From Facebook posts into a writing career

Hi! I’m I. My work always meant a lot to me, and I changed a lot of professional fields over the course of my long career. All of them had one thing in common – conducting some kind of research, finding out something new. I ended up with a vast body of knowledge, not quite knowing what to do with it. When I eventually retired, I didn’t know what to do with all the time I found myself having.

I was initially sceptical about attending a Design Thinking course – I saw the methodology as a tool for potential entrepreneurs, and I had no intention of starting my own business. The experience itself was a pleasant surprise – I found myself enjoying the interaction with peers from different countries, many of whom shared the same questions that I did. We have so much to share, but how and with whom? We ended up working on this very challenge together and came up with interesting ideas.

I came out of the course with the understanding that a job is not necessarily the only way to feed useful and to communicate with others. I started writing long Facebook posts on various topics that interested me (linguistics, ethnography, history) and sharing them with my friends. Eventually, one of them came up with the suggestion to turn all that content into a book. So, I reworked the posts, turned them into articles, and gave them an overarching structure. Now I’m in the last stages of working with my editor prior to publishing.

How will my journey continue? Will other books follow the first one? I don’t know yet. But I’m thankful for trying our something new. It is always a good idea to take the first step along an unknown road – maybe you didn’t know where you were headed initially, but it will always be an interesting new place!