Month: August 2014
Before computers stepped in, if you wanted to find a book in your library, you walked over to a shelf of drawers (or a few walls of drawers depending on the size of your library), scanned the labels on the outside of each drawer, opened the drawer that corresponded with the author or title for which you were searching, and then flipped through the cards until you found the title. It took going through this process to find out if a specific book was available in your library. If the card wasn’t there, either the book wasn’t available, or (as…
Read MoreThis blog can get kinda hardcore at times, I know. The posts can seem relentlessly insistent on hard work, self-discipline, and so forth. Today let’s talk about the other side. Let’s talk about when the writing day is over. I’m a big believer in “the office is closed.” What I mean is that, when the day’s work is done, I turn the switch off completely. I close the factory door and get the hell out of Dodge. This is not laziness or exasperation or fatigue. It’s a conscious, goal-oriented decision based upon a very specific conception of reality. In this…
Read MoreThe last two Wednesday posts, Process and Spot and The Game of Numbers, have been about the mental game of writing. Specifically, they’ve been about self-reinforcement. This is a subject they don’t teach at Harvard. What exactly is self-reinforcement? It’s not just patting yourself on the back or telling yourself, “Good work, kemo sabe” (one of my own favorite me-to-me phrases). In the two examples above, we’re talking about self-reinforcement for actions we’ve taken that have not produced results and that may not for a long time to come. This, of course, is the most important kind of self-reinforcement. It’s self-reinforcement…
Read MoreFor the past few weeks, Steve’s interviews with Jeff Simon have been appearing on this site. The last one ran just before Jeff’s Indiegogo campaign ended — fully funded I’d like to add (with a congrats to Jeff and Team Abercorn). I shared a bit about his campaign via the post “Why You Need to Know About Crowdfunding,” with lessons from crowdfunding that crossover into outreach, for sharing our work. A few additions to that piece: If Mozart Could Do It . . . Alexander Pope did it. Mozart did it. And . . . The “American Committee” (thank them…
Read MoreLast week we were talking about Rory McIlroy’s “trigger words” from his victory in the British Open a few weeks ago—“process” and “spot.” We were saying that the principle behind these concepts was equally applicable to writing and to entrepreneurship. What is that principle? It’s the idea of detaching yourself emotionally from the ultimate outcome of any enterprise (“I gonna win the Nobel Prize!” “I’m going to humiliate myself in the eyes of everyone I love!”) and focusing instead upon one simple, controllable object (“I’m going to sit down this day and work for three hours.”) I want to introduce…
Read MoreBoredom alert: this post is about golf. If your reaction is “Arrggh!”, now is your chance to bolt. I promise, however, that what follows will be extremely relevant to you and me and to our endeavors as artists and entrepreneurs. Here goes: Rory McIlroy won the British Open a couple of weeks ago. He was out front the whole way, dominating the field. Rory was kicking butt so totally that reporters began asking him, “What are you thinking about out there? Do you have ‘key thoughts’ that are helping you play so well?” Rory confessed that indeed he had two…
Read MoreIn his “Acting ‘As If’” post last week, Shawn wrote: “Our books are not Frontlist. They are backlist, evergreen, long-term commitments. So we spend weeks, months, years on every single one we put out there in an effort to reach what we think is the publisher’s job . . . getting the book into the hands of 10,000 readers. We have plans to promote all of our titles every chance we get, in any way we can do it, for as long as we’re around.” How is this accomplished? By getting on base and playing the long game. Getting On…
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