How to Accomplish the Seemingly Impossible

Or how I wrote a computer-interactive, make-your-own adventure children’s book in just in 30 days (with no previous experience)

Mitch Ditkoff
9 min readFeb 7, 2023
Excerpted from Full Moon at Sunrise

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.” — St. Francis of Assisi

The year was 1981. Ronald Reagan was the U.S. President. Lady Diana had just married Prince Charles. And I had just landed a job, in Los Angeles, with the highly respected consulting firm, The Inner Game Corporation, who was on the brink of landing a big contract with Atari, the $900 million dollar maker of Pacman.

And so, as negotiations heated up, Inner Game’s chief negotiator, the very savvy Prentiss Uchida, decided to sweeten the deal by promising Atari that we would deliver, in time for their upcoming computer summer camp, an interactive, make-you-own-adventure children’s book that would teach young teens how to learn faster, the Inner Game way, with much less stress than ever before.

I was thrilled to hear that Prentiss had closed the deal. That is, until I found out who was going to be writing the book: me — especially since the deadline was only 30 days away and I had…

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Mitch Ditkoff

Co-Founder of Idea Champions and Face the Music. Author of Storytelling for the Revolution, Storytelling at Work, Unspoken Word and Free the Genie. Human being