Why I Released 10 Books: Mike Baker HQ Human First Story

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Welcome to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m Mira. And yes, Mike Baker released 10 books at once. 10 books. Most people release one book and then need a nap, a spreadsheet, three pep talks, and several weeks of pretending they understand Amazon. Mike looked at that entire process and thought, what if I made this emotionally overwhelming for everyone, including myself? Which honestly tracks. Today’s episode is about why he did it, why 10 books, why now, and why they actually belong together.

Even if from the outside it looks like an ADHD bookshelf caught fire and somehow became a publishing strategy. But under all of that chaos, there is a real center. These books come from family grief, women’s health, faith change, ADHD, AI, leadership, love, and the belief that people still need honest words when life gets heavy. So here’s Mike with the story behind the release, the heart behind the work, and the bigger human first world he is building.

This is still here, still trying. Take it away, Mike. You’ve got some explaining to do, my friend. Well, hello everyone. Welcome back to Still Here, Still Trying. I’m your host, Mike Baker, and as always, I’m so glad that you’re here. Look, the question behind this episode is pretty simple. And I think many people have been wondering what the hell’s been going on in Mike Bakerland. Why did I release ten books at once? We’re gonna talk about that today.

And I understand why that might sound strange. Ten books is a lot. It looks like a lot from the outside. Looks like a lot from the inside. Some of the books are about women’s health and endometriosis. Some are about men, marriage, and what it means to show up better. Some deal with grief, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, faith transition, AI, leadership, and what I keep calling human-first work. That is a wide body of work, and I know that. I’ve had to sit with that myself.

From the outside, it might look like I went in every direction at once. Welcome to my brain. From the inside, it feels more connected, though. These books came out of the same life. They came from my family, my marriage, my kids, my mom, my faith change, my ADHD, my work, my music, and the people I keep meeting who are carrying things that they just do not always know how to explain. And that is the real reason that I wanted to record this episode.

I do not want the release to feel like a pile of book links. I want you to know the heart behind it. I want the person who finds one book to understand there’s a larger conversation around it. I want the person who listens to the music to know the songs come from the same place. I want the person who found Endodad76 to understand why that advocacy connects to the books about men, women, care, and listening. I want the person who found this podcast to have a better sense of what Mike Baker HQ is becoming.

The simplest way to say it is this: I make books, songs, podcast conversations, and art for people who are still here and still trying. And that is not a marketing line to me. That is the center of the work. It is the place that I just keep coming back to when I look at all of this and ask what holds it together. The books are different doors into the same house. You do not need to walk through every door, while you certainly can. You only need to find the one that fits what you are carrying right now.

And that matters because most of us do not live in one neat category. We do not get to pause grief because work is busy. We do not get to stop being parents because our faith is changing. We do not get to stop loving our spouse because we feel confused by what her body is going through. We do not get to stop worrying about the future because dinner still has to happen tonight. Life piles up and the books came out of that pile. I’ve spent a lot of time around people who are trying to keep going while carrying something heavy.

Sometimes that has been in healthcare, sometimes that has been in my own family, sometimes it’s been in conversations with friends, and sometimes it has been inside my own head at night when the house is quiet, and the thing I’m trying not to feel finally gets loud enough that I just have to pay attention. And that is where a lot of writing begins for me. Not with a perfect idea. More often it starts with a pressure that I cannot ignore. There’s a question, there’s a memory, there’s a frustration, there’s a person I love.

Or there’s a moment where I think somebody needs better words for this. And that happened with the book Believe Her the First Time. That book came from being a dad and a husband in a family shaped by endometriosis. My wife lives with it, my daughter lives with it. I have seen what happens when pain has to wait for belief. I’ve seen how much it costs women to explain, defend, document, and keep pushing for care while still trying to live their lives.

When you love someone in pain, you learn that concern is only the beginning. Listening matters, belief matters, how you respond matters, the way you talk in the car after the appointment matters. The way you show up when nobody knows what to do matters. I wrote that book for men who love someone with endometriosis or chronic pain, but I did not write it as a lecture from some guy above the room. I wrote it as an imperfect dad who has felt helpless.

I wrote it as a husband who is still learning. I wrote it as someone who believes that women deserve to be believed sooner than they often are. That same part of the work led to man versus menopause. Perimenopause and menopause are another place where men need better instincts. Too many husbands reach for jokes, silence, defensiveness, or fixing. Fixing on the fix it guy here. A woman’s body is changing, her sleep might be broken, her mood might feel unfamiliar, her body might not feel like home in the same way.

And the man beside her often has no idea how to stay steady without making the whole thing about himself. That book is practical, but the heart is simple. Love has to mature with a person that you love. A marriage cannot keep asking one person to carry every change while the other person waits for things to feel convenient again. That concern for women and for the way men need to grow runs through the book Get Out of the Way and the Better Man Field Guide.

I care about men becoming better, but I do not want that to become another self-improvement costume. Growth has to change the room. It has to change how people feel around us. It has to change the way that we listen when feedback stings. It has to show up at home, at work, in leadership, and in the private moments where nobody is giving us credit. Those books came from my belief that men have a lot of work to do, and that the women around us should not have to pay for our unwillingness to do it.

Another part of the release came from grief. That is where Still Here, Still Trying lives. It is the book most connected to this podcast, and probably the one that sounds most like the way I think when I’m telling the truth without trying to clean it up too much. I like that phrase because it gives people room to be honest. Some days you do not feel triumphant. Some days you do not feel healed. Some days the best you have is just showing up, doing the next thing, keeping your heart from closing, and making it to the end of the day with enough of yourself left to try again tomorrow.

Does that sound familiar? That matters to me. A lot of people are living that way. They are not making speeches about resilience. They are packing lunches, paying bills, answering emails, just lying awake, stressing about life, they’re driving home and trying not to let the hard things make them hard. The other book, Still My Mom, came from a more specific kind of grief. Alzheimer’s changed my family. It changed how I think about love and loss because that kind of goodbye does not happen all at once.

You lose pieces before you lose the person. You keep loving someone who is still here while missing parts of them that are harder and harder to reach. That is a strange and painful place to live. Families need words for it while they are still inside it. They need permission to be tired, they need permission to be angry and tender in the same day. They need help understanding that grief sometimes arrives before the funeral. And that does not make them unloving, it makes them human.

The faith book came from another tender place. Still good after all we could do is about my journey leaving Mormonism and trying to stay whole. And that one required care because faith is never only about doctrine. It is family, memory, belonging, identity, childhood, guilt, comfort, certainty, and love. When your faith changes, your whole internal map shifts. I did not write that book to attack the people that I love. I need you to hear that a thousand times.

It is not about attacking the people that I love. I wrote it because I know how complicated it is to leave something that shaped you. I know what it feels like to carry gratitude and pain in the same body. I know what it means to question old answers and still want to love your people well. For me, that book is about honesty without cruelty. It is about changing and still being good. It is about making room for the person who cannot believe the same way anymore but still wants to stay whole.

Then there is Beautifully Unfocused. That book came from the part of me that has spent a lifetime trying to understand my own brain. ADHD is not a cute personality quirk. It affects time, emotion, follow-through, relationships, work, money, self-trust, and the way that you talk to yourself after you fall short again and again. But shame has never helped me become more whole. It has only made the work heavier. That book is about learning to build with the brain that you have.

It’s about creativity and structure and leadership and the tools that help turn a flood of ideas into something real. And that is where AI enters the conversation for me. I use AI as a tool, you all know that. It helps me catch and organize what is moving too fast inside my mind. It does not replace the human part. Hear that plainly, it does not replace the human part. It does not know my family or my grief or the weight behind the stories. It helps me shape the work.

But the work still has to come from lived life. And that is an important distinction for me because I care a lot about the future. I care about technology and I care about what it might do to us if we stop paying attention. And that is where the book The Future Still Needs Us connects with human first. I believe we need better tools, but we also need better questions. We need to ask what kind of future we are building and whether people are still at the center of it.

The book Human First is the anchor for that wider question. It is about staying connected in a world that keeps rewarding division. It’s about leadership, disagreement, hope, and the work of seeing people as people, even when the world keeps pushing us toward categories. That does not mean avoiding hard conversations. I am not interested in fake peace. That’s so dumb. I am interested in the kind of honesty that still protects our humanity. I’m interested in leadership that remembers people are not obstacles to manage.

I am interested in communities where disagreement does not have to destroy every relationship. I am interested in a future where being human remains the point. And that is the real map behind these ten books. When I step back, I see five doors into the same work. Human First is the door for connection, leadership, AI, hope, and the future. Believe her is the door for endometriosis, menopause, women’s pain, women leading, and men becoming more responsible.

Still here is the door for grief, caregiving, music, the podcast, and the ordinary courage of continuing. Still good is the door for faith transition and staying whole. Beautifully unfocused is the door for ADHD, creativity, AI, and learning how to work with the mind that you actually have. That is enough structure to help people find their way in, but I hope it never becomes so polished that it loses the human part. The human part is the reason this exists.

I am not asking every person to read every book, while that would be super cool. It’s not reality. Most people will just start with one because one part of life is asking for attention. Maybe someone in your family lives with endometriosis. Maybe menopause is changing the weather inside your marriage, and you need a better way to understand it. Maybe Alzheimer’s has entered your family, and maybe your faith is changing. Maybe your brain has always felt too full and too fast.

Maybe you’re worried about AI and the future. Maybe you are tired and you just need something honest that does not pretend that everything is fine. Start there. That is how I hope people enter this work. Not by trying to understand the whole Mike Baker HQ universe in one sitting. Start with the book that sounds like your life. Start with a conversation that helps you love someone better. Start with the song that catches the feeling that you could not explain yet.

This is where the podcast matters too. A book is finished once it’s published, but a podcast keeps breathing. It lets me come back to these themes with more honesty, more context, and more room for what is happening right now. And it lets the work stay alive. The music matters for the same reasons. Sometimes a song gets to the feeling before I can write the chapter. Sometimes the emotional truth shows up in a melody first. And that is why the songs, books, podcasts, and art all belong together.

They are different forms, but they come from the same place. I want this release to help build active readers and active listeners. That is the part that I am working on now. I want people to buy the books, yes. But I also want them to come back. I want someone to read Believe Her the first time and then send it to a dad who needs it. I want someone to hear a podcast episode and subscribe because it gave them language for something real. I want someone to save a song on Spotify or Apple Music or anywhere you listen to songs because it belongs in a quiet drive.

I want someone to visit MikeBakerHQ.com and begin to see how the pieces connect. The website is still growing, but the framework is there. It is becoming the home base for the books, music, podcast, art advocacy, and the human first work. The most direct place to buy the books right now is my Amazon author page. The broader home for the work is MikeBakerHQ. So here is the ask that I want to make before I send you into the song. Start at the Amazon author page.

Pick the book that fits what you are carrying right now. Read it, share it with someone who needs it. Leave an honest review if it helps you, because reviews matter while the books are new and trying to find their readers. And then stay connected. Follow the podcast, follow the music, subscribe on YouTube, save a song on Spotify or wherever you listen to music. Visit MikeBakerHQ.com as the broader world keeps taking shape. Sign up for the email list.

This work was built for real people carrying real life, and I hope it finds you where you are. And I hope you stay for the larger conversation. Well, thank you for listening today. This one mattered to me, and I’m grateful that you gave me the time. If one of the books sounds like it belongs in your life, just started that Amazon author page or go to mikebakerhq.com. There’s a summary of all the books there. But read the one that meets you where you’re at, share it with someone who needs it, and if you love it, please leave a review.

Remember, you can find all the work at the website, mikebakerhq.com. This is still here, still trying. I’m Mike Baker. I’ll see you next week. Okay, well, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Before I send you out, like I do every week, I want to play one of my songs. Today we’re gonna bring back a song nobody hears. This one feels right today because I have just kind of been off in a way that I’ve I have had a hard time explaining. The books are live, the work is out there, the links exist, the posts are up, the Amazon pages are real.

And now there is this strange quiet after the release where I’m sitting with all of it, waiting to see if it connects. And that part is harder than I expected. When you are making something, you still have work to do. You can fix a sentence and rewrite a chapter, you can move a lyric around and record it another time, you can make another graphic and you can push the thing a little closer to what you meant. But once it is out, the work leave your leaves your hands.

And then you’re just left with a different kind of vulnerability. You start wondering if people will understand what you were trying to do. You wonder if they will see the heart in it, or only see a guy who released a bunch of books at once and think, what the hell is he doing? And it’s okay to think that. I know how it can look. I know 10 books is a lot. I know the whole Mike Baker HQ world can look wide from the outside. You’ve got all of these things, books and songs and conversations, right?

I mean, hitting lots of different topics from endometriosis to ADHD and leadership. But that’s all human-first work. And that is a lot to ask people to understand. But I also know what went into it. I cried writing Sammy’s story in Believe for the First Time. I mean cried. That was not my content. That was my daughter, my wife, our family, the helplessness of loving someone through pain that you cannot take away. I bawled writing about my mom, thinking about Alzheimer’s, thinking about goodbye, thinking about the pieces of her I still carry, and the pieces we had to lose before we were ready.

That was not a product. That was grief. That was just me sitting with a keyboard and trying to heal from all of that. That is why I have said that these books have part of my soul in them, and I mean that. They are not perfect. I know that. I can already see places where I will keep learning, keep refining, keep growing. But they are deep, they are honest, they came from real life, and they came from the parts of me that do not fit neatly into a brand or a clean little caption.

And maybe that is why this song fits. There’s a line in it that says, I’m not a brand, I’m not your feed, I’m just a man who fucking bleeds. That is the vulnerable part of this week. I am trying to build something that can reach people, yes. I care about Amazon and Spotify and YouTube, the podcast, the website, all of it. I want the work to find readers and listeners, but underneath all of that is a person who put real blood into the work and is hoping it does not disappear into the noise.

That is human first to me. It means remembering there is a person behind the work, a person behind the listen, a person behind the review, a person behind the book that gets sent to a dad, a husband, a daughter, a friend, or someone grieving quietly. It means the numbers matter because people are on the other side of them. So today I’m sending you out with this song because it says I do not know exactly how to get it where I needed it to go. I’m learning that hard in real time.

I know the work is good. I know it is I know it came from you. If you have ever given your best and wondered if anyone saw it, this song is for you. If you have ever carried something quietly and kept showing up anyway, this song is for you. If you have ever put your heart into something and then sat in the quiet afterward waiting to know if it reached anyone, I think you will understand this one. So here’s a song nobody hears. I hope you enjoy it.

Have a great week. Holdin’ on, thinking of them and holdin’ tight to all the shit I can’t make right. The ride home’s dark, my songs play low. I’m right there, but they don’t know it. And asking I sure as fuck won’t beg. So I just drive and hold my breath. Anybody feel like they’re fading slow, like you’re here. But nobody knows you show up real, then disappear. Still singing a song. Nobody here. My boys are grown, they’re doing fine and God that fills me with pride.

But this house don’t echo like it did before. Fuck, I miss their voices in these walls. I smile and I say I’m okay, but some nights I just fucking drift away. Anybody feel like they’re all down. Like you scream, but you scared it down to give your best. Year after year, still stands off nobody here. I’m not a breath, I’m not your feet, I’m just a man who fucking lead I leave my truth and every core the things I’ll never be thankful. The weight I carry, quite still.

Hoping someday someone will anybody feel like they’re close to God, like the fires lit, but it won’t burn long. You give your all through sweat and tears, still singin’ a song. Nobody hears. Maybe one day they’ll press rewind and feel the life I left behind. It ain’t career, it’s me and a song. Nobody hears it.