Michelle 'Mace' Curran

They're learned from immediately.

It was quite the process.

I worked on it for three years, and it's been out for about a month and a half as of when we're recording this.

So still very fresh.

It was one of those things where I was out there telling my story early on doing speeches, and I was constantly getting asked if I had a book.

I was like, I've been out of the Air Force for two minutes.

Hold on.

It takes a second to write a whole book.

And also, I didn't know if I had...

The wisdom and enough to put into 70,000 words.

That's very intimidating.

And I didn't want to just check the box to have a book.

I wanted to make sure it was something I was proud of, that I believed in, and that could really impact people.

So I sat down with a professional writer, almost like I would say my talks with her were like therapy because it would be like, well, I have this story.

And then we would dig into it and having that person to bounce ideas off of and find through lines and themes and all this like jumble of 13 years of crazy experiences I had was so helpful.

And it became clear very quickly that fear was really the common thread.

Because I tell some crazy stories of near misses in the airplane in the book where fear of physical harm, fear of death is on the table.

And I think that's what people expect coming from a fighter pilot.

But there's only a handful of those in there because that was not the fear that I dealt with most often.

It was that fear of failure, of not being good enough, of letting people down.