The book drops tomorrow.

Read time: 3 min.

This week the first proof copy of the book arrived.

I tore open the package in the garden with my girlfriend. The sun was out. We sat on a bench together and I held it for the first time.

There's something about the smell of a freshly printed book. That specific combination of paper and ink that makes it suddenly, undeniably real. Not a document on a screen anymore. Not a manuscript. A book. Something you can hold.

I started flipping through it, stopping on lessons I liked, reading a few lines out loud.

And then she said: can I pick one myself?

The lesson she landed on

She took the book from my hands and flipped through it slowly. Not looking for anything specific. Just letting her eye land where it landed.

She stopped on a lesson about resistance. About how the need to control things, to fight against what is, doesn't protect you from suffering. It amplifies it. That the thing you're resisting becomes bigger the harder you push against it. That letting go isn't weakness. It's the only way through.

She started reading it out loud.

Halfway through, she stopped. Tears rolled down her cheek. She looked up at me for a moment, almost surprised by them. Then she smiled, took a deep breath, and read the rest.

The thing about honest words

I wrote every lesson in this book. I had a specific idea behind each one. A particular angle, a particular truth I was trying to articulate.

But sitting on that bench, watching her find something in those words that I hadn't put there intentionally, I realized something I hadn't fully grasped before.

A book isn't what the writer puts into it.

It's what the reader brings to it.

She came to that lesson with her own life, her own experiences, her own quiet struggles that had nothing to do with how I wrote the words. And somehow, those words became a mirror for exactly what she was carrying.

That's not something you can design. It just happens. When the words are honest enough, they stop belonging to the person who wrote them and start belonging to whoever needs them.

One day away

June 1st is one day away now.

And I'm going into the final stretch not thinking about the launch or the numbers or what comes after.

I'm thinking about the people who are going to open this book and flip to a random page and find something that has nothing to do with what I intended and everything to do with what they needed.

That's what it's all for.

Much love,

— Martijn

P.S. The book launches tomorrow. If you're on the waitlist, you'll hear from me first thing in the morning. If you're not yet: connectwithgrowth.com/#waitlist