I vividly remember the moment when I decided to write this book. Now, looking back at it, I am very proud of this moment as it was a completely selfless one.

Let me tell you what happened. It was early in the morning of August 10th, 2020. I had just finished writing an essay. At the time I didn’t have a title for it, but in the book it’s called “Creative Rollercoaster”.

This essay started out as a short note about Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence that was going to accompany one of my investment articles. As I started reading about this piece, I was touched by the emotional rollercoaster Tchaikovsky suffered when he composed it. I caught myself thinking that Tchaikovsky’s emotional journey looked very familiar. I don’t compose music, but I write. Both are creative processes where you try to fish content out of your subconscious. What started as a short piece that was going to accompany music started to turn into a lengthy essay about creativity and writing. After I finished writing it, I realized that this essay could actually help others. But this was not the only life (non-investment) essay I had written. What if I put the life essays I had written over the last fifteen years into a book? This selfless thought “it could help others” is the one I am proud of.

I started looking through my essays. I was going to self-publish them. Nine days later I received an email from Craig Pearce, an editor at Harriman House, a British publisher that had published books by my friends Lawrence Cunningham and Morgan Housel. Craig and I had communicated a few years earlier about possibly publishing an investment book I was working on, Intellectual Investor. (I have yet to finish it.)

I told Craig that I was working on a very different book and sent him a sample. I was expecting a very polite (he is British, after all) response along the lines of “Vitaliy, this looks great. Good luck!” To my surprise, Harriman House expressed interest in publishing it. Now I was a bit confused. I started to question their sanity. I thought there must be something wrong with them. What kind of joint could they be running if they wanted to publish this?

I reached out to Lawrence and Morgan and asked them about their experience with Harriman House. Harriman House had just published Morgan’s Psychology of Money, which became an international bestseller and quite deservingly sold a million copies. Both gave Harriman House glowing reviews and confirmed that there was nothing wrong with either Craig or the publisher.

I was excited to get the book out into the world, and we agreed to a publishing date of March 2021. We were in the middle of the lockdown, so I had plenty of time on my hands. I worked mornings, evenings, and weekends on the book. At first, I was mostly rewriting existing published and unpublished essays. Then the writer in me took over and I wrote many new ones.

Everything was going according to plan, and then…

Well, I stumbled on Stoicism. It was love at first sight. I wanted to learn and to write about it and share it with the world. I told Craig that this detour might take a few months. I read everything I could get my hands on. This ended up delaying the book by about a year, but I don’t regret it. I ended up writing a book inside a book about Stoic philosophy.

Soul in the Game – The Art of a Meaningful Life ended up being a very personal and autobiographical book. But I truly hope that despite its being personal, Soul in the Game becomes not my but your book. I can only hope that I carried the selfless intention that triggered me to write it throughout the book.

I am finally directly impacted by the pandemic. Normally it takes four weeks to do a print run of a book. Thanks to Covid, and for reasons that are still unclear to me, it now takes four months. If the hardback sells out in June it will take until September to get new copies printed.

That’s why I strongly encourage you to order it now – otherwise you may need to wait until September.

Plus, if you order and send your confirmation to bonus@soulinthegame.net, I’ll send you six entirely new chapters (35 pages of content) to read now.