It will even start to bleed into my work. The last thing that gets affected is my work relationships because very rarely do I mention things I'm going through to the people I'm working with. I don't want to tell my publisher I'm having a bad emotional day. I try to deal with a problem before it gets to that point. But sometimes it affects something I'm working on, or I’ll get so distracted by this kind of emotion that I can’t work right. It happens.
This is why we have to set up habits that help us to stay in the right emotional state, help us to stay happy, healthy, and focused.
186
Lonely Danger
I don't want you to become someone who is writing twelve hours a day. It's tough to be a good writer when you're not also experiencing life.
If you spend twelve hours a day writing, after a couple of days or a couple of weeks at most, loneliness will start to become infectious. And even if you say, “I want to be lonely. I want to focus on that project,” there will still be a tone of loneliness that ends up in your book, and it will affect the feel of the book. Your solitude influences the writing even if you're someone who enjoys your own company.
I love spending time by myself. I could easily entertain myself for years on end with no problem. I have a lot of things I like to do. I have a lot of ways of entertaining myself. I have a great many hobbies. It would be no problem, but if I don't interact with other people, then my worldview becomes more and more isolationist. It affects the way I write, and everything just becomes a little bit lonely and a little bit melancholy, and I don't always want that in my books.
187
Music Creates the Mood
Sometimes I need to create a very specific emotion. I have different music that I use to write different scenes. Most of the time I listen to music without words so that I don't get distracted. If the music has words, sometimes you end up typing them while you are trying to write and suddenly your book has a paragraph of song lyrics.
When I need to write something sad, it's when I bring out the big guns. I simply play a very specific country music song on repeat. I play it over and over again while I'm writing the chapter that needs to be sad and it works every time. I never listen to that song otherwise because it is just too powerful.
However you listen to music, it's worth creating channels or playlists that match a mood instead of a genre. The music you listen to will affect your mood, and that will find its way onto the pages of anything you are writing.
If you listen to angry music, it will affect your mood and energy in that direction. That can be a powerful tool, as long as it is intentional. Music is used effectively as the background for many great movies. When you are writing, use music in the same way.
188
Marathon Man
Maintaining habits and hobbies is critical. Writing can't be the only thing in your life. Sometimes I have an emergency project that requires me to write twelve hours a day for three or four days in a row. But then I hit the wall like you wouldn't believe and can't write for a week or two.
I push my engine into the red, and I keep it there for a few days, but then it takes a lot longer to recover from pushing so hard. I could never write twelve hours a day for weeks on end. It would rip me to pieces. I have the ability to redline the engine, but I try to avoid it as much as possible. It's good to know that it's there when you need it as a reserve, but nobody can maintain this pace in the long term. It's just too hard.
As you master the 20K System, you will be able to write twenty thousand words a day when you want to. But that doesn't mean you always want to. You will know it's there if a big opportunity comes your way, but writing fast is about so much more than that. Like me, you will probably prefer to write a leisurely five to ten thousand words a day and then spend every afternoon having some fun.
As a 20K writer, you can put that number on the board when you need it, but you won't need it every day. You may start using dictation and start generating massive numbers consistently. However you generate your numbers, always pay attention to your emotional and psychological wellbeing. You will find that perfect balance that allows you to make a great living while enjoying your life.
I could easily dictate twenty thousand words a day every day for rest of my life, except I also record a lot of training videos and podcast episodes every day. Even with dictation, I choose to generate less than twenty thousand words a day because I have diversified how I put out content. I am working on so many projects at the same time.
Understand your body, your voice, and the structure of your business, to put together your custom marathon plan. Everyone has a different mix of content they need to create. Find that balance, and you will fall in love with writing all over again.
I write every single day because I love writing.
189
The Yin and the Yang
You don't want to write so few words that you can't make a living from your writing, and you don't want to write so many words that you can't maintain it. That's the balance we seek.
It is the sweet spot of writing. You need free time to spend doing the things you love with the people you care about the most. Having these other activities in your life will help to maintain your writing energy.
You can spend your time going for walks, hitting the batting cages, going to the movies, or playing in the ocean like I do. Finding inspiration is just as important as the time you spend in front of the computer.
Having these other things in your life is good because they recharge you emotionally and help your body to recover. When I sit too long in my chair at my desk, my back can start to hurt.
Lately, the middle of my back gets tight if I'm in that chair for too long. Grabbing the dog and walking around helps my body to stay strong, to avoid pain, and to feel more relaxed and loose. Exercising helps my body to recover from the physical act of writing.
As much as we spend mental energy, we also expend physical energy writing. Investing in physical activities keeps our body in balance. When thinking about hobbies, I don't mean sitting on the couch watching television or in front of the computer on social media. The better your hobbies, the better your writing will become.
We have talked about ritual and habit a great deal. A writing habit is about more than just the time in front of the computer. When building out the structure of your day, include time to take care of your mind, body, and spirit. To be a great marathon writer, you must develop a lifestyle that allows it. If I don't get enough exercise or time with my family, my numbers start to plummet. The time I spend not writing is even more critical than the time I spend hammering away at a keyboard.
190
Action Steps
Find a hobby that brings creative energy and ideas into your life.
Find a physical activity that recharges your batteries and keeps you healthy.
Push yourself to the limit to find how many words you can write when you have to “redline.”
Pay attention to how books, movies and music affect your mood and your writing. Only listen to music that affects your writing when you need it.
Focus on going beyond the time you spend writing and create a lifestyle that you can maintain.
Part XX
The Power of Positive Reinforcement
Well, you know, a lot of people look at the negative things, the things that they did wrong and - which I do. But I like to stress on the things I did right, because there are certain things that I like to look at from a positive standpoint that are just positive reinforcement.
- Tiger Woods
191
Feel Good
When you buy a new car, you feel great for about three weeks. Buying a new house might last a little bit longer. But after a little while, any new purchase loses its luster. It becomes just another part of your life.
People become shopaholics because they are chasing that feeling you get right when you buy something. They need to feel that rush over and over again. It is very common in our culture; buyi
ng stuff makes us feel good.
I buy things online and get that good feeling, and it's already gone by the time it arrives in the mail. Things arrive that I don't remember ordering all the time. Where I live, it can take up to three months for the things I order to arrive. The "purchase rush" never lasts that long for me.
Today something showed up in the mail that I forgot I'd ordered because it has been more than three weeks. It was a high chair for my son. He's seven months old, and we've had him eating on our laps for so long that we finally decided we needed a high chair.
I felt good when I bought it, and I felt good when it arrived. Then I opened the box and saw the pieces it was in, and I didn't feel very good. Fortunately, my wife was able to assemble the entire thing on her own without relying on my "technical expertise." She was able to build it, and I was astounded.
I took one look at the pieces and said, "There's no way I can build this; it’s too complicated for me." She assembled that monster in about ten or fifteen minutes. It just goes to show we all have different strengths and weaknesses.
192
Christmas Eve
The anticipation of hitting a goal sometimes feels even better than actually hitting it. The size of the goal doesn't affect how we feel when we hit it. That feeling of euphoria lasts just as long, whether I've finished a chapter or an entire book.
Most people enjoy Christmas Eve far more than Christmas Day.
Once you open all your presents you start thinking about your birthday or next Christmas. The moment of excitement has peaked, and now it will only go down until the next time you have presents coming your way.
If you are constantly looking for outside affirmation, you will never be satisfied, like the kid always waiting for next Christmas. We enjoy the anticipation more than the moment after because once we've achieved the goal, there's nothing left. I very much struggled with this as an early writer. My first goal was to sell one book, to have a stranger buy it and read something that I wrote. Then I wanted to sell ten books, then one hundred.
You keep setting new goals to have something to chase. I would tell myself that once I hit a certain number of sales, I could finally be happy and call myself a real writer.
We set these goals, and most of us structure our happiness in an “if/then paradigm.” “If I do this then I can be happy!”
193
Writing Addiction
There are certain things that I've mentioned throughout this book that we're going to start bringing together in the final phases. I hope you can feel that if you've written books before, then it's very obvious the loops I'm closing as we move toward the end of this book.
When you write, and when you have a big goal, if you only have that one big goal at the end, such as wanting to lose one hundred pounds, you don't get to feel good until you’re at the very end. You only get to feel good once. But the effectiveness of big and small goals and how we feel is almost the same. We have the same chemical reaction whether we accomplish a big or small goal.
No matter how big the goal, the second you accomplish that goal your good feeling peaks and will only go down from there. Even if you win the Superbowl, that feeling of victory only lasts a little while, and then you begin to look for that next goal. Searching for a bigger "fix" is why adrenaline junkies are always trying more and more dangerous sports.
Breaking down your writing projects into small goals gives you constant rewards. You can work in a state of perpetual satisfaction as you hit goal after goal. Breaking down the writing process into tiny goals provides you with a steady flow of reward, satisfaction, and enjoyment.
With the 20K Tiny Goal Method, you will become addicted to writing. Every time I finish a little section in Scrivener, I hit a goal and get a little feeling of accomplishment. Instead of having to write thirty-five thousand words to have a sense of accomplishment, I get a feeling of accomplishment every three to five hundred words. I get a feeling of accomplishment every twenty to twenty-five minutes at most.
This means I'm in a constant state of feeling good.
194
Bar Example
Sometimes, it's hard to learn a principle if we are too close to the action. So let's look at a scenario other than writing to see this idea in action. Imagine a single man who desires to learn how to meet and interact with women.
Like all men, our imaginary character goes to a bar in the hope of finding true love and an amazing connection. He orders a drink, and as his gaze floats across the crowd, he sees someone incredible. For a second he thinks he saw an angel and he feels destiny calling. Not one to ignore fate's knock, he walks across the bar to talk to her.
He has never approached a woman in a bar before and has no idea how to speak to a stranger. Everything he knows comes from television and movies. But he's willing to give it the old college try. He does his best, and it goes pretty well at first. He talks to her for about thirty seconds before things fizzle out. Her interest starts to wane, and she decides to let him down gently. She tells him it was lovely to meet him, but unfortunately, she has a boyfriend.
This is the absolutely critical moment in this interaction. Please focus on this frozen second in time, because if you get this, it will change your life.
Your average man will walk back toward his friends with his tail between his legs, looking like he just got shot down. His friends will make fun of him and laugh at him. The will say things like, "Look at you, loser, you tried your best, and you totally failed. You're such a loser."
His friends, while they think that they're being funny, are creating a great deal of negative reinforcement. They are inserting a bad habit directly into his heart.
They are attaching a negative emotion to the effort of trying.
In reality, he didn't fail on any level. How could he possibly know when the woman is in a relationship? She certainly didn't say he was ugly or something horrible to him. She said he was a nice guy and gave an objective reason why the interaction couldn't proceed. Whether or not she has a boyfriend is irrelevant. We can only look at the facts and objectively nothing bad happened.
195
The Act of Trying
When we attach a negative emotion to the act of trying, failure becomes inevitable. Every single man who has a negative feeling and feels trepidation at the thought of walking up and talking to a woman will struggle for the rest of his life with this feeling. This applies in any area of your life. If you’re afraid of job interviews, you always struggle with them.
We can either be glass half full or glass half empty people, and the more we become glass half full people, the easier every single process in your life will become. I don't want you to focus on the long term goal you haven't accomplished yet.
I haven't finished writing this book yet. This book is an incomplete goal right now.
I could focus on that unfinished goal, and this is what most people do; we look at the goal we haven't achieved. But that forces me into a negative emotional state. The last thing you want to do is attach a negative emotion to the act of trying.
If we circle back and remember the difference between systemic and random failure, not hitting goals does not mean failure. It means we're learning. Whenever you have a random failure, whenever you have an incomplete goal, that's not a sign of failure; that is a sign of progress. You're climbing up the mountain. You're getting closer and closer.
196
Peer Pressure
Don't get caught up in the temptation to compare yourself to other people. This especially is dangerous in social media and some authors’ groups. It can become infectious when everyone starts comparing their word counts. When you have a bad day, it will be magnified by the group.
As much as it's good to have a group, you want to be aware of the danger. When you have a bad day, you feel bad, and you don't want to share it. You're afraid of other people seeing that you have a low word count today. Again, we are attaching a negative emotion to the act of trying.
We have t
o be vigilant about our emotional state. These little cracks are all that negative emotion needs to break into your heart. A few bad feelings when you are trying to improve, and you'll slowly move closer and closer to quitting.
Here's the crazy thing. Maybe before reading this book, your best day was three thousand words. And next week, you write five thousand seven hundred words in one day. And you feel bad about it because you didn't hit ten thousand words. Even with an improved daily word count, you can feel bad if you focus on what you didn't accomplish rather than what you did.
Letting in this negative mindset will kill you as a writer.
It's one of the reasons I don't heavily recommend joining writers' groups, as much as the positive reinforcement is good. I very much worry about the possibility of negative emotions creeping in when you compare yourself to others.
Whatever methods you use to build up your infrastructure, whether you use gamification or micro loops or any other method of keeping yourself motivated, you must attach a positive emotion to the act of trying.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 22
