I can't quite believe it.

Read time: 3 min.

I don't really know how to write this one.

Not because nothing happened. Because too much happened, and I'm still standing in the middle of it trying to understand what I'm looking at.

Let me just tell you what the week looked like.

The numbers I didn't expect

The book came out Monday.

By the end of the week, over 2,000 copies had been sold. In the first week. That alone would have been the best-case scenario I could have imagined. We went past it so fast I didn't even see it happen.

But then the Amazon rankings started coming in.

Number one in new releases. Self-help. Happiness. Motivational. Personal transformation. Category after category, the book sat at the top.

And then, not even in new releases anymore, the overall self-help bestseller list on Amazon. There it was, my book on number 14.

I stared at that screen for a long time.

What number 14 actually means

I need to tell you what's on that list.

Atomic Habits. Think and Grow Rich. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. The Mountain Is You. The Secret.

These aren't just famous books to me. These are the books I grew up with. The ones I read when I was trying to figure out who I wanted to be. The ones that shaped how I think, how I work, how I see the world.

They built me.

And this week, my book sat above The Secret by Bob Proctor at number 14.

I can't fully process that sentence even as I write it. Every time I think about it, something happens to my face and my voice changes. Like right now, sitting here writing this, I can feel it again.

It doesn't feel real. But it is.

What I keep coming back to

I wrote this book alone. Every word, every lesson, every decision about how it would look and feel and read. One man, his laptop, and everything he believed about how to live well.

I didn't have a publisher. I didn't have a team. I figured out the distribution myself, the printing myself, everything myself. I just wanted it to exist. I wanted people to be able to read it. That was honestly enough for me.

What happened instead is something I couldn't have written as a goal because I wouldn't have believed it was possible.

And the strangest part is that I'm still not sure I believe it now.

The high and what comes after

I want to be honest about something.

This past week I've been living on a kind of high I've never felt before. Pure excitement, pure reward, pure disbelief. The adrenaline of the last months completely transformed into something else.

And I'm aware, somewhere underneath all of it, that what goes up eventually finds its level again. That the return to normal life after something like this requires its own kind of adjustment.

But right now I'm still in it. Still standing in the middle of a week that feels like it was made of someone else's dreams.

I'm just grateful I get to be the one living it.

Much love,

— Martijn

P.S. If you haven't grabbed a copy yet, the book is live now. Here’s the link: https://mybook.to/artofintentionalliving