The War Stories It Takes To Get To These Glorious Days

I’m celebrating today, and I figuratively invite you to lift a glass of champagne with me. I just put the last nail into the project, El Nuevo Piense y Hágase Rico, the Spanish translation of The NEW Think And Grow Rich.

I dispatched the translated autoresponder series off to my webmasters and asked them to go ahead and insert them. And later, as I was reflecting on this, I thought…”Wow, this whole thing looks so easy, but this is a real project. It took a loooot of time.”

In fact, it took several years of wanting to re-write Think and Grow Rich into The NEW Think And Grow Rich in English. It cost millions of dollars to do that, when you consider that I stepped down from a million-dollar position I could see wasn’t ever going to give me the time I needed to focus on the project and do what I knew should be done.

That process then took another year. And then we lived with the book for a year or two, working and getting it out. Among the victories of that period, we’ve got it out in the Chinese language—both Mandarin and Cantonese, the Hong Kong dialect, Vietnamese, and Korean. Today it's in Spanish, which, like English and Chinese, brings it to huge parts of the world. Being part Latino, living in Panama City, Panamá, and speaking the language, that was a natural. But writing is such a chore, I paid to get it translated. (Of course I checked every word.)

That means I didn’t do the primary work, but it still took a number of months, though nothing was dedicated time here in any of this, to review the text, organize it, sort it, and get it in the condition I wanted it in. Getting it in book form, at that point, follows simply.

Then it comes time to write the sales letter—a different kind of sales letter—and I had to get that translated, too. Then I had to get the testimonials translated, and the fellow who did the translation work even gave me a testimonial in Spanish.

And then I wrote the autoresponders which go out to affirm the purchase, give the buyers guidance, and tell them how to get the most out of it. That’s what we finished today. And I’m thinking, “Wow, this thing that seems so simple has been a monster! It’s taken a lot of time!” And I’m grateful that it’s done.

But you want to know something? It’s not over yet! We’re looking at putting it into an audio version now. And that involves more than just the time it takes to do the recording. You’ve got to prepare for it, you’ve got to get in the right space, you’ve got to make sure that any glitches appearing in that process – and the longer the project, the more the glitches – are fixed, and it takes eight times the time and money to fix something than it does to get it right. But if it’s glitched, you must repair it… And then there’s the regular editing involved, so we’re talking about another big arm of this project.

It all appears so simple to the end user, and I’m grateful to celebrate this. And, just because I’m reflecting on it, I wanted to share a few words about the war stories it takes to get to these glorious days.