I have always wanted to write a book.
Not for any sensible reason. There's just something impossibly romantic about a book with your name on the cover. If I'm honest, I've had the Oscar-speech-moment more than once, the one where you decide who you'd dedicate it to, long before writing a single usable word.
It turns out my daughter has caught the same bug. My bookshelf currently holds several works of hers, A4 paper folded and sellotaped into something book-shaped, each one a daring adventure. The current standout is "The Princes and the Missing Roobee." Every volume comes complete with an "about the author" section and a hand-drawn portrait of the author herself.
A passing psychologist might take one look at the two of us and diagnose a shared streak of raving narcissism. And maybe. But I don't think that's quite it.
I think it's that a book is tangible. It's a real, physical thing that carries what's inside you out into the world, where someone else can pick it up, understand it, and keep it long after you've put it down. My six-year-old can't articulate that. She just instinctively knows that if she makes the thing, the thing exists. It's hers, it says who made it, and it doesn't disappear when she leaves the room.
That instinct is more valuable than it looks, and most of us lose it somewhere on the way to being adults.
Because the most valuable things we know rarely make it out of our own heads. The way we think, the judgement we've built, the thing we understand better than almost anyone, all of it tends to stay locked inside us, undocumented, untransferable. Impressive while we're in the room. Gone the moment we're not.
A book is just the most romantic version of the thing worth doing anyway: taking what only exists inside you and making it into something that can outlive you.
My daughter worked that out at five, with a stapler and a felt tip. I'm still working on my version. But the principle is the same, and it's the one I'd want anyone to hold onto: if it only lives in your head, it dies with you.
Your business has a signature too. The way you do things, the judgement nobody else quite has, the reason people come to you and not the next one along. Right now, for most owners, all of it lives in exactly one place, and it's the same place mine and my daughter's books started. Inside your own head.
The work worth doing, romantic or not, is getting it out where it can outlast you.