The eBook for 'Why Cryptocurrencies?' is now available for free ★

The project is done

I’m very good at putting myself down and to focus on the negative parts to the expense of the positive.

I need to learn to take a step back and appreciate the good things I do, and even though it took a log time the book project is now completely done.

No matter how you look at it, actually finishing a large project such as self-publishing a book should be seen as a success. Sure, it took a lot longer than I wanted to wrap it up, but I finished it, and finishing a large project is an accomplishment in itself.

I’ve had this project hanging over me like a dark cloud, painfully aware that it’s almost done—and has been almost done for years—continually increasing my stress levels. But now, I can finally let it go.

Let it go, let it go
Can’t hold it back anymore
Let it go, let it go
Turn away and slam the door

(I prefer the Swedish version of the song.)

I made it more difficult for myself than it had to be

Despite reading countless advice to “focus on content”, and to “choose a simple solution”, I added too much complexity and was a tad too ambitious.

1. I used a non-standard generator, with no native eBook or PDF generation support.

   While generating a PDF was easy (it’s basically a copy of the PDF for the printed book), generating a nice-looking and functional EPUB took a bunch of time.

2. I was very particular with the typesetting and styling.

   The result looks great, but styling the web version, the printed version, and then (re)style the epub took a lot of extra time.

3. I wanted to take payments in crypto, so before I made the eBook I made my own cryptocurrency payment processor.

   The project suffered hard from ridiculous scope-creep, and it was far from “just accept a payment” (which was done the first week…). It’s also yet-another “almost finished” project I want to revisit.

In hindsight, the error is obvious. I should’ve written the book in an existing solution that would generate the website, epub, and PDF with minimal intervention from my side. Or at the very least I should’ve setup the epub and PDF generation from the start, instead of rushing the writing and leave the rest until later (leading to a bunch of extra work).

The idea was to make the eBook purchasable with an assortment of crypto—and I did have that for a while—but I really should’ve focused on finishing the eBook in a timely manner instead.

Burnout, procrastination, and losing faith

While I certainly bit off more than I could chew, I faced other challenges during the project:

1. I got burnt out, hard.
2. I’m an expert-level procrastinator.
3. My faith in the cryptocurrency community continued to dwindle.
4. We got another kid—twice! Now we have three.

I wrote a separate post about my burnout, no need to rehash the details of that unpleasant experience again here. With the burnout (and the depression that tagged along), my heavy procrastination, and the arrival of two kids, maybe the surprising thing isn’t that it took so long, but that I got anything done at all?

I still believe in the potential of crypto….

I still firmly believe that cryptocurrencies has an amazing unrealized potential—and I still stand behind the majority of my arguments in the book, where I focus on what cryptocurrencies can be useful for. In many ways I think the arguments of digital cash are even stronger today than when I started writing the book some 5 years ago.

But I severely underestimated the negative effect “fast money” had on the cryptocurrency community, and how the focus completely shifted from cryptocurrencies being used to buy things in the real world, to just rampant speculation and get-rich-schemes.

10 years ago, if you asked people what the point of Bitcoin was, they would’ve said that it’s a new form of money that you can send instantly and very cheaply to anyone in the world, without handing it over to a third-party.

But today people will point at the newly approved Bitcoin ETF, that Bitcoin has tons of institutional investments, and that it’s a “great Store of Value”. Which is all only an euphemism for speculation and a desire to get rich.

Thinking about it makes me tired and sad, and drains me of the energy and makes me want to distance myself from the space, rather than try to improve it. The point of crypto was to improve things for regular people, not this.

…

How’s that for a recommendation for my book that extols the virtues of crypto? :)

Main takeaways

If you want to finish a similar project in a reasonable amount of time, I’d say these are the biggest tips I have:

1. Fight complexity and scope-creep.

   Focus on the content of the book—cut down everything else. Except for marketing, but how to do that competently is a riddle you’ll have to solve yourself.

   If I had a setup that could generate a web version, an EPUB, and a PDF from the start the eBook would’ve been completed years ago. But now I let things come between, and time runs quickly when that happens.

2. Find a way to stay motivated.

   I for one love to start projects, but finishing them is tough. If you find a project that you’re really passionate about then you’ll drastically increase the chance for success. And even if you do, if the project takes a long time then it can still be challenging to get the project over the finish line.

   External positive feedback is also helpful, even though I believe the best motivation comes from within.

   What gave me the last push was that I told myself in very stern words that I have to finish this before I can start my next project. I’ve done this multiple times with varying levels of success, but this time my brain seemed to listen.

3. Sometimes shit out of your control happens.

   I was going to add “don’t get burnt out” as an item, but I should know that it’s not something you easily avoid.

   Acceptance that it sometimes take longer is good. I try to tell myself that it’s not a disaster just because it takes a bit longer than initially planned.