On Tuesday I published my first book.
I want to tell you what that actually felt like — not the version you post about, but the real one.
For ten years, these ideas lived in a safe place. In notebooks. In conversations over coffee. In the quiet space between knowing something and being willing to say it out loud.
And then, on Tuesday, they didn't belong to me anymore.
That's the part no one tells you about publishing. The moment you hit the button, the work stops being yours. It belongs to the people who read it. They'll find things in it you didn't know you put there. They'll carry parts of it into rooms you'll never enter. They'll use it in ways you never imagined.
And you have to be okay with that. You have to trust that what you built is strong enough to travel without you.
That's a negotiation, too, if you think about it. Letting go of control. Trusting the process. Trusting the people on the other side.
I wasn't sure I was ready for that.
I hit publish anyway.
And then something happened that I didn't expect.
People started saying the book back to me — in their own words.
David Mann C.Eng FIET, LSMIEEE wrote: "Negotiation isn't a battlefield — it's a journey toward understanding."
I sat with that for a long time. I spent ten years trying to say what David said in one sentence.
Peter Moreira , a journalist I deeply respect, wrote that the book "paints a new picture of a successful negotiator: a person who listens, who strives to understand their counterparty's position and needs, who responds to tension with a calming tone." He called it "a rare wisdom." I'm still not sure I've earned those words. But I'm grateful he offered them.
Ron Howard wrote something that stopped me cold: "Decency, calmness, fairness, composure, empathy, listening, and integrity are not weaknesses in business or negotiation. They are strengths." And then he said this: "This is a book about how people carry themselves through pressure, conflict, leadership, relationships, and life, with negotiation as the lens." I don't think I could describe the book better than that. And I wrote it.
And Rick Segal — a veteran entrepreneur, investor, and board director who has been across more tables than most people will see in a lifetime — wrote that it "nails the art, skill, and nuances of negotiation through the excellent use of education, real life examples, and an immediate action plan for you to be awesome." Rick was the first person to put a quote on paper for this book. That meant more than he knows.
Andy Abramson — one of the most respected names in communications and marketing, wrote: "Howard sent me an advance copy of his book. He wanted my opinion. Here's what I told him.
The Negotiators Compass comes from a real place.
That comes through immediately. This comes through immediately in the pilot story, in how someone handles pressure, in the parenting moments, and especially in the quieter decisions where most people either perform or fall apart.
Knowing Howard for more than 20 years, he's not performing here. He's showing his work ethic and his experience, which gives the book weight.
Howard also made a deliberate choice not to write a “win the room” negotiation book. Instead, The "Negotiators Compass" is about how to stay oriented when the room gets hard. That’s a harder path, and a more valuable one, but it comes with a tradeoff. You have to be sharper about where you draw lines, or the message can start to feel familiar instead of distinctive. The book does that and more.
Don't think about "The Negotiator's Compass" as another "how to" book. Think of it as a "how to be" instead."
I didn't ask any of them to say those things. I asked them to read the book. What they said back was theirs.
And that's when it stopped feeling like a launch and started feeling like a conversation.
Which is what it was always supposed to be.
This book was never meant to be a monologue. It was meant to start something — between you and the person across the table, between you and the conversation you've been avoiding, between you and the version of yourself that shows up when the pressure rises.
If you've read it, I'd love to know what stayed with you. Not a review. Not a rating. Just — what landed? What shifted? What conversation are you walking into differently because of something in these pages?
Hit reply. Tell me. That would mean more than anything.
What's ahead
The conversation doesn't end with the launch. It starts here.
Over the coming weeks, I'll be sharing more from inside the book — the four bearings, the stories behind the principles, the tools you can use in conversations that matter. And I'll be sharing what readers bring back, because the best ideas in this book aren't the ones I wrote. They're the ones you find.
If you know someone who could use this — a colleague, a friend, a family member heading into a conversation where the words matter — I'd be grateful if you forwarded this newsletter or shared the Amazon link. That's how books like this find the people they were written for.
Thank you for being here. Not just this week. From the beginning.
The compass is out in the world now. Let's see where it leads.
— Howard