He Said the Book Would Never Lead to a Business. It Became His Entire Second Career.
I told Chris Joseph years ago that his book would lead to a coaching career. He told me absolutely not. He meant it.
It took about two years for him to tell me I was right.
Chris was diagnosed with stage three pancreatic cancer in 2016, and seventy percent of people with that diagnosis are dead within a year. He quit chemo, fired his oncologist with no Plan B and is now about to turn 70.
He wrote his memoir, Life is a Ride, because the story was in his head and he had to get it out, not because he had some grand business plan.
But the book became his business card, his credibility, his foot in every door. People found it and kept asking the same thing: tell me what you did.
He threw himself into new projects (at one point he was doing five podcasts). He did a book tour with a musician friend because he was smart enough to know not that many people show up for an author alone. And eventually, all those "tell me what you did" conversations became Terrain Navigators, the health coaching practice he now runs for people facing the diagnosis he survived.
Chris didn't plan any of this. He just published a real book, took it seriously and let the ride take him where it was going. (It's not an accident the book is called Life is a Ride.)
In this episode:
- Why Chris fired his oncologist with no Plan B (and why he'd do it again)
- How he used his book as a business card to introduce himself to Joe Polish at a gala
- The moment he realized "tell me what you did" was a coaching business waiting to happen
- Why he wrote a memoir instead of a how-to (and why the how-to he's writing now terrifies him)
- What a friend's pickleball book disaster taught him about trying to do it all yourself
