The more you write and the more hours you put in, the more success you can find. There is no other way to learn writing than actually to do it. You can read five books about swimming, but unless you get in the water you are not going to know what to do.
My daughter is four years old, and she has been swimming for more than half her life. She is always trained to expect and wear a life jacket on the open ocean. We are very serious about water safety, but what good is a life jacket if she doesn't trust and understand it?
To see if she can handle a real emergency, we sometimes throw her into the middle of the pool. It's a controlled situation, but she is still surprised. As someone who watched a fellow student drown in front of me in college, I take swimming safety extremely seriously.
Do you want the first time your child tries to swim to be in a real emergency?
Writing is the same. You can read, study, and write stories just for yourself, but until you start writing something that you want to release into the world, that fear isn't there. That real experience is where your iron will get forged.
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Zoning Out Distractions
There are other things you can do to improve the quality and speed of your writing. I read a book every single day, and this helps me to think in words instead of just sounds. Reading is just one tool on the path to becoming a great writer, but alone it is not enough. Being able to read does not make me able to write well. Does watching football on television turn you into an athlete?
Another big part of writing is getting into the zone, and people give different names to this feeling. Sometimes people will talk about the runner's high; however, I've never run far enough to experience it for myself. The zone for me is where you’re writing, and you lose track of time, and you look back and realize that you just wrote five thousand words in the last thirty or sixty minutes.
It is this incredible state of being where you're writing fast, and you're totally in the zone with your book, and you're not thinking about other things. We constantly face distraction, and it's especially easy to get distracted as a writer. You are working for yourself, and there isn't anybody to check on your work or scold you for slacking off.
You can fire up the television, or you can watch a movie. You can play with your kids or just play video games. You can jump over to any website you want. One click of the mouse and you're watching videos online.
There are so many distractions, but when you get into the zone you lose the desire to interact with them, and you forget that they're there.
It's the same thing when you drive home from work, and you get home, but you don't remember the journey. You got the job done without realizing it.
Writing in the zone is precious because it's just this amazing feeling when you accomplish so much. It's amazing what you can accomplish without it being hard. The beginning of any new project is the most difficult part for me. The first few pages of a new book are where I always struggle and face the biggest desire to procrastinate.
Writing the first thousand or two thousand words, I feel like I'm fighting against myself. But then you hit that spot you are in the zone, and it becomes easy.
You're going to learn by the end of this book how to get into the zone every time you have a writing session.
(Editing Note - Yesterday, I was editing the first session of this book, and I just couldn't get into the zone. But in three hours I still edited and rewrote over seven thousand words. That was OUT of the zone. This is the kind of speed you can look forward to when you complete the 20K system.)
Writing doesn't need to be hard, and great writing doesn't need to be challenging. With the zone, you can do it in a way that's enjoyable.
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Short Goals
The final reason to speed up your writing is to bring the goal or destination closer to you. Many people set a huge goal for their first book of ninety or two hundred thousand words. They have these massive goals because they want to write books in categories that demand great length.
When your goal is to write a one-hundred-thousand-word book, and you are only writing one hundred words a day, you are nearly three years away from hitting that goal.
It's very hard for us as humans to take the long view. We're very much a short-sighted people. Short-sightedness is why we are all overweight, why people smoke, and why we make so many other poor short-term decisions.
We are defined as a people and as a culture by the poor choices we make. Unfortunately, we spend our later years suffering from the poor decisions of our youth.
This short-sightedness applies to writing just as much as anything else. When the finish line for your book is months away, it's hard to stay the course; it's simply too far away.
I love writing, but I hate running. The thought of running a marathon is a nightmare to me because it takes so long. I don't have the patience for that.
The thought of running for four hours straight (and let's be honest, if I ran a marathon it would be closer to eight hours) is a nightmare to me because it's so far away. But I can run for 20 minutes no problem because that's an achievable goal. I could do a 5K in a pinch. I wouldn't be very fast, and I would certainly struggle because running is not one of the sports I do very often.
I would much rather do anything in the water like swim, kayak, paddle, surf, or windsurf. These are things I do more often. I enjoy those sports.
A closer goal is achievable, but when you have a goal that is two years away, the odds of hitting it trend toward zero. We struggle with goals that are far away in every area of life. I don't like far-away goals; I prefer my goals to be right in front of my face.
I wrote ninety-three thousand words for Serve No Master in four days. Breaking Orbit is just over forty-one thousand words, and I wrote that casually over the course of three days and a quick little morning session.
I spent most of those days working on other projects just like I am while writing this book. I'm only spending one to two hours a day recording, and this book will be written in less than a week.
When the finish line is close, achieving total focus is achievable. How many times have people told you that they operate well under pressure? That they do better with deadlines?
They are expressing this critical core concept. Humans respond to clear and visible goals. If you want to finish your book, then you need to be able to feel the finish line in your very bones.
If you can start a book on Monday and finish by Friday, that's a very achievable and manageable task. Suddenly your work output becomes predictable. You can plan for the future and organize your writing schedule. Anyone can handle five days of writing. That's a goal that doesn't feel overwhelming. Instead, it feels accomplishable, and that's what we want.
We want a goal that you feel like you can reach because then you'll reach it. When a goal seems very far away, when the goal feels like it's going to take weeks and weeks or months or even years to reach, we lose the course.
It's challenging for us to maintain focus for that long. We start to feel overwhelmed; that far-away goal is too daunting. For some of my coaching clients, their biggest struggle is that they feel like they're never going to hit the finish line. They have been struggling for so long that the goal doesn't feel real.
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Man on the Moon
There is only one reason that America put a man on the moon in the 1960s. President Kennedy stood in Rice Stadium in 1962 and said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade."
This one line from a phenomenal speech changed everything. He set a goal in a workable timeframe.
Let's be real with each other for a moment. Do you think we will send a ship to Mars in the next ten years? Do you feel like we will colonize another planet in your lifetime?
Nope. Me neither.
People have been talking about Mars my entire life, but nobody thinks it will happen in our lifetimes. The goal is too far away. But if the president stood in front of the world and said we would have men on Mars wit
hin ten years, everything would change.
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The Doldrums
With goals, time frame is everything.
When one of my coaching clients has been working on a book for six, twelve or even eighteen months, they reach this moment where they suddenly feel this sense of terror. This sense of impending doom becomes overwhelming. When we are close to the finish line on a project that took too long, we start to think that it's never going to happen and just decide to quit when we are so close to hitting that goal.
This destroys so many writers. It destroys many entrepreneurs as well. We get to that point, and we are so close to crossing the finish line, but we lose heart, and we give up.
We decide that this is never going to work anyways and we procrastinate more and more. We fail to release the book, or we fail to finish the book. Or we fail to write the final chapter. For everyone, it's a different moment in the process.
For some people, the investment becomes emotional. When you spend three years writing a book, you are so emotionally connected to it that the thought of rejection becomes overwhelming. There is nothing worse than finding out you wasted three years of your life. Better to never release the book and never risk that rejection.
We get stuck in a moment that we hate. Everyone has a part of the writing process that they hate the most. I love researching and writing, but I dread editing. The editing process is where I get bogged down. I will write a book in just a few days, but editing takes me two to four times longer depending on the project.
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The Editors Curse
Getting in the zone for editing is a nightmare for me. It's where the temptation to procrastinate or work on another project rears its ugly little head. Fortunately, I have been massively improving my editing process, and I am going to show you some great stuff later in the book to speed that part up.
Because I hate editing so much, I've gotten very good at it. It doesn't take nearly as long as it did six months ago. I'm editing a lot faster, but I still don't love it. It's still my least favorite part, and it still usually takes me longer to edit than to write.
Writing is a creative process, and I love creating content. My passion has become my career. But editing uses the logical and analytical part of your brain. It feels like I'm stuck back in school.
With this book, my decision to dictate rather than write by hand means that my editing process will be more extensive. There are a lot more challenges when turning spoken words into written words. I know that editing a dictation is harder.
Right now I'm sitting on my little dock enjoying life and dictating this book. I'm deep in paradise, but when it's time to edit, my taxes come due. I will pay for all this freedom with longer and tougher editing sessions.
(I was right. Editing a dictation is much harder than any of my previous books.)
With dictation, there are many unique problems. Sometimes I say the wrongs words or the dictation software makes a mistake. I use overly familiar language or spew run-on sentences.
There is a trade-off between dictating and editing, and I'm very interested to see what that experience is like.
Now you know upfront that I don't like editing. That's why I worked to speed up my editing process just as I worked to speed up my writing process. By the end of this book, you will know how to do both so you can feel closer to your goal. You can accomplish more and have a better sense of what you can do as a writer. This will give you more confidence and allow you to make more money and build a real business around your writing.
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Action Steps
Know your end goal.
Why do you want to write faster?
What are the biggest distractions when you want to write?
Establish a strategy to master your distractions one by one.
Sit down for a session and write for as long as it takes to get into the writing “zone.”
Break your big goals down into smaller goals.
Part VI
The 20K a Day Tracking System
This search for what you want is like tracking something that doesn't want to be tracked. It takes time to get a dance right, to create something memorable.
- Fred Astaire
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You MUST track your progress
Tracking your progress is absolutely, unequivocally the most important step in the 20K Writing System.
You must track your progress with any venture or project. With anything you're working on, tracking is the key element. If you're trying to lose weight and you never step on the scale, you have no idea if you're doing well.
Would you go to work every day if you didn't know what you would get paid until the end of the month?
We need these markers to help us achieve success. We need a tracking system that allows us to measure our goals. If you don't track how many words you write and just go by feeling, you will fail this process. Because, for instance, you will not know if you go from 2000 words to 2500 words a day. You won’t recognize your significant improvement. If you're not tracking your progress, you won't realize you are 25% faster. You will feel like this process has failed and you haven't accomplished anything.
Study after study shows that without tracking our minds forget where we started. We'll feel a sense of accomplishment, but then we'll forget our progress. We are very bad at remembering what we've done.
In looking back at the past, you don't remember how well you did a week ago.
How do you know if you're doing better today without a written record? You can see this principle in action every day in every gym in the world.
When you go to the gym and lift weights, if you don't write down how much weight you lifted last week, you won't remember just a few days later. The problem is that the action is so repetitive. Your brain isn't going to store a memory that looks just like every other memory you have of the gym.
You are repeating the same memory over and over again; you're pushing that bar above the bench press over and over and over again. You're working so hard and pushing that bar with all that weight, but if you do it three times a week how can you remember what you did seventeen sessions ago?
We don't have perfect memory. This process of writing fast is objective. It's all about the numbers. Feeling just doesn't matter. Without deep statistics and consistent tracking, you won't notice when you are having problems.
Everyone writes in a different way; some of us are good at writing in the morning, and some are good at writing in the evening. Some people can write for an hour straight, but then they need a break for thirty minutes.
Some people can write for five hours straight without needing a break. Some of us can easily write five days a week but falter when we try to do seven.
We need to find your writing sweet spot, and only with hard data can we find it. You may discover that you like writing in the morning, but you write ten percent faster in the evening. This information is crucial to planning your writing strategy.
I do a lot of tracking with writing locations, and I regularly experiment on myself. Last year, I had a little office about two hundred meters from my house. It was this little concrete box with soundproof walls that I could use to record lots of videos and my other audio work with ease. I was cranking out these massive work sessions and getting into the zone was a breeze.
But then I noticed that I was spending twelve-hour days in my little bunker. We are living in paradise, and I was spending my days in an office without a window.
Now I work out of my bedroom. I realized that I was very efficient, but I would rather give up 10 to 15% of my efficiency to be near my children all day. Most of the time when I'm writing, at least one of my kids is in the room with me, and I love that. I'll put on my headphones while my daughter watches a movie right next to me. She watches a movie or plays with Play-Doh at her little desk next to mine.
I have my music on so I can stay in the zone. I don't get distracted by her. I'm still working hard, but at least we're
together. I like being in the presence my children, and it's very enjoyable for me.
As a child, one of my great regrets was that I didn't get to spend enough time with my father. He had to work a full-time job, and he worked for himself. He was building a business just like I am, which meant that he would put in twelve- to fourteen-hour days, seven days a week during my childhood. He built his business just the way I have built my own, and I want to achieve the same success, but I'd rather do it from home.
I would rather be a little bit less efficient in exchange for more time with my family. I made the decision to give up 10 to 15 percent of my efficiency to spend more time with my kids. That does mean more interruptions and more sounds of a dog barking in the background of some my recordings that I have to try to edit out later. It does mean I have some extra challenges that I must overcome.
I have to deal with little distractions and noises that mess up some my projects and force me to redo some things. That's the trade-off I made because I know my statistics. I know what it's worth at this ratio, but if working from home decreased my efficiency 60 or 70 percent then I wouldn't do it. It would be too much of a hit to my revenue.
Possessing hard data allows me to track things. For this project, we're on this adventure together. Learning to write faster is not artistic. The 20K System is not about your creativity; this is the other part of writing. This system focuses on the scientific part of writing.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 5