The bestseller that almost wasn't.

My new book, Growth Levers and How to Find Them, ranks in the top 0.03% of all titles on Amazon, but it almost never got published.

Here’s the story of a philosopher, a poet, and a bestseller that almost wasn’t.

It was December 2022, and I’d just wasted a year of my life writing a book that I couldn’t publish.

My friends said it was great, so did my editor. But I knew it wasn’t, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

I had 3 options: 

1. Don’t publish a book (out of the question).

2. Publish a bad book (also out of the question).

3. Find a way to make it good.

I realized I only had one option. Sunk costs be damned, I had to find a way to make this book good.

I didn’t even know why it was bad. But I knew someone who would.

Ellen Fishbein is a brilliant editor who’s in extremely high demand, but she kindly agreed to read my manuscript, and we set up a Zoom.

“Matt, you’re a good writer, but this is not a good book.”

“It doesn’t have a thesis.”

A thesis?

“Every great nonfiction book,” she explained, “presents a focused thesis.” For example: 

• The Black Swan - Individual outlier events are rare, but collectively, they occur often, and we ignore them at our peril.

• The Tipping Point - What looks like a sudden change results from years of hard work and small changes compounding.

I had a list of ideas that I thought were my thesis, but she unwound each one.

So what should I do?

Ellen agreed to take me on as a client, but it would take months for me to finally realize what the book was about – even though I wrote the book!

Here’s how that process worked.

How I cut 500 pages of rambling into 112 pages of Bestseller

I spent 5 months working with Ellen’s business partner Bill, he’s a philosopher. (That’s not a metaphor—he’s not a philosophical guy; he’s an actual philosophy professor.) He doesn’t know the first thing about startups, but he’s an intensely clear and rigorous thinker.

We worked through each sentence. He pressed me to explain each term and concept “like I was talking to an intelligent 12-year-old." He challenged me to define terms, clarify distinctions, and break everything down to first principles.

Bill and I working through the manuscript

I saw the problem: My arguments wandered, and I used jargon to cover gaps in my thinking. Bill purged these abstractions; my thinking and writing improved.

Still, I felt like we were lost in the weeds, no closer to finding my thesis. But Bill reassured me that we were close, and that when we found it, the book would “practically write itself."

And then… it did!

The moment everything changed

One day, Bill asked a seemingly innocuous question:

“Matt, I’m no entrepreneur, but everything you say sounds kind of obvious: Track how many customers you have, try to increase that number. Interview your customers, test ideas with experiments and document your learning. This is obvious, right? Don’t most startups don’t operate like this?”

“No Bill, you’d be shocked, they really don’t.”

“Then what do they do?”

Thinking back, I could identify 3 patterns of failure:

1. Overthinkers who strategize and debate but never actually do any work

2. Under-thinkers who keep shipping stuff that gets no traction until they run out of money,

3. Executives who hire a bunch of experts and delegate everything, and then get annoyed and fire everyone when the company doesn’t grow.

“That’s gold dust, Matt! Write that up, it’s going in the book.”

A thesis, at last.

Things were moving, but I still didn’t have my thesis. What was the common thread? Why did all 3 approaches fail, while my approach succeeded?

The answer came to me on a bike ride near a town called Leatherhead, which looks nicer than it sounds.

It all came down to missing information.

These 3 practices: thinking, executing and delegating, are only as good as the information on which they’re based. They work well in mature companies with established playbooks, they are modes of optimisation. 

Mature companies know who buys their products and why, where to find those people, what to say to them, how to onboard them, how much to charge, and a hundred other little details.

Startups, by contrast, still need to figure all that stuff out—fast!

Hence my thesis: A startup’s chance of success depends on their pace and quality of learning.

Thinking, executing, and delegating are great ways to operate, but very slow ways to learn.

They’re modes of optimization, not discovery. To win, a startup must become an instrument of discovery.

Bill was right. Once I’d figured out my thesis, the rest of the book poured out in a matter of days, and the chapters sequenced themselves.

But the book was still too long.

Enter the poet

My readers, entrepreneurs, are impatient. Many are dyslexic, have ADHD or both. I needed an “airplane book” that could be read on a short flight.

Thanks to Bill, I now knew what the book was and wasn’t about—so I was able to cut it down to around 200 pages. (I couldn’t bring myself to actually delete anything, so I pasted stuff into another doc called “cutting room floor.”)

Then something amazing happened. @Ellen Fishbein isn’t just an editor, she’s a poet. She studies language in minute detail.

I don’t know what she did, exactly. But one morning I woke up to find an email with a link to a 100-page book.

I read those 100 pages on my phone in an hour, and I was thrilled. I knew I’d written the best book I could. Even if nobody bought it, I’d still be happy with it.

Epilogue

An instant bestseller on Amazon, I sold 2K copies in the first 2 weeks. Now, I get daily messages from complete strangers thanking me for my book. (And most of my Amazon five-star reviews say “concise” or “no filler.”)

If you’re writing a book, I have one piece of advice: Figure out your thesis before you write the book. I’ll do that next time.

And if you’re looking for an editor, I recommend the philosopher and the poet at Writing.coach.