Jeff Goins's Blog, page 28

147: Spike Your Creativity by Sleeping Smarter: Interview with Shawn Stevenson

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is a badge of honor worn proudly by those who embrace a “hustle” mentality. But the irony is this way of life will actually kill you. And when you’re dead, you’re not sleeping. You’re not creating, either.

For whatever reason, we creatives have a tendency to sacrifice sleep at the altar of our work before anything else. God forbid we binge-watch Netflix less or stop bringing our smartphones to bed. The trouble is we’re doing more harm than we realize to both our health and creativity by burning the candle at both ends.

This week’s guest on The Portfolio Life is a bestselling author, sleep expert, popular podcast host, and fitness authority, Shawn Stevenson. Shawn and I recently spent a week together at a speaking gig in the Philippines, and I can tell you he is the real deal.

Listen in as we talk about the drastic effect of one day of sleep deprivation, common sleep myths, and how you can hack your health to perform at a higher creative level.

Listen to the podcast

To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).

Show highlights

In this episode, Shawn and I discuss:

Why the quality of your sleep matters more than the quantity
The optimal time to stop consuming caffeine
Combatting the norm of perpetual exhaustion as a badge of honor
The truth behind your genes
How Shawn went from NFL level speed to the spine of an 80-year-old in high school
Why deciding to get well is a crucial step in your health
3 pillars of changing your life from the inside out
How the time of day (or night) impacts your dietary choices
Creating a culture in your home of honoring sleep
Why you can’t pay back a sleep debt
The “Money Time” sleep window

Quotes and takeaways

“If sleep is for suckers, I’m a lollipop.” –Shawn Stevenson
The assimilation of nutrients is magnified by movement.
“There’s a difference between doing work and actually being effective.” –Shawn Stevenson
We are 60% more reactive to negative stimuli when sleep deprived.
A great night of sleep starts the moment you wake up in the morning.
Create a bedtime ritual for yourself, not just your kids.
Fix your gut to fix your sleep.

“Sleep is not an obstacle, it’s a catalyst. Sleep is a force multiplier.Tweet thisTweet
Resources

Sleep Smarter by Shawn Stevenson
Flux app
Shawn’s blog & podcast

Do you get enough sleep? How would you rate your sleep quality? What do you want to change about your sleep? Share in the comments

Click here to download a free PDF of the complete interview transcript.

Is Your Idea Any Good? Here’s How to Tell…

How do you know if something is a good idea? Do you trust your gut? Ask other people? When is the right time to go all in on a creative endeavor?

For the longest time, I misunderstood how the creative process worked. I thought brilliance was a crapshoot: you either got lucky or you didn’t. To me, it was a product of throwing as many things as possible against the wall and seeing what stuck. I assumed that to come up with a brilliant idea the best thing to do was keep “throwing” things.

Certainly, there is some truth to this. Edison apparently came up with a thousand ways to make a lightbulb before he found one that worked. Master artists average a minimum of ten years of practicing their craft before they produce brilliant work. We know genius takes time.

But is that all there is to it?

Hustle smarter

The truth is ideation is not just about attempts. It’s also about process. I see this often with who just keep trying to “make it.” They’re waiting for a break, pounding the pavement, hoping the hustle will pay off. But they’re kidding themselves.

Hear me loud and clear on this: There is smart hustle. And there is stupid hustle.

Stupid hustle says “keep trying, and some day all your hard work will pay off.” It tells you that it’s their fault for not understanding how good you are and to just keep going for it. This is the American Dream, the story we think is the success of every great artist, entrepreneur, and athlete. But that’s not the whole story.

“There is smart hustle. And there is stupid hustle.Tweet thisTweet

Smart hustle isn’t just about trying stuff until something works. It’s about intelligent trial and error. It’s about taking feedback and using it to make your work better. To keep doing the things that work and quit the things that won’t.

As singer Colbie Caillat remarked when she was rejected by American Idol early on in her career: “I was shy,” she recalled. “I was nervous. I didn’t look the greatest. I wasn’t ready for it yet. I was glad, when I auditioned, that they said no.”

In other words, they were right to reject her. She wasn’t that good yet. But that rejection fueled the young singer’s drive. It made her want to be better. Why? Afterwards, she didn’t just keep trying things the way she had been doing them before. She took the feedback, applied it to her craft, and found a way to succeed.

And if that’s what it takes for a platinum artist to succeed in the very competitive music industry, it’s probably won’t take anything less than that for you or me.

Quitters are winners

Seth Godin talks about this in his short but powerful book, The Dip, in which he debunks the common myth that “quitters never win.” That’s not true, he says:

Winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt.

Quitters win all the time:

T.S. Eliot quit his job as a bank teller to write poems.
Jimmy Page quit a promising career as a studio musician to start Led Zeppelin.
Mark Zuckerberg quit college to launch Facebook.

Some of the world’s highest performers quit their way to success by discarding the things they weren’t good at or didn’t love so they could do something better. Everyone has something that they can be best in the world at. You just have to quit your way to it.

So what does this look? How do you decide when something is a good idea and when something is a bad idea? It’s a process.

Experiment-Chase-Program

Years ago, when I was a marketing director at a nonprofit, my friend Mark Almand gave me some great advice. “At our company,” he said, “we never go all in on any single idea. We test it.”

“How?” I asked.

“Simple,” he said. “We call it experiment-chase-program. Before we spend a bunch of money on a new strategy or create a whole new division, we run an experiment. We set a goal and use limited resources to try to reach that goal.

“If it works, we move on to the ‘chase’ stage, which requires us to double down, spending some more money and time chasing this strategy. If we continue to see results, say over the course of a month or quarter maybe, we’ll move to ‘program.’ This is where turn this idea or strategy into some ongoing effort. We make it part of the business plan or marketing strategy. It gets a regular line item in the budget.

“Of course, we continue to measure how well it’s doing, but we realize at this stage there will be ups and downs, and so we evaluate on a less frequent basis. But if at any point, we think the program is no longer working, we go back to experimenting.”

Experiment. Chase. Program. A simple concept that applies to just about everything:

You would never propose marriage on the first date. You’d go out, and if it worked, you’d continue doing that for a while — for months, if not years. And then if you were still in love and wanted to spend the rest of your lives together, you take the next step and get married.
You wouldn’t quit your job after your first sale. You’d slowly begin replacing your income and when it made sense, you’d make the switch.
You wouldn’t expect to get a book deal the same day you started your blog. You’d take your time building an audience, and when you were ready, you’d approach a publisher.

As you may know by now, I’m not a big fan of the “take the leap” strategy that some  people champion when it comes to pursuing a pasion. Rather, I endorse a “build a bridge” approach. Take your time chasing a dream, and it will likely last a lot longer.

“Take your time chasing a dream, and it will likely last longer.Tweet thisTweet

And so it is with your big idea, the book you want to write, that business you want to start. Don’t go all in until you do the following first.

1. Experiment: Test the idea

Before you write the book or launch the business, start small. Begin with a habit. Try doing it for half an hour to an hour every day for 30 days and see if you still like it. See if you even have the discipline to do it every day.

Author Shauna Niequist once told me early on in my writing journey, “Most people think they have a whole book on their computer, when in fact all they have is a chapter.” She was talking about herself, but she was, of course, talking about me, too.

If you’ve caught the writing bug, as was the case with me, consider starting a blog and writing on it once a week before you run off and try to write a book. If you can’t do it on a blog, you won’t be able to do it in a book.

“If you can’t show up to write regularly on a blog, you won’t show up to write your book.Tweet thisTweet

Run an experiment. Set a timeline for it, have an intended outcome, and create some consequences for what happens if you hit your goal or don’t. If you don’t, you need to keep experimenting. If you do, move on to the next step.

2. Chase: Explore the idea and see if it scales

Once you’ve seen some success and realize that this thing you want to do is more than just a good idea — it’s something you have to do — then it’s time to chase it down.

If you were writing for 30 minutes a day, now it’s time to start writing for two hours. It’s time to start marketing and maybe even selling something. If you did it for 30 days, now up the ante to 90 days.

Make everything harder and riskier to see if you continue to enjoy the process. See if the idea holds up to scrutiny to 100 strangers. Get people to read your work, critique your business idea, give you feedback on your form and technique.

This is how we get better. We invest more of ourselves into the process and figure out what we’re still doing wrong.

“Make everything harder and riskier to see if you still enjoy the process.Tweet thisTweet

I applied this principle after seeing results of my efforts with this blog — people were subscribing — and so I decided to try to sell something after a year of maintaining that habit. It was still an experiment but one that was a little less of a pipe dream than “I want to write a book!”

I conducted a survey, asking my audience what content they wanted, and they said “blogging help” so I wrote a short, 10,000-word eBook in a couple of weeks and sold it. I said, “If it sells 100 copies, then I’ll keep doing this. If not, I’ll try to find another way to support my family.”

500 people bought that eBook in two days. So I kept going. I kept chasing. And a year later, that Big Moment finally came… two years into the process.

3. Program: Commit to the long game

At this point, you can go all in.

You can quit your job or write that book or whatever. It doesn’t have to take two years, but it won’t happen all once, either. I quit my job after I’d run a number of experiments and chased the things that worked (books, courses, blogging) while quitting the things that didn’t (consulting, coaching, software). I found a way that worked for me and built a system around that.

I created a program.

This isn’t just about writing or quitting your job or any of that. It’s about how you take a big idea and turn it into something that just might work. It’s also a way to try just about anything without shooting down “bad ideas” or throwing away money and time at things that you think are good ideas that just don’t seem to pay off. The truth is, nobody knows if an idea is good or bad until it works or fails.

“Nobody knows if an idea is good until it works.Tweet thisTweet

The other day one of our team members said, “Hey! How about we do THIS?”

I said, “Good idea. Let’s try it. But first, let’s experiment.”

Do you jump first and ask questions later? What’s your process for vetting new ideas? Share in the comments.

146: The Strategic Advantage of Creative Thinking: Interview with Rob Levit

For too long, there has been a gap between working in a cubicle and spending time on your passion. That needs to stop. Creative thinking and critical thinking are not at odds. In fact, they can work together quite well.

It’s difficult for some of us to face another day at the office, plugging away at a job we’re disconnected from, while our book, our blog, or camera is collecting dust at home, waiting to be picked up again. But can’t we be creative at work?

Do our day jobs really have to drain us, or could they possibly fill us up?

This week’s guest on The Portfolio Life believes in the competitive advantage of creative thinking. During our conversation, he admitted artists know more about getting things done than most people. Listen in as creativity expert Rob Levit and I talk about why people are afraid to take risks, how to manage your time, and why talent is a gift.

I can’t change what people do in their jobs, but I can help them appreciate how to do it in a way that creates more meaning for them.

—Rob Levit

Listen to the podcast

To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).

Show highlights

In this episode, Rob and I discuss:

Why people are afraid to take basic creative risks
How to develop a “pro-noia” mentality to see possibilities
Undoing the adage of “those you can’t do, teach”
Wrestling with feeling self-centered as a professional musician
The value of real-time feedback and the bias for growth/development
What stories we tell ourselves that keep us from being creative
The misconception of being talented and entitled to making a good living
Where creatives commonly get stuck
Overcoming the conflict between art and commerce
The ultimate gift we take for granted
A major caveat that is never included in self-help books

Takeaways

Everyone is interested in learning how to learn.
Creativity thrives in the context of relationship and community.
Failure of imagination occurs when we refuse to make time to reflect.
Don’t create false barriers. Explore other avenues to flex your creative muscle.
If your talent is a gift, it is your obligation to develop it to the highest level regardless of the reward.
If you create things people don’t want you lose the right to complain when they don’t “get” it.
Get comfortable with making mistakes.
Life is not a microwave oven, it’s a crockpot. You have to slow cook things.
Every moment that we live is potentially a wonderful, miraculous, great moment.
No matter who you are or what you’re doing, people feel a deeper connection to life when they are creating.
If you’re afraid to fail, you don’t belong in the arena.
You’ll never know if the spaghetti will stick on the wall unless you throw it.

“Underneath all improvisation is mastery.Tweet thisTweet
Resources

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde
ThinkerToys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques by Michael Michalko
Kind of Blue by Miles Davis
The Creativity Expert (Rob’s blog)
Podcast sponsor: Tribe Theme by Notable Themes

How can you use your creative mind as a competitive advantage? What excuses stop you from creating? Share in the comments

Click here to download a free PDF of the complete interview transcript.

How to Be More Creative (without Having to Be Original)

How do we become creative? Do we motivate ourselves to create works of genius? Do we study our way into greatness? No. We do none of that. We steal.

As Austin Kleon says,

“A good artist understands that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”

When I started writing, I wanted to find my voice. But whenever I tried to write in an original style, it wasn’t any good. For a long time, I thought this was what real writers did. They must have been born with some innate talent, some style just waiting to get onto the page.

Turns out, that’s simply not true. We find our voices by writing in other people’s voices. We hone our craft by stealing from the work of others.

“We find our voices by writing in other people’s voices.Tweet thisTweet
Saving history by stealing it

There is an old Irish myth that illustrates this. In the story, a young monk named Columcille steals a manuscript from an abbot in hopes of copying it. When the young monk’s theft is discovered, the abbot demands it.

Columcille refuses, and the case is brought before the high king who demands the monk return both documents. The young monk impulsively tells his father, who is also a king, and what ensues is a battle leaving the abbot dead and the monk plagued with guilt. To atone for his sins, Columcille is banished from Ireland and lives out his exile on a small island named Iona, just off the coast of Scotland.

At Iona, Columcille spends the remainder of his days paying penance through acts of service to the church and western culture. He and his band of monks spend their time copying ancient documents and preserving them for posterity. Like their founder, they copied the work they loved, preserving it for future generations. They were stealing, too.

Iona soon became a refuge of western culture, one of a few sites in the world where art and culture were preserved while barbarian hordes tried to destroy it. The documents those monks copied would prevail through the Dark Ages, saved from destruction and preserved for the future.

A band of Irish monks rescued western culture from near annihilation. How? Not by doing original work. They copied manuscripts of ancient documents, which they inherited from the Romans. And the Romans, of course, stole their culture from the Greeks. While the Greeks borrowed from each other.

And on and on it goes.

Creativity is stealing

Creativity is not about coming up with something new and original. It is about borrowing ideas from a variety of sources and re-assembling them into a better or at least different package.

This process is hard work. It involves studying what others have already done and adapting it to your own purposes.

If you do this well, you won’t merely crib other people’s work and pass it off as your own. You will build upon it, and make it better. But be careful here, as far too many creatives have gotten lost in the pursuit of originality and damaged their work as a result.

“Before you become an artist, you must first become a thief.Tweet thisTweet

Creativity is stealing. When you “steal like an artist,” you follow in the footsteps of history’s greatest creative minds. But before you become an artist, you must first become a thief.

Here’s how it works.

1. Study

First, you must study the work of those who came before you. You must become a student of other people’s work.

When the famous choreographer Twyla Tharp started dancing in New York, the dancer dedicated herself to studying every great dancer who was working at the time. She patterned herself after these professionals, learning what she could from them, copying their every move. “I would literally stand behind them in class,” she said, “in copying mode, and fall right into their footsteps. Their technique, style, and timing imprinted themselves on my muscles.”

Tharp understood that honing her dance skills would begin not with coming up with an original technique, but with copying what others were doing. She imitated the greats and after years of study created a style that was all her own — at least, that’s what people thought.

“That’s the power of muscle memory,” she wrote in her book, The Creative Habit. “It gives you a path toward genuine creation through simple re-creation.”

“Establish your authority by mastering the techniques of established authorities.Tweet thisTweet

The way you establish your authority in a certain field is by mastering the techniques of those who are already authorities. And what eventually emerges over time is your technique.

2. Steal

Then you must steal the work. You must copy your way into creativity, deriving your inspiration from others and calling it your own.

For generations, writers have done this by copying the words of their favorite authors verbatim.

Hunter S. Thompson did this with the work of his idol, F. Scott Fitzgerald, when he wrote out the pages of The Great Gatsby to get a feel for “what it was like to write that way.” He also admitted in an interview to stealing more words and phrases from the Bible than from any other source, because he liked the way they sounded.

Great artists do not try to be original. They copy the work of both masters and peers — word by word, stroke by stroke, they mimic what they admire until those techniques become habitual. “Skill gets imprinted through action,” Tharp once said. We create by copying, and as we do, the skill becomes embedded into our memory.

“Great artists do not try to be original. They copy the work of both masters and peers.Tweet thisTweet

So, how do you do this, ethically?

Well, first you give credit where credit is due. You list your sources. You acknowledge your influences. And you steal from not just one place but many places. And you recombine all that work into a hodgepodge — a mosaic — that other people will dare to call original.

The work of an artist, then, is not so much about creating things as it is about curating them.

3. Share

Finally, you share the work with others. This is the point at which the work you steal becomes generous. If you follow the example of greats artists like Michelangelo and borrow from the past, adding your own artistic flare, you are doing more than borrowing — you are creating.

This is what Jim Henson did when he borrowed his unique style of puppetry from the likes of Burr Tillstrom, creator of Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and other influences. Tillstrom won the admiration of both children and adults with his performances, which involved him standing behind a stage with a curtain to conceal his movements while the puppets acted out the skit. It was a simple arrangement; one Jim would borrow from and adapt to suit his needs. Later in life, he would credit Tillstrom for doing more to bring puppetry to TV than he ever did.

When you steal like this, you are passing something on for posterity; you are paying the work forward. Using the material around and available to you, you end up doing something new. And when people start calling you genius, the best thing you can do is honestly point to your influences.

So, how do you become creative? You start by stealing. It’s just that simple. But simple doesn’t always mean easy.

Who are your creative influences? How can you steal from them to create something original? Share in the comments.

145: How to Draw Creative Inspiration from Your Day Job: Interview with John Weiss

It’s hard for some people to believe, but you don’t have to choose between your day job and your dream job. The two can complement each other in ways you never imagined possible.

When you think of a cartoonist, you probably don’t think of somebody with a Masters degree in criminal justice administration. A creative life of making satirical art doesn’t jive with running a police department. On the surface, these two occupations seem at odds with one another.

But that’s just what this week’s guest on The Portfolio Life did for over 25 years. John Weiss is a former police chief who pursued his passions of cartooning, painting and writing while working in law enforcement.

Now that John is retired, he is a full-time artist painting landscapes, drawing cartoons, and writing a weekly art column.

Listen in as John and I talk about how he navigated the tension between creative expression and police work by letting his day job and dream job inspire each other.

Listen to the podcast

To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).

Show highlights

In this episode, John and I discuss:

Drawing political cartoons in college
If he regrets getting a “real” job
How a day job compliments artistry
Confronting stereotypes of artists and law enforcement officers
How a creative background made him better at police work
A funny story about getting pulled over
Pivoting to different art forms to accommodate career growth
When he stopped apologizing for being an artist

Takeaways

A day job compliments your artistry.
Creativity and artfulness are necessary skills.
Life gives you inspiration for writing.
Going viral isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“Stand out by creating great work.Tweet thisTweet
Resources

7 Ways Police Work Made Me a Better Writer – John’s guest post on Goins, Writer.
John Weiss’s blog
Want Your Children to Survive The Future? Send Them to Art School
Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World by Michael Hyatt
Memories are Roses in Our Winter
Podcast sponsor: Tribe Theme by Notable Themes

Click here to download a free PDF of the complete interview transcript.

How can your creative passion inform your day job? Have you ever considered your day job as a source of inspiration? Share in the comments.

Yes, You Can Publish a Book (Here’s How)

Most people dream of publishing a book without realizing the work that goes into such a project. I still remember the thrill of finishing my first book and the surreal sense of accomplishment. Honestly, I never thought I’d ever publish a book. But thanks to a few simple choices, I was able to do it much sooner than I ever dreamed. Here’s how you can do the same.

Let’s start with sharing what it took to publish that first book. The lessons I learned along the way can help you realize your own dream of writing and publishing a book sooner than you think.

So, how does this work?

Well, there were three steps that made it possible to get a book contract in less than eight months — all without having to write a single book proposal or query letter. If you want to write books for a living, this is where you start.

Below are three simple steps you need to publish a book.

Step 1: Build a platform

Publishers and literary agents all have one important question when you submit a book idea or proposal to them:

Do you have a platform?

What they mean by this is, “Do you have influence?”

Can you speak, and people will listen? Do you have authority on a particular subject and a way to communicate it? Have people given you permission to share information with them?

Types of platforms

There are various types of platforms:

Radio show
Podcast
Television program
YouTube channel
Newspaper or magazine column
Blog

The trick is to pick one that matches your voice and start building it. It will take time, patience, and permission. A great primer on this subject would be Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing.

One crucial tool for building your platform is respect. You will need to respect people. Never spam them, always add value. And you will win.

“Respect is a crucial tool for building your platform.Tweet thisTweet

Right now, a popular platform type for emerging authors is a blog. It’s what I used, and it worked.

You can do the same.

Step 2: Create a personal brand

Authors have brands. This goes beyond your personality and likes/dislikes. It has to do with your writing voice and what’s relevant to an audience.

Not every aspect of your personality will be represented in your brand.

And that’s okay.

You need to pick the right tone for the group you’re trying to reach and focus on sharing what matters most to others.

What a brand is not

A brand is NOT the subject of your blog. It’s how you color your subject; it’s a particular flair that makes you, the writer, unique. You can write about cooking or entrepreneurship and still have the same voice.

“A brand is NOT the subject of your blog. It’s how you color your subject.Tweet thisTweet

The good news is that with a blog, you can try out different ways to represent yourself until you find what works for you and your readers.

Everything you do needs to connect with this representation of yourself. Your headshots, blog header, etc. all need to support this brand, as well.

Step 3: Find your tribe

Publishing isn’t just about writing. It’s about relationships, too. You have to know the right people to get noticed. And the best way to do that is to find your tribe of followers and fans who will support you.

A tribe is different from a platform. Whereas a platform is the asset you use to reach an audience, your tribe consists of the people that help you build it.

Who makes up your tribe

There are three types of people who make up a tribe:

Fans
Friends
Advocates

Fans buy your work. The best way to earn them is to be generous. (Try giving away a free eBook — here’s mine.)

Friends help you grow in your craft. The best way to connect with other writers who can help you is to network (often by doing favors).

Advocates help you build your reach. The way to get on their radar is to do quality work and look for opportunities to serve.

You need all three in order to make the right connections to see your platform grow and eventually land yourself a book contract.

Why traditional publishing?

I am a fan of the recent trend of self-publishing and authors making it happen without the permission of gatekeepers. I love that attitude; it’s what got me started blogging in the first place and, ironically, led to my book contract.

However, I think there is a good deal traditional publishers still have to offer first-time authors. In particular, I have enjoyed the process of learning how a book comes to be. Any money I make is an added bonus (not a financial necessity).

Plus, there is still a lot of authority that comes with being a “published author.” Since not anyone can do it (like with self-publishing), having a book deal with a traditional publisher can be a good way to build your clout. Of course, it’s not for everyone, and I completely respect that.

That said, I think traditional publishing will either evolve or go away completely. There are already plenty of authors who are successfully selling books without ever going through a publisher.

Whatever you do, the thing that you cannot do is wait to be picked. Either build your platform and get a book contract, or build your platform and self publish. But don’t just sit there and dream. We don’t have time for that.

Stop stalling and just start.

“Don’t just sit there and dream. We don’t have time for that.Tweet thisTweet

If you need more help with getting published, check out these books and articles:

10 Ridiculously Simple Tips for How to Write a Book
You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Me
The Unconventional Guide to How to Publish Your Book by Chris Guillebeau
Writing a Winning Book Proposal by Michael Hyatt

Disclosure: Some of the above links are affiliate links.

What kind of book are you writing? Are you going to self-publish or traditionally publish? Share in the comments.

Why You Can (And Should) Keep Writing When You Have Children

If you’re a parent, you’ll already know this: the moment you have your first child, your life changes.

Forever. Irrevocably. And quite dramatically.

In the midst of broken nights, feeding, cuddling, and getting to know a brand new person, writing might not be the first thing on your mind. (Especially if you’re the one who gave birth, and you’re still recovering.)

Perhaps you feel that writing is something that now needs to be put on hold: until your child, or children, are a little older. Maybe until they’re in school.

Some parents end up putting writing on hold for years, until their kids grow up and leave home.

But you don’t need to do that. While your role as a parent is hugely important, it doesn’t need to be your entire life.

Keep your identity as a writer, too. Your writing matters. Your ideas and stories are still just as important as they were before.

Yes, it’s even harder to find time to write once you’re a parent. But it is possible.

“Keep your identity as a writer after you become a parent.@AliVenturesTweet thisTweet
Write in short, scheduled sessions

There are a ton of great reasons to schedule your writing time. Here’s the one that matters most to me as a parent:

Scheduling means I don’t feel guilty about writing… and I don’t feel guilty about NOT writing.

When you’ve planned ahead, you can sit down to write without worrying that you should be doing something else. This is your time, time you’ve deliberately set aside for doing something that is truly important to you.

And when you’ve planned ahead, you don’t need to worry that you’re not writing in every spare moment. You can look forward to a writing session, knowing that you’ll be able to sit down and write soon.

“Schedule your writing to avoid feeling guilty about it.@AliVenturesTweet thisTweet
The optimal writing session length

Depending on the age of your kids, your writing sessions may need to be very short.

During the most difficult time for my writing, I had a 22-month-old toddler and a newborn. I tried to fit in 15 minutes when they were both napping in the middle of the day.

A few months on, when my older one started playgroup, I used to write in the nearby McDonald’s with the baby napping (always briefly, alas) in the stroller. On a very good day, I’d manage 15 minutes in McDonald’s and a further 15 minutes in the evening. It doesn’t sound like much… but those 15 minutes did add up.

Now the kids are a little older (two and almost-four), I write fiction for half an hour between teatime and bath time: my husband is always home at this point and I escape to my study!

What might work for you? These are some possibilities:

10 minutes as soon as your baby goes down for a nap, every day.
15 minutes before everyone else wakes up, every day.
30 minutes during your lunch break at work, every weekday.
45 minutes in the evening, every other day (alternate with your partner on who does chores and who gets to write/relax…!)
45 minutes after you’ve dropped the kids at school… before you start on the housework.

Get your partner on board

Hopefully, you’ve got a supportive partner who understands why you want – need – to write.

If that’s not the case, though, perhaps the best way forward is to frame your writing as a leisure or hobby activity.

For instance, you might arrange things like this: you get to write, say, every Saturday afternoon while your partner has the kids for two hours. On Sundays, you take the kids for two hours while your partner does whatever they want to do.

If your partner doesn’t “get” writing, you might feel unsupported and isolated.

As a parent, it can be tricky to get out to local writing groups in the evenings or on weekends. Do look for sources of support, though – maybe an online forum, a Facebook group, or a friend who you can email regularly.

Schedule writing retreats

While short writing sessions are great on a day-by-day basis, I think all writers can benefit from being able to really immerse themselves in their writing occasionally.

As a parent, this is doubly helpful: not only do you get to spend some focused time writing, you also get a proper break from your kids!

In 2016, while my kids were 1 and 3, I did two writing retreats:

A day-long structured retreat (10am – 5pm) in March, with the wonderful Lorna Fergusson of Fictionfire, in Oxford in the UK. I wrote two and a half chapters of the first draft of my novel-in-progress.
An overnight retreat (2pm Sat – 11am Sun) in November, where I booked into a local hotel (my one requirement was “a bedroom with a desk”) and did a ton of editing and rewriting on my novel.

Both times, I also got to eat a delicious meal in peace…!

What to Do When You Don’t Feel Motivated to Write

Today, I went to the gym — not because I had to or because I felt guilty about not working out, but because I wanted to. And that’s a new thing for me. Which, oddly, taught me a lesson about motivation and writing.

Most people set goals. Maybe to write a book or lose a few pounds or even launch a business. We all understand what it means to dream for a better life. But the follow-through is often the hardest part.

How do you stay inspired when life gets hard?

This is a question I get a lot and one that’s tough to answer. But the way we answer it will determine our success in so many areas of life, from the art we create to the way we treat our bodies and our loved ones. In particular, this is a question writers often ask themselves.

So, here are four methods to stay motivated when it’s hard to get your best work out into the world.

1. Copy someone else

In my case, I wasn’t feeling motivated to eat right until I was at the gym and saw an overweight man giving it his all, staying late after the class was over, and then telling the instructor, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

That motivated me to take my health a little more seriously — not because he was obese, but because he was motivated. As Donald Miller wrote, “Sometimes, you have to watch someone else love something before you can love it yourself.”

This is also the reason I didn’t hire a personal trainer and instead took a weight training class — so that I could be surrounded by a half dozen other guys who are stronger than me and further along in this journey than I am. It’s motivating to see how they do it.

In order to write better, you need to surround yourself with good writers. Read the classics. Pay attention to the masters. Follow in the footsteps of greatness, and you too will soon be great.

“In order to write better, surround yourself with good writers.Tweet thisTweet

Exercise: Reach out to five people whose success you want to mimic and ask them how they did it. You might be surprised at who responds and what they say.

2. Set small goals

We all get motivated to reach higher once we’ve met certain minimum goals.

Once you start losing weight, it’s easier to continue losing weight. You motivate yourself. This is true in business, too. Once you make your first $1, it’s easier to make your next $10 or even $1000. But that initial hump between 0 and 1 is the most difficult.

Setting small targets and achieving them is one way we create consistency in our routines to help us hit our most desired goals. The secret to this is to not make that first goal too big, but just beyond your current reach.

In my case, setting a personal record for deadlift last week without even meaning to was what made me want to race back to the gym this week.

Next, find a way to get a personal breakthrough. Set small goals and accomplish them. Start with 500 words a day, not the goal to write a book. After you’ve done that for two months and it’s officially a habit (studies say it takes 66 days on average, not 21, to create a habit), then you can start thinking bigger.

While writing my most recent book, I started losing motivation to finish it once I was about two-thirds done. I would block out an hour or two to write and then I would just waste that time. So I took a tip from Neil Fiore, expert on the psychology of procrastination and author of The Now Habit, and gave myself small rewards every time I sat down to write. For me, this was a $10 coffee smoothie at the end of each writing time. It got me through that final hump by rewiring my brain to embrace the thing I was avoiding as something to actually look forward to.

Exercise: Set a tiny goal, like writing 10 minutes a day, and celebrate every time you hit that goal. After a week of consistency, increase to 15 minutes. And so on. Remember to reward yourself.

3. Ask for help

When in doubt, ask someone who’s done what you want to do. Hire a coach. Ask a friend. Read a blog. Listen to a podcast. Find teachers and mentors. Invite them to coffee or lunch. Ask them smart questions that you can’t read the answers to on their blog or in their books.

I’ve done this in almost every area of my life, including health and fitness, as well as business and even writing. In some cases, I pay these people. In others, we swap services. And in others, it’s just an informal mentoring relationship.

The point is if you want to achieve greatness, you have to surround yourself with great people. When you can’t talk with them personally, become a student from afar. Copy what they do and become their case study, giving them all the credit for your success.

“If you want to achieve greatness, you have to surround yourself with great people.Tweet thisTweet

Exercise: Take someone’s advice (from a book, podcast, or blog post) and email them about it, telling them how they helped you. This is the secret to getting influencers to pay attention to you. Make them look good by doing what they say. Demonstrate that it works.

4. Remember your “why”

I used to work out because I didn’t like the way I looked. It was a shame-based approach to getting into shape. I’d take up running or a new diet, do it religiously for a few months, and then move on.

What was happening?

A good friend of mine recently gave me some tough feedback on the way I was running my business, saying, “It feels like you’re looking for an easy button.”

Ouch. He was right, though. I wanted a hack, a shortcut, some easy route to success. But the truth is there isn’t one. In my experience, there are no big breaks. There is only the work, and either you love it or you don’t.

“There are no big breaks. There is only the work. You either love it, or you don’t.Tweet thisTweet

If shortcuts to success do exist, they typically don’t last. As my friend David once told me after getting $70,000 in an insurance settlement, which he then proceeded to turn into $150,000 in debt on some bad real estate investments, “Any success you did not earn, you will inevitably waste.”

In our context, this means that you must embrace the process. And in order to do that, you have to connect with your why, with the reason you want to do this in the first place.

For me, my health is important to me because it means having more energy to share with my family and friends, as well as feeling more confident about myself. With writing, it’s ultimately about impact. I want to write words that move people’s souls and change culture. That’s what gets me up in the morning and helps me work through the dips.

Your situation will never change until you get clear about your real goals and honest about the process it will take to get there.

Exercise: Write down five reasons why you want to change. Do you want to be a famous author? Finally finish a book? Make a little money off your words or art? Then, do the opposite. What are five reasons to stay the same? Consider the cost of both doing the work and not doing the work. What do you ultimately want, and what are you willing to give?

Grab a club

So, that’s how inspiration works when you’re not feeling inspired. You don’t wait to feel motivated. In the words of Jack London, you go after it with a club.

Your situation will never change until you tap into your true motivation for change. Dig deep. It’s in there. Once you find it, nearly anything is possible.

What’s one unlikely place you can find some inspiration today? Share in the comments.

How to Just Start When it Comes to Writing

There’s nothing more frustrating than the bright, white glow of an empty screen and the constant, blinking reminder from your cursor that you’re not making any progress.

Writing a strong piece – one that’s valuable to your readers and that you feel great about – isn’t easy.

But what if I told you there’s a simple formula you can follow to get more writing done in a single day than you did all last week?

A simple formula for real progress

You already know the toughest part about writing is getting started. If you can get the first sentence down, then the rest will follow.

Of course you’ll do re-writes, have edits to make, and you might even go back and add a thing or two. But doesn’t it feel incredible to just start?

Just starting the writing process is progress in and of itself, not to mention what follows: strong momentum, or what some refer to as “the flow”.

This simple formula for real progress is made up of two parts and will help you just start every time you use it.

The two parts are: “Focus Time” and “Refresh Time”.

If you’re familiar with the Pomodoro Technique, then you probably know where I’m headed with this. The idea is that you give yourself a specific amount of time to accomplish X, start a timer to hold yourself accountable, and FOCUS on X until your timer runs out.

Once your Focus Time is over, you’ll get some well-deserved Refresh Time.

Let’s say you’re working on writing a book, and you’re in the very beginning stages. You might choose “research publishing options” as your X, start a timer for 30 minutes, and FOCUS on researching publishing options until your 30 minutes is up.

Once your 30 minute Focus Time is over, you might give yourself 10 minutes of Refresh Time, and then start a new session to repeat the formula for another task on your list.

This formula is so powerful because it’s backed up by Parkinson’s Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Give yourself a time limit, and you’ll get more writing done in a single day than you did all last week.

Seems simple, right?

Simple, but not easy. Let’s dig a bit deeper…

What comes with this simple formula

While this simple formula will help you make real progress, there’s more to it: what comes with this formula is required, but it’s typically left out.

In order for this formula to work, you must:

Plan ahead
Practice productivity, discipline and focus

Plan ahead

When I say plan ahead, I don’t mean that you have to plan weeks or months in advance; I mean plan the night before to help set yourself up for success tomorrow.

I like to call this “Win Tomorrow Today”.

It’s very easy to do, and all it requires is that before you shut down for the day, you take out a piece of paper or a sticky note, and write down the ONE thing you will accomplish tomorrow.

As an example, you might write down on your sticky note: “Write the table of contents for my book”.

Ever hear the saying from Brian Tracy “Eat That Frog”? Sounds pretty disgusting, but what he’s referring to is your one most important task of the day. Eat That Frog means you’re not going to procrastinate or make excuses as to why you can’t do it – instead, you’re going to sit down and do it.

Be sure to put that piece of paper or sticky note on your computer so it’s the first thing you see in the morning.

Practice productivity

Productivity means accomplishing tasks that matter to you and your business in an efficient manner. Now that you know exactly what you’re going to focus on first thanks to planning ahead, you’ve already started practicing productivity.

Planning ahead is critical for productivity, even if it means having a single task or a smaller goal you want to accomplish written down. This will take the guesswork out of what you should focus on first, which is what many people waste their time doing with the most precious hours of the day.

When you sit down at your computer and see your sticky note that says “Write the table of contents for my book”, all that’s left to do is set a timer and start your Focus Time.

When you practice productivity, you’ll be using the most effective hours of your day to make progress on a task or goal that matters to you and your business instead of getting stuck on other people’s agenda.

Practice discipline

Discipline means setting and sticking to a plan of action, and it’s often the case that even though you have the one thing you want to focus on written down and stuck to your computer so it’s the first thing you see, you get distracted before you start.

In order to practice discipline, start by breaking your ONE goal for the day down into smaller steps.

A lot of times what can hold you back from getting started, or what can distract you from focusing on the task at hand, is not knowing what your first step is.

This is an excuse you’re making to not start.

If your one goal for the day is to write your table of contents for your book, then breaking that down into smaller steps might look like this:

Figure out what a table of contents includes
Refer to my outline for consistency
Edit

If it’s an involved task or goal you’re working on and you’re not sure what steps four, five and six are, don’t get caught up stressing about it. Focus on figuring out what your first step is, and the subsequent step will reveal itself.

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

When you practice discipline, you’ll be eliminating the excuses that have been holding you back from making any real progress.

Practice focus

Focus means following one course until success and remaining distraction-free in the process. This is where we circle back to our simple formula for real progress.

You’ve planned ahead so you know what the ONE goal you will accomplish is, and in doing so you’ve already started practicing productivity.

By breaking down your ONE goal into smaller steps, you’ve removed any excuses you could possibly use to not take your first step.

Now all that’s left to do is set your Focus Time and just start.

In order to eliminate any distractions that might come up during your Focus Time, make sure you’re in a work environment you feel comfortable in and that you’ve turned off any notifications or pop ups that might break your focus.

Also, it’s helpful to have a piece of paper next to you. That way, if you think of an idea during your Focus Time you’re afraid you’ll forget about, or you remember another task you have to get done that day, you can write it down on your piece of paper and immediately get back on task.

When you practice focus, you’ll start making real progress on the tasks that matter to you and your business.

“When you practice focus, you’ll start making real progress on the tasks that matter to you and your business.John Lee DumasTweet thisTweet
Start making real progress

Not feeling like you’re making any progress is no fun. In addition, it can spiral quickly and turn into things like a lack of motivation and a lot of frustration.

The good news is, you get to choose.

By using the simple formula above, planning ahead, and practicing productivity, discipline and focus, you’re choosing progress.

Stop the constant, blinking reminder from your cursor – all you have to do is just start.

If you’re ready to just start, I have the perfect guide to help you with this formula. It’s called The Mastery Journal: Master Productivity, Discipline and Focus in 100 Days.

The Mastery Journal walks you step-by-step through setting up four sessions of your Focus Time and your Refresh Time on a daily basis; provides motivational quotes and daily gratitude reminders; helps you develop a morning routine; and reminds you to plan ahead every night so you can Win Tomorrow Today.

Head over to TheMasteryJournal.com to grab your Mastery Journal today!

What are your biggest hurdles to just starting? What is ONE task you want to accomplish today? Share in the comments.

You Aren’t Born an Artist, You Become One

Recently, I finished up a new book on what it takes to be a creative professional. The book comes out in June, but over the next few months, I’ll share some lessons. Here’s the first one.

There’s an old quote attributed to Picasso that says we are all born artists but the trick is to remain one. I think that’s just not true. We aren’t born an artist. We must become one.

“You aren’t born an artist. You become one.Tweet thisTweet

Of course, are all creative. Some of us write poems and others imagine a better future for our children, but we all have it in us to make things, to turn nothing into something, and bring a new creation into the world.

This is the magic of being human.

In the Bible, God creates the earth and all that’s in it, but he gives Adam and Eve the responsibility of naming the animals. My interpretation of that moment is he’s saying, “Join me in this.” He’s calling us to be creative.

We all have a call to creative, so that makes us artists in a sense. But what does it take to become a professional artist, and not just a hobbyist? It takes a lot more than just being born, it turns out.

Here are three steps to take if you’re considering a career in the arts.

Step #1: Lean in to your fear

We all know people who discovered their creative potential later on in life. The world may have beaten it out of them, or maybe it never existed at all. Then, they experienced a creative awakening.

When Brianna Lamberson decided at the Tribe Conference she wanted to write a book, she was doing something bold. She was deciding to become someone she wasn’t. And this scared her. But she decided to lean in and do it, anyway.

After 30 days, she had a 30,000-word manuscript for a book and launched it, making $800 in the first week. How did she do it? She imagined herself feeling unafraid and did the very thing that terrified her the most.

And it worked.

This happens to some artists late in life, and for some much earlier. But for every creative genius, it must happen. And by that, I mean, you must make a choice. You must become more uncomfortable with standing still than with taking risks.

“You must become more uncomfortable with standing still than with taking risks.Tweet thisTweet

No, I don’t believe you are born an artist, but I do believe you can become one.

Step #2: Take baby steps (and become what you practice)

So, let’s say you decide to be a painter or a novelist or even an entrepreneur. Let’s say you hear this prompting and decide to act. What happens next? Next, you practice.

When a young lawyer and new father named John Grisham thought he might have it in him to write thrillers, he got up a little early every morning and went to his office.

There, he would write for the first hour or so of the day. The goal was a few pages of his novel. He never studied writing and wasn’t sure he necessarily wanted to be a writer. He just knew that you don’t become something by waiting or wishing for it. You become something by doing it.

And that meant if he wanted to be a writer, he was going to have to write.

He didn’t write a lot. Most days, it was just a few hundred words. It took him three years to write that first book. And when it was done, he couldn’t get any major publisher to look at it. No one was calling him congratulating him on the new book.

So, he wrote another.

While he was writing the second book, he bought a bunch of copies of his first book and decided to promote it himself since the small publisher had done little to support him. And then, the second book was sold to a major publisher and became a movie, and then, he started calling himself a writer.

Re-imagining who you want to be is an important step to re-creating your destiny. I have encouraged thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, to call themselves writers if they want to write. But it doesn’t stop there. You can’t just call yourself a writer. You also have to act like one.

And that’s true for all artists.

“You can’t just call yourself a writer. You have to act like one.Tweet thisTweet

John Grisham is a bestselling novelist today because he had the discipline in one of the busiest seasons of life to chase something he wasn’t even sure would make for a career. But he was curious enough to see, and that meant he had to practice.

Imagine how that must have felt, three years into a project before completing it, all while practicing law and raising small children. Imagine how discouraging that could have felt and how he must have been tempted to quit. And then imagine publishing that work and seeing little success.

And then, imagine starting the next one with, perhaps, no expectation of anything changing. All because you were curious.

This is what it takes to be an artist. Not to be born with any special abilities, but to imagine a new, creative life for yourself and then to create that life. Not with big and giant leaps of faith towards the unknown, but with small and persistent steps toward an unknown destiny.

I know many creatively successful people, and almost all of them began this way. Not with a big break or a sudden realization but by gradually believing in another life and acting their way into it. For many of them, it took years, sometimes over a decade. And if it happened sooner, they often didn’t know what to do with their newfound fame and success.

Step #3: Leave the familiar

Adrian Cardenas was a professional baseball player who after his first year in the major leagues quit the game to become a filmmaker.

After his first year of playing for the Chicago Cubs, Adrian realized that his past decade of practicing the sport was, in fact, not leading to this life. Playing for 40,000 people, mastering the craft of baseball. It wasn’t for him. And it took a moment like that to realize it.

So what did he do? He quit. He started over. He did the scary thing that so many of us struggle to do, even when we feel this call within us: he reinvented himself.

I call this the Rule of Re-creation, and it is an essential principle to living a more creative life. When the world calls you one thing, you must break out and become who you really are. Before you get to create great art, you must first re-create yourself.

“Before you get to create great art, you must first re-create yourself.Tweet thisTweet

Years ago, I quit my old blog and decided to start a new one. I stopped calling myself a “marketer” and began calling myself a writer, even though I had no book or any significant work behind me at this point. I chose to believe I could be something different from what I’d always been.

I re-created myself.

I suppose you could look into the past and see me winning a sixth grade spelling bee or helping my peers in college with their term papers, you might be able to deduce that I had always been a writer. But if you were to ask me at twenty-seven years old if I was a writer, I would have said, “No.”

Becoming a writer for me was a choice. And this is true for anyone who wants to do anything creative in their life, like write a book or paint a masterpiece or even launch a business. This kind of act doesn’t happen to you. You chose it.

Sure, you may feel called to this work. It may come to you in certain quiet and vulnerable moments when you’re wondering what your life is about. You may feel drawn to it as something certain and at once inexplicable. But the fact remains: you don’t become an artist until you decide to be one. If the calling comes, you still must answer.

“You don’t become an artist until you decide to be one.Tweet thisTweet
Why am I telling you this?

I’m sharing this, because I believe you have important work that deserves to be shared. And I also believe this world does a poor job of encouraging us to be creative. Our places of work often aren’t great places for this work to be shared, and sadly our homes where we were raised weren’t, either.

So, if you want to be an artist (whatever that means to you), it will require some boldness, a certain tenacity. And the journey won’t be easy. But I hope you’ll take it anyway, because we need your work, and we need you to share this work that only you can share.

Here’s what it takes in practical terms:

Not everyone is born an artist. But we all have the power to become artists. To start, we must believe this.
We must take tiny, daily steps in the direction of our creative calling. We must practice and be prepared for rejection, failure, and the tedium of life.
We must re-create ourselves by leaving the familiar and reimagining a new future for ourselves. This may require us to quit one thing and transition into something else. Maybe the thing we quit is a mind-set, or maybe it’s a job. But we will have to leave one thing to go in search of something new.

If we do these things and don’t quit, then we just might become what we dream of becoming. And if we do these things in hopes of one day being an artist, we are in luck. Because these are not the things you do to become an artist. These are the things that artists do.

If you are believing in a different future for yourself, constantly reinventing who you are and what you do, taking small but intentional steps towards becoming that thing, then you are not an amateur or a hobbyist. You, dear reader, are an artist.

So, get creating.

One great way to start sharing your work with the world is through a blog. Tune in for one of my free webinars this week on how to launch a blog and get your first 1000 subscribers!

Click below to register for the date and time that works best for you.

Tuesday, 21 February 2017, at 10:00 am CST
Wednesday, 22 February 2017, at 10:00 am CST
Wednesday, 22 February 2017, at 02:00 pm CST

What kind of artist are you? What do you need practice daily in order to act like an artist? Share in the comments.