Yesterday marked a significant milestone in my life. I completed and published my first book.

I'd wanted to write a book for many years, but such a project seemed too daunting.

The longest piece I'd written before this was a ~3,500-word blog post, but a book is several thousands of words long.

What helped me see this mammoth project through was thinking in milestones.

After the initial idea and figuring out the contents of the book, I divided this project into four milestones:

• Milestone 1: Writing all 31 chapters of the book
• Milestone 2: Editing and polishing the written chapters
• Milestone 3: Typesetting all chapters into beautiful, readable pages
• Milestone 4: Putting everything together and creating bonus materials

I further divided these milestones into smaller steps, mapped to each day. For example, I wrote one chapter a day during the first milestone, edited 2–3 chapters a day during the second milestone, and typeset 5–6 chapters each day during milestone three.

By milestone three, I had finished 95% of the book.

Milestone four was about adding the extra chapters like Introduction and Acknowledgements and creating printable flash cards that would help the reader reinforce what they've learned by reviewing the lesson daily:

What was initially an intimidating project transformed into a series of achievable steps I could schedule into my daily routine.

This idea might seem already heard of or something you already practice, but it's worth repeating because we often give up on our ambitious projects, thinking they're too far out of our reach.

Taking a step back and understanding how to break your ambitious project into milestones and, subsequently, tasks you can do in a day or a week can help you accomplish even the boldest goals.

This brings me to the next point. After sending 115 issues of this newsletter featuring over a hundred books, it feels surreal to share my first published book in this newsletter with you.

So, let's move on to the rest of this newsletter issue: