By the time that email arrived, Tom Dayspring had already given me nearly four weeks of his time.

That was no small thing. Dr. Dayspring is one of the most influential lipidologists in the country, the person other lipid experts quote, with a schedule that doesn’t have room for an unknown first-time author and his manuscript. Somehow he made room anyway. He read my chapters. He sent back corrections. I revised. He sent back more corrections. I revised again, and in the process managed to add even more lipid science than before.

You can probably see where this is going.

Then came the email. It was short, and I could almost hear the sigh behind it:

“Steve, don’t try to be a lipidologist. Tell your story.”

It stung for about five minutes. Then it landed. I had spent two years learning everything I could about ApoB, Lp(a), and particle counts, and I was determined to prove it on every page. Somewhere along the way I’d stopped writing a story and started writing a textbook, and not a very good one. I’d been trying to out-lipid one of the best lipidologists in the world, in a book he was kindly helping me fix.

So I took his advice to heart. (Pun fully intended.)

I merged my two big lipid chapters into one. I took a scalpel to Chapter 15, “How Heart Attacks Happen,” and cut it back to what a reader actually needs to follow the story. Then I went looking for every other place where I’d wandered into a science lecture when I should have been telling readers what happened next. There were more of those than I’d like to admit.

The book is better because of that one sentence, and because a very busy man cared enough to write it.

Thank you, Tom.