Behind the Scenes of 'Raising Your Resolution' (2): It Was Originally Not Meant to See the Light of Day?!

The book "Raising Your Resolution" has a slide deck of the same name as its source.¹

After the final proofs of my previous book, "Implementing the Future," were done, I had some free time around the beginning of January 2021, so I decided to write slides in one go before March, when I would get busy preparing for classes. That was what prompted me to write the slides on resolution.

I was hesitant about publishing the "Resolution" slides

What I still remember is that after roughly putting together these "Resolution" slides, I became anxious, wondering, "Is there any point in putting these slides out into the world...?", and consulted the colleagues around me.

I had written things that were far too obvious, and I was worried: "Isn't it so self-evident that there's no new information in it...?" I don't feel that way to that extent about my other slides, but I recall that the feeling was especially strong with the resolution slides.

After that, I presented it once to my colleagues, received feedback, and revised it once. Thinking that maybe I didn't need to publish it after all, I told myself, "Still, I've made it, and even if there's no response from the world, I can use it when giving feedback on ideas, so let's put it out." When I did, I remember being surprised by the big response.

I talked about the same thing in a tweet in 2021.

This year, the resolution slides seem to have been the most read, at around 120,000 page views. It's a memorable deck that I published after asking people around me, "Is there any point in putting this slide out...?" https://t.co/5Rwu5vPWic

— Takaaki Umada 🐴 "Raising Your Resolution" out 11/19 (@tumada) December 28, 2021

Encouraged by the reaction after I published the slides, I thought, "Maybe I could turn this into a book," and I wrote the draft manuscript in one go based on the slides during Golden Week 2021. After that, I sent an email to Eiji Press on May 21, 2021, to discuss it, and the talks about making it a book began to move from there.

Without everyone's reactions to the slides on the Web, this book would probably not have been released, and I probably wouldn't have thought of writing a book at all.

The value lies in having "information, thinking, and action that I want you to know" put together

I wrote that I had thought the content of the resolution slides was "obvious" and contained "no new information."

In fact, I still think the content doesn't contain any tremendously new insights. I don't think it contains the kind of eye-opening insight that a work of philosophy might, and it may not be a book that earns a perfect 5 in reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.

However, I now think there may be value in the "way of organizing" — depth, breadth, structure, and time — and in the fact that things many people had vaguely felt have been put into words.

It is the value of a textbook: things are organized and comprehensively covered, for the time being. It is, after all, an introductory book, and may serve as a foundation on which to "deepen" things further. For veterans, I hope they read it thinking "Yes, that's right," and for younger people, I hope they grasp the broad outline of the way of thinking and start taking action — that, I think, would be its value.

In that sense, I think the best ways to use this book may be to use it when conveying the "obvious" things you already know to other people, or to hand it to young new hires so they can learn the "information, thinking, and action I want you to know."

Does "obvious" also mean "standard"?

I have begun to think that being regarded by everyone as "obvious" also means it can become a "standard."

If readers feel that this book, "Raising Your Resolution," has "neatly organized the knowledge everyone should have," then I hope it can find its place among the lineup of standard books on business thinking, and I would be glad if people with long business experience used it in that way.

Footnotes

1. At the time of its release, the slide deck was titled "Increasing Resolution," but I changed it to "Raising Your Resolution" to match the book's publication. ↩