Daniel Coyle: On the Transformative Process of Rewriting
In this interview, author Daniel Coyle discusses the importance of a healthy community in his new book, Flourish.
Daniel Coyle is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Culture Code, which was named Best Business Book of the Year by Bloomberg, BookPal, and Business Insider. Coyle has served as an advisor to many high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. His other books include The Talent Code, The Secret Race, The Little Book of Talent, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects, which was made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves. Coyle was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and now lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife, Jenny, and their four children. Follow him on Facebook.
In this interview, Daniel discusses the importance of a healthy community in his new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment, his hope for readers, and more.
Name: Daniel Coyle
Literary agent: David Black
Book title: Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment
Publisher: Bantam
Release date: February 3, 2026
Genre/category: Leadership and Motivation
Previous titles: The Talent Code, The Culture Code, Hardball, The Little Book of Talent, The Culture Playbook, The Secret Race, Lance Armstrong’s War, Waking Samuel
Elevator pitch: Flourishing isn’t luck—it’s a learnable skill of building community
What prompted you to write this book?
A garden-variety midlife crisis that awakened me to big questions. What is a meaningful life, really? How do we build one for ourselves and our loved ones?
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
Five years, filled with lots of reporting and travel, in which I found flourishing people and visited them. The idea started out focusing on individuals, but the more I learned, the more vividly I saw the truth: Flourishing happens in and through healthy community. We become our best selves through our relationships with each other.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
All my books take a long time, and they often lead to the same lesson: This is a team sport. I’m a slow learner, but for this one it’s been really powerful to see the difference the group brain can make, on the cover, on the endless drafts, on the publicity and marketing efforts. A book succeeds in and through the communities it creates; it’s been fun to see how much this book embodies that truth.
One other thing: I used to think that the job of a great book is to provide answers. Now I see that the real job is to pose the right questions, and to give people ways of seeing and living into those questions. That’s been liberating—it’s a burden to have to come up with answers—but creating spaces where we can explore questions together is fun and invigorating.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
I shouldn’t be surprised at this after eight books, but I always end up amazed at how transformative the rewriting process is. The gap between the early versions of this book and the later versions was gigantic.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I hope they come away with a clear mental model of what flourishing is, along with some memorable examples of how to do it. In the larger sense, I hope that they have a new appreciation for the power of community. Which comes down to two fundamental actions: See the gifts; share the gifts.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Don’t write what you know. Write toward what you long to understand. To put it another way: Stop chasing answers and start living into questions.
