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Still Not Getting to That Goal? Four Essential Factors

Habits

obstacle

I started this blog about four and a half years ago and started doing energetic research into willpower and habit change two years before that. My belief when I started was that it would be possible to learn how to change nearly any habit, to summon far greater willpower, because it was clear that around the world, there are people who make these changes every day. So, is it true? Does learning about habits and willpower give you willpower and mastery of your habits? The answer is no … and yes.

The further I got into this subject, the more I kept wondering when I would break through. I lost weight, got much more fit, earned a black belt, finished writing books, eliminated some bad habits, improved my relationships, and otherwise made a lot of improvements in my life … but I would still sometimes waste time I needed for more important things, show up late now and then, make bad decisions, or otherwise demonstrate to myself that whatever willpower was, I hadn’t mastered it.

So I sat down the other day and pondered everything I’ve learned since 2007 or so. If learning all about habits and willpower doesn’t give you mastery over them, what does? As near as I can figure it, it comes down to four things that stand between us and change. I think when I describe them, you’ll see why learning alone doesn’t cover it (other than the facts that habit change takes time and that just knowing about something won’t automatically change our behavior).

1. Tools and Knowledge
Here’s an area where what I’ve learned and written about here has been powerful. Mental and emotional tools can cut through a lot of habit difficulties and get us on the right path. For example, we can learn to generate confidence and enthusiasm in place of depression and hopelessness with idea repair; we can clear our minds and let go of things that bother us through meditation; and understanding mental schemas can let us get to some of the root causes of our worst behaviors.

2. Thinking
How we think, what we tell ourselves, and where we put our focus make a huge difference in how we feel and what our lives are like. We can often change our thinking using tools like the ones I mentioned, but whether it occurs naturally or has help through mental tools, our thinking itself is crucial in determining our actions and decisions.

3. Lifestyle
Nutrition, sleep, exercise, friends, social contacts, activity, surroundings, physical tools, responsibilities, family, and many more external factors can influence our internal state. Here too, I’ve learned about many useful improvements through researching and writing about the psychology of habits on this blog, whether it’s a quiet walk in green space, having just the right tool, or keeping company with people who help us become better.

4. Commitment
Here’s the tough one: we have to care. Knowing how to do something or having a theoretical goal generally doesn’t carry us very far unless we’re strongly and consistently motivated by our own emotions.

I’m not just using “commitment” as a substitute for “willpower” here, creating a circular argument. What I’m talking about isn’t making the right decisions or doing the right things, but rather consistently caring about our decisions and what the right ones are.

Commitment can come from many different places, so fortunately we can influence it. It can come from our own emotional difficulties: for instance, a person who craves attention might use that to drive excellence in music, or a person who hates conflict may learn how to be a consummate peacemaker. It can come from thinking and understanding, when we get to know ourselves better and make important connections. (It’s one thing for me to know that doughnuts aren’t good for me, but it helps me more to realize how foods like that contribute to atherosclerosis, drain my energy, and give me a headache). It can be inspired by a role model or a clear picture of the future, be shocked into us through a tragedy, be nurtured by helpful surroundings, or rest on support from friends and family. Commitment is an emotional state in which we yearn toward a goal or state of being. Without it, it doesn’t matter how we can act, because commitment directs how we do act.

Which matters … why?
The point of bringing up these four aspects of willpower or habit change is to create a simple way to look at our goals and see what’s missing.

For example, why did I lose 60 pounds or so and then stop about 15 pounds heavier than my ideal weight? After all, I have the mental tools to lose weight and know how to direct my thinking, and my lifestyle is compatible with fitness and weight loss. What happened, I believe, is that my commitment dried up. Having reached this point, I’m fairly happy (though not ecstatic) with how fit I am, and my health is very good. Losing more weight would make me look better, which would be a fine thing both in terms of my self-image and my romantic relationship, but there’s nothing about it that would affect my life expectancy or my ability to be in my relationship in the first place, whereas my old weight years ago really could affect those kinds of things. To lose more weight, I’d have to find reasons to really, really care. This might involve hanging around with extremely fit people, finding more reasons to lose the extra pounds, or working on increasing my enjoyment of fitness.

In the same way, any of the four things above can be missing in a person’s quest to change. For example, a person might passionately want to quit smoking, might live in an environment that discourages smoking, and might be beautifully focused on the problem, but if that person doesn’t have a good working approach–that is, doesn’t have the right tools–then quitting may fail time and time again.

So I invite you to do in your life what I’m doing in mine these days: if you have an important goal that you’re having trouble reaching, look at it in terms of these four factors. Do you have all the tools and knowledge you need to succeed? Are you thinking thoughts that move you toward your goal? Is your environment helping or hurting you (or both)? Are you deeply and emotionally commited, and does that commitment stay strong even when trouble comes?

So, will I ever master willpower and habits? Somehow I suspect not, but it continues to be worth trying, and I continue to push hard. Maybe in another six and a half years. Who knows? It could happen. Check back with me then.

Photo by foxypar4

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The Power of Vulnerability

The human mind

Social work professor Brené Brown gave a startling TED talk a while back, and her basic point was this: we usually want things to go a certain way. We usually want to be able to predict what happens and for it to be something we’ve identified as good. What we don’t want is to screw up, to look bad, to open ourselves up to pain, loss, or embarrassment, or to invest ourselves in something that doesn’t pan out. Yet Brown makes a compelling case that without the willingness to be vulnerable, we shut ourselves down and make it impossible to enjoy or make the most of our lives.

To tell you the truth, I’m especially enthusiastic to share with you Dr. Brown’s following TED talk, but it’s important (and rewarding!) to see this one first. If you’re not already one of the roughly 8.5 million people (at the time of this writing) who’ve heard what she has to say, please find 20 minutes now, or as soon as it’s practical, and hear her out. I’ll follow up with a related post soon.

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New Year’s Resolutions for Change from the Inside Out

Strategies and goals

Jason Shen has an interesting blog I discovered only very recently. Entitled “The Art of A**-Kicking,” Shen’s blog focuses on “starting things, conquering fear and kicking a** in work and life.” In late 2010, Shen posted an article on New Year’s Resolutions that I highly recommend: “How to Set Great New Year’s Resolutions (Backed by Scientific Research!)

I’ve written about New Year’s Resolutions before (for instance, see “Should You Make a New Year’s Resolution?“, “Why New Year’s Is Such a Good Time to Make a Resolution” and “Taking Stock for a New Year’s Resolution“), and you’ll find a lot of common ground between my posts and Shen’s. What struck me most about Shen’s article, though, is his emphasis on making resolutions about the way you feel. This fits with much of what I know about how people successfully change their behavior, and it struck me as an unusually useful way to come up with a resolution.

Most resolutions seem to be about achieving some external result: losing weight, quitting smoking … that kind of thing. The examples Shen gives, on the other hand, are about changing how we feel about some significant part of our lives. They raise the question “What can I do to feel happier?” or “What would make my lifestyle feel more healthy?” By focusing on how the resolution makes us feel, we get two special advantages: first, we’re focusing on the process instead of the outcome, which tends to be a more motivating approach for a variety of reasons. Second, we’re making a special point of ensuring that the actions we’re taking make us feel the way we want to feel, and that good feeling motivates us to keep pushing ahead.

Examples of result goals and feeling goals
An example: let’s say my resolution is to lose weight; it’s 3 weeks in; and I’ve lost 1.5 pounds after upping my exercise and eating a little better. That’s not bad, but it’s not very inspiring: it doesn’t really feel like I’m succeeding, just maybe sort of a little on the road to succeeding. I’m putting all my enthusiasm into the idea that some time in the future, I will have achieved something big. In the mean time, which could be a very long time, I don’t have much good news to announce.

If instead, though, my resolution is to feel more fit, then every time I complete an exercise session or choose the better food option, I’ve succeeded. It’s not a big success, but successes don’t have to be big to feel good, and anything that makes us feel good is much more motivating than something that makes us feel like a disappointment, or at best a potential someday-success.

Not affirming affirmations
As much as I like Shen’s post, I had some comments to add for my readers here on a couple of thing he mentions. One is his recommendation of affirmations, which from what I’ve seen of the research are often counter-productive. One problem is that they risk creating broken ideas, and even though an affirmation may create an upbeat falsehood (“I look great and am easy to get along with!”) it’s still a falsehood and has all of the drawbacks a falsehood usually has when we treat it in our own minds as truth.

What’s a “goal,” exactly?
I also find Shen’s distinction between “goals” and “resolutions” potentially confusing, depending on how you think about the words. He defines goals as “external targets that rely substantially on things outside of your immediate control” and talks about “resolutions” as being largely within your control. For what he calls “goals” I tend to use words like “aspirations,” and what he calls “resolutions” I and many other people interested in motivation often refer to as “goals,” for instance in the posts “One Good Way to Judge Goals: S.M.A.R.T.” and “What Kinds of Goals Really Work?” With that said, a lot of people use the word “goals” to mean exactly what he describes, too, and I think the way he talks about using the words makes plenty of sense; it’s different from how the word is used in here and some other places.

Both of us, however, are trying to point out an important distinction that the English-speaking world doesn’t usually make, that of  whether we’re talking about something that we can affect ourselves (like finishing a project) instead of something that to a large extent is outside of our control (like getting a promotion).

One thing at a time
Finally, Shen recommends keeping your goals to no more than 2 or 3 at a time. I haven’t yet come across research to shed more light on the question, but my experience and my inference from some of the literature is that adding only one new goal at a time is generally the way to go. Once you’re well on your way with that one, adding another works much more comfortably. The danger of adding too many at once is that of not having enough attention to spare to focus regularly on any of the goals, so they all fail.

The exception to this would be very simple goals, like drinking more water or making the bed in the morning. It appears that we can tackle several small changes more or less at the same time and still see success.

Photo by pennstatelive

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Wait, You’re Not a Real Writer at All!

Writing

The original version of this article first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’m editing and republishing each of my BHfW columns here over time.

Writing professionally, or even just aspiring to write professionally, requires a weird combination of hubris and humility. You have to be willing to believe, at least for the 15 minutes it takes to put together and send out your submission, that the stuff you make up and write down is so fascinating that thousands or tens of thousands of people would pay good money to read it. The Hollywood Bowl has a seating capacity of about 18,000, but even a modestly successful midlist novelist or someone who sells a story to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reaches more people than that. Who the hell do we think we are?

At the same time, we have to embrace humility if we’re not going to drive ourselves nuts. Actors and salespeople are among the few who compete with writers in the “getting rejected” department–and even those professions don’t spend two years on a project, send it out, wait eighteen months, and receive in return a form letter saying “No thank you; good luck elsewhere.”

Impostor syndrome
So is it any wonder that writers are often susceptible to Impostor Syndrome? If you’re not familiar with Impostor Syndrome, you might be interested in the article “Impostor Syndrome” on this site, but short version is that it’s when you see your successes and you think they must be due to someone making a mistake. Any time you sell a story, get a bite from an agent, or receive a positive review, it seems like a fluke. Obviously these people don’t understand that I’m really a big faker, you might think, or if I wrote something good, it was just blind luck and will never happen again.

Many many writers I know struggle with impostor syndrome. From a certain perspective, it makes sense: if you spend years and years looking up to people who are getting regularly published in certain magazines or whose novels are making it into the hands of thousands of satisfied readers, and if during this time you get a constant barrage of polite but generally impersonal messages that say “No, this thing that you poured your heart and every ounce of skill you have into really isn’t any good,” then you’d have a pretty inflated view of yourself to not ask yourself if the sale you finally get isn’t some kind of anomaly. (No disrespect intended to those who, like me, lean more to the hubris side than the humility one.) Maybe the editor who bought your story was drunk when she read it. Maybe your new agent is confusing you with another writer who’s actually good.

Misdirected expectations
It can get even worse when you have a little success: maybe you sell a story or get an honorable mention in a major contest. What happens if the next story you send out fails miserably? It just reinforces the idea that the first success was a fluke–even though any decent statistician with access to writers’ track records would predict a few failures with a high degree of confidence, even for writers who overall became very successful.

It doesn’t help that we writers are not particularly good judges of our own work. (See “Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing”). We may think a particular piece we’ve done is the best thing ever written, or may think it’s utter trash, and in either case we can be right on the nose, tragically wrong, or even both.

Thinking your way out
So how do you stop feeling like a faker? Well, there’s thought and there’s action.

In the thought department, we’re better off when we avoid telling ourselves things that are either false or questionable and instead stick to things we know are true. For instance, instead of thinking “I know this story is going to be rejected,” we can substitute the thought “This story might sell or it might not. If it doesn’t, I’ll send it somewhere else.” That process, called “cognitive restructuring” (or my preferred term, “idea repair”), may seem elementary, but it’s surprisingly effective, as research and clinical results have shown. If you’re interested in idea repair, which is useful for far more than just addressing Impostor Syndrome, you can find articles, books, and other resources on the topic here.

Where does confidence come from?
On the action side of things, one of the most productive things to do is more. Write more, send more out, and get more used to the rejections–and the acceptances. I was at my son’s high school yesterday for a parent presentation, and I was powerfully impressed to see what complete confidence and self-possession every one of his teachers showed when presenting to groups of parents. How can they be so confident? I asked myself.

The answer to where the confidence came from was quickly obvious to me: these are teachers who enjoy their jobs, and they stand up and talk like this for most of every workday. They have get in more public speaking in the typical week than many people will do in their lifetimes. Effective practice makes you better and better at what you’re doing, and it also quells concerns about whether you have any right to do it. I’ve written about 15,000 words of fiction in the past week. I know from critique responses (we sometimes get very rapid turnaround on critique in my writer’s group) that at least some of those words worked well for a good sampling of readers, but I have no way of knowing if the stories I’ve put together will sell or just become more rejection magnets. However, having written all that, and especially doing that and then sending the work out, I know that I’m a writer. Whether or not editors buy what I write is up to them and out of my direct control. All I can do is keep plugging away, always working on something new, concerning myself not with whether people accept what I’ve written but with how well I’m doing the job of churning out words worth reading.

The thing is, regardless of how successful your writing is now or ever, if you bust your hump putting out new works, and if you push the envelope to try to make yourself better at what you do, then you’re a writer–and you might as well be proud of it.

Photo by V’ron

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The Help: Kathryn Stockett Achieves Resounding Success After Years of Rejection

Projects

Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, has become my new favorite example of the power of persistence. She certainly hasn’t made me forget about Jo Rowling, whose first Harry Potter book was rejected by 12 publishers before finding a home at Bloomsbury, but Rowling got representation from the second agent she tried, while Stockett reportedly got at least 45 rejections for The Help before even finding an agent (see this article for a bit more on that).

If you don’t happen to be involved with publishing, I should explain that even after an author finds an agent, the agent then has to submit the book to publishers, so even finding an agent can be a long way away from getting a book published.

The Help is an engrossing, insightful novel about black maids and their white employers in the American South in the early 1960’s. I finished reading it (actually, listening to the audio book, which is very well performed) the other day, and it has taken its place among my favorite novels for its involving story, entertaining style, and heart. As you may know, Stockett’s novel has been made into a hugely successful movie and has sold millions of copies. After reading it, I found myself hoping that it had to do with direct experience, that Stockett was one of the children who were raised by the kinds of maids we get to know in the book. This turns out to be true, although Stockett is about a decade younger than the children in her novel.

Try, Improve, Try Again
Flying in the face of Robert Heinlein’s famous advice (“You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order”), which reportedly even Heinlein himself didn’t quite follow, Stockett kept making changes and improving her manuscript as she received rejection after rejection, though she doesn’t seem to have been at all immune to the painful process of having a work you’ve slaved away on repeatedly turned down and spoken ill of. This brings to mind Harper Lee’s process with To Kill a Mockingbird: she edited that novel over a long, laborious period with her editor, Tay Hohoff. While we know that there are great successes that come out more or less great from the beginning, others, clearly, are crafted over time.

It’s tempting to think that when many agents or publishers reject a book that later becomes successful, that they’re simply foolish or short-sighted. This can certainly be the case, as with the book publishers who said children would never read a book as long as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or the editor who told Emily Dickinson that her poems were “generally devoid of true poetical qualities.” Sometimes, though, these people are just being truthful about work that doesn’t fit for them, or are responding to something that isn’t yet fully realized, a diamond in the rough that as far as the rejecting party knows may never really be cut to its proper shape.

Does persistence always pay off?
So should we take from this that, like Stockett, all we have to do is to hang in there, keep trying, and success will eventually come? I would suggest that the complete answer to that is “Yes and no.” Persistence seems to be a very important quality to have if we want to be successful at anything great. Actually, maybe “persistence” doesn’t quite cover it. Maybe the word I’m looking for is devotion, when we don’t simply show up, but put our whole selves into our efforts.

With that said, persistence alone isn’t necessarily going to get us anywhere. The Help is reportedly Stockett’s first novel, but she has a background in writing and editing, and most of the published novelists I know wrote at least one other novel or a lot of short stories (sometimes both) before selling a book.

Diamond in the rough or practice project?
So it is possible to stick with a project too long. With that said, I’m not sure it’s possible for us to stick with projects we really believe in, profoundly, for too long. Practice is essential to developing great skill, and realistically, some of the projects on which we set all of our hopes will eventually turn out to have been practice projects: practice books, practice jobs … even practice relationships.

Other projects need improvement. There’s no such thing as practice parenting if real kids are involved, so despite any past mistakes, all we can hope to do with parenting is to improve ourselves and do the best we can going forward. Some books just need a lot of editing or rewriting. Some businesses need a new direction to survive or thrive.

How do we tell the difference? That’s the hardest part, of course, but the keys seem to be

1) We are most successful when we pursue goals we’re passionate about
2) Failure and rejection are not, in themselves, evidence that we’re on the wrong track
3) If we continue backing one specific project or effort, we need to be open to improving it if the opportunity presents itself, and
4) Experience and insight sometimes show us that a previous attempt is no longer worth pursuing.

That last point is tricky, but the core of it is keeping in touch with our passion for our work. If that passion has died away because we come to see that we can do more or better, than that’s all right: it may be time to start a new project. If we’ve simply been worn down by not achieving what we had hoped for, though, the danger is of giving up too soon. Success is sometimes a long road, but personally, I’m inspired by the example of people who, like Stockett, have followed it to its end however long that takes.

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Having a Purpose Makes You Powerful

Strategies and goals

In a recent post (“How to Change the World: Simon Sinek on Leadership“), I talked about Simon Sinek’s TED talk, which boils down to “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it.” By “buy,” Sinek also means “care,” “act,” “follow,” or “join in.” The principle fits sales, but it also fits social change, politics, the spread of ideas, and a lot else.

To have a “why” is to have a purpose, and I’ve begun to realize that having a purpose makes you nearly invincible. To explain that, let me tell you two stories. Let’s start with the failure.

The fall of the REALM
About 18 years ago I owned a small software development company outside Philadelphia, and I was hired to develop a software product to manage real estate and physical assets, like vehicles and storage tanks. The man behind the project at the client company was a friendly, energetic guy, and he quickly revealed that he was interested in doing more than just dealing with his own corporation’s needs: he had forged an agreement with the company such that they got free updates and enhancements and he would get rights to the software they paid to have developed. As I was the developer, he offered to split proceeds with me 50/50 if I would stay in the game and develop it further.

This was a golden opportunity. There was no software we could find that did what REALM (Real Estate, Assets, and Logistics Management) came to be able to do. REALM was easy to use, was inexpensive by corporate software standards, and was developed by an asset management specialist (him) and a skilled database and application developer (me). We made many enhancements and began to sell the software. We got a few clients, a few opportunities … and eventually fizzled. What should have been a business that could have made me financially secure for a long time, if not for life, turned out to be a time suck. Why? We had a good product. We had funding to develop it to a marketable state. We were both smart, friendly people. What happened?

I’ll tell you what happened: my heart wasn’t in it. When it came right down to it, I didn’t care about physical asset management, and even if I did, I didn’t care about the corporations that needed to do it. I was in the project for the money; that was basically it.

I don’t mean to suggest it was immoral or anything. After all, we need money to live in this society: without it, there would be a very real chance of starving or freezing to death on the street. Yet money has never really seemed that important to me in the grand scheme of things, and it was an utter failure for me as inspiration.

The rise of Codex
Now let’s shift gears and talk about something I’ve done that has been very successful: Codex. Codex is a free, online writers’ group designed originally for “neo-pro” fiction writers–that is, writers who are just beginning to prove themselves. (A number of its members have since become established pros, however.) The initial entrance requirements were either making a pro fiction sale or attending one of the major workshops where they choose participants from a writing sample. We later added alternative ways to qualify: getting a good agent or reaching a certain level of success with selfpub writing.

Codex was a ton of work. I had written a forum system in the past, and I used that for Codex instead of installing one of the common ones. Because I had done that, it wasn’t too hard to integrate a lot of features into the forum, like a critique exchange with tracked critique credit, contests with anonymous participation, a library of Codexians’ work, a blog tour system, and a lot more. The Codex forum as it now exists represents tens of thousands of dollars worth of custom programming, though I had never thought about it like that until just now.

Yet the technical work has been a minority of what I have done to keep the group running. I’ve participated in thousands of discussions, moderated, handled disputes, developed rules when they were needed, oriented new members, and otherwise run things that need running.

How has Codex worked out? Very, very well. We’ve barely made any effort to recruit members, but we get a steady stream of new applications. We’ve had over seven thousand discussions with well over 200,000 posts, over a thousand works critiqued, and dozens of contests over eight years. Our membership continues to grow bit by bit: last I checked, there were more than 230 active members. More and more members are selling novels and short stories and getting nominated for awards. On the current Nebula award ballot, every single person in the short story category is a member of Codex, though one of that group joined (without any solicitation from the group) after the nominations were announced.

Codex doesn’t net me any money–in fact, in the past it has cost me money, though this year a Codex member generously underwrote the cost of the entire year’s hosting as a celebration of his writing success. What’s more, these days I’m so busy with my own writing and related work, family, Taekwondo, and the daily demands of life that I can’t really even participate meaningfully in the discussions–I don’t have time. Yet Codex has provided meaningful friendships, my best professional opportunities in writing, huge amounts of insight, and a lot more. My first book sale (to a major publisher), my opportunity to do commentary for a Florida NPR affiliate, and my first professional speaking engagement all occurred because of Codex.

The thing is, I’ve never questioned my commitment to Codex because I have a purpose: to develop and be part of a community that helps its members improve their writing. If I hadn’t had that purpose, I would have given up on it a long time ago. My purpose protected Codex from getting derailed by problems like arguments among members (rare, but damaging), unreliable Internet hosting providers (we’ve had to switch service providers five times!), the need for complicated yet unpaid programming work, and so on.

There is no such thing as competition when you have purpose
Having a real purpose eliminates competition: people who are doing the same thing you’re doing for the same reason are helping you, because a real purpose is about something bigger than ourselves. People who are doing the “same” thing you’re doing for different reasons, often shallow ones, really aren’t doing the same thing at all.

I’ve recently started doing professional speaking events, and at first I was a bit worried that there would be too much competition for me to thrive. Yet I quickly came to realize that my speaking was an outgrowth of the same thing that has made this blog successful, which is a profound desire to first learn, then share knowledge of how to become a more empowered, compassionate, and happy human being. I don’t know whether that sounds hokey or not, but I do know that people who hear me speak do and will see that I am there to try to make their lives profoundly better. Anyone who’s doing the exact same thing has my admiration. Anyone who isn’t is no competition at all.

Photo by Lisa Tiyamiyu

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Stay the Course or Try Something New and Promising? Some Ways to Decide

Strategies and goals

A friend recently mentioned that she was having trouble deciding whether to stay with a project she’d been working on for some time or to follow a new, very unusual idea she’d come up with that could, she thinks, be highly successful. While she’s been enthusiastic about the new idea, it isn’t catching on with the people she’s talked to about it so far.

There is no simple way, much of the time, to make these kinds of decisions. Some of us are constantly seduced by new and exciting ideas–for me, for instance, it’s an unusual week when I don’t dream up some huge project I could be doing instead of what I have on my plate already. I’m glad to say I usually write these down and stay the course, since if I followed every one I’d never finish anything at all.

Others of us have no inclination to rock the boat and want to stay with what we have–sometimes even when that’s showing every sign of failing.

So how can we make good decisions about choices when we can’t predict the outcomes? Here are some suggestions for ways to do that.

Sometimes audacity is brilliant
First, it seems to me that doing things that other people say will never work sometimes works amazingly, as with J.K. Rowling’s much-too-long debut young adult novel or Beethoven’s opening to his 5th symphony, which starts on the second beat.

Innovators have to be able to hold the line
Second, even when an audacious idea is successful, its creator often has to perservere well beyond the usual point of success to get anywhere. Rowling was rejected by a couple of dozen publishers before Bloomsbury picked her up, and the great majority of writers would probably never have persisted that long. I gather that some of the initial reaction to Beethoven’s 5th symphony was disbelief and scorn, though some of that may have been because the premiere went very badly.

Failure is normal
Third, most ideas that other people say will never work really do never work, just because it’s hard to make a big, new thing come to life in an effective way. Audacious surprise successes are very unusual.

How committed can you be?
Fourth, the audacious ideas that do succeed seem to do so only when their creator is completely behind the idea, heart and soul. I can reflect on a variety of businesses I’ve worked on the past that have begun promisingly but ultimately died with a whimper because I didn’t want pour my entire life into them. Some were very sound, and one of the businesses did hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of business before it petered out, but when it comes down to it, business isn’t what interests me, so that these days I avoid getting involved in business pursuits whenever I can even though I’ve gained a lot of good experience in that area.

Follow happiness
Some advice that’s very good in other situations, like “follow your passions” or “just do it!” can fail us when we’re working on complicated decisions. One suggestion I’ve heard is “What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?” This kind of advice has led uncounted young people to Hollywood to try to become stars, for instance, and the huge majority of them wash out completely. Does that make it a bad decision? It depends. Maybe the thing to do is to choose the course that will make you happy even if you fail, just because you tried and you put everything you had into it. With that approach, even failure can be a form of success.

Photo by brockzilla

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Your Opinion and Twenty-Five Cents: Judging Your Own Writing

Writing

This piece first appeared in my column “Brain Hacks for Writers” over at the online publication Futurismic. I’ll be republishing each of my BHfW columns here over the next few weeks.

I don’t know, personally, whether it’s merely difficult or actually impossible for writers to judge our own writing well. You write a story that you’re convinced is the finest thing you’ve ever written and send it out to the world, and it’s only 18 months and ten rejection slips later that you decide it really wasn’t so good after all. Or you scribble something up in a rush that you think is unremarkable, and everyone who reads it tells you it’s great.

This stuff is frustrating. If we don’t know how well we’re doing, how can we do better? And how can we ever have any confidence in our own work? If we can’t really judge the quality of our own writing, even something that sells can feel like a fluke, a bad call on the part of an editor. A few thousand adoring fans can be an effective cure for this, but they are hard to come by in those numbers.

It does make sense, though, that we can’t be perfect judges of our own writing. If we could, we’d immediately see and fix all of the flaws, never suffer any doubt as to changes we might need to make, and never be upset by a rejection. Further, being able to judge the written work would mean completely ignoring all of the imagined things that went into that work, not allowing them to influence the reading at all–yet we have to be intimately involved with those imaginings in order to write the piece in the first place.

It seems to me that it’s important to recognize this blindness, this inability of any one person–especially the author–to make any kind of final judgment about a piece of writing. If we don’t come to terms with this limitation, we’re doomed to crash repeatedly into the jagged rocks of reader and editor opinion, to be amazed and horrified at the difference between our beliefs about our own work and everyone else’s. Some writers (you may have met them) do exactly this, assuming that if they write work they deem brilliant and readers don’t agree, then the readers are deficient. That way lies madness–and also failure and a really annoying personality.

But though we can never be perfect judges of our own work, there are steps we can take to be better at judging it. Here are specific techniques we writers can use to get a new perspective on what we write:

  • Get someone else to read it. This can be a critique group, a friend, a relative, a teacher, etc., although all of these kinds of readers are problematic in one way or another. Teachers and other writers have ideas about how things should be written that don’t necessarily have to do with how well something reads, and friends and relatives tend to be biased. The ideal feedback would come from a group of people in the target audience who don’t have a connection to the writer and don’t write, though that’s not an easy group to recruit.
  • Let time pass. I don’t know about you, but for me it’s very difficult to let a piece sit when I’m excited about it. I want to send it out right away and get some kind of excited response in return. Yet if I let a piece sit for weeks or months (or at least a few days), then when I come back to it my experience is much closer to that of a normal reader than it was immediately after I wrote it, when I still had all the supporting ideas and images swirling in my head.
  • Read it aloud. Some people have no use for this approach, others swear by it, and yet others (like me) might like it if they tried it but never seem to get around to trying it. If you’re in that last group, consider having a computer, Kindle, or other device read it to you. (I’ll be giving this a whirl myself.) You can even use headphones.
  • Look for specifics. Another way to get perspective on your work is to analyze it instead of reading it to experience it. You can go through the piece checking for voice, plot, sensory detail, character, or practically anything else. One friend of mine goes through printouts of his work and highlights things like action, moments that show character motivation, and themes in different colors to check the balance and pacing. You might like to use a checklist: I have one I’ve compiled of the best ideas I’ve come across, “The Virtuoso Writer’s Cheat Sheet,” which I use to try to remind myself of all of the ways I could improve a given story.
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Three Steps to Getting Paid for What You Love

Strategies and goals

I try to steer clear of posting a lot of personal theories here, but bear with me, because if I put together evidence from a variety of sources and make a leap of faith or two, I find myself faced with a pretty solid-looking explanation of how people succeed at making self-employment pay the bills, get new businesses to succeed, sell novels, and otherwise find ways to connect their passions with their paychecks.

It’s three fairly simple steps–though unfortunately, this is one of those cases where simple and easy don’t mean exactly the same thing. Are the steps readily understandable? Yes. Is there an excellent chance you and I can do them? Also yes. Would the process be quick and convenient? Hell no.

Step 1. Practice and get feedback
A huge body of solid research has been done on people who are exceptionally good at all kinds of things, from sports to music to business to law enforcement and beyond, and one of the conclusions that appears to be inescapable is this: people who get in tons of deliberate practice–that is, focused effort to improve with careful attention to results (see “Practice vs. Deliberate Practice” and “Do you have enough talent to become great at it?“) get very good, and people who don’t get in deliberate practice don’t. To keep this post short, I’ll let you investigate (or not) as you’re inclined to, but in case you haven’t already come across the information, I’d like to urge you to glance at the above articles and consider the books they point to if you are interested in being great at anything. Inborn talent is a misleading explanation we’ve come up with for a process that really isn’t that mysterious.

Feedback is even harder than practice, because while you can simply decide to practice something, you can’t force other people to carefully consider your work and give you their honest opinion of it. Too, most of the people who like you enough to do that are too biased to be able to provide an impartial opinion. However, feedback is essential in order to be sure you’re practicing the right things and to tell you how far you’re getting. It also makes the process of practicing much more compelling and fun (see “Flow: What It Feels Like to Be Perfectly Motivated” and “Some Steps for Getting into a State of Flow“).

It’s tempting to want to skip step 1. After all, it takes years to get really excellent at something. Fortunately, skipping is sometimes possible if your business or job doesn’t require any special skills for the entry level. If you want to excel in retail sales or to work your way up the ladder in a business that always needs new people, you may not need to practice anything before you start: you can learn on the job.

However, if you want to live by writing novels or making robots or coordinating a fleet of moped couriers, you probably have some real study ahead of you–or if you’ve been practicing for years, already behind you.

Step 2. Choose something you love
If you’re doing something for its own sake, then there will be rewards regardless of whether or not you’re financially successful any time soon. You’ll have reasons to keep with it through the hard times, you’ll think about it more often (and therefore come up with better and deeper ideas about it), and you’ll enjoy yourself even when no one is paying you. Since very often becoming successful enough to get paid at something means doing it for nothing or next-to-nothing for a quite a while first, this is a major advantage.

For one practical example of this idea (though applied to fitness rather than income), see “Finding Exercise You Love: The Taekwondo Example.”

Step 3. Be willing to work at it for a long time
This may be the hardest part: say you’ve become really terrific at something and have found a way to combine a passion with an income opportunity. Many times, at this point, the money does not flow at the beginning. Sometimes it doesn’t flow for years. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was rejected a dozen times before Bloomsbury bought it. (See accounts of other multiply-rejected successful authors at this link.) Founders of new businesses, unless they already have control over a lot of money, often have to work for a long time with no income to get to the point of viability, to say nothing of profitability. Artists, like musicians and novelists, often have even longer to wait.

In 1983, actor Jim Carey reportedly wrote a check to himself for ten million dollars–and postdated it ten years in the future. This is the kind of commitment and long-term thinking that tends to foster a certain amount of success. Doing a very good James T. Kirk impression also doesn’t hurt.

Yes those who don’t persist hardly ever triumph. Business is difficult. Writing a good novel is difficult. Convincing people that you should be their massage therapist is difficult. Those who don’t continue to believe in themselves and what they’re doing, persisting because they love their work and knowing they have something worthwhile because they’ve gotten feedback on their practice efforts, can stay in the game long enough to actually make it work.

It’s true, of course, that some people get discovered in Hollywood the week after they roll into town; some novelists get big deals from publishers as soon as they finish their first books; and some businesses start making real money right out of the gate. Sometimes time isn’t necessary. However, those are the exceptions: the Steve Jobs and Stephen Kings of the world didn’t find instant success, and we’re not likely to either. But if we’re doing something well, something we love, then we can afford to wait.

Photo by eszter

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On Writing and Failure

States of mind

A memoir of what went wrong
With mixed feelings, I’ve been reading Tom Grimes’ memoir Mentor, an account of his life as a writer, especially as concerns his time learning with Frank Conroy, who for some time directed the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I don’t know if you have heard of Grimes; I don’t think I had. He’s had some partly-successful novels, some reviewed well, some not so well–but Mentor, as he writes it, is an account of his failure as a writer.

His first book felt unimportant to him when it came out, but it got excellent reviews in some very important venues. However, as far as I can tell it didn’t make him much money or do much to combat his desperate struggle to prove his self-worth. (I’m not inferring what he thinks here; Grimes is extremely candid about his feelings in the book.)

His second book was finished with huge expectations of success, but from the beginning of its publishing journey yielded mixed signs and mixed reviews. In the end, it appears, it made back only 10% of its advance, which is certainly a financial failure, and also a sharp slap to the face for the writer.

His memoir seems to have gotten some good reviews, although judging by the Amazon ranking at the time I read this, it isn’t taking the world by storm.

Failure seems to be a huge and important subject for Grimes. Reading his memoir at this particular moment, as I’m about to launch into a new project that’s not like anything I’ve attempted before, may be a very good thing for me, because it’s good to face the failure bogeyman right at the beginning.

Is that you, Failure?
I should explain about the new book: for several years I’ve been researching the psychology of motivation and habit intensively. For about ten years, I’ve been writing prolifically and working to build a career as a writer. I had planned on being a professional writer since the third grade or earlier. But of course “writer” isn’t a position like “systems analyst” or “pastry chef,” where you can get a job, go in to do it each day, and feel more or less successful every time you bring home a paycheck. It’s more like being an entrepreneur, or a salesperson who works only on commission, or a painter: you put everything you can into each new project, and then innumerable people other than you–customers or end users or the general public–decide whether it will succeed or not. This would be easier to take, I think, if it were always clear that it was only this final audience that made the decision–that books always sell well when they’re well-written, or that a quality widget sells itself–but unfortunately there are also gatekeepers, timing issues, competing or distracting products, editors or agents or supervisors or clients getting sick or getting pregnant or moving on, good or bad marketing, and all the rest.

Why does a book fail?
If you write a book and it flops, how do you account for it? Did the book just suck? Or to speak more gently, perhaps the book didn’t have a large enough audience to succeed? Or maybe the publisher didn’t get the book out to reviewers as they were supposed to do (as happened to a friend of mine with an excellent trilogy of his that is still attracting new readers, despite rather than because of the original publisher)? Was it marketed to the wrong audience? (It could be argued that my book Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures should have been marketed as a general interest book rather than only, as it was, to writers–but that was potentially my mistake and my agent’s in placing it with a publisher that specifically caters to writers.) Was it released at a bad time? Was it mislabeled or miscategorized? Did that awful cover doom it (though I was very pleased with my book cover)? And so on.

I don’t know about you, but I would love to have hard numbers on that. If I were to put out a book that only earned back half of its advance (this hasn’t happened to me; my first book earned modestly more than the advance–but hey, look at me being so quick to assure you that I’m not a failure.) I would want to know why, if it were possible, even if the answer was that the cover and the marketing strategy only accounted for 7% of the failure and the rest was squarely on my shoulders.

But here’s what I assume: I assume that a book most often succeeds or fails on how much the text itself makes people want to read it. There are exceptions: for instance, while I’m sure The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a fine book, it seems likely to me that its continuing success is fueled in part simply by the fact that it’s selling so well, as potential readers think “Well, it’s got to be good: millions and millions of people are reading it.” In a way, success builds success.

And obscurity builds obscurity. If no one knows about a book, the chance that they’ll stumble on it and pick it off a knee-height shelf at Barnes & Noble where a single copy is wedged in between books by two other obscure authors, or that they’ll dig it up and buy it from Amazon despite no one having rated it and it showing up at the bottom of the search results based on nonexistent sales, is poor. To some extent success for a book requires an inciting incident–or better, a dozen of them–meaning a review in a venue that a lot of people read, a news story, a mention in mass media, an event, piggybacking on the success of something else (especially the author’s other books), an ad in the right place (if ads really do help books), etc.

But now I’m just rambling about the publishing business, of which I know something but not nearly as much as a lot of other people who blog on the subject much more skillfully (Nathan Bransford comes to mind, for example). What I really want to talk about is the role of failure in a writer’s life as it affects self-motivation.

Failure: not as bad as death
No writing failure is complete if the author is not dead, in which case literary success takes a distant second in importance to being deceased as far as the author is concerned. The nature of a failed book is usually that hardly anyone has heard of it. This is merciful: as writers, it’s our successes that are well-known, while our failures tend to be of great interest mainly to ourselves and our publishers. Not so with movies, for instance. Will Bennifer ever live down Gigli? I’ve never seen the thing, don’t know what it’s about, and had to double check to be sure I got the “Bennifer” thing right, and yet here even I am making fun of it. Obscurity is nice sometimes, if you ask me.

So here I am entering on this book project, and it’s higher-stakes for me than previous ones. First, it carries the weight of years of investigation into the human mind, and if the book doesn’t fly, there’s a temptation to imagine that effort to have been a waste (though it’s already repaid me several times over, truth be told).

Second, it carries the weight of a decade of very serious writing efforts and a couple of decades more of on-and-off writing before that. If I can’t write a successful novel after all this practice, study, hard work, and even networking, what the hell is wrong with me?

Third, the new novel will be a mainstream novel, not a science fiction or fantasy novel. In fantasy and science fiction, it seems to me, we don’t take ourselves with the deadly seriousness I often associate with mainstream (let alone “literary”) writers. The F&SF community is comfortable and friendly and already understands that one failed novel does not determine a career. If I were to get a $5,000 advance and just barely earn out with a fantasy or science fiction novel, it would more or less be a success. This is not my feeling about a mainstream novel. I’m bidding for a wider audience, and it’s a churning metropolis of authors rather than a friendly neighborhood.

Embracing the whatever
And yet … this book can fail. That’s OK. I can put a year into writing it and two years into seeing it sold and published, assuming it even gets that far, and end up back where I started or worse, and that’s still OK. Believe me, I won’t be pleased if I get that outcome, but it’s possible whether I like it or not, so I intend to accept this from the outset, and that gives me strength. Not fearing what will happen, I don’t have to cling to ideas about the novel that seem essential for its success (but which, as I don’t really know for sure what will make for a success or not any more than anyone else does, could be its doom). I don’t have to take myself too seriously. I can screw around in the book, please myself, and hope readers will come along.

Fearing failure, I might handle things differently–hold off submitting the book when it’s ready, clamp down on my natural voice out of anxiety that I’ll sound stupid, fail to engage with the book because I don’t want to engage with the fear I would have created around it, and so on. Fear creates resistance: that’s its job. Fear of a predator in a jungle could make us run like hell or fight desperately. With writing, we don’t want to be running from or struggling with: we want to be diving into. It’s hard to execute a good dive into something that scares you, or when you’re scared of what will happen when you come back up.

So failure: yes, possible. Maybe every book you (if you’re a writer) or I will ever write will flop miserably–never getting a read from an editor or agent or never selling to a publisher or never getting read even though it’s been published. Maybe I’ll write the best novel in the history of the universe and it will come out in the wrong form at the wrong time and be completely ignored due to an unexpected invasion of the United States by Canada. We could say the same of everything else: every romance has a chance of dying, every child has a chance of being hit by an ice cream truck, every job has a chance of disappearing, every friend has a chance of turning on you. It doesn’t matter. I mean it actually doesn’t matter at this stage. This is the stage where we create and throw things out. When it comes back, maybe it will matter enough to be worth learning from, and maybe not. Sooner or later, if it fails, it will be worth moving on from.

Or maybe this time around it won’t be failure: it will be wild success. Maybe every major thing you try to do from this moment on will succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Who can know for sure? For now, I think I’ll ponder that.

Photo by blmiers2

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