I got one of those enjoyable firings.
When people tell me that I can't achieve something, it becomes my obsession. That was my motivation as I built my online business, and over the past seven years, I've made far more money than the boss who fired me will make in her entire lifetime.
I've shattered some incredible goals. People told me that I could never write a best-selling novel. Having written more than fifty, I've reached that goal so many times that it no longer interests me. I often don't even tell people that I'm a bestselling author because it's not exciting to me anymore. I've hit that goal, and when you hit a target a certain number of times, it's not very exciting to you anymore.
Now I have a new goal. My new mission is about the Serve No Master brand, these books, and everything, including all the free training on my website. All this content, it's all about one single goal, and that is to prove that I can replicate what I do in you.
People told me that I couldn't be a bestseller, then they said I couldn't teach other people to do it.
Challenge accepted.
My goal is to teach you to become a fast and successful writer. To prove that I can accomplish anything I say I can. To demonstrate that I'm not an exception and that it's not some genius part of me that makes me able to succeed with writing, but in fact it's a replicable system that I have developed and can impart to you.
Having worked in multiple markets and written books in so many different spaces with bestsellers across the spectrum, I have no doubt that if you follow my system and if you finish this book, you will achieve greatness.
It's strange when you reach that part of the book where you have to list all your great accomplishments. People get excited about who you are, and I'm not sure if I have to do that because you're already reading this book. You know who I am; I have written over one hundred books in the last several years.
I've made well into seven figures from my book writing. Books that I've written have grossed over $10 million. That includes direct response, and that includes books that have sold on Amazon. I think that's a whole lot of money.
I'm not the best writer in the world. There are plenty of writers who have sold more books and made more money than me; that's true. What matters to me and what I'm excited about is the ratio of time worked to money earned.
Right now I'm sitting on my little dock watching crabs play on the rocks and enjoying the sunshine and being in paradise. It's not just about what you do; it's how you do it.
I know plenty of writers who grind in a basement in a nightmare situation, writing and writing and writing. Is it worth it to make more money if you have to work that many hours? It doesn't sound very exciting to me.
When I think about your future, I want you to be someone who writes just 2 to 4 hours a day and spends the rest of their day with your children, with your family, with the ones you love or just having adventures.
At whatever phase you are in life, I want you to accomplish amazing things, and I want to hear about it. I love all the emails I get from people who read my books and visit my website and listen to my podcast. That's very exciting for me, and it means a lot to me that people reach out. I respond to every single email I get personally.
Every email starts with the writer wanting to see if I reply. I always get that same message, and I always reply myself. When we start having these amazing conversations, it's precious to me. I love connecting with people who have gained from what I share.
Together we're taking this incredible journey. I will not only help you to replicate some of my skills but also to develop the life you want. Not everybody wants to live on a tropical island like I do. It is very remote, and if you like five-star restaurants, you will hate it here. If you hate silence or love riding around in a car, this is the wrong island.
If you like movie theaters or batting cages or miniature golf, this is the wrong place for you, but if you like surfing, a low cost of living, stand-up paddling, and windsurfing then you might just find my life appealing.
All you need to build a writing career now is a smartphone and a microphone. You don't even need a laptop anymore; just get other people to edit your book.
I am going to show you some cool secrets. As you get a little farther into this book, I have some exciting things that I just I can't wait to share with you.
Part II
What’s This Book About?
My parents always taught me that my day job would never make me rich; it'd be my homework.
- Daymond John
14
Hitting Big Numbers
People message me all the time to ask questions about writing fast, keeping the story going, and deciding what to write about.
I get inundated by all of these different problems, and when people reach out to me about the same thing multiple times, that's a sign that it's an important topic to cover.
Rather than placing the same information in email after email, I decided to create this book to provide a single resource that I could point people to. An easy place to answer the most common questions that I receive.
This book is designed to meet you exactly where you need help.
Whether you're struggling with your character development or you're struggling with your dialogue, or just getting frozen in certain scenes in your fiction books. Maybe you just can't seem to create the arc that your nonfiction book needs to connect with the audience. Or you feel like you're missing a single step that is taking too long.
This book really can help you to accomplish several important things. I want to help you increase your writing speed, and I want to help you increase your endurance. I'm going to help improve your book production process.
This book goes perfectly hand in hand with Breaking Orbit, but here, we are going to go much deeper into the writing process. Breaking Orbit goes into great detail about researching and launching your book and how to outline. It covers the entire book development process.
Rather than get bogged down trying to cover the same ground again, we are going to focus on one core principle here: speed. Being able to write fast is wonderful. Writing faster means writing more words per hour, but also developing greater endurance to generate more words per day, developing the ability to write for longer sessions.
What good is writing five thousand words an hour if you get burned out after thirty minutes?
Words per hour become an artificial number if you aren't writing for multiple hours every single day. We are going to work together to create something that is sustainable. New writers often make the mistake of pushing themselves too hard and burning themselves out.
There's a moment when you're writing and when you just feel a sense of exhaustion. For me, when I'm in a massive session (sometimes that number is ten or twenty thousand words), I suddenly notice the quality of what I'm writing diminishes. I can feel the quality going down and the mistakes going up. I'm very tempted to push, especially if I'm at seventeen thousand words.
I always want to have a twenty-thousand-word day, but when you push too hard, you hurt yourself the next day. Because the next day you can't recover as quickly. You are tired and worn out. If you become overtired or you over push yourself too far and burn out, then your quality of work the next day goes down.
Suddenly you can only write half as long the next day.
You must develop a pace that is maintainable. As much as writing is about small sprints, it's also about marathons, writing large blocks of words every day. When you have these structures in place and have the ability to write a large number of words per hour and a goodly number of words per day, you know what you're capable of. That helps you plan out your projects much, much more efficiently.
Now I don't spend entire days writing very often. I like to spend part of the day writing and part of the day working on other projects. While dictating this book, I'm also working on several other projects at the same time. I don't want to spend eight hours a day writing.
I don't know if it will take
me even eight hours to dictate this entire book (It didn't. It only took seven hours and thirty-six minutes.), but I'm going to dictate this book in one-hour blocks. Each section I record is a different audio file. And each dictation session is roughly forty to sixty minutes.
I don't know how long this entire process will take, and dictating a book is an entirely new system for me. I'm learning how much I can handle. I do know that if I dictate for too long, I will damage my voice and hurt my throat. And if that happens, I won't be able to perform for several days.
I've created many, many video products, and when creating video products using my previous workflow, I would spend three or four days recording videos and just push, push, push. In the end, I would almost always get sick. What good is it to get everything done in three days if you can't do anything for the next two weeks?
Many of the stories and the lessons in this guide come from my personal experiences and not just opinion and speculation.
I've been down each of these roads and as much as I have written a lot of words, I've also recorded a lot of words. I record five podcast episodes every week. I've recorded many, many hours of video. At the same time as I'm recording this, I'm also recording a video product, so my voice is getting some serious exercise.
The ability to write fast, capacity to write for longer spaces of time and knowing your endurance limits, puts you in control of your destiny and can unlock the ability to make a living from your writing.
15
This Book Has Homework?
You’ll notice that this book is loaded with little sections called “Action Steps.” These steps weren’t actually my idea. One of my wonderful Tribe members came up with the idea when he read an early draft of the book. They are exercises that he devised for himself after reading each section.
Less than a week after reading the rough draft of this book, he has nearly written twenty thousand words and finished his first book. The exercises are really working for him and I’m excited to share them with you.
One of the best things you can do is take some notes in a special notebook while you go through this book. There will be loads of information that you simply absorb, but there will also be a few gems that you really want to latch on to. I keep two notebooks with me at all times to store ideas and plan out all my projects. Feel free save the action steps in your notebook. And yes, I know that some of the action steps are just really good notes. They are still worth saving!
There are often questions in the action steps as well. Don’t just copy them into your notebook; write down your answers.
16
Action Steps
Remember: Our goal is to write books fast that sell.
Write daily. Even if you only write five minutes a day, you are establishing a powerful habit.
Part III
The First Dictation
Do not be embarrassed by your failures, learn from them and start again.
- Richard Branson
17
The Sport of Writing
The real key to success with any project, but especially with writing, is your foundation.
There is this dreaded moment every author faces, where we are sitting in front of a blank page. We can’t think of what to do. You get hit with this massive hammer of writer's block, and it's the worst feeling in the world because you're sitting there not doing anything and, like any negative emotion, writer's block becomes stronger the more you think about it.
It's the same thing that happens to professional athletes when they get into a slump; a baseball player has a couple of bad at-bats, and people start to notice. They strike out five times in a row, and suddenly people start saying, “slump.” When you hear that word, it becomes a reality.
We manifest reality because we have the ability to affect ourselves. We start to hear people say “slump” and start to think that maybe I am in a slump now. It gets worse and worse. The condition continues to get worse and worse because an aberration became something we thought was real and we started getting more and more worried about it.
This is what happens when you mix up random error with systemic error.
18
A Little Caveat
If the tone of this book seems a little bit familiar, it's because I'm speaking rather than writing, and I do speak and write a little bit differently.
When I go to the final edits, I'll try to change the tone of it, but I want you to get that feeling; to see what it feels like to read a dictated book.
Dictating and transcribing this book is a real process, and it's something different for me. Writing this book is an adventure for me, just as reading it is an adventure for you.
19
CRITICAL LESSON - The Two Types of Errors
Random error is when you run into a series of different problems. A systemic error is when you run into the exact same problem over and over again.
20
Random Errors
Often we blame random errors on an act of God or the universe. If you write several books and the first book has a ton of spelling problems, the second book has something wrong with the cover, and the third book no one wants to give a positive review, you start to think the universe is against you. You say that you're cursed, but in reality, you are showing signs of improvement as a writer because each time you have a different problem.
When you have a mistake you learn from, and you don't repeat it, you move up the mountain from good to great.
The ability to understand that some problems are random and to learn from them guarantees you will become successful.
When we turn that random error of "I can't think of anything to write about today" into a big problem called writer's block, we treat it like a systemic problem.
The way to conquer systemic problems is to isolate the cause and eradicate them at the root.
21
Research Kills Writer's Block
The best way to avoid writer's block is never to let it happen in the first place. I've never sat in front my computer and stared at a blank page for hours. It's never happened to me, not because I’m a great writer, but because I'm an excellent researcher.
The foundation of a successful book, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, a cookbook or whatever, is preparation. For every hour you spend researching, you can shave as many as ten hours from your writing process. This entire book was outlined to death long before I started recording the first word.
A phenomenal amount of research went into this book. I went and looked at how other people write fast and how other people talk about writing to see other people's approaches. To look for other ideas that are different from my method because there are many different ways to learn to do everything. There are loads of martial arts you can learn, but in the end, they all teach you the same thing: how to fight.
There are a lot of different ways to write fast, but I'm sharing with you the technique that works for me and the method that will work for you. It all starts with a sturdy foundation.
Some people approach writing fiction with no plan and write by the seat of their pants. They write with no outline. Some people are very successful using this method. They are the minority, but they exist. As with anything, there's always someone who can do something different.
Some people are double-jointed, and some people can speak twenty languages, but it doesn't mean that anyone can learn to do it. I would never write a book without an outline.
It's impossible for me to do and it's certainly impossible to do it fast. Your brain has two modes: there is the mode where you are absorbing information and the mode where you are pushing information out. Research is an absorbing phase and writing is a pushing-out phase; you're taking the content and the ideas from within your body and putting them out.
When you research and try to think of ideas on the fly, you keep switching back and forth between these modes, and it's not a quick transition. You lose massive amounts of time to this inefficiency.
I can write a th
ousand words in two hours if I'm researching at the same time. Doing both at the same time slows down my research, and it slows down how fast I write. It ruins both sides of the equation. Before we go any farther, if there's one thing you take away from this book, if you are one those people that is only going to read this far then quit - I ask you, I beg you to understand and to take home the importance of outlining and deep research before you start writing.
Proper research and outlining will change everything for you. It will be a game changer even if you're already doing well as a writer; you will become significantly faster.
22
Weird Kid or Visionary?
One of the categories I'm dabbling in is adult coloring books. I find coloring books very fascinating because I was ahead of this particular trend. When I was in high school, I was a very stressed out teenager. I was very stressed out dealing with the PSAT, the SAT, the ACT, and the SAT II. All these tests, getting into the right college, finding the right scholarship and being able to afford college.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 3