There is a woman in Bodija — a large market district in Ibadan, in Nigeria’s south west — who has been selling fabric for eighteen years. Ask her about any material in her shop and she will tell you where it came from, how it will behave after three washes, what it should cost, and who is trying to cheat you. She knows which colours sit well together on a dark skin and which ones quarrel. She knows this the way you know your own name.
If you told her she was sitting on a product, she would laugh at you. "This one? Everybody knows this."
Everybody does not know this. That is the whole point, and it is the thing I want to talk about.
The curse of familiarity
There is a particular blindness that comes with competence. The longer you have known something, the harder it becomes to remember that you once did not know it. The knowledge stops feeling like knowledge and starts feeling like common sense, and nobody pays for common sense.
I have watched this in almost every professional I have worked with. The accountant who can look at a set of books for ten minutes and tell you exactly where the business is bleeding. The school proprietress who can predict, in the first term, which child is going to struggle and why. The engineer who knows which contractor is going to disappoint you before the contract is signed.
Every one of them will tell you the same thing: this is just what I do.
" What is natural to you is not natural to everybody. That is the trap. You cannot see the thing you are standing on.
You are not starting from a blank page
When people finally decide to package what they know, they almost always start in the wrong place. They open a blank document, type a title, stare at it for twenty minutes, and conclude that they are not really a writer after all.
But the material already exists. It has existed for years. It is scattered across long WhatsApp replies you typed at eleven at night to explain something to a friend. It is in the advice you have repeated so many times that you no longer hear yourself giving it. It is in the phone calls people make to you when they are stuck.
That is not nothing. That is a first draft written over a decade, in fragments, and then thrown away.
Start by harvesting, not by writing
Before you write a single line, answer four questions on paper.
One. What are the three questions people always ask you?
Not the polite ones. The ones they call you about. The ones they ask after the meeting has ended and everyone else has left the room.
A teacher hears: my child is bright but not performing, what do I do? A tailor hears: which material will not fade after three washes? An accountant hears: how do I know if this business is actually making profit? A nurse hears: is this fever something to worry about? A mechanic hears: is this car worth buying? A caterer hears: how much rice do I cook for two hundred guests?
Two. What do people compliment you on?
Write down five. Include the ones that embarrass you slightly because they feel too ordinary to mention. Those are usually the valuable ones, because ordinary to you means invisible to you.
You explain things so anybody can understand. You never panic in an emergency. You always know what matches what. Your food tastes exactly the same every single time. You can tell when somebody is not being straight with you. You are very patient with difficult people.
Three. What mistakes do you watch other people make, that you know how to prevent?
Your expertise is often clearest in the errors you can see coming. A person who can prevent a costly mistake is worth more than a person who can describe a good outcome.
An estate agent watches people pay for land before verifying the title. An accountant watches business owners mix personal money with company money. A caterer watches people price from ingredients alone and forget gas, transport and labour. A proprietor watches parents choose a school by the building instead of the teachers. A mechanic watches people buy a car because the body is clean.
Four. The scar.
This is the one nobody writes down, and it is the most valuable of the four. What mistake once embarrassed you badly, taught you something you will never forget, and yet you still watch other people make it?
"I started a job on a verbal agreement and lost four months. Nothing starts without writing now, and I still watch people do it every week." "I under-quoted the biggest wedding of my career and finished it at a loss. Now I quote with a margin for surprises." "I wrote off a boy in his first term. He turned out brilliant. I have never judged a child early again." "I gave goods on credit to a familiar face. No credit without a record now." "I signed off on figures I had not personally checked."
That list costs something to write, which is precisely why it is worth money. Anybody can tell you what to do. Very few people will tell you what it cost them to learn it, and that is the difference between advice and authority.
" Your scars are not a record of your failures. They are a record of the tuition you have already paid. Somebody else is about to pay it.
Those four lists are your raw material. You now have more than most people who set out to write a book.
Talk it out. Do not type it out.
Here is where I would push against the usual advice.
A lot of people who know a great deal write poorly, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. Writing is a separate skill from knowing. But those same people will speak about their work for forty minutes without pausing, with stories, with detail, with the kind of precision you cannot fake.
So use the side you are already good at. Open your voice recorder. Pick one item from one of those four lists. Speak for ten minutes as though you are explaining it to one person who genuinely asked.
Then take that recording to an AI tool and ask it to transcribe and organise it. Not to write it. To organise it.
" The job of AI here is not to tell you what you know. It is to ask you the right questions and arrange what you say. You supply the knowledge. It supplies the structure.
This distinction matters more than anything else in this article. If you ask AI to write about your field, it will produce something smooth, generic and worthless, because it is drawing from everybody and therefore from nobody. If you ask it to interview you and then organise your answers, what comes out is yours, with your stories and your judgement in it, and nobody else on earth can produce it.
Climb the ladder one rung at a time
The other reason people stall is that they aim at the top rung first. They decide they are going to write a book, the scale of it defeats them, and they do nothing at all.
But there is a ladder, and every rung on it is finished, useful, and sellable on its own.
One. A clear written answer to one question people keep asking you. One evening of work.
Two. That answer expanded into an article, with a real story in it, published where people can find it.
Three. Five to ten of those answers gathered into a structured guide that people download.
Four. You teaching it live, online or in a room, for a fee.
Five. That session recorded and organised into a course that sells while you sleep.
Six. All of it arranged into an argument, and published as a book.
Notice that the book is the last rung, not the first. And notice that by the time you reach it, you are not writing a book. You are assembling one from work you have already finished and already been paid for.
A note from my own experience
I have been speaking on radio every Tuesday morning for a little over two months. I did not sit down to write anything. I answered one question a week.
Somewhere along the way those answers started forming into shapes I could name. A way of structuring a request to an AI tool. A way of thinking about who gets left behind and why. A way of describing the three kinds of people in every room when a new technology arrives. I did not plan any of it. It accumulated.
That is what I am asking you to trust. You do not need a plan for a book. You need a question, a recorder, and the discipline to do it again next week.
Start this week
I have put together a short worksheet that walks through everything above. The four harvest lists, with worked examples from a dozen different trades, the seven questions to answer into your recorder, and the ladder. It is free and you are welcome to share it with anyone.
Pick one question. Record ten minutes. That is the whole assignment.
" Stop giving away your hard-earned wisdom in fragmented conversations. Package it, protect it, and let it pay you back.
If you do the exercise and something useful comes out of it, I would genuinely like to hear about it. And if you get stuck halfway, that is worth telling me too, because the place where people get stuck is usually the place where the next thing needs to be built.