A guest in your house

For over a year this book lived in my house. Now it lives in yours.

Since 11 September my phone has turned into a small gallery. Friends send photos of Cards on the Table on a kitchen table next to the espresso cup. On an office shelf, squeezed between an annual report and a plant that has seen better days. One on a bedside table. I choose to read that as a compliment. Other readings are possible.

An author is a strange kind of guest. He cannot choose the room or the company. He has no say on whether he ends up on the bedside table or under a laptop that needs to sit two centimetres higher for a video call. A guest who complains about the room does not get invited back.

The English say the proof of the pudding is in the eating. For a writer, the eating starts now. Months of rewriting count for nothing until a reader, alone, finishes page 40 and decides whether page 41 is worth it. I cannot follow the book into that moment or explain what I meant. It has to stand on its own two feet.

Then something worse happened. I started reading the photos with my own framework. After years of sorting people in meeting rooms into eight personas, I cannot switch it off. So I sort my friends.

The Data-Driven friend notes: 157 pages, good paper. The Enthusiast posts it on LinkedIn before opening it. The Skeptic asks, very kindly, whether I really wrote it myself. The Big-Picture friend wants to know about the film rights. The Consensus Builder buys three copies, one for each colleague, so nobody feels left out. And the Quiet One sends nothing at all. Then, three weeks later, a single message quoting the one sentence in the book I was never sure about.

That last message is the one I am waiting for.