It is very hard for me to tell you to start the habit of writing twenty thousand words a day now. That’s a big goal, and it requires a big habit. Even telling you to write two-hour blocks at a time might overwhelm you. Large goals require large habits, and those are overwhelming.
The secret to large habits is the same as the secret to writing a large book; break it down into smaller pieces. Small habits stack into large habits. And the best way to build those small critical habits is to wrap them in a ritual.
If you start every writing session with a cup of tea at the same time, if you regulate what time you eat during the day, if you control what time you start and finish each task, you begin to create a ritual. You can call it habit stacking if you prefer that term, but to me, a collection of habits is a ritual.
Put together a series of actions that you repeat around every writing session. These small tasks will build the emotional infrastructure that you need to build your new habit. You don’t build a new skyscraper without scaffolding. We need a support structure in place.
Sitting on this dock is a new habit for me. To support this writing habit, I must complete a series of preparatory steps. Those steps are now my ritual. And before the ritual, I need to get the tools in place. My iPad mini and iPhone need to be fully charged so that I have enough time to complete my tasks. I need my outline prepared in advance. These tasks are not part of the actual ritual, but they are preparation for the ritual.
Last night when I finished recording, I realized that I completely wanted to change how I was going to organize this section, so I had to go and move my new mind map from my computer to the iPad. I am looking at that very mind map right now. I prepared my mind map last night so that I could perform my ritual and then write this section today. There are preparation steps that go before any good ritual.
In the same way that we clean the goblet, clean the linen, and lay out all the other tools for a religious ritual, we will get all of your ritual pieces prepared in advance.
Before we think about having a ritual, we must prepare our tools. Complete your outline, have it in a usable format and complete all of your research. These steps need to be completed, or your writing session is destined to fail.
I’m in the middle of writing this book, but my first outline for the next book is already complete. I like to stay one book ahead with my preparation. I have also already started development of the book covers for my next two books. Doing these steps in advance ensures that lack of preparation never kills a writing session.
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Design Your Ritual
Begin to create a ritual that you perform before each writing session. The exact nature of the ritual doesn’t matter. It’s the act of performing a series of steps in a very particular pattern.
I’ve been teaching about ritual for a long time, and today I’m going to share something very special with you. We’ve been talking about writing so much. Now I’m going to give you an example from back in my single days, way back in my twenties before I had a wife and any children.
Like many guys, I wanted to talk to women when I went out at night, but I was horribly terrified. I built this ritual to help me overcome my fear and develop a positive habit. I would get in the zone and finally feel comfortable enough to talk to women. This ritual is one of the reasons my kids exist now, so I think it worked out pretty well.
One quick warning: my ritual did include listening to Nickelback music. If that makes you feel ill, then you might need to skip this section. ;) For your convenience, this story will be told in the present tense.
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My Dating Ritual
This is the exact routine that I like to perform every night before I go out with the intention of meeting beautiful women.
I take a shower and blast trance in the background. It’s my favorite type of music, and I have been a DJ for a decade now. It always makes me feel good, and I am creating a positive state. The music helps me to get into the zone.
Every step of the way I am doing what I like, and I don’t care what other people like. I am focused on completing my ritual to perfection; once I start my ritual, nothing else matters.
I get dressed and do my hair in a different order depending on the type of place I’m going. If I am wearing a t-shirt, then I have to put that on before I do my hair. If I am wearing a button-down shirt and a skinny tie, then I do my hair first.
I turn the music up and fire up my hair dryer. I need to be able to hear the music even when I’m heating up my hair.
Once I am completely dressed, I lay out every bracelet, watch, tie, ring, and necklace that I own. Then I pick out which ones make me the most excited tonight. I buy most of my stuff off of Etsy, and so everything has a personal story to it.
Now it’s time to bring other people into my ritual. I like to go out with a group of two to three other guys. Any more than that and you run the risk of talking to each other in a circle all night and not meeting anybody new. I like to go out with other single guys who are in alignment with me. Because we want to accomplish the same goal, we can follow the same ritual. I only bring guys that I enjoy being out with me. I want to feel really good about myself at every step of this process.
On the way to the venue, I listen to the same music every single time. Because I have had so many good times out, it gets me into that mood. It’s like every time I listen to these songs, good things happen. I am taking advantage of the way my brain functions.
What do I listen to? I rock out to Nickelback – big time. Now I know you might be groaning right now, but that’s because you are listening to the wrong Nickelback songs. They have about five songs I like that talk about getting drunk, having fun, and partying. All things that I enjoy. So it puts me in a kind of let's-rock-this-party-to-the-ground mood.
If you are in the car with me and you HATE Nickelback, you will still be rocking out. I get so excited that it’s infectious. I then spend the car ride talking about how we are going to have so much fun, and tonight is going to be awesome. When I was in London, I would rock out my music on my headphones and dance on the subway. It’s about me getting into the zone and living in the moment.
When I walk into any bar or club, I walk in with authority. I am still in the middle of my ritual, and I am completely focused on working my way through each task correctly. I don’t look around for cute girls or to see if there are better-looking guys than me there. I am so focused on my ritual that I often get into bars and clubs without paying the cover. From the outside, it looks like I have so much authority that people respond to it.
I then walk straight to the bar and order my first drink. I always order the same drink. This is my personal buffer time. During this one drink, I don’t talk to women. Even if a girl starts a conversation with me, I usually disengage. This is my personal time, and it is sacrosanct. During this time I like to let the cares of the world drift away. I don’t want to be thinking about work or money or family stuff. I just let that float away and have my own time to just be.
After my first drink I walk around and see what’s going on. I look to see if any of my other friends are around and if I see an interesting woman, I immediately start talking to her.
At this point, the ritual has ended, and I’ve started talking to a woman before my anxiety can rear its ugly head. The entire purpose of this ritual is to overcome my crushing fear of talking to women.
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Build Your Ritual
I hope you focused on the intricacy of my ritual more than anything else. Most people get ready to go out, but that isn’t enough for me. Having a powerful ritual gave me the confidence to meet and marry my beautiful wife. Now let’s get back to writing.
When your ritual is specific and strict, it becomes very powerful. My ritual even involved listening to the same songs over and over. Now, I write in such large sessions that my ritual covers the entire day. But for now, start with a small pre-writing ritual.
If you already created your ritual back dur
ing the section on getting into the zone, wonderful! If not, now you have a second chance to use this technique to build powerful habits.
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Action Steps
Memorize the two types of failure.
Analyze the barriers that have kept you from hitting your writing targets in the past.
Have you blamed your failures on third parties? Has this limited your ability to change your destiny?
Apply the “The Sudoku Mom Gun Test” to each of your past excuses and see if it really is beyond your ability to turn things around.
Look for the causes of failures in your own habits and isolate each one.
Build a writing ritual and be very strict about it.
Part XVII
Breaking Bad
Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.
- Mario Andretti
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Stop and Go Systems
Within your brain, your habits are controlled by two primary systems; one system forms habits and the other stops them. Your brain is designed to create maximum efficiency, so your habit-formation system is far stronger than your habit-stopping system.
This weak system explains why so many people are trapped in bad habits. Smokers can't quit, and the overweight can't seem to stop eating the foods that are killing them. Stopping cold turkey is a nightmare.
Understanding that the habit-formation system is more powerful leads to an elegant solution: instead of stopping bad habits, we simply replace them with good ones.
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Brain Macros
Your brain uses habits to store shortcuts just like your computer does. On the computer, these shortcuts are called macros. You push one button, and the computer takes several actions.
If you’re an advanced user of programs like Excel, or if you do very advanced computer programming, you're probably familiar with macros. Even if you just play a lot of video games, you probably know what I’m talking about. Just hit a button and five things happen in a row. A macro is how you train the computer to do a bunch of things in a sequence to save you time.
Your brain forms habits to create similar shortcuts. This habit-formation system is designed to decrease how much of the day you spend thinking about things that don't matter. Breathing is a habit. Your heartbeat is also a habit. We don't have the ability to control our heartbeats, but you do have some ability to control your breathing. As we move higher up the function tree, we have more control over our habits.
Have you ever thought about the way you walk? Or have you ever seen someone who runs funny?
My son is learning to walk right now, and every single part of the process requires his absolute focus. A loud noise or an odd smell is more than enough to make him topple over. He hasn’t turned walking into a habit yet. But as adults, we never think about how we walk or consider the possibility of changing this pattern.
If you read as many spy novels as I do, you know one of the easiest ways to identify people is the way they walk. Everyone's walk is unique. Super spies change the way they walk to avoid detection. When they focus directly on this habit that most people take for granted, they can alter it. They don't do this by simply stopping the way they used to walk, because that would never work. Instead, they replace their old walking rhythm with a new one.
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Stopping Addiction
Starting and forming habits is a lot easier than quitting them. Learning to smoke only takes a few minutes, but quitting takes some people decades. As someone who had a serious smoking problem, I have been down that road myself. I quit smoking in a single day four years ago by activating my habit-formation system rather than using the quitting system.
Believe me, I know the siren song of powerful addiction and powerful habits that are hard to stop. If you only depend upon your habit-stopping system, you will fail every time.
Your habit-stopping system is very weak and is powered by your ability to focus. If the only thing you're thinking about is quitting smoking twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the habit-stopping system will work. But if you become stressed, if you become distracted by anything else, then the system will fail. Its great weakness is that your habit-stopping system only works when you actively think about it.
The solution to this age-old conundrum is habit replacement. We want to take bad habits and replace them with good ones.
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Infrastructure
This process begins with building up the correct infrastructure. Depending on your situation, you will be dealing with different distractions and bad habits.
For every habit, there is a distraction that keeps us from achieving success. Perhaps you can’t hit your daily workout goal. Maybe you are always late for work. Maybe you just watch way too much television. Whatever your habit problem, it can be fixed by focusing on infrastructure first.
When I was in high school, I stopped watching television altogether. I ran this experiment on myself when I was a senior. I had a revelation that television is a mind suck because there is no beginning and no end. You can sit in front of the television all day, every day and be entertained and distracted forever. As someone who was watching six hours or more a day, I couldn’t just flip the off switch. The cravings would still be there haunting me.
This was long before there were DVRs. So I switched from watching television to watching DVDs. I signed up for Netflix and would only watch them on my television. Some people look at this and can’t see the difference. But I created several infrastructure gates to limit my wasted time. First, movies have a beginning and an end. When the movie is over, you have to walk up to the machine, take the old movie out, put a new video in and press play. You must actively decide to watch more. Additionally, starting a new movie is a commitment to stay still for at least ninety minutes. Instead of losing eight hours a day, in short, thirty-minute blocks, I had to actively decide if I wanted to spend another two hours watching a movie.
The second gate comes from Netflix itself. At any given time, I could only have two movies in my house. I didn’t have six hours of mindless entertainment available. These barriers are how you can begin to establish habit-altering infrastructure.
Before I changed, I would come home from school at three and easily watch television until midnight. That’s nine hours a day that I was losing, all because television makes it so easy; that’s horrifying.
The more infrastructure we can place between you and the bad habit, the better. If you are watching TV when you should be working, then we can slowly replace that habit with better habits. The first is to move away from watching live television. There is nothing worse than watching television live. You are spending 20-35% of your time just watching commercials. That’s not entertaining!
The first step is to switch from watching live to watching recorded versions of your shows. Just waiting to watch a show until right after it has ended will recapture precious minutes of your life.
The average thirty-minute television show only contains twenty-two to twenty-four minutes of content. Think about how much time you spend not watching the show you want to watch. This ratio of show to commercial is getting worse all the time, and pretty soon you will watch more commercials than you do television shows. What a waste of time!
The path to success is replacement. Replace your live habit with recorded versions. That’s the first replacement, and you get back a good twenty-five percent of that wasted time. This is a much easier first step to implement. The second advantage to watching recorded shows is that you have to actively decide to watch each show by clicking that button on your remote. We are turning your passive bad habit into an active one. We are building some great infrastructure.
There are plenty of people who would tell you that you need to quit television cold turkey. That you need to unplug everything or throw out your television. Those are the s
ame people that preach about going on a new magic diet and losing all of the weight in a month.
It's great in theory, but it never works.
I'm not interested in advice that sounds good but fails. I've written a lot of products in the personal development niche. I’ve made a lot of changes to my life and helped others because I understand that this habit change process is effective. If I try to force massive change into your life, you are more likely to fail. That’s not my approach. I care about how fast you are writing a year from now; that is how I will measure my success.
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Focus Tools
When it comes to focusing on your computer, there are tons of tools out there designed to help you. There are always new pieces of software designed to help you focus and avoid distraction. I have posted a few links to the ones that I like on my 20K page, but I don’t use any of them. I’m not a big believer in recommending stuff that I don’t use, so I’m just providing some reference.
Some tools block the Internet, turn off certain programs or turn off everything on your computer except for a word processor. Some are time-based, and some are goal-based, so you can’t close the program until you hit your word count goal.
20K a Day: How to Launch More Books and Make More Money Page 19