Who: Tero Isokauppila
Claim To Fame: A life-long student of nutrition and an expert on natural health, Tero is the founder of Four Sigmatic, a natural superfood company specializing in medicinal mushroom-based coffees, hot cacaos and elixir products. He is also the author of two books — Healing Mushrooms: A Practical and Culinary Guide to Using Mushrooms for Whole Body Health and Santa Sold Shrooms: The Origin Story Of The World’s Most Famous Person.
Where To Find Tero: His Website, Instagram
Praise For Tero: “Anyone seeking knowledge and greater understanding of self will find this book inspirational.” — Reggie Watts, Musician, Actor and Comedian
This book pays homage to the native Sami People of Lapland, and my Nordic heritage. I grew up with parts of this folklore in Finland, and when the New York Times covered other sections of the story last Christmas, I felt that the time was right to bring the full truth to America. I talked about the potential of a storybook with Four Sigmatic’s Art Director, fellow Finn, Juho Heinola, and he was immediately excited to collaborate.
Our goal for the book is to tell the true, real story of Santa Claus and help others connect with the holiday’s roots in nature. All of our holidays have become so commercialized. I think it’s important that we focus on what really matters: our connections with others and our planet.
Writing my book on the health benefits and culinary applications of mushrooms took a lot longer to create, but much less time to edit. Testing recipes and researching the Western science behind mushrooms was time-consuming, but when those were done the job was basically complete. Santa Sold Shrooms was the opposite. The story was crystal clear in my head, but it was very, very hard to edit the text into a simple, yet exciting format for all ages.
My last book also had less illustrations. I loved being able to really collaborate with Juho on this book. I’d share the draft of where I was at, and he’d take a part of it and hand-illustrate the story. This inspired me to go into more (or less) detail in certain sections. We worked very closely together handing drafts and illustrations back and forth to produce the fully illustrated book.
I’ve been a long-time fan of podcasts for education and entertainment. With the promotion of my first book, I really noticed how valuable they are for book marketing. I also learned that everybody has an opinion on books: the publisher, the editors, the agent, the press, my mother, my friends, my employees, everyone. But at the end of the day, the author must feel proud of their work. I learned with my first book that you shouldn’t ask for too much feedback from other people because you risk losing the reason why you started. This time I was very selective with who I showed drafts of the book to.
Writing is very easy for me when I’m in the groove. The hard part sometimes is to get to that mental flow state. For me, it takes long, uninterrupted stretches of time. Emails, text messages, and phone calls are quite toxic when you’re trying to write. I would block full days off to write, but I also give myself permission to not write on those days unless it came organically.
At the final stretch, I traveled to an isolated island in Finland, without any internet connection, to finish the book. It was a good way to keep myself focused on the book and not on my business.
Four Sigmatic has a quite sizeable email newsletter subscriber list, and I’ve been writing (usually) long-form emails for years. I also write other long-form articles, but the consistent writing of emails–and the feedback I get from them via open-rates, click-rates, and reader replies–is what keeps me most in check. I highly recommend having at least a once-monthly email newsletter if you want to be a writer.
So many. I’ve pretty much dedicated my whole life to health and productivity hacks. The best ones are crazy simple though, like setting clear daily/weekly/monthly priorities for myself and taking short breaks throughout the day to stay focused. These days I also have an assistant and a team of people helping me run Four Sigmatic, which is definitely useful in many ways.
I think understanding the reader and customer is a similar exercise. As both a writer and an entrepreneur, you need to know who your audience is. For me personally, I spend an hour a day reading our customers’ reviews and social posts to learn more about what they like, and what they want.
You also need to be a bit of a dreamer or a maverick in both cases. I think most good entrepreneurs and writers are big thinkers who want to influence people with their stories, products, and services.
I actually don’t read many new books anymore. I prefer re-reading some of my favorites. Often more is not better…better is better. And for me, it seems like reading certain books again and again is a better way. I often find new elements and wisdom from them. One of my favorites is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
I also daily read a lot of non-books, from news articles to blog posts.
Yes, I have another health-focused book in mind. I also wrote a philosophy book with my best friend when we were in our early twenties. We never officially published it, but I want to update this book and bring it back. I think some of the messages in that book are now more current than ever before. And of course, my monthly email newsletter and article writing habit.
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