A quick update first.

I've now had feedback from my 18 wonderful beta readers, and also from the very helpful developmental editor at the publisher. The good news is no structural changes, but I'm going to tighten up various sections for clarity, and make some of the suggested things to do easier. I'll tell you more about that once I've worked through them all.

The thing I actually want to tell you about is that this week I nearly changed the book title.

(Some of you may remember the pain I went through previously with the subtitle…)

Some of the beta feedback came back saying people weren't initially sure what "outsized" meant in this context.

Not all of them, but enough.

One person challenged the word "leadership". She said that the book was very helpful for her but that she probably wouldn't have picked it up because she didn't think of herself as a leader (even though she most definitely is).

The book is about knowing yourself, making better decisions, and building your character – all of which give you outsized impact as a leader. But that also applies to anyone a few years into their career. So "leadership" might be narrowing the audience rather than defining who the book is helpful for.

So, only two words in the title, and both of them possibly wrong. That’s a bit concerning because the title has now been propagated on the book industry systems… if you Google “outsized leadership” you’ll see what I mean.

Further than I should have.

I revisited the title and subtitle options again, starting with something that used neither word. Either two fairly ordinary words that become ownable next to each other, the way Atomic Habits does, or something plainly descriptive that tells you what the book does.

But I didn't get far, because "leadership" isn't in the title by accident. My business is leadership development, and the book exists partly to support the leadership development programmes I run.

So that left one word to solve for, and what I kept circling back to was ‘easier’ instead of ‘outsized’. I landed on Easier Leadership, decided that was the answer, and bought the domain.

But what I'd missed was that I'd been imagining someone meeting the title cold, standing in front of a shelf, with nothing to go on but two words. But that's not likely to be most people who are considering buying the book. Most people who buy this book will have read about it somewhere first, or heard me talk about it, or had it recommended to them, and then clicked through and taken a look on Amazon. In that situation, a memorable title with a term I can own is valuable.

And Outsized Leadership is more distinctive than Easier Leadership. The more unusual word, Outsized, felt like a problem, but it's also what makes the title stick.

So I'm keeping the title. But the feedback did its job, because the confusion was real even if the title wasn’t the thing to change.

What I'm doing instead is putting a definition of each word, and the term, right at the front of the book (thanks, Siôn), and the back cover text will explain what Outsized Leadership is and so will the Amazon blurb. The front cover will also have the subtitle of 'How to Make a Bigger Impact with Less Effort'.

It's a fairly good example of the thing the book is about.

I had a real piece of evidence, I drew a reasonable conclusion from it, and I nearly made a significant decision on the back of it within a few hours. What saved me wasn't more information. It was going back to check my original assumptions (known as a ‘fixed point’ in the book).

That's Rule 4 from the book (all about making easier and better decisions), happening to me.

Bad decisions usually aren’t bad reasoning. They’re good reasoning from something that turns out not to be true. I’d be interested to know whether you recognise that.

Thanks for being on this journey with me, I appreciate your support.

Mostyn

P.S. If you know someone who'd be interested in hearing about the book, please do send this email on to them – they can sign up for themselves here.

P.P.S. If you’ve joined recently, the earlier editions are all here – how the book came about, what it’s about, and the day the draft finally went to the publisher.