You never know how much you don’t know till you gave your word to see a project through to completion. Thats what happen with my book Just BE Cause: Ah Ha Moments to Inspire the Next Generation of Change Makers. To be honest I wrote this book because its exactly what I needed when
I created my social venture The SWT Life, which helps young people find their superpower as a teenager.
There was no person or series of people that spoke to me in the land of social entrepreneurship that I could relate to and or understand. So like Biggie Smalls said it was all a dream, literally. And I decided to like Ghandi to “Be the change”, that I wished to see in the world. Also I found an ebook in which the tagline was “How to write an eBook in 30 days” I was sold. So my 22 year old self started on a long journey with no money and no idea about the publishing world. The game begun! I decided I wanted this book to be like Chicken Soup for Social Change in terms of having multiple contributors and having it told like good ol story time. Using themes that I had experienced while working on The SWT Life and a series of other ventures that kept popping up. Even though the book is geared to Millennials I wanted to have the contributors be inclusive, to tell the stories of some dynamic young people and super cool adults.
As I continued on my quest there were many times that I wanted to stop but I had to remember my commitment to my 32 contributors. The choice to decide who I wanted to BE in this process was present like never before. And like each chapter in my book I had to decide my cause, so I had to BE a Resource, Be Impactful, BE On It, Be Charged and a series of other things. I then made the decision to work smart and not hard, to look and see who I knew that could provide me insight with this book.
And did I find it, I took a publishing class and reached out to a woman that helped The Great Seth Godin with one of his books, took a Skillshare class on getting press and reached out to a friend that had written and published a few books himself. Everything that I needed was literally at my fingertips. PayPal for affiliates, APE the book for process, Google Docs for writing, Hootsuite for social media, Google for everything else and some amazing friends that rocked out just because. Once I remembered that I literally had nothing to lose by as Seth Godin says shipping I was at the finish line with the flag waving. And now because of all that work I get the pleasure of sharing with you Ah Ha Moments to Inspire the NEXT Generation of Change Makers.
This is an excerpt from Just Be Cause by Syreeta Gates.
Syreeta Gates is a Culture Creator. Founder of The SWT Life, and The Score Magazine and Curator of History MEETS Hip-Hop and Author of Just BE Cause: Ah Ha Moments to Inspire the Next Generation of Change Makers.
