People sometimes ask me why No, I Won't Buy You a Drink! is a memoir rather than simply a book of ideas.
The answer is trust.
The ideas at the end of the book didn't appear overnight. They were shaped by hearing loss, illness, travel, mistakes, friendships, awkward conversations, and years of paying attention to people.
I spent more than twenty years thinking about many of the ideas explored in the Ricardo Report.
But when I finally sat down to write the book, I realised something important.
Most people don't trust conclusions until they understand how you reached them.
So I wrote the story first.
In just four months, I wrote the memoir itself - the events, the travel, the hospitals, the rugby clubs, the detention centre, the border crossings, and the people I met along the way.
Then I stopped.
For six months, I barely looked at the manuscript.
When I returned, I realised the story explained what I had done, but not necessarily what I had learned.
That's when I began writing the Ricardo Report.
The report wasn't intended to tell readers what to think. It was my attempt to connect the dots between experiences that had taken place over decades.
Why had certain conversations stayed with me?
Why did hearing differently change the way I understood people?
Why did some strangers leave a greater impression than famous landmarks?
Why did authentic connection seem harder to find than it should be?
The memoir tells the story of the journey.
The Ricardo Report explores the lessons hidden inside it.
Looking back, I don't think I could have written the report first.
Without the story, the ideas would simply have been opinions.
The journey gave them context.
The mistakes gave them credibility.
The people gave them meaning.
In the end, No, I Won't Buy You a Drink! became two books in one.
The first is about where I went.
The second is about what I learned when I got there.