What Writing Books Has Taught Me About Consulting

How a Side Project Became an Unexpected Masterclass in Structure, Uncertainty, and Letting Go

Nov 22, 2025

Hi there,

I didn’t set out to learn anything new about consulting by writing a book. But somewhere between the drafts, edits, and mild existential crises, I realized the writing process was teaching me more about my consulting work than most projects ever had.

Over time, that quiet side experiment turned into a steady part of my professional life. I’ve ended up writing several books and more articles and blog posts than I’d comfortably admit (if you’re curious, you can check out my list of publications).

And that’s when it hit me: writing books and consulting are basically the same job, just wrapped in different packaging.

Both involve confusion, structure, opinions, rework, surprises, and that constant internal debate between “this is terrible” and “maybe this is actually pretty good.” Writing simply made those patterns impossible to ignore.

Here are the biggest lessons.

Structure Isn’t a Nice-to-Have

In consulting, structure is how you survive, and often the very thing you’re hired to produce. You step into a client’s world, which is usually somewhat messy (and sometimes spectacularly messy), and your job is to make it understandable.

Writing a book forces the exact same discipline. Only this time, there’s no team to align, no real client to clarify expectations, and not always even a proper kickoff. There’s just you and your scattered thoughts—hopefully captured somewhere in rough notes.

And in both consulting and writing, structure doesn’t magically emerge at the end. It has to be built from the moment you start. Skip that step early, and you’ll spend the next twelve months paying dearly for the shortcut.

First Drafts Are Always Worse Than You Expect

When you write a book, you quickly discover something consultants quietly know but rarely admit: your first versions are never as good as you hoped. They might look professional at a glance, but underneath they’re still rough.

My first drafts are usually full of repetition, half-formed ideas, placeholders, and paragraphs that read like they were written after a long day and too much coffee. Accepting that this “messy middle” is both normal and necessary changed everything. Clarity doesn’t appear before writing—it emerges because you write.

Consulting works exactly the same way. The first architecture model, the first deck, the first summary is almost never elegant. But it gives you something concrete to react to, refine, and eventually shape into something genuinely valuable.

Feedback Is Easier When You Expect It

Book writing teaches you to handle feedback without panicking. Editors don’t sugarcoat, why would they? When they say something like, “I’m having a hard time believing the main character’s motives,” they’re not questioning your existence. They’re simply telling you the character needs more work.

Learning to take that kind of feedback calmly—and even gratefully—makes consulting easier too. It’s not personal; it’s part of the process. Feedback is something you’re supposed to use, not fear.

There’s a moment in writing when you stop defending your ideas and start refining them. Also consulting becomes far more enjoyable once you reach that same point.

Finding a Publisher Is Very Much Like Selling Architecture Work

You can put together a thoughtful, well-structured, crystal-clear book proposal—and still hear nothing back. In fact, getting a polite “no” is already a small victory. Silence is the default.

It feels exactly like pitching enterprise architecture work to leadership. You can have a solid case, a real need, a feasible plan, and a convincing presentation… and they still dismiss it as unnecessary overhead. Not because the work is bad, but because they don’t want to commit to something they don’t fully understand—or simply don’t have the budget for.

A great proposal doesn’t guarantee acceptance. Timing matters. Priorities matter. Market trends, editor preferences, internal politics—they all matter just as much as quality. In the end, persistence often wins where brilliance alone doesn’t.

That realization changed how I approach consulting proposals too. Sometimes “not now” genuinely means “not now,” not “your idea is worthless.”

You Can’t Include Everything

Writing a book forces you to make real choices. You cut entire sections you were proud of. You drop stories that once felt essential. You simplify arguments even when every part of you wants to add one more nuance, footnote, or clever insight.

Consulting works the same way. You leave out details because the client won’t remember them anyway. You remove complexity because it doesn’t create clarity. And you simplify models because no one benefits from a diagram that resembles a plate of spaghetti.

Writing has taught me to ask a better question. Not “What else could I add?” but “What actually helps the reader?” That shift has made me a better consultant as well.

Book Is Never Truly Finished

You can always polish a sentence. You can always refine an example. You can always reorganize chapters to slightly improve the flow. There’s no natural endpoint, only endless opportunities to tweak. But at some point, the book has to go to the publisher.

Consulting deliverables work the same way. Eventually the client needs something concrete, something that lets them move forward. Not a flawless masterpiece, but a solid foundation. Sometimes even a single slide full of bullet points is enough, if that’s exactly what the client needs at that moment.

Letting go is a skill. Writing simply has forced me to practice it.

Long-Form Writing Rewires Your Brain

The biggest lesson surprised me: writing long-form material genuinely changes how you think.

You start seeing arguments in longer arcs, developing patience with uncertainty as you live with half-formed ideas for weeks. You get comfortable holding incomplete thoughts while shaping them, and you begin to distinguish much more clearly between what’s merely interesting and what’s actually useful.

At the same time, you’re carrying the entire book in your head—the structure, the dependencies between chapters, the echoes and connections—constantly checking that the logic holds and nothing contradicts something earlier. It becomes a kind of mental map, very much like architecture work, where you keep the whole landscape in mind while refining individual parts.

All of this has made me a calmer, more structured consultant. It’s easier to approach complex client problems when you’ve trained your brain to navigate complexity on the page first. Apparently, if you spend months making sense of a giant mess in a manuscript, real-world messes start looking a lot more manageable.

Final Thoughts

Writing a book taught me more about consulting than consulting ever taught me about writing.

It taught me structure, persistence, humility, and the value of steady refinement. It reminded me that good work rarely arrives through inspiration alone—it comes from showing up, shaping the mess, and accepting that clarity grows slowly.

If you’ve ever wondered whether writing a book or any long-form project is worth the effort, here’s my honest answer:

Yes.

Not because it’s easy, but because it makes you a better consultant—and honestly, a better person.

👉 Have you ever worked on something long-form—a thesis, report, strategy, or book—that taught you more than you expected? I’d love to hear your experience.

See you next time,
Eetu Niemi
IT Consulting Career Hub 🚀

✍️ Curious About My Writing?

If you want to explore more of what I write—books, articles, blog posts, guides, and the occasional speculative short story—you’ll find everything neatly collected at eetuniemi.net.

🇫🇮 Four-Day Workweek, Finnish Edition

If you read Finnish, I recently wrote an article for Duunitori about how the four-day workweek unlocked my writing career, and turned out to be my secret weapon for clarity, focus, and real efficiency.

It’s a deeper look at why constant busyness kills good thinking, and how a shorter week can bring it back.