Why I Wrote GenTech (1.5 minute read)

I’ve been writing books since I was five years old. My first book was about a rabbit. I even illustrated it with my own drawings…then sold it to my grandma for a quarter. She said it was pretty good!

While at university, I wrote three self-published books that covered my rent and paid my groceries. It also gave me an opportunity to speak. These paper books only cost a buck to print but I re-sold them for as much as ten times that amount. I didn’t get rich, but that’s never been my goal. I wrote my first nationally published book at the tender age of 25. It was a best-seller in its field. In fact, it’s still selling thirty years later. To date, I’ve penned five published books and over a dozen digital works. I’m proud of each one.

But I’ve never penned a book like GenTech: An American Story of Technology, Change and Who We Really Are. It’s a book like none of the rest. It’s in a different field of study (history, sociology, generational analysis). It’s penned for a different market. And it’s a book I’ve waited a lifetime to write.

Some books are like that

As I mention in the book’s credits, some books you write, and some books write you. GenTech is the latter. For decades I’ve written on generations, spoke about generations, interviewed people from different generations, studied generations and observed how generations, particularly my own, moved through history. After five and a half decades on the planet, I finally got the chance to share my ideas and insights. Someone finally believed in this work as much as I did (thank you, Morgan James Publishing).

It’s a book that emerges at just the right time

GenTech will be released in May 2020 and that’s a significant year. It’s the first of a new decade. It’s a year that mirrors perfect “20-20” vision. I also believe it will prove a year of unbelievable new technologies that will begin to reimagine, once again, how we work, play, worship, interact and live. These “hairy” technologies—holograms, artificial intelligence, robotics—will further transform our lives and take us down a new road to a place we can only imagine, but our children and grandchildren will inherit comfortably.

Consequently, GenTech is a book about Americans, our story and our times (and the technologies that influenced us since 1900). It’s a work that challenges assumptions and corrects ideas about generations. If you’ve grown weary, as I have, of generational boxes like “boomers,” “Xers,” “Millennials” and “Gen Z,” then you’ll appreciate GenTech. We are not generations that can be crammed into a box and labeled. We are not alphabet soup. In reality, we are generations wired by unique technologies that guided us in youth (between the ages of 10-25).

We are generations of technology. We are GenTech.

And that’s why I wrote this book.

It’s a story that needed to be told.