A Note Before You Begin

This book began as a book for my son.
 

He was approaching his sixteenth birthday, and I wanted to give him something more useful than advice. So I wrote down the mistakes — the accidental choices, the moments I got it wrong in a room full of people, the small humiliations that turned out to matter more than the wins. I wanted him to know his father never had a blueprint.
 

When a few of those stories found their way onto LinkedIn, strangers started writing back. Consultants, managers, people who had never set foot in a boardroom: all of them recognizing something in the same small failures I thought were mine alone. That response is the only reason this exists as a book rather than a private file on my laptop.
 

This is not a leadership manual, and it isn't really about consulting. It's about the unscheduled, unglamorous apprenticeship that happens underneath a career. The parts nobody puts in a job description. If you're early in your own climb, I hope it saves you a few of the harder lessons. If you're further along, I hope it gives you permission to admit that you're still learning them too.
 

The earliest chapters of this story, a childhood in a nine-square-meter provision shop in Jakarta, and the years before my consulting career, deserve a book of their own. That one is already underway. This one starts at the door I almost didn't get through.
 

— E.W.