Scott Britton
Scott Britton
Revised Intro: “Realizing It’s Not Working”
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@October 8, 2024 8:31 AM (CST) – @October 8, 2024 9:51 AM (CST)
@October 8, 2024 1:30 PM (CST) – @October 8, 2024 2:18 PM (CST)
The One Thing
Keep the tension and suspense of the narrative, but clarify the timeline.
Feedback
- It’s difficult to follow a sentence when the subject is a long phrase. Watch out for these types of passive sentences. Make it clear who/what is doing the action and what the action is: subject, verb, object. This is not a hard rule, just a good guideline. Example:
- Here, the subject is that whole highlighted phrase. It’s not clear where the subject is or what the action is.
- Subject: “we”; Adverb + Verb: “had officially sold”; Object: “our company”
- Another example of a confusing, long subject-phrase:
- Cliches are distracting and take the reader out of the book. They’re not always bad, but where they’re glaring, swap them out for something more concrete, personal, specific, interesting, unexpected — even if it’s simpler and more literal. Example:
- The timeline and some of the verb tenses are confusing. The main thing to clarify is this: When did the barista interaction happen relative to closing the sale with Salesforce? Did it happen long before? In the weeks before?
- It would also help to know what year this was, just for cultural context (e.g. mindfulness in the mainstream). Consider mentioning the year of the Salesforce sale somewhere in this chapter.
- This is super interesting and surprising. It helps set up the whole book. It makes me thing that you were meditating for the wrong reasons, using it as a means to success. And I imagine that now you have an entirely different relationship with mindfulness and a stronger devotion to it. This makes me want to read on.
- Be mindful of paragraph breaks, and make sure not to split apart one idea. Use paragraph breaks to transition between ideas.
- Other timeline questions: When did you start Troops relative to the barista interaction? At 24 you started meditation, but when did you get serious about it? At what age did you start Troops? How many companies did you found prior?
- Events that need to have a clear chronology (and here is my guess at what the order is):
- Alopecia scare and the start of your mindfulness journey at 24
- Starting your first company
- Panic attack on the balcony in Manhattan
- Encounter with the joyous barista
- Psychedelic experience
- Closing the sale of your company
- To be clear, the chronology of events needs to be clear, but the narrative shouldn’t go in chronological order. I think you have the narrative arc very close to correct.
- Consider ending on the day/week of your Troops exit — the day you closed with Salesforce. I’m not sure where in the timeline the Intro ends. By ending it with the exit, we come full circle, and your reader will feel “caught up,” ready to dive deeper into your story and learn from your insights.
- There are many instances where you use this sentence construction: “ I wondered how I could make this happen
?” The way this is written, though, it’s a statement, not a question. Be aware of how often you use this, and when you do, swap the question mark for a period. - I was hooked in throughout. You kept raising questions and sharing parts of your story that made me want to know more, to keep reading. And I felt ready to jump into the body of the book at the end of the intro, which is a great signal.
“After 7 long years of hard work,the sale of our company Troops to Salesforceofficially closed.”
My edit: “After seven long years of hard work, we had officially sold our company, Troops, to Salesforce.”
The more I noticed myself regressing back into my habitual ways of being, the stronger this desire to reunite with that part of myself I had briefly touched became.“But for whatever reason, this moment hit me over the head like a ton of bricks.”My edit: “but for whatever reason, it overwhelmed me in that coffee shop.”
“Around this time, mindfulness had officially entered the mainstream. It seemed like the default solution for anyone who wanted to become happier. The problem was I had already been meditating for the past 6 years.”