Yesterday, I made a fourteen-minute video while driving around in my car.

There wasn’t really a plan. My first book was coming out in ten days, and I think I just wanted to capture what that felt like. So I hit record and started talking about how I got here.

I talked about leaving a twenty-five-year corporate career. About writing The FireStarter every week. About the book I originally planned to write and the one I eventually wrote instead. About how strange it still feels to say that my first book is about to be out in the world.

Mostly, I was just thinking out loud.

Which meant the video looked exactly like someone thinking out loud.

I repeated myself. I stumbled over a few words. I probably overexplained.

When I watched it back, I knew what I was supposed to do.

Cut it down. Find the best sixty or ninety seconds. Tighten the story. Remove the repetition. Make it more polished, more efficient, more social-media appropriate.

And I almost did.

But the longer I watched it, the more I wondered if, in trying to polish it, I was about to remove the very thing that made it worth watching.

So I did something different.

I left it alone.

The Book I Was Supposed to Write

That decision stayed with me for the rest of the day because, eventually, I realized this wasn’t the first time I had been here.

A couple of years ago, when I decided to write a book, I knew exactly what kind of book someone like me was supposed to write.

A non-fiction leadership book.

I had spent most of my career leading people. I had stories, lessons, mistakes, successes and more than a few opinions about what makes leadership work.

So I started writing one.

I got through the first few chapters and stopped.

There was nothing particularly wrong with it. In some ways, that was the problem. It sounded like a leadership book written by someone who had spent twenty-five years in leadership.

I just didn’t want to read it.

What kept pulling me somewhere else was a thought about home.

I started thinking about the version of me that walked through the door after a great day at work and the version that sometimes walked through after a terrible one. Same house. Same family. Same dinner table. But work had a way of changing who showed up there.

Then I thought about all the people I had led over the years.

They went home too.

Whatever happened during the day didn’t disappear when they left the building. Some part of it went home with them, which meant that some part of leadership went home with them too.

That was the idea I wanted to explore.

But I didn’t want to explain it.

I wanted someone to feel it.

And that meant writing the book I definitely wasn’t supposed to write.

A novel.

The Uncomfortable Part

That changed everything.

Writing about leadership felt familiar. Creating Tyler and Kiera, building their families, giving them lives and asking someone to care about what happened to them for a couple hundred pages felt very different.

There were plenty of moments when I wondered who I was to do it.

Even after the book was finished, that uncertainty didn’t disappear. When the first advance copies arrived, I gave one to someone I trusted and held onto the rest because I wanted to hear what the first person thought before I risked giving the second one away.

There is apparently a very fine line between courage and waiting for one person to tell you that you haven’t embarrassed yourself.

Then he read it.

He told me he saw himself in the characters. More than one of them. He told me he felt the story.

Then someone else read it and said something similar. Then someone else.

Different people. Different lives.

But they weren’t talking to me about a leadership framework.

They were talking about Tyler and Kiera. About their own careers. Their own families. Their own dinner tables.

And that is the part I keep coming back to.

All the value, living inside the book I wasn’t supposed to write.

What Are We Fixing?

Which brings me back to yesterday.

Because I wonder how often we do this in other parts of our lives.

We have an idea, an instinct or a way of doing something that feels like ours, and almost immediately we start measuring it against what we think it is supposed to look like.

A career is supposed to move a certain way.

A leader is supposed to sound a certain way.

A business idea should fit neatly into something people already understand.

A social media video should certainly be shorter than fourteen minutes.

So we start fixing.

And sometimes we absolutely should. Most things get better with thought, effort, feedback and another draft.

But I am beginning to think there is a difference between improving something and making it more acceptable.

Perhaps this is exactly when we should be careful.

Because if we keep sanding away everything that doesn’t fit the expected shape, eventually we may end up with something perfectly acceptable that nobody could ever know was ours.

Leave It Alone

I have no idea how many people will watch all fourteen minutes of that video.

I also have no idea what ultimately happens with this book.

There are still plenty of unknowns in both.

But yesterday gave me a reminder I think I needed.

Sometimes the value is sitting inside the very part we are most tempted to remove.

The strange idea.

The uncomfortable choice.

The thing that doesn’t quite fit.

The version of ourselves we keep trying to make a little easier for everyone else to understand.

So maybe the question isn’t always, “How do I make this better?”

Maybe every once in a while, before we start cutting and polishing and reshaping, there is another question worth asking.

What if the thing I’m trying to fix is the thing that makes it matter?

And if the answer is yes...

maybe leave it alone.

P.S. Leadership at the Dinner Table comes out September 15. Pre-orders are open now.  After everything I just wrote above, there really is only one thing I hope for when you read it. I hope you feel it.

With Absolute Sincerity,

Ed Clementi,

Founder & CEO of Inspired Fire, LLC

Make an Impact and Feel an Impact!