I'm having a post-project crash

Two weeks ago, a project that I had been working on for nearly two years launched into the world. (And if you’re new around here and have missed my incessant promotion of it, I’m referring to The Energy Game).

And as the workload and publicity (and let’s face it, attention) die down, I’ve found myself in a slump.

I’ve been asking myself questions like:

• Was is all worth it? (I calculated that I have spent over 1000 hours (!!!!!) on this book. That's 1000 hours I could have spent doing literally anything else, including sleeping).

• Was the book even any good? (You have no idea how bad the self-doubt and worry still is for me when it comes to putting something as permanent as a book into the world. It’s not like a social media post that you can just edit or delete and pretend it never happened).

• Will I (or should I) ever write another book? And will people even read self-development books in the future when a chatbot can just tell us what to do in a way that is hyper-personalised to us (assuming you’ve trained your AI effectively).

• What should I do with all this newfound time? (Don’t worry reader, I’ve already filled every minute of it).

When I had my Sydney book launch for The Energy Game with Holly Wainwright (who happens to be one of my favourite writers), she asked me, “How do you measure the success of your books?”

I told her that for me, it’s about whether it changes people for the better. But the problem with that metric is: most of the time, I will never know.

I think about the huge number of books that I have read that have changed me for the better. To be honest, the only reason these writers know the impact that their work has had on me is because I invite them to come on the How I Work podcast and I tell them directly.

And particularly, for this post-project crash I’m in right now, and with the book only having been out in the world for two weeks, the reality is that there are actually very few people who have finished reading it. Hence, even less feedback on my ultimate reason for writing the book in the first place.

So what should I do?

Well naturally, I turned to the research to give me some guidance. Interestingly, there is a LOT of research into this area, and much of it has focused on Olympic athletes and what happens after the competition. (Not that I am comparing myself to an Olympic athlete. The extent of my sporting achievement was convincing my PE teacher I had my period for roughly 40 weeks of the year).

As is often the case in psychological research, a lot of it was fairly intuitive: Make sure you have support. Give yourself time to decompress. Practice self-compassion. Get back into your regular structure and routine.

But what really helped me was this piece of advice:

Think differently about how you interpret results.

You’d be hard pressed to find a writer that doesn’t care about sales figures. This is typically the thing that determines whether you’ll be invited back to write another book with your publisher.

I care a lot about numbers and I care a LOT about how well my books sell.

But research would suggest that external numbers/validation like this is not helpful to reflect on during this period.

Instead, I’m asking questions like:

• What did I accomplish that was genuinely difficult? (Um, I wrote a freaking 70,000 word book while being a full-time CEO of Inventium!)

• What worked better than last time? (On a good day, I think that The Energy Game is the best book I’ve written yet, and I managed to write it while juggling a million other things and without burning myself out. Which, of course, would have been deeply ironic had this happened).

• What did I learn or build that will endure? (Through everything I researched and learnt and applied throughout this project, my energy did a 180, and I have a million times more energy to throw at my life).

• Whom did (or will) the work affect? (Hopefully, most of the people that read it).

• Which outcomes were under my control (focus more on these) and which were not (and less on these)? (This was the most helpful one for me because I have wasted too much energy focusing on outcomes that were outside of my control and not enough on what was within my control).

So there you have it. If you find these questions useful, then save them for when you are going through your own post-project crash.