Today, early in the morning, after a chaotic stretch of preparing breakfast and lunch boxes for the kids, I sat down for a while, opened my laptop, and found out that Cheers for a Good Life had become Amazon’s #1 New Release in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality, and shortly after, the #1 Best Seller in Interpersonal Relations.
Nahhhh. I don’t believe it! I’ve read those two sentences back to myself more times than I’d like to admit, mostly just to check they’re actually true.
Before I say anything else, I want to be honest about something: I didn’t write this book chasing a ranking. I wrote it in the quiet pockets of ordinary life, after lunch boxes were packed, before the house fully woke up, in between the endless rhythms of raising five children. Most days, I assumed I was writing for a handful of readers: a few friends, some strangers on the internet, and maybe my own children years from now, wondering what their mother was thinking during all those school runs and bedtime negotiations.
So when the badges appeared, my first reaction wasn’t triumph. It was disbelief. And then, a little unexpectedly, grief…not sad grief, the other kind. The kind that arrives when something you’ve built quietly, in private, over a long time, suddenly becomes visible to people who weren’t there for any of the ordinary parts.
Because here’s what a badge like that doesn’t show you. It doesn’t show the four birthday parties that got rained out. The messy drafts. The mornings when the coffee went cold because one of the kids needed something before I’d even finished a page. It doesn’t show the years I spent believing the good life was somewhere else, somewhere quieter than Jakarta, somewhere I hadn’t found yet instead of realizing I was already standing inside it.
Looking back, I think that’s the real argument of the book. A good life isn’t found. It’s built. Slowly, quietly, out of choices nobody’s filming. There’s something beautifully ironic about being reminded of that by an Amazon ranking.
I don’t say any of this to undercut the excitement. I am excited, genuinely, in a way that still catches me off guard a few times a day. I say it because I think the badges are worth less as a trophy and more as evidence. Not evidence that I did something extraordinary. Evidence that the small, unglamorous, extraordinarily boring thesis of this whole book, that ordinary days, repeated with intention, quietly build something real, turned out to be true even for the book itself.
Honestly, I am still amazed by how right that idea is.
To everyone who bought a copy, left a review, entered the giveaway, recommended it to a friend, or simply believed in this book before anyone else did — thank you. You didn’t just help a book climb a chart. You reminded me that the smallest, most ordinary choices often become the ones that change everything.
Maybe that’s the real lesson. A good life and every meaningful thing we build isn’t created in extraordinary moments. It’s built, one intentional choice at a time.
Love,
Kirana
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