20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money

by Jonathan Green

  To motivate myself, I started taking small jobs. First, I found jobs working as a copywriting assistant and researcher. I got paid to do some of the grunt work. I love research, so this was right up my alley. Over the past year, I have been taking bigger jobs and moved up the pay scale accordingly. I now get paid more for copywriting jobs than I do for ghostwriting jobs.

  At first, I was taking low-paying jobs just to learn. I would rather get paid two hundred dollars to do some homework than nothing at all. Some of my clients didn’t understand why I took those cheap jobs. But I see the value in getting paid to learn. They were paying me to develop a skill that has magnified my income.

  I can recommend taking ghostwriting jobs while you are building up your writing speed. When writing for yourself, sometimes the financial goal is simply too far away. The greater the distance between your goal and right now, the harder it is to maintain focus.

  Take a job writing ten blog posts where you get paid on delivery. Suddenly, writing fast means you get paid sooner. There is nothing like getting paid tomorrow to motivate you today. If you aren’t sure where to find ghostwriting work, I have LOADS of information and links on my site for you.

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  Action Steps

  Start every project with a clear word count target.

  Plan when you are going to do these exercises and put them on a calendar.

  Commit to twenty-one days to master the 20K System.

  Continue your exercises and drills until you can hit twenty thousand words a day consistently.

  Find some client work and get paid while you learn.

  Part XVI

  The 20K Habit

  Winning is habit. Unfortunately, so is losing.

  - Vince Lombardi

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  The Two Failures

  It's taken me a while to decide exactly how I want to organize this section. The next book in this series is called Control Your Fate. It's all about controlling your destiny by learning how to stack habits. It will teach you how to build a series of positive habits to replace the bad habits that have a tendency to rule our lives. Originally I was going to talk about habits in an entirely different way here, but realizing what I want to do with that next book, I have to change my plan midstream.

  I hate when you read a book and discover that you have to read the next book in the series to solve your current problem. I don’t need to drop a cliffhanger in the middle of this monster. I don't want to leave you in the lurch and make you wait two months for the next book to come out

  I want to give you a strong basic understanding of habits and some of the exciting stuff that's going to be coming out in the next book. I want to give you enough to implement immediately; don’t feel obligated to wait for my next book. You can become a fast, successful writer with great habits right here!

  Habit all comes down to how our brains process information. Our brains are designed to find effective strategies to help us get the results we want. When we try something and get a bad result, our brain starts to learn from that. And it usually works.

  Unless we give our brains bad information. As discussed at the very beginning of this book, there is a very big difference between systemic failure and random failure. Please pause for just a moment and memorize those two terms. If you have ever hit a wall or felt like a failure, this lesson will change your life.

  Most of us mix up these two types of failures.

  Systemic failure is when the same failure happens over and over again, but we don’t change our behavior. Think of the mouse that keeps getting shocked trying to get the same piece of cheese.

  Random failure is where each failure happens at a different point in the process. The mouse walks into a trap in one part of the maze; then it gets lost, then it falls into the water. Each of these failures is different.

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  Blame the Universe

  Unfortunately, we often run into random failure and think that it’s systemic. This misdiagnosis leads us to blame the universe for our troubles.

  Some people blame the government. Some people blame aliens. We look for someone else to blame. It can be lady luck, fortune, the universe, or any other mystical force that we have no ability to measure or control.

  When you blame one of these third-party factors, you give away your power. The more you blame one of these external forces, the less chance you have to turn things around and improve your life.

  If you get distracted ten minutes into every writing session and start checking your social media, then that is a systemic failure; the same thing is happening over and over again.

  If you have a different failure in each writing session, however, you are dealing with random failure. If you get distracted by social media after ten minutes in one session and then the television after fifteen minutes in the next, it’s not systemic. In the third writing session, the phone rings after just five minutes, and you can’t resist the urge to answer it. Finally, in your fourth session, the doorbell rings. It’s starting to feel like you just can’t catch a break!

  At the end of the day, you might look back and start to think that you failed. You didn’t complete any of your writing tasks. The final result was the same failure, so you tell your brain that it was systemic. When you incorrectly label your failure type, it becomes an unfixable problem. That’s when the desire to blame someone else starts to creep in.

  The reality is that you accomplished a great deal. Each time you hit a failure, you self-corrected and moved forward. You had four different fails; that is a very good thing. That is a sign that you are improving.

  When we talk about rising stronger from a fall, we are talking about random failure. Random failure is great. It’s how we learn. My son is learning to walk right now. He falls all the time, but each time he falls it is for a different reason. He learns from each mistake and moves on to the next one. If he incorrectly thought that his random failure was systemic, he could say to himself, “The universe just doesn’t want me to walk.”

  Every time I work on a project, something goes wrong. I never have perfect days or flawless projects. But each time it's a different type of failure. Sometimes I have a problem with my website, sometimes I have a problem with one of the links, and sometimes there's a problem with a book cover. These little things happen, and it's normal. If I were to overreact and say, “God is against me. The universe doesn't want me to succeed,” I would never be able to learn from my mistakes and failures.

  I’m experiencing random failure, which is a good thing. If you blame the universe for random failures, you have generated an excuse for inaction. If the world is keeping you from writing fast, then there is nothing you can do. You do not have the power to affect the universe.

  Here is the process simplified: You experience random failure. Then you start to think that some outside force is out to get you. You have no power to change this outside force. Therefore you shouldn’t even bother trying. Thus you justify failure and inaction.

  This is the thought pattern that destroys far too many budding writers.

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  There is No Cure

  One other way that this “blaming the universe” manifests is in blaming our ability. This is a two-step process and allows us to mask what we are doing.

  Instead of saying that God doesn’t want me to be a writer, you can say that you weren’t born with that talent. But who hands out talents? However you want to say it, you are still blaming an external force. If you aren’t religious, that doesn't change anything. Just insert the word “universe.”

  There are real limitations in life. I’ll never be taller or younger. Those are real limits. Talents are real. Some people are born with more talents than others. Singing is a talent. Everyone starts with a base singing level.

  I took singing lessons for a year. In my very first lesson, the teacher looked at me and asked me what my goal was. I told her that I wrote music, and I wanted to be able to sing well enough to explain to the singer what I wanted th
e song to sound like.

  You could see the stress fade from her face. She was nervous about telling me that my dreams of singing professionally would never happen. That is a talent issue. My inability to sing well is a systemic problem. I can improve a little, but it’s still pretty rough.

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  Stop Blaming Talent

  We see someone at the Olympics do well. We immediately see that our lives are inferior. Rather than saying, “He worked really hard, and the reason I’m fat is that I don’t,” we look for something else to blame. We blame the universe or luck or genetics. These are all different words that lead to the same thing.

  You cannot control the talents you are born with. They are systemic. These words are just modern replacements for the spiritual, invisible third party. The meaning is the same even if we are using slightly different words.

  Writing fast is not a talent. I was not born writing fast. I didn't even touch a keyboard until I was six years old. Stop using words like "talent" and "natural ability" as an excuse for inaction.

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  Systemic Failures are Easy to Fix

  If you've been trying to write a book for two years, and you haven't written a single word, then you have a systemic problem. The unwritten book is a systemic problem, but there is a good chance that if we dig deeper, we can find a series of distractions that knocked you off course.

  I have owned a PlayStation for the past three years. (Before you get up in arms, the last machine I owned was an Xbox.) A few weeks ago I noticed that my productivity fell into the toilet. I was tired, and I wasn’t hitting my daily targets. I was feeling lethargic and moody. I know that this feeling creeps in when I don’t exercise enough.

  A little self-reflection revealed that my problem started when I downloaded a new game. I went from playing a few hours a week to a few hours a day. This is a systemic problem, and real systemic problems can be fixed. I now turn on a timer and only play for one hour a day. Some days I don’t play at all. Limiting my access to this distraction corrected my problem.

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  Isolate the Problem

  There are two steps to finding and conquering any systemic failure. The first is to clearly define your goal. If you don’t have a clearly defined goal, don’t be surprised if you never hit it.

  When I was in high school, I would often take long drives with no destination in mind, and of course I would end up nowhere.

  The second step is to isolate the cause of the problem. In my PlayStation example, the cause of my decreased productivity wasn’t laziness; I was distracted by a new game.

  If you have a long-term project that just never gets finished, you can look at all of your attempts to work and try to find the cause. If you’re anything like me, each time you started on the project something new distracted you. All of these little failures knocked you off course. The big picture is that you don’t have enough focus.

  At first, it sounds like a systemic failure. The reality is that each of these little failures added up. If we dialed in, we would find that there are ten or fewer random failures behind the blanket statement that you "lack focus."

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  The Little Genius

  Forgive me if you’ve read this story from me before, but this is one of the greatest examples I ever experienced. I was a tutor in my twenties, and I worked with a child who was diagnosed as special needs. I began to work with him and quickly discovered that he couldn't learn unless he was moving. Like a shark, for him, movement was life.

  He was terrible at tests, and the teachers told his parents that he had a systemic problem. He wasn’t smart enough to go to the next grade, and they needed to look elsewhere.

  I started tutoring this boy, and he would spend every session with two pencils in his hands, drumming. Most tutors would have ripped them right out of his hands. They mistake their annoyance at the noise with the boy not paying attention. Fortunately, I have lived with multiple drummers in my life, and I’m used to annoying rhythms.

  As I began to work with this child, I discovered that he’s one of the smartest people alive. If you’ve read my other books, you know that I have a super duper high IQ and a master’s degree. I’ve been around a lot of smart people. This boy was in a different level. He’s smart enough that I’m an ant in his presence, and he has the natural code-breaking ability of a supercomputer. I’m not smart enough to use the correct words to describe what I experienced working with him.

  After a few sessions, I had to take his mom aside and have a very awkward conversation. A week ago his school told her that he had a learning disability, and I had to inform her that it was the opposite. He’s so much smarter than us that it’s pretty close to terrifying. He could solve math problems designed to take hours faster than I could flip to the back of the book to check the answer.

  When he took the school exam to jump the next level, he achieved the highest score in the school. The principal was baffled. They started to think that I was a master tutor. I wish I could take credit. All I did was notice that his problem was misdiagnosed. And sometimes that is enough.

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  The Writing Habit

  Right now, your goal is to write twenty thousand words a day consistently. You want to develop that ability at the drop of a hat, to turn the title of this book into a concrete ability that you can call upon when it’s needed.

  There are a couple of core skills that you need to develop to achieve this goal. You need to be able to write quickly for short periods of time. You then need the ability to turn these sprints into longer writing blocks. During this transition, you move from tracking words per minute to words per hour.

  Then you need the ability to maintain that pace for a marathon. Pretty much anybody can write quickly for five minutes. The real skill is turning those five-minute sprints into a two-hour writing session, then expanding until you are sprinting for three to four hours a day. That’s when you start hitting some serious numbers.

  Many possible distractions can get in the way. But let’s focus on the most likely culprits. Most of our habit problems have to do with time allocation, focus, and priority.

  When we misdiagnose one of these problems, we blame the universe or talents. We mix up talents and skills all the time. (Skills you can improve and learn. Talents are things we are born with.)

  Skills = random

  Talent = systemic

  There is a simple test to measure if the problem is a lack of ability.

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  The Sudoku Mom Gun Test

  I am excellent at math, but I have a weakness; I can’t do sudoku. I have tried many times, and I have never completed a single puzzle. My nephew had a children’s sudoku book with fewer squares; it used colors instead of numbers.

  I was unable to help him solve a single puzzle, and my sister thought I was messing around. Unfortunately, it’s true. This hole in my brain is a systemic failure. And it is how I developed the “Sudoku Mom Gun Test.”

  If my mom was on her knees in front of me with someone holding a gun to her head, and this villain said, “Finish this sudoku in the next five minutes or your mom is gone,” I would immediately start saying my goodbyes.

  It’s that simple. I would miss her terribly, but I’m aware that I just can’t do it. It’s like I’m colorblind, except it’s only for sudoku.

  So when you’re telling yourself that you don’t have the ability to write twenty thousand words in a day, apply this test. If a loved one’s life were on the line, could you crank out those words? Of course you could.

  This test proves that the problem is fixable. You can improve with more time or focus.

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  The Power of Ritual

  Once you have isolated your cause of failure, you can begin to fix it. Your failure is the result of distraction and that’s simply a bad habit. (If you can write for eight hours straight without distraction, but can’t hit your word count goals, then the problem can be corrected with exercises from the previous section.)


  To deal with a habit-based problem, I like to start with ritual. “Ritual” is a very powerful word, and it’s much better to use than habit. It’s such an unfamiliar word that I can use its power to help you become a faster writer. We most often think of ritual in a religious context, and we very rarely think about it in our daily lives. We say “routine” all the time, so the word has lost much of its power. The meanings are pretty much the same, but if you say “ritual,” you are more likely to succeed here.

  Rituals are very specific and well defined. You might have a routine where you go to the gym every day before work, but you can show up at different times and still maintain that routine. You can get to the gym at seven or seven fifteen. Ritual is more precise than that. A ritual must be performed in a certain order using a certain length of time. This specificity provides power.

  We are going to develop a ritual together right now. This will be the ritual you perform before every single writing session. Using a ritual in this way will help you get into the zone faster every single time you write.