INTRODUCTION
ast Tuesday, for the first time in my life, I did a push-
up. That wouldn't be remarkable for most of you,
probably. It might even seem pathetic to most of
you. But for me it was an occasion to celebrate, because it
capped five months of hard work that followed a lifetime of
resolutely thinking of myself as spectacularly incapable.
I hail from a stunningly unathletic family: most of us are
more Eeyore than Seabiscuit; we are the ones picked last
for the team, the ones who are afraid of the ball. And I was
(quite literally) a 100-pound weakling. So the idea of my being
capable of a push-up (or 5, or 10, or—maybe, eventually—50
or more!) seemed as improbable as my writing this in
Russian.
Why am I telling you about that pathetic-but-epic push-
up . . . in a book about writing and content creation and
publishing?
Because learning to craft better content can involve
nothing more than developing some necessary muscles.
Right now you might not consider yourself much of a writer,
or much of a content creator, just as I never considered
myself someone who could drop and pump out a set of push-
ups.
L
