The one book rule you can't break.

The hardest part of writing your business book isn’t the writing, which, by the way, is hard as hell.

The tough part is finding The Proposition.

Your Proposition is your differentiator, a piece of counter-intuitive thinking that makes your book impossible to ignore and even harder to put down.

• The 4-Hour Workweek.
• The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People.
• How To Win Friends and Influence People.
• Nuclear Habits.
• Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away.
• 10X is Easier than 2X.

All these books are built on one powerful idea. It doesn’t have to be a new idea, which is great, since there are none.

But it has to hit. In just a few words it needs to activate something: curiosity or that jangle we hear when the words are perfect. It has to be audacious enough to interest and realistic enough to work.

While I write and ghostwrite wonderful books for people, I also understand smaller businesses can’t afford to hire me.?

What you may not understand is that when you write your book, your real job is to find your Proposition. Without that, all you’ve got to offer is word soup.

Your Proposition lives in Your Backstory.

A friend in Mississippi named Scherrie Prince works in estate planning and estate law. Scherrie told me her family, which had survived slavery, Jim Crow and all the indignities put upon people of color, had fragmented…because her parents left their will undone.

That’s her why and it’s a powerful one. You want Scherrie to work on for you. It’s personal to her.

Another friend, the digital marketer Jason Hunt, told me about a joyful stint in which he toured Japan as a resoundingly unsuccessful Caucasian rock star.

Jason found he enjoyed the marketing of the band as much as performing.

Jason wrote a fine book called Drop the Mic Marketing.

What are the absolute, best in brand, bottom-line conclusions in marketing…the mic droppers.

Here are some tips for finding your proposition.

1. Who is the most influential person in your life? What is the most important thing they imparted on you?
2. If we met and I asked you what is the one, most essential element of your work that no one knows, what would you say?
3. What is the backstory that led you to your current occupation?

Everyone has something. Dig lightly.?

One warning: The only wrong path is the one from which you never veer. If you write the book you planned to write, you wrote the wrong book.

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