My agent, Peter Ginsberg, who has worked with me for nearly thirty years, brought his imaginative and open-minded approach to creating publishing partnerships that best serve the cause of the work. Kimberly Meilun at Penguin Random House artfully guided me through the process from final manuscript to finished book.

So, here we have the story of a mom at home who decides to become a writer of history. She writes a book that the president reads. The president applies the lessons of the book to help avert a nuclear war. And we’re all alive today.

Barbara Tuchman didn’t set out to save the world when she wrote her books. She was just following her encodings. Once she discovered her encodings, she simply trusted them and focused the inner fire on writing books. She didn’t stop herself with questions like “Is this a worthy use of myself?” or “What will my parents think?” or “Does my husband approve?” or “Is this going to make me famous?” or “Will it generate huge social good in the eyes of my peers?” or any of that.

One might expect that I’d wrap up a book like this with a set of recipes for living or a list of ten steps to a better life, or a bevy of helpful prescriptions. The findings of the research and the ethos of this book stand against the very idea of doing that. You might have come to greatly admire many of the people in this study (as did I), but that doesn’t mean you should try to become exactly like any of them. Don’t confuse admiration with prescription, role models with cookie-cutter templates.

Nigel Wilcockson, my longtime publishing partner in the U.K., proved himself yet again to be a writer’s editor with whom I can engage intellectually and philosophically. Early in our working friendship, Nigel grasped that my work was never fundamentally about business and leadership, but about the study of people and exceptional human endeavor, and he encouraged me to boldly break out of the limiting circle of being defined as a business and leadership author.

Bill Meehan, intellectual provocateur and caring friend, encouraged and challenged me to widen and deepen the scope of what this book is all about. “Don’t waste your time— or your words— on the little questions,” he’d hammer at me. “Go for the big questions, the questions of truth and wisdom and meaning. You need to be more of a poet and less of an analyst, more of a philosopher and less of a strategist” I’ve always built my books on a foundation of rigorous research and empirical evidence, and What to Make of a Life is no exception.