The real work begins with a sentence.
Not a metaphorical sentence. A literal one.
A sentence that forces clarity, coherence, and commitment.
A sentence he calls the North Star of a book.
Eric recently joined a live Creative Lab hosted by Act Two, a five-week creative accelerator that helps people finally start (and ship) the projects they’ve been putting off—podcasts, books, apps, videos, and more. Over an hour with a small group of creators, founders, and writers, he walked them through the framework that shaped The Almanack of Naval, The Anthology of Balaji, and his forthcoming Book of Elon. It’s the same framework Scribe uses with hundreds of authors.
And it all starts with a deceptively simple question:
Who is this for, what transformation are you offering them, and why does it matter to you?
Why Books Still Matter More Than You Think
Before diving into the mechanics, Eric addressed the quiet question many aspiring authors carry:
Do books still matter in a scrolling world?
His answer: More than ever.
A book is a prestige object—rare, intentional, durable.
It’s a “lighthouse,” as Eric calls it: one piece of high-quality work that shines for years without updates or algorithms.
As he said, “A great book is a credential on the level of a PhD, a gold medal, or a business exit. It puts you in rooms you otherwise never would have entered.”
Books scale like digital products but carry the psychological weight of a physical one. They bypass the noise of feeds, the churn of social platforms, and the suspicion baked into ad-supported content. People opt into books. They pay for them. They finish them alone in quiet. And when a book transforms them, they tell people.
That word-of-mouth engine—the only engine that can take a book from 10 copies to 10,000—is powered by specificity.
They try to write a book for “everyone who…”
Everyone who wants to improve…
Everyone who wants more freedom…
Everyone who needs leadership advice…
Eric’s stance is blunt: “Uncomfortably specific is the goal. If you’re not worried your audience is too small, you’re not specific enough.”
Why?
Because a book only spreads when its first readers feel personally, intimately understood—when it feels like the author wrote directly to them.
Eric’s own surprise success with The Almanac of Naval illustrates this. He wrote the book for a tiny audience—essentially “terminally online Naval fans in San Francisco in their twenties.” Yet the book resonated globally.
The paradox: writing for one person often reaches millions.
Writing for millions usually reaches no one.
The North Star Framework
Every author at Scribe begins with three questions:
Do you want impact? Credibility? Money? Reputation?
If you don’t acknowledge your selfish motive, you risk losing motivation halfway through.
What pain are they in?
What capability will they gain after reading your book?
Only then do you combine the three into the North Star Sentence: “I will use this book to target by teaching them , which will lead to .”
This sentence becomes the guiding document for:
A few themes emerged:
What job did you have?
What pain did you experience?
What trapped belief did you harbor?
Vague targeting creates vague writing.
Authenticity plus quality naturally produces originality.
Why Some Authors Succeed and Others Don’t
People over-index on launch week and under-index on the next five years.
The authors who win are the ones who keep talking about one book for a long time.
David Goggins.
Tim Ferriss.
James Clear.
Paul Millerd.
All of them lived with one idea for years and years.
A book is not one decision to start writing.
It’s a thousand decisions to not quit.
When Books Drive Businesses (Even Quietly)
Eric also highlighted the second category of author success: books that may not sell millions but produce millions in business value.
He told the story of a financial planner who wrote a hyper-specific book—for retiring owners of financial planning firms. His Amazon page shows single-digit reviews. Yet the book has helped him acquire businesses worth millions.
The targeting made the difference.
The audience was small, but the value per reader was enormous.
The lesson:
A book with a small audience can outperform a book with a large one, if the transformation it offers is meaningful.
Scribe’s Role in the Creative Process
Eric closed by explaining how Scribe supports authors across all three “marathons” of the book journey:
Books like James Clear’s, David Goggins’s, and thousands more have gone through variations of this framework. But even Eric—who now sells more than a million copies per title—still uses the exact same worksheet.
Why?
Because every great book begins with a clear intention.
A Final Invitation
Eric closed with a quote he returns to often:
“Inspiration is perishable. Act on it immediately.”
If you leave inspiration sitting for too long, it evaporates.
If you act on it—especially with a North Star—you might just write the book that changes your life, your business, and your readers.