So I've got John A. Cuff on the line author of Quitter Start and the recent Do-Over as well as

Stuff Christians Lake from way back. John, how's it going?

It's going great. Thanks for having me on James.

John, let me first ask this. I want to talk about your most recent book Do-Over.

But your very first book, you wrote Stuff Christians Lake and you wrote that when you were still kind of at the cubicle job. Am I right?

Yeah, I worked for Auto Trader in Atlanta as a technical kind of writer.

And when you wrote that book, did that give you like this extra kind of cool factor at work?

Yeah, temporarily. Like a handful of people knew about it and they would say like,

Oh, are you going to quit your job? And I would always say, I got 30 grand in my advance, which after agent and taxes was $13,000.

So that's just a crazy thought that I would quit my job for $13,000.

And people don't realize that it's actually very hard to make money as an author of books in general.

It's nearly impossible. Yeah. Well, like you, like let me just ask, you know, how many speaking gigs have you done in the past year?

Probably 60. Yeah, so you got to do a lot of work on top of writing books to, you know, essentially have your dream job.

Which is kind of the essence of all your works, which is how to go from kind of the day job to the dream job, you know, through all these different.

Essentially the arc of your books. That's the story I see.

Yeah, 100% and there's so much of that that you don't get to see because, you know, Instagram looks a certain way.

And then the reality is you're doing a lot of stuff that you wouldn't qualify as like this is dreamy.

Well, yeah, because I'm, you know, 60 talks, like I do a lot of speaking.

And I think I would get really burnt out giving 60 talks in a year.

Yeah, I enjoy it. I mean, the thing for me is I've started to do meetups before the talks.

So in addition to doing the talk, I'll say to the internet, hey, I'm going to be at the spot at 7 a.m. Let's get together.

And I get to connect with people and share ideas and hear their ideas.

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