My mom celebrated her 65th birthday this week. One of her goals for her 70th birthday is to put together a book.

It made me think of the books I want to write. If you take away the intimidation of a book–final drafts, agents, publishing, marketing–and see it instead as a coherent, clear, worthwhile collection that helps people get from point A to point B, then writing a book (or a book-wiki) is a wonderful thing. It’s about organizing knowledge in a way that many other people can use.

Here I’m reminded of Joseph Sestito’s “Write for Your Lives: Inspire Your Creative Writing with Buddhist Wisdom”:

p112. With this motivation, you can develop what I call “the lifeline
of books” concept. Mortimer J Adler developed a list called Great
Books of the Western World. If you examine these books, you will find
that most of them begin with extensive outlines. For example, if you
read Aristotle’s Ethics, you will see that the outline is five or ten
pages long, depending upon the translation – it is extremely detailed.
As a creative individual, you will generate more ideas for writing
beneficial books than you could have time to even begin in this
lifetime; yet, you may have just enough time to write their outlines.
Therefore, when you leave this life, in addition to leaving behind
your body, possessions, friends, family, and everything else, you can
also leave your own lifeline of books. These are the outlines for the
beneficial books that you did not have the time to write in this
lifetime, so that others can put their minds to work on the creation
of these books.

What are the books and book ideas I want to leave behind?

• Livin’ la Vida Emacs: More than a Text Editor
• Work Better Together: an Individual’s Guide to Collaboration Tools
• The Shy Connector’s Guide to Social Networking
• Sketch Notes: Visual Notetaking
• The Bright Side of Life
• Photography with a Difference
• Take the First Circus
• Bookworm: Making the Most of Reading
• Sharing What You Know
• With My Own Hands: Adventures in Cooking, Gardening, Sewing, and other Domestic Arts
• Sharing to Learn: How to Write, Draw, and Speak Your Way to Understanding
• Lunch is in the Freezer: Batch-cooking Tips and Recipes
• The Happiness Habit
• Remote Presentations That Rock
• May and December
• The Written Life
• More than a Number: Creating a Happy Career in a Big Company
• Being Real Online: How to be a Person, Not Just a Brand
• Worth It or Not: Analyzing Your Decisions and Improving Your Plans
• The Elephant and the Bee
• Persuasion: Using Rhetoric, Argument, and Negotiation in Everyday Life
• How Wonderful Can It Be?: A Life of Continuous Improvement
• On Fire: Bringing Passion to Work and Life
• Still Life with Cats
• Geek in Love
• A Classic Education
• Life, Limited: Freedom, Creativity, and Happiness through Limits
• It’s All Part of the Story
• Ineluctable: A Life of Words
• Living by the Numbers
• Most Things Right
• In Between Worlds: Stories of Immigration
• A Few Pages Ahead
• Becoming Sisters
• In Your Back Pocket: The Benefits of Plan B to Z
• Stoic Optimism
• The Abundance of Time

2011-02-11 Fri 06:10