Rather than serialize Conquistador, like Charles Dickens, I’m going to post the Amazon order form so you can buy it. It costs $9.99 for paperback, $15.99 for hardcover, Kindle is $4.99.

Even though authors are supposed to refrain from reviewing their own work, I’m going to offer a few responses from readers so far, as a sort of review, so you’ll know what your getting for your hard-earned $15.99, $9.99, or $4.99.

First off, it’s only nominally about polo. It’s really about evaluating your own work product and not being overly optimistic or pessimistic about it. In other words, to be objective. Sal, the book’s hero, realizes that the years he’s put in, the goals he had, the living he’s earned, which formed the basis for his mis-evaluation, count less in his attempt to be objective than comparing how well he’s done with how well he hoped to do.

Furthermore, when he has to downgrade his assessment, he begins to wonder how he might have done better. This is the core of the book, which you will read nowhere else. While polo, or anything else that receives large amounts of attention, is hard enough to play well, there’s a much greater difficulty, in arranging circumstances so that you can do enough of it to start making progress. To do this, you’ll have to be resourceful, determined, and tough as hell. The world doesn’t intend for you to be good at polo, or anything else. If it did, you’d already be a ten-goaler. You’ll have to wrest your success away from its indifference, if not downright hostility. Sal “wins,” if you will, by coming up with a radically different practice regimen, one that really works, and his long-sought, elusive success comes in the certainty that he knows what he’s doing.

One last point: if you do get circumstances to align so that you can do a lot of it, play polo, sail, speak Spanish, or whatever it is, and you start improving, there will come a moment when you get it. It’s like going through a door, you’re inside now. Don’t overlook this moment. It’s what you’ve been working toward and hoping for. Enjoy it.

Here’s the book: