Most people want to write a book. I’m an author, so the conversation comes up a lot.
- “I’ve got a great idea for a book. I’m thinking of taking a writing vacation some day.”
- “How did you write your book? I’d like to write one myself, and am having trouble getting started.”
- “Do you ever have writer’s block? How do you overcome it?”
Then I explain how I work. “Since September 2005,” I say, “I’ve been writing six days a week, two hours a day whenever I’m not traveling. I time block 8am to 10am every day, and during that time I write. I put away my phone. I set aside all distraction. I focus on writing, and that’s it. When 10am rolls around, I stop. I move on to other things, because I’m not productive past that point.”
Those small investments add up. “That’s about three hundred days a year for more than eleven years now, which adds up to almost seven thousand hours of writing so far,” I say. “At this point I’ve got six books finished and cued up for publication. I did a TED talk on the third book in the lineup, The Code, a book that’s 762 pages with 525 footnotes.”
Then I show how the small investments continue to add up. “I blog a few times a week and am on pace to release a book a year for the rest of my life.”
Most people are shocked at this because they believe two big myths about how achievement works. Let’s call them the short-term achievement myth and the long-term achievement myth.
The Short-Term Achievement Myth
People tend to believe they can achieve more in the short-term than is actually possible.
They think, I’ll clean up the whole yard this Saturday. Then they barely finish cutting the grass and quit in discouragement. Or they think, I’ll lock myself in a cabin for a week and write a book. They schedule the trip, get there, overload on coffee, twiddle, read a lot of magazines, and get discouraged about how little writing they actually finished when the trip is over.
Then they tell themselves, I always think I can do more than I can, I won’t fall for that again. They give up on the idea of getting big things done.
The Long-Term Achievement Myth
People also tend to believe they can achieve less in the long-term than is actually possible. They don’t see how daily investments can add up over time. They think, One hour a day writing isn’t enough to get the job done. They fail to appreciate how the small investments add up, so they don’t schedule those investments.
In my book Automatic Influence I describe this long-term incremental growth process in a chapter titled “Penny Thick,” where I describe the growth patterns of the Giant Sequoias of the Sierra Nevadas. These massive trees reach towering heights growing the thickness of a penny every day. If we pulled out a chair and spent a day watching a young sequoia grow, we’d see nothing at all. So little is happening that we’d be bored to tears.
But over time the pennies stack up to towering heights.
Start Stacking The Pennies
I suggest we start converting our big dreams into consistent small investments, so we can start stacking up the pennies. Imagine what we might do with regular investments into our education? One penny at a time, we could become world-class experts in our field in five to ten years. Or imagine what we might do with regular investments into our spending? When we make smart small decisions, day after day, it adds up to savings and investment over time. Or what might happen if we ditched the cabin idea and invested a half hour a day writing that book? I bet we’d finish a year or two from now.