It is strange to sit down and write a book. It is stranger yet, not to have a specific plan for it. There was no structure, no “answer on page 142, line 6”, nothing, when I first sat down in front of the computer to write this book. The only thing present was a cabin in the woods, me, and a blank computer screen, as well as an intent to write. The rest is what emerged.

It is one thing to write such a book, but perhaps it must be even more strange to pick it up, knowing full well that it is literally called ‘The Most Useless Book’. Shouldn’t books provide value? Attempt to make at least some part of your life better? If knowledge and wisdom are too much to ask, then maybe a book should be so kind as to provide you with some form of entertainment?

Well, not really. Hear me out. When you see a dancer - an elegant, beautiful, gracious dancer - perform a miraculous act of movement to music, what kind of dance would you prefer? One that is choreographed, pre-meditated, planned, and practiced 497 times or perhaps one where the artist, given her skills and abilities, and thousands of hours of practice - dances to the music that she herself was not ready for, creating movement out of the spontaneity of life - surprising not only you, as the audience, but also herself as the dancer? For me, the answer is clearly the latter. In fact, I am going to be so bold as to claim that the former is nothing more than a well-practiced movement ritual, and the latter is a true and only form of dance.

This book is similar. It is an attempt to dance, to let my self-expression be free. To let all that accumulated creativity, wisdom, knowledge, as well as the experience of having written hundreds (maybe thousands) of articles, be released. To surprise me, the author, and to surprise you, the reader, in the process.

To me, it is important to do things from this place of ‘lack of expectations, non-existence of ambition, and of limited purpose’. Let me explain.

Having done a fair amount of what people tend to call ‘self-development’, as much as I don’t like the term, I have come to realize that often, your goals, ambitions, and expectations can paralyze you. That they are at times living in inverse proportion to your ability to start working on your dreams.

Imagine your goal is to create a book that is just as famous as Homer’s Odyssey, while making as much money from it as J. K. Rowling did from Harry Potter, not to forget that you want it to influence as many lives as Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl did.

That is a tall order, and as a result, you may spend most of your life planning, instead of acting. Similarly, if you have expectations of your work, you may terrorize yourself constantly with questions such as: “Am I good enough?”, “Am I getting closer to my goals?”, “Will this help me, or is this a waste of time, and I should get a day job instead?” - never starting your dream project. Even if you do eventually write your book, will you publish it and fear facing the reality of whether it is actually good or not? Probably not.

So yes, this book, from the very beginning, was intended to have no specific goal, no specific agenda, no specific task. It is an artistic experiment. It is a creation of freedom. What my gut feeling tells me is that in the process of creation, the meaning, the purpose, and even the ‘topic’ will emerge.

In fact, it already has. Life is a mystery, and when I wrote the first draft, I did not yet know that the answer to everything would end up on page 142, line 6, but it has come to me, and asked me to be included, which shows me that once we really let go of expectations, the meaning comes to us instead of us fighting for it. Beyond that, there really is no point, just art.

“There must be some point to the rest of the book, right?” - you may be thinking.

The first instinct is to hold my ground and to give you an outright “Nope. No point at all”. However, that would be a lie, and I am not about to start lying on the very first page of my very first book.

Thus, I must admit, there is a tiny, minor, barely noticeable (even to myself) point to this exercise. Argh… okay, fine. Several tiny, minor, barely noticeable points. First, I hope that by reading this book - as useless as it is intended to be - someone will find the information contained within actionable (which is not to say, useful). Second, it is to see if I have it in me to start and finish a whole book. Third - it seems to be a goal of mine that consistently stays on my ‘Goal List’ - you see, I re-do my goal list monthly, from memory, and if I remember something consistently (most things I forget), then perhaps it is something worth doing. Writing a book has been on the list for over five years, so here we are.

Finally, since I already mentioned that this will be an art project, I want to invite you to participate in it by giving you full freedom to rewrite, modify, and re-create this text to your own liking. If you own this book, you will also have access to a wiki page for it, where anyone can modify it to suit their needs. This starts as my book, but I certainly hope that it will end up being our book.