In October 2011, extremely disillusioned with my job with a big pink newspaper, I started working on a book. The idea was not to waste time and get some meaning into my otherwise dull and boring life at that point of time.
My contract with the publisher was to write a book of around 1,00,000 words. But the first draft, when I finished writing it in June 2012, turned out to be close to 3,20,000 words. Of course, as far as first drafts go, there was a lot of repetition. The funny thing I discovered was that as I wrote, I kept forgetting what I was writing and in the process ended up repeating a lot of stuff.
Eventually, I managed to cut the book down to around 2,40,000 words. The book was now smaller than before but still much bigger than the 1,00,000 words that the contract called for. And there was no way something as long as 2,40,000 words could be cut to 1,00,000 words. And publishing 2,40,000 words at one go would price the book out of the market.
In the end, my publisher suggested that we do a trilogy instead of one book. This sounded like a good idea. Nevertheless, the work involved went up. Each of the three parts now needed to be books in their own right. I finally managed to send across the third part to the publisher in October 2014, three years after I had first started writing what was supposed to be one book.
It had been a mentally, emotionally and physically taxing journey, which came with a huge opportunity cost, given that I eventually quit my job to complete the book. If I knew in 2011 that it would take me three years to write a book, close to four years to publish it and I would have to face the kind of emotional, mental and physical stress that I did, I wouldn't have got around to writing the book.
But given that I was writing a book for the first time, I did not know how difficult and immersive the entire process would eventually turn out to be. And my lack of knowledge and experience on this front essentially kept me going. There was a sense of optimism which was a part of the entire process and which kept me going over a period of four years, as one book became three books.
The point is that that my lack of experience led to certain optimism, even though I am not a very optimistic person in real life, and this eventually led me to completing the books. After completing the books, there was a certain belief that people wanted to read what I had written, even though it was slightly esoteric, and this led me to relentlessly promoting the books in the media. This optimism essentially led to more than a few people reading the book.
It seems like having an optimism bias does have its share of uses. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (he won the Economics prize) writes in Thinking, Fast and Slow: "Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are inventors, entrepreneurs, political and military leaders...The evidence suggests that an optimistic bias plays a role-sometimes the dominant role-whenever individuals or institutions voluntarily take on significant risks. More often than not, risk-takers underestimate the odds they face and do not invest sufficient effort to find out what the odds are."
This is precisely how things played out in my case. I terribly underestimated the odds on many front. First, I underestimated the breadth of the topic that I had chosen to write on, which happened to be the history of money and the current financial crisis. Then I underestimated the time it would take for the book to be written and published. I had estimated a time frame of 18 months at best. Finally, it took close to 46 months, from when I started writing to when the final book came out.
Over and above this, I underestimated how stressful the entire process of writing and editing a book could be. Given the lack of good editors in the non-fiction space, editing (even something as basic as proofreading) can be a nerve-wracking experience at times. Hence, I had no idea of these things and I kept going.
In fact, this lack of experience and over-optimism is what drives people towards entrepreneurship, something which is at the heart of capitalism as it has evolved. As Kahneman writes, "Because they misread risks, optimistic entrepreneurs often believe they are prudent, even when they are not." This, when the chances of a small business surviving are very low.
The interesting thing is that entrepreneurs at some level seem to understand that entrepreneurship is risky business, but they also believe that the risks don't apply to them. As Jason Zweig writes in Your Money and Your Brain, "A survey of nearly 3,000 entrepreneurs who recently launched a new business showed how true that is. When asked to rate the chances of success for "any business like yours," only 39 per cent said that the odds were at least 7 out of 10. But when asked to estimate the odds that their own venture would succeed, 81 per cent of the entrepreneurs said they stood at least 7 out of 10 chance, and an amazing 33 per cent of them said there was zero possibility that they would fail."
This, when on average, half of new businesses fail within five years. Of course, new businesses pop up to fill this space. As Zweig puts it, "There's no doubt that most of these entrepreneurs were kidding themselves. But how else could any of them muster the courage to start a new business. Without an extra dose of confidence, it would be much harder to make decisive choices in an uncertain world and to overcome setbacks that barricade the path to success. As Kahneman puts it, "The combination of optimism and overconfidence is one of the main forces that keep capitalism alive."
A similar overconfidence is what keeps writers going. What else explains the fact that more than a million books get published every year all over the world and a very few of them actually become bestsellers. It is the optimism of writers that ensures they keep writing. Publishers also don't know what works and their business model is to keep throwing books into the market and hope that something works.
To conclude, when I finished writing the Easy Money series of books, I thought I won't make the same mistakes again. But that is not how things have turned out. Over the last six months, I have been working on a new book and have made the same mistakes that I made the first time around.
I underestimated the risks and have been over-optimistic about the entire venture. The question is: do we actually live and learn?
This article was originally published on December 17, 2016.
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