On February 5, 2016, I spoke to my doctor on the phone. What he said meant that writing this book became a priority. I had been prepared for bad news, and it was. The diagnosis was pancreatic cancer.
Our talk that Friday afternoon only confirmed what had gradually become obvious to me during the last few days of undergoing medical investigations. The prognosis was bad. I had approximately one year left to live.
I spent most of that evening in tears. I was lucky to have Agneta, my wife, who had been my lovely young girlfriend and then became my partner for life when we got married in 1972. Through the comfort she offered me and the support of our children and friends, I was able to adjust to this new reality. I would not die in the coming month. Terminal illness or not, life would go on. And I would be around to enjoy life during the spring and summer at least.
Cancer made the structure of my daily life unpredictable and my work schedule had to change. Just a few days after learning of my illness, I canceled all my lecture engagements and also my participation in film and TV projects. It was sad but I had no choice. Besides, I had specific plans, which helped me cope with these dramatic measures. One item on my to-do list moved to the top: complete the book that I had planned to write jointly with my son, Ola, and his wife, Anna. We had agreed on the title: Factfulness. Over the last eighteen years, the three of us had been working together in public education and founded a not-for-profit venture called Gapminder.
In the autumn of 2015, Anna and Ola had formulated the concept behind the book as well as its title. We had decided to set aside the following year for writing it, in parallel with our work for Gapminder. After my cancer diagnosis I was in even more of a hurry.
I quickly realized that there was enough material for two books. While Factfulness is about the reasons why people find development on a global scale so hard to grasp, this book is about me and how I reached that understanding.
In other words, this is a memoir. Unlike Factfulness, it is very short on numbers. Instead, I tell stories about meeting people who opened my eyes, and made me step back and think again.
Hans Rosling
Uppsala, January 2017