Good morning, John. Beginnings and endings...
I like it. I like this frame.
I love beginnings. I've got several beginnings that I'm interested in.
Soda syrups. Sock - anything to do with socks I'm really into right now.
I've got a couple things I'd like to end on a sort of a national level.
But in terms of me, things that I can definitely do and control, I don't know what I want to end.
We interview people for jobs sometimes, sometimes for fairly high-level jobs.
I once had somebody come into a job interview and be like,
“I could get you to acquisition in just a couple of years,”
and I was like, “To ac - to what?”
Like, building Complexly up to sell it, and I was just like,
“Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
I wanna be running this company when I die!”
I was really sounding like a moped there for a second.
Here's a thing that I would like to end. I would like to end my line edits for my book.
What are line edits, Hank? Okay, here's what book writing looks like, if you're in the traditional publishing industry.
First, you write a book. I don't know how this works. I don't know.
So you've got a manuscript, and you've got an editor. However that happened... is a mystery.
But you got it, and you give it to the editor. And then either they tell you, "This is trash,"
or they write you a letter. And that's called the editorial letter, and it says, “This book is not trash,”
followed by a 22 page list of all the ways in which the book is trash. This is the success condition.
So then, you finished your big revision. You've basically rewritten the book.
There's 50,000 words that aren't in there anymore and 40,000 new ones.
Then you get your line edits. And your line edits are like, line by line, your editor goes, “Why did you do this?”
Usually it's fairly simple things like it's, you need a different word here
because you used this word earlier in the sentence beforehand.
And then occasionally you get a line edit that basically says, “Rewrite this chapter,”
and you're like, “This isn't a line edit!”
And during the line edit is for me when I read the entire book out loud.
I'm a slow reader regardless, but reading out loud is particularly slow.
Now of course, after your line edit, you get your copy edit, and that's when somebody, in my case last time,
the valedictorian of my high school graduating class for some reason, Mary Beth Constant,
just reads your entire manuscript and tells you all of the little things you got wrong
and that's usually much less troublesome. You're just being like,
“Yes, I agree that there should be a comma there. You're right, I did use the wrong word, Mary Beth.
Yes, you are still smarter than me all of these years later.”
This is maybe the weirdest coincidence of my entire life. I hope I get Mary Beth again.
There was literally a single typo in the whole book when it came out, which is amazing.
So at this point, you've been changing this book like every day for six, eight months?
You've been looking at it and changing things, and then they say, “Don't change anything else!”
And your entire mind is built to change the book, and then you have to say, “No!”
This is the final! You decide now that all of the words that are in here deserve to be in here,
and none of the words that aren't in there should be, and...
Gaaaaah!
I'm not a high stress person, I'm really not. I'm laid back, but that is too much.
That is the biggest ending I'm working toward in 2020, and I'm kind of terrified of it!
I like this book a lot. It's… it's much more ambitious than my first book, and I think that it says
a lot of interesting and important things that we need to be saying and thinking about right now.
But this is one of the great things about creative work, that you are forced to an end.
So I guess I'm lucky to have a job where I get lots of little “I did it” moments,
whether it's finishing a book or whether it's finishing this video.
John, I'll see you...
right now, because we're on tour together.
[JOHN:] Hank, you just made a whole video about your book
in which you didn't say the name of the book, which is A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor.
Nor did you say when it comes out, which is July 7th.
And nor did you say that it's available for pre-order now, which it is.