The Courage to be Vulnerable Enough to Ship

2020-12-06 by David

Shipping is Always Hard, But…

The more I try to put my work into the world, the more I see that it’s more about doing the work than the work itself.

This notion has been a long time coming. Even though I’ve heard Seth Godin say it for over a decade.)

The evidence that shows me this is that I care less that the work is “good” or not. (That sentence, for example, is not very good. I’m leaving it anyway!) I care less if people read my work or not.

It Gets Easier

Of course, I want people to learn and grow from my work. We all want that. And of course, I want more people to experience my work.

But when we focus on outcomes to the point that it stops us from shipping, we lose.

I’m tired of losing the shipping game.

The most generous thing I can do is ship steady work.

Because that’s how I will learn and grow. And when I learn, then others can learn and grow, too. Especially those who have a hard time shipping.

And that’s a lot of us.

When You Ship

Put your heart into it.
Build the creative habit muscle.
Know that it will get better, especially when you Ship.

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If you think shipping imperfectly could work for you too, then click the clickers below to get the email updates. There’s no point in going at this alone!

How I Learned to Never Get Lost While Creating

2020-12-03 by David

I’ve been lost so many times in the creative wilderness, I can’t count.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

The silvan glades that I happily entered turned into dark, spooky haunts after a few wrong turns. Thankfully, I’ve learned that exploring a real forest and the creative wilderness are not that different. If you don’t take the right tools along, you can get lost.

Tools Help Along the Journey

A compass in your hand in the woods helps you because it shows you a constant direction. Every time you look down at it you can find North. Knowing that one True direction can help you find your way.

Similarly, when you go on a creative journey (like to write a book or to start a podcast) you also need a kind of compass to help you through.

Maps and compasses are familiar enough tools. But what do we take into the creative wilderness? What creative tools can help you find your way when you get lost?

The Creator’s Compass

After many years of getting lost, I’ve finally found a kind of compass for creators that I call the Re-Creation Cycle. It’s a simple 4-part tool to help you see where you are in the process. Like a real compass, it’s a circle. One that you go around and around in as you get more and more creative.

I gave it a short mnemonic, PART to help you remember the four parts. When you choose to take PART on a creative journey, you go through each of the four letters.

Here are the Four Parts of the Re-Creation Cycle

PART

We start with a Problem to solve. That’s the P.
Then, we begin to take Action, A.
These actions get Results, R.
The results teach us something new. We have learned and come back around, coming full cycle to T, a new Truth.

People Get Lost Without a Compass

Choosing to take PART in a challenge is always a choice. So that means many people also choose not to act. They see a problem but don’t take action to change their results and they don’t find new Truths.

This is getting stuck. This is the start of despair. This is when you feel like there is no way out and you have nowhere else to go. Depression sets in and the spiral is the opposite of creative.

It’s destructive. (Did you notice TRAP is what you get if you do the PART cycle backwards? Don’t fall into the backward spiraling TRAP!)

Know Where You Are At All Times

With the Creator Compass, I know where I am in the cycle at all times. This is the key to not getting lost. When I face a Problem, I know I can choose to be scared or get curious about my next actions.

The more Action I take the quicker and deeper the learning I get. (Writing this article is one of those actions. Writing and Shipping daily is what really works. best.) My actions will yield Results, and by reflecting I can better learn from them.

And coming full circle the results will give new Truths that will give me clarity for the next time I chose to make my way around the cycle.

What Would You Choose Moving Forward?

Like a real forest, there are always challenges and pits to fall into. Would you rather enter those woods empty-handed, or with a compass as your guide? Take Re-Creation Cycle with you and you will never get lost.

Why Do People Say “Why Did You Bring Me Back from the Dead?”

2020-12-02 by David

Because We All Want to Belong, and that’s OK.

Photo by John Baker on Unsplash

A few months ago I heard something amazing. Dr. Zach Bush was talking to Rich Roll about his experience of being there when people came back from the dead.

“Why did you bring me back?” is often the first thing they said.

Dr. Bush then explained that people who die often experience a feeling of being fully accepted for the first time in their lives. You can listen to this moment for yourself here in “Zach Bush Wants You to Let Go of Your Story”.

Wow. I did not see that coming.

I’m so intrigued by this idea because I want to know why this idea is the one idea so many people brought back from the dead.

Why Does Acceptance Matter So Much to Us?

Is it just our biology?

I know that we humans are a social species, and therefore we want to belong to our human groups. We evolved to need each other. Being in a group meant we survived.

But this “biology idea” seems too basic. It’s too biological and too mechanical to make sense in this life after death scenario.

Or Is it our spiritual nature?

I think so.

When Dr. Bush’s patients came back from death they did not speak on this biological, mechanical level. They did not say “I felt like I belonged to the human social species”.

When people revived from death they felt accepted into a greater more mysterious whole.

I Don’t Have to Know Why it Matters In the End

I’m not going to answer this question today. But I do know this…

To live most fully, we need to focus on why acceptance matters the most.

This idea of belonging and acceptance fascinates me. Today, that’s enough.

I know I want to belong. To humanity, but also to something bigger.

Being aware of this need to belong will help me feel this belonging, somehow.

I also know that I’m not alone in this. Our modern culture is not doing a good job dealing with the belonging/acceptance issue.

We can do better.

I will do better.

Today I’m stating publicly that I am ALL IN on this challenge of finding a greater sense of belonging. So that when I die I might be able to say I found some belonging along the way.

I hope you will join me on this journey.

Are you in?

I hope so, because I know I can’t go it alone.

Scrivener Import and Split

2020-11-03 by David

Break Up a Long Document into Smaller Chunks

I’m writing my first book and using the Scrivener app to help.

Going back and forth copying and pasting in a long document would be murder for me! So, instead, I’m using Scrivener to Import and Split my long doc into small pieces.

Scrivener helps you organize your book content by helping you break it down and organize it into chunks.

This “Import and Split” function is great for easily breaking up a large document into smaller more manageable chunks. Then you can easily move them around in the Scrivener corkboard view, outline view, etc.

The solution for this is to use a “Unique Keyword” type of phrase to tell Scrivener where to split the doc.

For my long Word document, the keyword is a date that I’ve used on every separate chunk. So I tell Scrivener to look for the “2020-” text and split the chunks when it finds it. I’ve written for 100 days, so that’s going to give me 100 chunks.

The Menu path to use this is File > Import > Import and Split > then at the bottom use “Options” to tell Scrivener where to make the breaks.

Get Inspired by Stephen King On Writing

2020-10-16 by David

Stephen King Is A Monster Writer

If you decide to become a writer (like I have) you had better have some heavyweight fighters in your corner.

Stephen King is a world champion kind of heavyweight, so I’m picking him as one of my writing mentors. I don’t particularly enjoy the horror genre, but his book on writing is outstanding.

Many of the readers on Goodreads.com would agree. They have ranked his writing book higher than any other writing book on the site. And there are many.

Quick Facts About Stephen King

He’s sold over 350 Million Books
He’s written 61 novels since 1967
He’s written over 200 short stories
He’s 73 years old as of 2020

This collection of quotes from “Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft” is presented here as a resource for finding inspiration.

Stephen King On Inspiration for Writing

“Your job isn’t to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.”

“Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon. or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up.”

“So okay there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You’ve blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.”

“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He’s a basement kind of guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think it’s fair? I think it’s fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist, but he’s got inspiration. It’s right that you should do all the work and burn all the mid-night oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There’s stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know.”

Stephen King On the Writing Process

“Let me say it again: You must not come lightly to the blank page.”

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.”

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”

“I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book – something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.”

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don’t feel like it, and sometimes you’re doing good work when it feels like all you’re managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

“Talent renders the whole idea of rehearsal meaningless; when you find something at which you are talented, you do it (whatever it is) until your fingers bleed or your eyes are ready to fall out of your head. Even when no one is listening (or reading or watching), every outing is a bravura performance, because you as the creator are happy. Perhaps even ecstatic.”

“I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave during a period of severe sunspot activity.”

Stephen King On Editing

“Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.”

“To write is human, to edit is divine.”

“When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.”

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

“In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling.”

“When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.”

“I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day… fifty the day after that… and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.”

Stephen King On Reading

“Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.”

“Reading at meals is considered rude in polite society, but if you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects.”

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”

“Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”

“I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read”

“The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.”

Stephen King On the Writing Life

“Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”

“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair … Come to it any way but lightly.”

“But it’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.”

“Writing isn’t about making money, getting famous, getting dates, getting laid, or making friends. In the end it’s about enriching the lives of those who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well. It’s about getting up, getting well, and getting over. Getting happy, okay? Getting happy. …this book…is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”

“I have spent a good many years since – too many, I think – being ashamed about what I write. I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction or poetry who has ever published a line has been accused by someone of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all.”

“Some of this book—perhaps too much—has been about how I learned to do it. Much of it has been about how you can do it better. The rest of it—and perhaps the best of it—is a permission slip: you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will. Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up. ”

You can find more of my Writing Resources Here.