The bus station in
Podgorica, Montenegro is not the type of place you’d expect something special to happen. The buildings are gray concrete, and you have to pay to use the toilet (a very reasonable 0.30 euros).
As we settle into our seats on the bus, I smile at the couple behind us, and ask if they speak English. They do. I apologize for leaning my chair back, explaining that the latch is broken. They tell me it’s no problem in a voice that says it’s kind of annoying, but they understand it’s nobody’s fault.
The guy then looks at me and asks if I wrote a book about personal training. I tell him yes.
His name is Evangelos, and he’s from Greece. He tells me he worked as a personal trainer through college and grad school, but now that he’s finishing his PhD in engineering, he’s out of the fitness industry.
But
while he trained clients, he must’ve found my book helpful, because he recognized me on a bus 4,649 miles from where I wrote it.
I started writing my first book,
Ignite the Fire, in 2009, when I was 24, because I was too ignorant to know the many reasons why I shouldn’t. I had no network; no idea how to write, publish, or market; no friends who’d published a book (I wouldn’t meet Lou Schuler for another three years); and
didn’t yet know self-publishing was even an option.
In 2011, when I launched Ignite, I had zero support inside the young and broken fitness industry.
Nobody thought a 26-year old had any business trying to educate his peers. They hated me for even trying. But they didn’t write the book from their positions of superior knowledge and insight. I wrote it from my position of optimistic ignorance.
I still write books, and people keep buying and sharing and reading and learning and growing from themI wonder if more people would do more meaningful work if they stopped trying to figure out every detail before they begin. One of the details you learn is how hard it’s going to be, and that’s often enough to keep you from doing it.
My advice: Put what you have to offer out into the
world. When you do, you might have a chance to chat with somebody like Evangelos on a bus from Montenegro to Albania on a random Wednesday in July on your way to trek in the Albanian Alps to celebrate your wedding anniversary with your wife. Or something like that.