Story 1: Overcoming physical demands of writing a book
Writing this book was one of the hardest things I have done in my testing career at my age of 42. Why? It challenged me physically and mentally. Mental challenge is obvious but physical challenge?
I had gotten my lifestyle used to not sitting in one place and working for a long time. This book required me to sit, think, write, re-write and when I am in the flow – getting up and breaking the flow wasn’t a useful thing to do. Equally, sometimes, I had to sit for a good enough time to get the flow going. All this combined made me sit for long hours at a stretch and write.
Plus, this book had to be written with examples from work Moolya had done in the past. To dig into a decade of work – choose examples and write was incredibly hard. Thankfully Dhanasekar Subramaniam had supported in writing this book by putting work samples from the past that eased my job of writing partially. However, every thing written in this book had to be backed by evidence of work so if the evidence changes (I mean, instead of picking one work example, I picked another) the story had to be modified. This meant – extra hours of sitting.
My back would have gone for a toss had I not balanced this writing and enduring experience with yoga, runs, walk, strengthening exercise. I have been consistent in this since my mid 30’s and thankfully it came in handy. When I was 27 and my father was 57, I asked him to write a book for Foundry Managers on Maintenance since he was a stalwart and well known in the industry then. He couldn’t because he had no practice or writing and no physical endurance to sit through the process. I wish he had. Becoming successful at something and writing a book about practices or lessons learned are two different things. If you are considering to write a book in the future – consider building physical endurance, exercise, strength training and yoga. Otherwise the book you write will partially kill you.
Story 2 : I had to re-write several chapters several times
Why? What was the problem with them? Nothing – they weren’t up to my personal satisfaction. I had to re-write several chapters several times until it reached to my personal satisfaction.
Each of us are perfectionist at something. I am a perfectionist in bringing joy to what I do and how I do. I need to enjoy writing the book like how musicians on stage enjoy singing and performing. If I don’t enjoy having written it – how will people enjoy reading it?
I enjoyed writing some but didn’t enjoy reading it. I had to re-write the chapter. Sadly, the whole tone changes once I re-write and very few paragraphs are re-usable. Instead of stitching it together – I prefer to start fresh. Like that – each chapter has several versions to it.
Re-writing once isn’t a problem. I have re-written 2 chapters, 7 times. Until, I find joy writing it and reading it. I had to keep doing it. Re-writing those chapters, seven times, defeated the joy of writing and reading it. However, there was a personal satisfaction when I read it and I loved it. Felt worthy of my readers time. Your time and my time!
Story 3: Writing based on facts is harder than writing theory and visionary statements
Everything in the book is a fact. I have been writing based on my experience and many a time – I didn’t need to present it along with a fact. This book is a fact book. Writing facts and then writing a story around it is hard.
Sometimes in the flow – I wrote something – DS checked it and said – “No, this ain’t a fact. This is speculative based on the fact”. I either had to correct it or find a fact to prove it back to DS. I had to write a piece and search for the fact that co-relates to what I wrote.
So, this book was written two ways. One to write a story and bring facts to establish it or put the fact and write the story around it. That’s hard. I had to switch between two different styles of writing and sometimes when I re-wrote I had to re-write the same piece in one style and change it to the other style.
Story 4 : Writing based on history is even harder
This book is 15% a history book. The story of how Moolya progressed to where it is today and how we systematically built the lego blocks over the years. Dismantling it and re-building it the way we did over the years while explaining the mistakes we made on the way, was a hard journey to write.
I wasn’t used to this style of writing. The freeflow writer was challenged to write history – while keep the narrative, engaging storytelling and explanation around the history pointing towards the vision of this book.
I am used to writing experience reports. They are like writing history too but they are the most recent history. This book needed reference of more than a decade of work. I now have a newly developed respect for people who write history books. It is absolutely difficult to write one.
Story 5 : I was ready to quit writing and publishing
Yes, I did. I can write about it now. As it got more and more difficult to write it due to various reasons listed above, I wanted to give up. No one asked me to write this book. I was the one who gave this mission of writing a book to myself which originally was just to write a small updated hand-book for Moolyans. In the process of writing a hand-book came the mission and vision to put it as a book that is available to all. Why? Many people outside of Moolya make Moolya possible.
I thought, I should stop writing and release it as a hand-book to people in Moolya. No one will ever know that I wanted to put this out in this detail and as a book. I thought giving up sometimes is good.
If that was one instance, here’s another. I thought I had done writing and re-read the book and didn’t get the feel I wanted in some places. I had by then re-written some chapters a few times and I was satisfied but it still needed some changes and re-arranging a few things. One chapter I wrote had to be chopped off completely. That was also a moment I truly wanted to give up and just publish it as a PDF for whoever interested to read in whatever shape it was in.
I just closed my laptop and went for a walk. Met a friend. Went out and had drinks. Just to distract myself out of thinking about the book and not getting into the guilt of quitting a book of this magnitude.
I failed at quitting. Went back to writing, polishing, cleaning and publishing. I am such a failure that I failed to quit.
Story 7 : The publishing process was harder than it was for Buddha in Testing
Buddha in Testing is a super book. Not because I wrote it. After 4 years of publishing, it still keeps selling a couple of copies every single day and I keep getting emails from people about how it has calmed them down as a tester or has helped them to handle situations. Publishing this book was a breeze. I had great collab with Notionpress. They did a fantastic job.
I went back to them for Growth Driven Testing. Over the years, they had changed some processes and had grown as a company. I had to escalate and move a few things that were just not moving. At one point – I wanted to reach out to their CEO over an email as their customer, author and a fellow CEO but their staff said the CEO is un-contactable. Wow! I was surprised at that.
I then had to work with people on the ground to move things. Finally, I got things moving by just having to do a lot of writing back and forth. I got a feeling that I did more work than them in the process of publishing.
Semi Final Thoughts
I am glad I persisted and was definitely supported by many people in Moolya, including Dhanasekar Subramaniam, Bhavana Vasudeva, Himanshu Gopalani and Esha Medha.
Quitting is a common thought but not quitting after wanting to quit is uncommon.
The joy of getting this book out and holding it the first time was absolutely fantastic and a feeling of having won over all my inner demons who didn’t want this book to be published.
This book did get good reviews from Moolya’s customers (existing and potential). This book attracted a few people to apply to Moolya for their career option.
At the TribeQonf – one of the tester came up to me and said – their team read the book and started implementing Growth Driven Testing and I felt absolutely worth having not quit.
Several test leads gifted this book to their team members and tagged me on LinkedIn and I was absolutely delighted to see it.
The moment I was done writing and publishing it – I found a detachment with the book. It is a spiritual level thing. I am surprised when people credit me for Buddha in Testing and Growth Driven Testing books.
Detached but committed.
Passion is a fuel. I used the fuel to not give up. A decade ago, I used the fuel to burn myself down 🙂
Quit, don’t quit… Noodles, don’t noodles… You are too concerned about what was and what will be. There is a saying: yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. – Oogway!
Kung Fu Panda
This book is a gift to everyone who loves to read and drive growth for their business and customers through testing. Testing is more than just a feedback loop. Feedback loops exist to drive growth. We have forgotten the growth and are focused too much on the feedback loop.
Growth Driven Testing is dedicated to all those who grow themselves by growing others. This book has resisted me trying to quit writing and publishing it, so many times. This book wanted to come out and just chose me as its main author.
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