Two critical questions for writing a book, part 2

The following is an excerpt from from Brad Lindemann’s forthcoming book, In Business For Life: What Being In Business For Life Has Taught me About the Business of Life.

Ouch. The lady has a point.

If you’re looking for another “How I succeeded in business and you can too” book, well, keep looking. My first book will likely disappoint you. It took me 27 years to complete this project, partly because I falsely believed that without a substantial business empire platform to stand upon, I had nothing worthwhile to say. I’ve come to believe just the opposite. My answers to the “So what?” and “Who cares?” questions have come at great cost on the battlefields of life and business. As such, they have “been tried as silver is tried” (Psalm 66:10). I now have the good fortune of sharing some of the lessons learned along the way.

Just prior to starting this little writing project, our humble enterprise known as Ambassador Solutions celebrated its 25th anniversary on April 1, 2014. In 2009, we “celebrated” our twentieth in the depths of The Great Recession. By God’s grace, that marked the only money-losing year in our company’s history. That also marked our second near-death corporate experience; 2001 was the first. The latter has been orders of magnitude more difficult to recover from. But recovering we are, albeit in a new fast and light condition.

While I’ve been in business my entire adult life and learned much about the business of life from it, I’ve not allowed my business to be my life. To which my lovely bride says, “Really? What about all those lost evenings spent brooding over deals gone bad and opportunities lost? What about all that whining over not being able to catch a break if it was dropped in your lap? What about all those ungrateful employees who just didn’t seem to get it…whatever IT was at the time?”
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Ouch. The lady has a point.

Okay, so let me dial-back a bit and distinguish how I have wanted to view my business versus how I have actually viewed my business. Over the last quarter century plus, I’ve spent way too much time and energy acting as if my business was my life. I hope this book helps balance the scales. There really was much more than just business going on during those years.