Let’s talk about builders for a second. Not the construction kind, the other kind: the people quietly assembling a business, a body of work, an identity, out of nothing but stubbornness and an idea. You know the type. You might even be the type.
Our next author for this spotlight is one of them. Shadrach Mensah Forson has spent years in digital spaces, building communities, testing ideas, turning things that only existed in his head into things that exist in the world. Somewhere in the middle of all that building, he started asking a harder question: what does the process actually do to the person doing the building?
That question became his book, The Builders’ Codex. Below, he talks about where the book came from, what almost kept him from publishing it, and the one thing he hopes every reader walks away asking themselves.
Meet the Author
Ask Shadrach who he is outside the writing, and the answer is not a job title. It’s a description of how his mind works.
I’m Shadrach Mensah Forson, a Ghanaian writer and thinker. I’m naturally curious and reflective, and I’ve always been interested in people, ideas, and the experiences that shape who we become.
Writing is a major part of my life, but it isn’t the only thing I do. When I’m not writing, I’m usually building something else. I’ve spent a lot of time working in digital spaces, building communities, exploring online business, and experimenting with ideas. I enjoy taking something that exists only as an idea and finding a way to turn it into something real.
Outside of work and writing, I’m someone who spends a lot of time observing and thinking. I enjoy meaningful conversations, learning new things, questioning ideas, and trying to understand the world beyond what is immediately visible.
I think all of these parts of me eventually find their way into my writing. The author is not really separate from the person. What I write is often a reflection of what I have experienced, observed, questioned, and come to believe.
So, behind the author is simply a young man trying to build a meaningful life, create things that matter, and understand life deeply enough to leave something worthwhile behind.
His love for writing did not begin with a story he wanted to tell. It began with questions he couldn’t shake.
I discovered my love for writing through an attempt to give language to things people lived with but rarely named.
I was trying to understand a certain kind of life, so I kept asking questions. I wanted to understand why people think the way they do, why we make certain choices, what shapes us, and why some experiences are so difficult to explain even when so many people live through them.
As I searched for answers, I found myself writing down the questions, the thoughts they produced, and eventually the answers I discovered along the way. Writing became a way of making sense of what I was observing and experiencing.
Over time, I realised that I wasn’t just writing because I enjoyed it. I was writing because there were things I felt needed to be said, and perhaps more importantly, things people needed language for.
And somewhere along the way, private note-taking turned into something with a bigger purpose.
I think I became an author when I realised that the questions I had been asking for years were beginning to produce answers.
For a long time, I was fascinated by trying to understand people, their choices, their struggles, and the different ways we experience life. I kept asking questions, searching for understanding, and sitting with ideas that I couldn’t always explain easily.
At some point, the answers I was finding began moving from being just knowledge or thoughts in my head to becoming words that other people could read. I realised that keeping those ideas to myself wasn’t enough. I wanted to give them form, examine them more deeply, and make them available to other people who might be asking some of the same questions.
That was what pushed me toward becoming an author. It wasn’t simply the desire to write books. It was the desire to take what I was discovering and turn it into something that could be shared, questioned, and hopefully useful to someone else.
The Question Behind The Builders’ Codex
Every builder gets asked about the result. The business that worked, the goal that got hit, the dream that finally became real. Shadrach got curious about everything happening underneath that.
The Builders’ Codex grew out of a question I had been trying to understand for a long time: Why do people who choose to build meaningful lives seem to experience life in a certain way?
I became increasingly interested in what happens beneath the visible part of building. We often see the result, the person who succeeds, the work that gets completed, the dream that eventually becomes real. But we don’t always see what the process does to the person building it.
I wanted to understand the sacrifices, the uncertainty, the discipline, the isolation, the changes in identity, and the internal battles that can come with choosing to build something meaningful.
The more I explored those questions, the more I realised that there were experiences many builders were living through but didn’t necessarily have language for. The Builders’ Codex became my attempt to give those experiences language and to explore what it really means to build, not just something in the world, but a life, an identity, and a future.
In that sense, the book wasn’t born from one particular moment. It grew out of years of questions, observations, and searching for understanding. Eventually, those questions became a book.
Inside the Writing Process
Six separate bodies of work do not just fuse into one book on their own. Getting there was the hardest part of the whole project.
The most challenging part was putting the six parts together. Initially, each part was a separate body of work on its own. But as the ideas developed, I began to see that they could come together as something much larger and more cohesive.
The challenge was figuring out how to bring them together in a way that felt intentional — not simply as six separate works placed beside each other, but as different parts of one larger masterwork.
That process required me to rethink the structure, the relationship between the parts, and how each one contributed to the larger idea of the book. Eventually, I found a way to bring them together, and that became The Builders’ Codex as it exists today.
On Publishing With Crows
We asked him straight up what the publishing process was actually like.
My experience working with Crows Publishing was very positive. One of the things I appreciated most was how supportive they were throughout the process. They also made the payment plan very easy and manageable for me, which made the publishing journey much smoother.
I was particularly impressed with the final physical book. When I first received a copy and saw The Builders’ Codex as an actual paperback, I was genuinely happy and impressed. The appearance, paper quality, design, and overall presentation were all very well done.
There is something special about seeing a work that existed in your head and on your pages become a physical book that you can actually hold. Crows Publishing gave me that experience, and I’m grateful for the role they played in bringing the book into its physical form.
What He’d Tell You If You’re Still Hesitating
If there’s a manuscript sitting on your laptop right now because the next step feels too big, this answer is for you.
My advice would be that if you have already taken the time to put your ideas into a manuscript and you genuinely want to see that work published, take the necessary steps to move it forward, even if the process seems difficult at first.
I understand the hesitation because I experienced it myself. One of the biggest concerns I had was money. I wasn’t sure how I was going to afford the publishing process, and that uncertainty could easily have made me postpone the whole thing.
What I eventually realised was that sometimes we become intimidated by a process before we even understand what is actually required of us. In my case, I didn’t know that Crows Publishing would make the process much easier and smoother for me, particularly through the payment plan.
So I would tell anyone with a manuscript sitting unfinished or unpublished: don’t let the fear of the next step stop you before you’ve even taken it. Find out what your options are, take the necessary steps, and keep moving.
You have already done something important by getting the ideas out of your head and onto paper. The next step is giving those ideas the opportunity to reach someone else.
His Question for the Reader
We asked him what he’d want to know from someone who just closed the book for the last time. His answer turned into three questions of his own.
If I could sit across from a reader who had just finished The Builders’ Codex, I think the one question I would want to ask them is:
Did the book give language to something you had been experiencing or carrying for years?
Did it help you understand the life you had been living but perhaps never had the words to explain?
Did it expose parts of your inner life that the world may never have seen because they had been covered by the work, the responsibilities, or the things you were busy building?
Those are the questions I would genuinely want answered. Because I didn’t write The Builders’ Codex simply to give people ideas. I wanted to give language to experiences that are often lived privately and understood only vaguely.
If a reader can finish the book and say, “I have felt this for years, but I never knew how to name it,” then I would feel that the book had done what I hoped it would do.
Conclusion
Most people who build something impressive get asked how they did it. Shadrach spent his book asking what it cost. That is a harder question, and a more honest one, and it’s probably why his answers here feel less like a highlight reel and more like a conversation with someone who has actually been in it.
If you have ever built something, quietly, without applause, while wondering whether anyone would understand what it took, The Builders’ Codex sounds like it was written with you in mind.
Want to contact the author for speaking engagements, book purchase or collaborations? You can reach him here:
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