Dear Writer, You Need to Quit (QuitBooks for Writers, #1)

by Becca Syme

If there was “one” guiding principle for transformation that works, it would be: alignment2. Alignment is symmetry between your self and your systems. Between your purpose, your personality, your platform, your capacity, and your goals.

The core premise of my Better-Faster Academy courses is that your productivity (your success) is a system. It’s made up of your environment, your personality, your platform, your resources, and your patterns.

keystone habits are little tweaks that bring a broken or malfunctioning system into alignment and allow it to bear weight again.

Most of us think our choices exist in a vacuum. (Like, I can make any choice at any time.) But the reality is, our choices are more like drops of water than individual data points. There’s a river of inertia in our brains, after so many years of individual drops collecting in and washing through the riverbeds of our neural nets, and re-directing that water is costly and work-intensive.

But if you want to execute in spite of inertia, what do you do? Narrow. If you narrow your focus, you stockpile your creative resistance to the inertia, and then the force of water has a harder time sweeping away the new riverbeds.

The first step is always acceptance. Because if you continue to hold unrealistic expectations in your head, it’s going to continue to cause you more pain. Some things, you just have to give up. The expectation that you can change everything is one of them.

Second, once you’ve accepted, then prioritize. What’s most important? This kind of alignment is what I do in every coaching call. Narrow the focus. Look for the one thing that will make the biggest impact on the system. Find the keystone.

Third—and this is hard, I know—but pick the top priority only, and take some steps to strategically and intentionally impact that one big thing. Don’t overhaul the system, especially not at first. Take action to change the most important thing, and don’t let yourself back down from that. Willpower is a resource, just like our energy. It’s not unlimited. And one of the reasons that “change all the things” doesn’t work is because we’re spending our willpower in tiny increments in too many places, and then it runs out.

Their system is not magic. Their alignment is magic. The way their system lines up with their brain, their goals, and their capacity is the magic thing.

Question the premise. QTP.

When you expect writing to be easy all the time, you will be frustrated, because reality will eventually prove you wrong. When it does, if you hold on to the unrealistic expectation (“this should always be fun”), you’re going to spiral into an emotional funk when you can’t make it fun. Or you’ll try everything you can think of to get the happy back, which will cause its own kind of stress when it doesn’t work (because you will have attempted to fix the problem and failed, which is worse than just having the problem in the first place).

when you have a constant source of psychological essential pain (writing should be fun), and then it isn’t fun (reality—feel the ouch), we instinctively soothe the pain (pull away from the writing, go and look for ways to make writing fun… or worse, end up on Facebook or in our inboxes), but what we don’t do is take corrective action to change the unrealistic expectation.

In order to stand out, you have to stand out. Which means that you have to be better than everyone else at something. Something. But not everything.

Being memorable quite literally means that you did something so well or so completely or so fascinatingly that people remember you.

As a rule, whenever you “find yourself” doing something (like going to Facebook for distraction), that’s not a conscious choice. It’s subconscious. Otherwise, you would be aware of making a conscious choice4

The internet is the place where productivity goes to die.

As the math proved, there are diminishing returns the longer you’re on social media. Beyond a certain (very small) number of minutes, you’re not making enough impact on the “platform” for it to outweigh the impact writing words on a manuscript would have. The magic number seemed to be 20 minutes a day of actual platform work (read: interacting with fans, and engaging with potential sales, but not necessarily selling or author group use5; everything else is recreational use). After that, the returns diminished so significantly that it actually started stealing money from your platform (assuming that you would spend those minutes on manuscript creation in some form).

New York can survive because it is made up of big corporations who can afford to take risks in a volatile market.

those are the four elements it takes to succeed. Talent, work, timing, and luck.

“One-star reviews legitimize books.” They are a signal to readers that enough people read the books, they’re worth checking out. If no one hates your book, you’ve failed at writing it.

“People are naturally polarizing. If someone loves something, other people will find it and hate it. Love and hate are memorable. ‘Like’ is forgettable.”

Welcome the haters, because they’re a sign that you’re doing something right.

Fear can be very useful. I don’t want to kick fear out of your trip completely. Fear is what keeps us from doing stupid crap. Fear is what reminds us to take things seriously. It keeps us tied to the mast when there’s danger out there that would otherwise overcome us. But instead of letting fear navigate, we want to move it to the side car. Because it can’t steer from the side car.

what can last forever is indecision. It’s called inaction.

almost all of the premises we accept are subconscious, and you live (depending on which psychologist thinkers you listen to) somewhere between 70% and 95% of your life by subconscious thought.