Topic diversity
These are all things I now know a fair bit about:
- Advertising
- Academia
- Agile development
- Application development
- Augmented reality
- Automation
- Brand licensing
- Business books
- Cancer research
- Career planning
- Chatbots
- Communication strategy
- Corporate AI management
- Corporate AI technology
- Corporate culture
- Corporate leadership
- Corporate strategy
- Creativity
- Customer experience
- Cybersecurity
- Data management
- Digital marketing
- Digital transformation
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion
- Electoral politics
- Executive search
- Financial advising
- Financial technology
- Ghostwriting
- Immigration politics
- Innovation
- Macroeconomics
- Management
- Management consulting
- Media disruption
- Military leadership
- Mobile technology
- Organizational design
- Political discourse
- Psychology of tech workers
- Purposeful leadership
- Sales
- Social Media
- Social media marketing
- Startups
- Statistics
- The nervous system
- Thought leadership
- Transportation and automotive technology
- Wellness
- Workplace neurodiversity
- Writing
I’ve worked intensely on 80 books as an author, editor, or book coach. That’s where I learned all this stuff.
What these topics have in common
These topics are all about ideas. They’re all nonfiction. But other than that, they’re all over the map.
I specialize in technology trends. That covers a broad set of topics, but tech trends books and their authors tend to have a certain profile that I’m comfortable with. I can credibly call myself an expert on those kinds of book, in part because of my background as an author of several and ex-technology analyst.
But I love politics. I love startups. I love science and medicine. I love math and statistics. I love marketing. I love analyzing corporations and leadership. There are no fixed boundaries to the topics that interest me, so there are a lot of books I’m in a position to coach people on.
After a couple of decades of this, I know two things.
First, the thing I love more than any topic is the creativity and ambition of authors, which is why I keep doing this.
And second, the ability to get paid to be curious and learn about the world is an unimaginable gift. There are no boundaries to my list of topics because there are no limits to my curiosity.
In praise of being a generalist
When I parachuted out of my graduate program in mathematics, I knew one thing: that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed doing specialized math that only a tiny group of fellow mathematicians could appreciate.
My first real job was a writing job. Writing is a protean skill: you can apply it to almost anything.
Making a living as a writer and exposes you to the world.
It may pay better to be a specialist.
But it serves your soul better to be a generalist.