The Operating Manual for Being Human
For publishers, agents and press
The manuscript is finished. It has been read by two independent editors, line edited, copyedited, and checked back against the original research. The full proposal is below and arrives the moment you ask for it.
Read a few pages of Unit 2, set the way the book will be set.
The book
| Title | The Operating Manual for Being Human |
|---|---|
| Category | Prescriptive nonfiction. Self-help and psychology. |
| Length | 67,000 words, roughly 69,000 with front and back matter |
| Shape | Twenty units, 81 first-person field notes, a set of practices closing every unit |
| Sources | 86 works in the bibliography, every claim checked back against the original |
| Drawings | 42 planned. Thirteen full page, eighteen inside the text, eleven small details. |
| Status | Manuscript complete. Read by two independent editors, line edited, copyedited. |
Where it sits
Nervous system literacy has moved out of clinical circles and into ordinary conversation. Readers have the vocabulary now and no map. The shelf answers one problem at a time: a trauma book, a sleep book, a dopamine book, an attachment book. People assemble an understanding piecemeal, if at all. This is the book that puts the pieces together.
| Book | What it shares | Where this one differs |
|---|---|---|
| The Body Keeps the Score Bessel van der Kolk | The ground everything else stands on | The practical, unit by unit manual for the readers he convinced but did not equip |
| How to Do the Work Nicole LePera | The same audience, at scale | A male operator's voice, a systems frame, and deeper sourcing |
| Burnout Emily and Amelia Nagoski | Finishing the stress cycle | Widens from one syndrome to the whole system |
| Dopamine Nation Anna Lembke | Chemistry without shame | Goes past addiction to everyday regulation |
| The Myth of Normal Gabor Maté | Culture as the thing doing the damage | Answers with a toolkit a person can use rather than a critique of society |
| Atomic Habits James Clear | The shape rather than the subject | One governing idea, short sections, immediately usable, and a book people give away |
None of them is illustrated. That is the opening, and it is why the drawings are a commercial decision rather than a decorative one. An illustrated book is one people buy a second copy of to give away.
Who wrote it
Mark Feinberg has spent twenty years building and selling companies across consumer goods, healthcare and technology. He has taken several of them to an exit, raised more than $25M, and advised hundreds of founders. He co-founded Tame The Noise, a coaching and advisory practice, and is entrepreneur in residence at a university startup incubator, where he works daily with people under exactly the pressures this book maps.
He started the book after his closest friend and business partner died suddenly in a plane crash. That turned the research from an interest into something he needed, and it anchors the units on grief and connection.
The credibility here is an operator’s, not a clinician’s. He is not a therapist and the book never presents him as one.
Platform: more than 30,000 LinkedIn connections and an active publishing habit, the Tame The Noise newsletter, an established coaching practice, and speaking through corporate, university and founder networks.
What comes with it
The printed book stands on its own. Around it sits a companion, designed and not yet built, working on one principle the category ignores: it is meant to be used less over time.
The sources open where you are reading
Every claim in the book traces back to a named researcher. In print that means a bibliography at the back that almost nobody opens. In the companion the researcher is a short note you can open at the moment you are curious, written in plain language and linked to the original.
The practices are spoken, not written
Each unit ends with a practice. Someone in the middle of a panic response cannot read instructions off a screen, because the part that reads is the part that has gone offline. So the practices are audio, in Mark's voice, and the screen goes dark while one is playing.
The community leads with what it refuses
No feeds, no follower counts, no open forums, no comment threads on trauma material. What there is instead is quiet signal: which passages readers stopped at. Four hundred people putting the book down at the same paragraph does the real work, which is knowing you are not the only one, without asking anyone to perform anything for strangers.
The sources, as a reader would meet them
Three of roughly forty, written the way they would appear.
Bessel van der Kolk
Psychiatrist, BostonFounded the Trauma Center in Brookline and spent four decades on how traumatic memory is stored in the body rather than as a story. His central claim is that talking alone often cannot reach what the body is holding.
Stephen Porges
NeuroscientistDeveloped polyvagal theory, which describes how the vagus nerve decides whether a situation reads as safe or dangerous, mostly below conscious awareness. It reframes calm as a physical state rather than a decision.
Peter Levine
Somatic ExperiencingBuilt his method on the observation that prey animals shake off survival energy and finish the threat cycle, while people override that and hold on to it.
A practice, as it would run
The screen goes dark, one line of instruction, and no timer counting down at anybody. Press it and see.
Putting your feet on the floor
Four minutes, spoken. The screen goes dark and stays dark until you end it. There is no timer counting down at you.
The recording is not made yet. What runs is the screen itself, without the voice.
Get the material
The one-page overview is being written. Email mark@tamethenoise.com and it comes straight back.
No form on that one. The form below exists so the proposal has a name attached to it, not so it can be approved. It arrives on screen and by email the moment you send it.
The full manuscript is available on request. Write to mark@tamethenoise.com.