The Janus Plan is in the world.
September 15 this month is when pre-orders are released and the book begins its life in the hands of readers. The energy behind this launch has been building for months: the podcasts, the reviews arriving, the requests for workshops and keynotes, the bylines confirmed to publish, the TEDx Talk now live and finding its audience. It still does not feel entirely real. And yet here we are.
Thirty Years to Write a Five-Year Book
I have told the origin story enough times to know its shape: the boy in the Philippines who found Janus in an encyclopedia. The chronic New Year’s resolution maker and breaker. The Hong Kong hotel room in 1997. The breakdown. The honest reckoning that followed. The thirty years of living the practice before I had the courage to write it down.
But what I have not said as often, and what feels most true today, is that the writing of this book was its own Janus practice.
Every time I thought I understood where the book was headed, I had to stop. Look backward at what it had become. Release the version I had planned for and recommit to the one that was forming on the page. The book asked me to live what I was writing. It was not always comfortable but it was exactly right.
Five years of writing. Thirty years of living. One book. And now it belongs not to me but to everyone who picks it up.
The People Who Made This Possible
A book that appears to be the work of one person almost never is. You have heard how it takes a village. I have done my best to mention individuals in the book’s acknowledgments.
To the advance readers who gave the manuscript their honest attention before it was ready for the world, your feedback shaped the final pages in ways I am still discovering.
To the entire team at Weaving Influence Press, for the care you brought to every stage of this, from editing and design to distribution and publicity, along with Pellien Public Relations, and to the audiobook team at Audible who helped me put it into a format that reaches people the page alone cannot.
To the friends and family who believed in this project when it was still finding its shape, who encouraged me when my confidence wavered, and who never once suggested I was taking too long.
To those who endorsed The Janus Plan, your words opened doors and your belief in the work meant everything.
To the podcast hosts, interviewers, and reporters who showed up before the book existed in its final form, asked the questions that sharpened my thinking, and gave the ideas a platform to travel. The conversations you created confirmed, over and over, that this idea had a place in the world.
To the pre-order community and to you who will acquire the book. Thank you. From the bottom of a very full heart.
What I Hope the Book Does
I hope The Janus Plan reaches the person who has been making the same resolution for five Januaries in a row and cannot understand why it keeps dissolving. The executive who arrives at every annual planning session with enormous energy and leaves with a plan built on the same unexamined assumptions as the one before it. The student crossing the threshold into a new academic year carrying last year’s patterns without knowing they are there. The retiree embarking on a chapter that is unwritten.
I hope it reaches the person who is not sure they belong in the self-help section of the bookstore. The one who finds the relentless optimism of most goal-setting books slightly exhausting and suspects that the honest backward look might be more useful than another framework for moving faster.
And I hope it does what every good book is supposed to do: asks something of the reader they were not expecting to be asked and finds them, in that moment of honest response, a little more themselves than they were before they opened it.
I also hope the book opens doors.
Not just the doors that lead to someone reading it alone on a Sunday morning, though I hope for that too. I mean the doors that lead to rooms. The planning retreat where a leadership team finally asks what the year behind them was actually trying to teach them before a single slide is presented. The workshop where a group of professionals sits together and writes honestly, for the first time, about what they want to leave behind. The book club where a family or a community of friends discovers that the conversation the book opens is more valuable than anything they expected to find inside it.
I want to be in those rooms.
As a facilitator. As a keynote speaker. As the person who asks the questions that most planning sessions never make time for and then stays to hear what comes up when people answer them honestly. The principles and practices in The Janus Plan were built to travel from the individual reader to the team, from the team to the organization, from the organization to the community. They work at any scale. And they work best when someone is in the room to hold the space for the honest conversation that follows.
If you lead a team, a company, a community, or a gathering of people standing at a threshold who could use a framework for crossing it with intention, I would love to hear from you. jobert@joberteabueva.com
It Is Just the Beginning
Here is what I know about books: they find their readers over time, not all at once.
The launch week matters. The reviews matter. The early conversations matter. But the book that shapes someone’s year, the one that gets dog-eared and underlined and given to a friend who needs it, is still finding its way to them.
The Janus Plan is just beginning its life in the world. And I am learning, in real time, what it means to release something you have held tightly for years and trust it to do its work without you in the room.
That is, of course, the Janus practice. Look backward at what you have built with honesty and gratitude. Then step forward. And let it go.