Read an Excerpt

Publish
 
It was a Tuesday around 7A.M. when I clicked “Publish” on an essay on Medium.com titled “The Crossroads of Should & Must.”
 
We share things online. Every day. All the time. But something about this thing was different. So different, that in a few short weeks, it was tweeted to over five million people and read by over a quarter million readers.
 
“Drop everything you’re doing and read this right now,” one woman posted. “This article changed my life,” wrote another. “I was about to send it to all of my employees,” wrote one CEO, “but I assumed that a third of them would quit if they read it. But you know what? If they don’t want to be here, I want them to quit—so I sent it.”
 
The emails poured in. The tweets lit up my phone. The article spread through the Web in a flash, and then flashed some more. It continued to shine and grow and, well, here we are. I decided to write this book because of the people who shared their stories with me and the pain and courage I felt in their struggle. Women in their thirties. Men in their twenties. A high school senior. Fathers. A widow. Single moms. Millionaires who were poor. Poor people who were millionaires. Teachers. Lawyers. A musician disguised as a lawyer. A poet who loved to drive a city bus. Women who didn’t want kids. Fathers who wanted to raise kids. People who felt stuck in their jobs and people who were so desperately grateful to have a job at all.
 
The pain cut across gender, location, and age. And at its essence, the pain was this—
 
All too often, we feel that we are not living the fullness of our lives because we are not expressing the fullness of our gifts.
 
I heard from people who seemed willing to do anything to make their dissatisfaction go away, but they didn’t know what to do. I wrote this book to share what I have found most helpful in navigating my own journey, as well as what has been most helpful for the people I met. However, you’re not holding a book of answers, because only you know those; you’re holding a collection of the most effective questions I encountered along the way. Think of these pages as a series of doorways designed so that you can choose which way your journey will go.
 
These pages are a pep talk to honor that voice inside of you that says you have something special to give. It’s a reminder that while there is no map for where you’re going, many have traveled this road before. It’s permission to unlearn everything you’ve ever been told you should do in order to learn what you must.
 
It’s 11:55 a.m. on a Thursday, and I’m clicking “Save” on this document one final time before it begins its adventure into the world. In my own life, I’ve found that things appear at the ideal time. Not before. And not after. Consider the possibility that this book made its way into your hands because you wanted it to. Because a part of you has seen a crossroads in your life, and you’re ready for the journey ahead. I am humbled and grateful that these words will find their way from me to you, somehow, in some way, at just the right time. Thank you for being a part of this wild and wondrous journey. From one fellow traveler to another—Godspeed.
 
Elle
October 23, 2014
San Francisco, CA