan, R., “Prosocial behavior increases well-being and vitality even without contact with the beneficiary: Causal and behavioral evidence”, Motivation and Emotion (2016)

Wrzesniewski, A., Dutton, J. E., “Crafting a Job: Revisioning Employees as Active Crafters of Their Work”, Academy of Management Review (2001)

Scott, R., Hauer, R., “Blade Runner”, Warner Bros. (1982)

Wiese, B.S., “Personal Project Pursuit: Goals, Action and Human Flourishing”, Psychology Press (2007)

Messersmith, E. E., Schulenberg, J. E., : "Goal Attainment, Goal Striving, and Well-Being During the Transition to Adulthood: A Ten-Year U.S. National Longitudinal Study", New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development (2010)

Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., Diener, E., "The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?", American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin (2005)