Eckhart Aurelius Hughes AMA (Ask Me Anything)

[Davy Ifedigbo]

As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

[Surabhi Rani]

What is the name of the next book you are going to write? What are your upcoming writing projects? Do you have any plans for the future and strategies to accomplish those goals?

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Hi, Davy Ifedigbo,

Thank you for your questions!

As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

Great question! Here's the answer: I never attended college at all, not even a single course or semester.

My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

I wanted to be able to chat about books I had read recently with other people who had read the same book. This was back before iPhone or Kindle had been released. Nowadays it's common for one to hop online and chat with a niche community about interest.

In real life, if I just read a book, the odds that any random person would have read it recently, or even at all, was low. So there was nobody to talk about it with. But with the internet, and especially my idea of OnlineBookClub, I could easily hop online and instantly be connected with other people who read that exact book and chat about it with them.

Nowadays, if you want to chat with people about something very specific (e.g. a certain book you read, a certain motorcycle you might want to buy, a certain video game, etc.) is easy and common to do. But at the time it I was slightly ahead of the curve in creating OnlineBookClub.

For example, I created OnlineBookClub before Goodreads was created.


Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

What is the name of the next book you are going to write?

In It Together might be last

However, I am going to release a slightly updated edition soon, and then an audiobook. I also want to create translated versions of In It Together in several other languages.

I did also propose an idea to write a book with a title like Time is Not Real: An Easily Understood But Rigorous Scientific Explanation, and put it up to vote via retweet on Twitter, but so far it only has 8 retweets, so I don't think I'll do it, unless it gets a lot more retweets. 1,000 retweets, and I will probably do it. Anything less, probably not.

What are your upcoming writing projects?

Other than what I've mentioned above, I mostly only journal now, both prose and poetry. If anything is good enough to share, I just post it online using either (1) social media, (2) the In It Together Discussion Forum at OnlinePhilosophyClub, and/or (3) the the Creative Original Works: Poetry Forum at OnlineBookClub.

To partly answer your next question, I don't have a goal to journal or write, so I also don't have or need a strategy to accomplish it. It happens on its own, much more like a burp or sneeze. In fact, a sneeze is a great analogy because I can kind of hold it in if I choose to, but there's just a great relief when I let it out.

A big reason I like to write and journal is simply to get the words out of my head so my head can be emptier and my mind can be clearer. This goes even things like to-do lists and my calendar. I do not try to remember my to-do list or events calendar. If anything, I actively do my best to forget them when I write them down, and I write things on my to-do list or calendar precisely so I don't have to walk around having my head crowded with all sorts of repeated thoughts like, "Today I want to do X, and also Y, and also Z, and I have deadline for A coming tomorrow to worry about, and oh yeah I need to pick my dry cleaning, etc. etc. etc.".

With my pen, I delegate my thoughts to the page, so I don't have to deal with them.

Do you have any plans for the future and strategies to accomplish those goals?

Well, as preface, my favorite fiction book Of Mice and Men, the title of which is taken from a poem that includes the line, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry."

I do set goals and plan out strategies, but I don't get attached to the plans. That's, for many reasons, but one is so that I can stay nimble and adapt as needed, so to speak.

With that said, I do still have a goal to fulfill my promise to do my book tour. My goal is to have that fully planned out by July 15th, and then fully complete the whole tour within a year or so at most. To get there, I do want to first release the aforementioned 3rd Edition and audiobook.

There's many steps on my plan for that but one is that I want to either hire one overall tour manager to mange the tour, or hire a person at each and every to manage the book tour in that spot. I can choose dates and buy plane tickets and get myself to the airport and then attend and do whatever it is author's do on a book tour, but I can't do all that and then also play the role of tour manager and planner, especially since I'm not familiar with the locations I will be attending.

I am also working on some software for my mentoring program that will be scalable and ideally serve as an all-in-one productivity app for all sorts of people and purposes, not just to facilitate mentor/mentee relationships.

Finally, I have a goal to use my mentoring program to also partner with 12 people over the next year to start 12 different companies. I cannot be a CEO of 12 different companies, but I can mentor and partner with 12 individuals who can each be the CEO of their own company, and so that's my goal.


Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius

[Melissa Jane]

Hi, Davy Ifedigbo,

Thank you for your questions!

As this section allows us to inquire about various topics, I am keen to learn more about you. Which university did you attend, and which course did you pursue there? Additionally, could you please provide the year of your graduation?

Great question! Here's the answer: I never attended college at all, not even a single course or semester.

My primary inquiry centers around your motivation for establishing an online book club. As a young adult, I am eager to uncover the responses to these inquiries.

I wanted to be able to chat about books I had read recently with other people who had read the same book. This was back before iPhone or Kindle had been released. Nowadays it's common for one to hop online and chat with a niche community about interest.

In real life, if I just read a book, the odds that any random person would have read it recently, or even at all, was low. So there was nobody to talk about it with. But with the internet, and especially my idea of OnlineBookClub, I could easily hop online and instantly be connected with other people who read that exact book and chat about it with them.

Nowadays, if you want to chat with people about something very specific (e.g. a certain book you read, a certain motorcycle you might want to buy, a certain video game, etc.) is easy and common to do. But at the time it I was slightly ahead of the curve in creating OnlineBookClub.

For example, I created OnlineBookClub before Goodreads was created.


Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius

Hi,

Thank you for sharing this. Since you're answering personal questions, I also have a few: I read that you created OnlineBookClub at 19. Did you learn web programming in school or was it self-taught? I also read that so many people, including Mark Zuckerberg, had initial startups that didn't do very well before Facebook. Are there any startups that you created before or after OnlineBookClub that didn't do as well as you expected?

Have you ever done an author interview on Onlinebookclub? If so, can you share a link?

Thank you so much for sharing your experience with us.

[Eckhart Aurelius Hughes]

Hi, Melissa Jane,

Thank you for your questions!

I read that you created OnlineBookClub at 19. Did you learn web programming in school or was it self-taught?

It was self-taught.

Around the same time, I would even have some people I knew in real life sometimes offer to pay me small amounts of money to jazz up their MySpace page.

I also read that so many people, including Mark Zuckerberg, had initial startups that didn't do very well before Facebook. Are there any startups that you created before or after OnlineBookClub that didn't do as well as you expected?

Not formally. In other words, I've never run a company that had to declare bankruptcy or even be sold off (at all, let alone for a loss).

I never took any outside investments or loans, but rather bootstrapped the whole thing. So even if OnlineBookClub had failed in the first 8 years, it probably wouldn't have caused me any long-term damage, let alone leave investors or loaners hung out to dry.

But, to this day, I start plenty of projects that flop or fail. I don't register them as formal companies or such. They fail too quickly to ever get off the ground.

For example, one time I started a blogger review program at OnlineBookClub. It never really worked well and eventually I to just shut it down.

To really answer your question, though, almost every project including all of my books and OnlineBookClub itself as a whole and any subventures within it never do as well as I hoped or anticipated. I may have never hit the moon, and likely and perhaps luckily never will, but in a way I'm always aiming there. In some ways, if I don't think I'll hit the moon, I don't even take the shot. Any time I go forward with a book or business or idea, at first I typically think it's the next big thing and will do thousands of times better than it ultimately does.

It may look like I was aim for the top of the fence and succeed, but I aim only for the moon. What some other people might consider success might be my worst case scenario, so to speak.

There's a wise expression: Hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.

Personally, I don't think much in terms of 'hope' at all because I see hope as synonymous with fear, so for me we could rephrase it as: Incorrectly anticipate the best, and prepare for the worst. That's kind of the story of my life.

My physical actions might often indicate a person who is conservatively strategic enough to know to not walk too far out on the ledge, but in my heart I still believe I can fly.

Have you ever done an author interview on Onlinebookclub? If so, can you share a link?

Yes, here is the link:

https://forums.onlinebookclub.org/viewtopic.php?f=80&t=217356




Thank you,
Scott
a.k.a. Eckhart Aurelius

[Surabhi Rani]

Thank you, Sir, for all your initiatives! It was very informative and enriching to learn about your ideas and projects for the future. I appreciate your idea of translating your book, 'In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All.' Your idea of a book tour was greatly inspiring and knowledgeable. Also, I wish you all the best for the new app you are going to create for people from all walks of life. It feels really great to learn about such a platform being created for keen readers!