In order to pass along the knowledge of how to succeed, first you must know how to fail. A great deal, if possible. This is essential because it’s far more common (and easier) to make mistakes than to enjoy success. Being aware of potential points of derailment helps to better and more accurately navigate your readers past your own missteps so they can succeed where perhaps you first failed quite miserably.

I happen to be an unparalleled authority on the subject of failure, both through scholarship and experience — though I recommend the latter, as I believe gaining failure “in the field” is superior to passively acquiring failure from books. One can bake a perfect chocolate cake on the first attempt, but that does not impart the same authority of cakemanship as does baking a perfect chocolate cake after numerous epic fails.

The writing process for my advice/self-help book, “This Is How,” was unlike my experiences of writing a novel or memoir. I was less concerned with the craft of artful, attractive, witty sentences, and entirely concerned with clarity and specificity. I felt no need to maintain the levity of my previous books because the point of “This Is How” was not to entertain but to inform, challenge, help make minor psychological repairs and enlighten.

I was not writing on a single topic, like “How to Invest Wisely in a Post-Occupy Economy” (though I have ample documentation of my impressive failures in this area). I wanted to show people how a deeper honesty with themselves when assessing their lives could resolve many common psychological issues. Many people mistakenly assume they know “the truth” about their situations. In order to familiarize readers with what I called the deeper “truth behind the truth,” I pulled examples from my life, but I also freely explored issues I have not faced myself, like obesity or the loss of a child. I did this to demonstrate how my approach to resolving my own issues is modular, unrelated to the issues themselves.