Three things I learned writing my first book

In March this year I published, Problem Hunter.

Writing a book I found is like solving a puzzle that has a thousand problems you discover, one after the other.

Standing back from the experience, these are three key learnings that helped make solving this challenge a whole lot easier.

1. Mindset needs daily maintenance

Eighteen months planning and twelve months writing. Six drafts. Over 400,000 words written to get 70,000 I was happy with. A written word efficiency rate of 17%.

Early on, chapter rewrites and deletions felt a lot like stinging failures because they set me back from where I wanted to be, and where I thought I should be.

Writing progressively became a burden because I had the mindset that it should be easier than it was.

That the right words should flow with relative ease. A belief peddled by self publishing promotors that I bought into…because I wanted to believe it.

After three months of this I noticed the pattern, and decided to break it.

I reframed the task of writing to be: “Each word has either a purpose or a place.”

That way, when there were rewrites, my belief was removing words just helped discover or make way for the right ones that needed to be included. Nothing was wasted.

I had to learn to resist the temptation to descend into self punishment by reframing each rewrite as a diversion not a defeat. Each dead end just gave me data that helped me inch closer to completion.

This mindset shift opened the doors to let my creativity flow freely because I didn’t judge the words that first came out if they didn’t fit perfectly.

Up until this point I didn’t have a daily practice of reflecting on my progress to see what was working and what could be improved. So it took longer to catch the pattern and correct it.

After this, each morning I asked myself three questions: “what did I do well, what did I learn and what could I do better?”

Micro adjustments then became routine, kept me on track and allowed progress to flow much faster.

2. Goals beat expectations

Goals are important because they provide direction and a measure of progress. We need them to maintain control over our focus and actions.

However, when goals switch over to expectations, they add a heavy burden that makes progress much harder when you’re pursuing big challenges.

When I started writing I created a wall chart and measured my daily writing output on a graph. The goal was to have a 70,000 word book written in three months.

This goal quickly turned into an expectation because of the tight timeline, and the way I chose to measure progress.

But, I hadn’t written a book like this before so had to learn the skill of writing as well as confront a long held limiting belief that writing wasn’t my skillset. I came close to failing Year 12 English and in the back of my mind still carried this heavy burden.

Each day that passed where I didn’t hit my daily writing target of 2,000 quality words, added a measure of anxiety and pressure that accumulated. It had no outlet other than to be carried.

What I learned was goals held as expectations create rigidity in thinking and stifle learning. Which isn’t great when learning new skills and confronting limiting beliefs are essential for success.

Borrowing from Andy Warhol, I decided to do the opposite to create a better solution for myself. (In the late 1970s Warhol reversed the images of his famous Marilyn Monroe prints to create a new series, Reversals, that earnt him twice what he made on the original prints.)

I reframed my goal as a simple intention to create the most valuable book I could for the reader as fast as I could. This gave me the flexibility of thought and space for learning and growth I needed to complete it. I would have given up if I didn’t reframe my goal this way. I still measured progress, but not with the burden of fixed expectations.

The steeper your learning curve I found, the lighter you need to be to travel it.

3. Create to gift others, not yourself

Sounds simple, but I fell into this trap hard at first. My early drafts were ego dumps, everything I knew, poorly organised and badly written.

The breakthrough came when I stopped asking myself, "What do I want to say?" and started asking, "What does the reader need to hear or know to make their future better?"

If readers had a better future from what I had written, then I will have succeeded.

Each word, each chapter title, each metaphor and story was run through the filter of “Will this help create a better future for the reader?” If it didn’t, then the words written served the purpose of finding those that did.

Early in a learning cycle you tend to focus on how your skills can improve. It’s more inward focused than outward. It’s easy to stay inwardly focused when you’re in this phase.

But this doesn’t produce the best result because it’s focused on what you want, not what it does for others.

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