advice

Small moves, Ellie.

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You already know that making too big a statement at the start of the year ain't going to work. I will go to the moon, salvage all the junk that's up there, bring it back and sell it. Or even just I'm going to lose three stone in weight by Tuesday. But there are also apparently small resolutions that you give up on because they are out of your control: I will get an agent this month, that kind of thing. There is a huge amount you can do toward getting an agent if that's what you need and you can do a gigantic amount of it right now, but the final step requires them saying yes and offering you a deal you want. You can't control their schedule, therefore you can't control yours. Not in this one case.

But if you pick smaller goals and ones that are within your control, you aren't just making life easier for yourself, you're helping to convince yourself that resolutions are achievable. If we never did the bigger ones we'd never do anything, but having small, concrete, possible resolutions that we then actually do and actually stick to, it helps a mile.

So says an article in Pick the Brain anyway.

Hat tip, as so often, to Lifehacker for spotting this.

The surprising truth about what motivates us

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It’s money, right? Apparently no. Which is good, since there seems to be a lot less of that around. This is a short lecture accompanied by animated annotations that are absorbing and ultimately rather hopeful about what we do, why we do it and what we can do next.

You will want the video to pull back out to show the entire animated board and it doesn’t. Sorry about that.

Ask for what you want and ask it now, ask up front

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I do talk about this in my book, The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers but I’ve just now, this minute, had to put it into use for a new reason. When you want something and you’re emailing somebody to get it, say so right at the top. Line one.

The reason I give in the book is that we’ve all had emails where we’ve wondered what in the hell this person wants. And when they do that very British thing of working up to the point by reminding you who they are, how we met, how, gosh, you said some day you could send me something, maybe, hello, it has an unintended effect. I read all this about that time we met in ‘Nam, how we stole a taxi together in Saigon and wrote Les Mis 2 together and as it goes on, as it gets ever more specific, I can’t help but worry. This is going to be big, I think. This is going to be really serious. This may be trouble.

And then they just ask for a link to the book. (Here, have the UK link and the US one too. It’s no trouble.)

But there is also the fact that saying what you want right at the start is a difficult writing task. Especially today. I had to write to my agent with all sorts of issues. All good, you understand, but just the sheer volume of things to discuss about new projects, things I want him to do, things I should’ve told him I’d already done.

The more I thought about it, the more I could think of other issues I needed to cover. It’s fine to think I should pick one and only email about that, leave the rest to another day but this is a real job and a real email about a real thing. Anything like stripping it down would be a correct writing exercise but not what he or I needed. Too much, too intertwined, too complicated.

So I started with line one. What I want.

There is always something that you want most, there is always something that you want first. So I wrote that down.

And having written it, every single other thing fell into place. It turned out to be what I call a three-biscuit email (it’ll take him those and some tea to work through the things in it) but as a reader today he will fly through the email and know exactly what is going on and exactly what I’m after.

Because I spent so long thinking about the first line, the rest of the email poured out of me in a flash. 

It’s a big deal for me, it’s a complicated subject, but wallop, that email is done and I’m on to the next thing. Specifically I’m on to talking to you. And now I’ll just pop off to get some breakfast. I’m starving and saying all that about biscuits did not improve things.

Start here

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Okay, so things got in the way and you didn’t start the project over the summer like you planned. There’s Christmas: you can start it as soon as you get off work for Christmas. Easy. Come 1 January, it’ll all be done, you’ll see.

Well, okay, Christmas was a bit rough. But when you get through the year-end reports, you can start then. It’ll be easy.

Start now instead. Start here.

On your way to work, as you stand in the kitchen cooking, as you finally go to bed tonight, start here. Just start with one thing, possibly the smallest thing you can think of but definitely the first thing you can find. If you’re going to write a book about your family history, write down who the best relative to talk to is. Just their name.

If you want to produce an event, do a Googly search for any similar ones coming up this year and write down their dates so you know which ones to avoid.

Then carry on in to work, finish making the meals, turn out the light and sleep.

You can very easily keep putting projects off but they never get done. You can’t very easily get a project done – but you can get them started.

Just start now. Start here.

Hands up, I dun it, it was me

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A fella I’d never heard of writes about working on software I’ve never seen and it is rather compellingly frank. Brad McCarty puts his hand up and accepts mistakes he’s made before talking about how that acceptance led to things getting better:

http://uptake.co/no-room-for-excuses

I found this via The Loop website.

Advice for the overwhelmed

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Lifehacker has a suggestion for – wait, I’m forever telling you about good-to-great Lifehacker articles, have you bookmarked that site yet? – one way to cope when you’re drowning:

http://lifehacker.com/try-an-s-o-s-stop-organize-secure-when-you-re-over-1477798160

Try it. I have my own systems and they are in my book, The Blank Screen (US link, UK link). Mind you, I think this business of coping on bad days is so important and I believe what I can tell you about it is potentially so useful, I give away that Blank Screen chapter for free. Here it is: Bad Days from The Blank Screen.

I hope it and the Lifehacker article are useful to you.

You’re on your own and it’s necessary

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“It just seems like, you agree to have a certain personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone.”

Angela Chase (Claire Danes) in My So-Called Life

pilot episode by Winnie Holzman

Maybe you were the class clown in school. If you run in to someone from there today, you still are. To them. You’re somewhat older and you’ve been through the wars but that doesn’t matter. You’re the clown, they’re the ones who were your best friends even though you now cannot see what you had in common with them. She’s the one you fancied and, god, if you aren’t still tongue-tied talking to her.

We are slotted into types and categories by everyone and we do it to them too. This is true, this has always been true, and it has always been interesting when you run into more than one set of friends at the same time. And it’s hugely more interesting now that we have Facebook and you can see the strata of your life reflected in those friends who knew you here, who knew you there. 

But there is one result of all this that actually holds you back. That stops you doing things.

It’s this. Call five friends and tell them you’re moving to New York. You haven’t got a job there, it’s just something you’ve got to do and you hope to find somewhere cheap to stay at first. I hope that at least one of your friends will be excited for you but you know that at least four, probably all five, will try to talk you out of it.

They’d be right to. No job? Nowhere to stay? They’re looking out for you, they care for you. This would be why they are your five closest friends that you can call about this stuff.

There’s a part of them, too, that reckons New York is a long away and they’ll never see you again. You can’t object to that, that’s lovely.

Only, there is also this unconscious part of them that says you’re not the one who goes to New York. You’re not the one who starts a new business, you’re not the sort to do anything they haven’t already seen you do.

Consequently, unless they are very unusual people – and you hang on to them if they are – you will forever find them holding you back. Their concerns for your wellbeing coupled to this locked perception of what you are and what you do means your friends will invariably hold you back.

So you can’t take their advice. You just can’t. If you did, you’d never do anything. I sound like I’m criticising your friends but really the only thing I dislike is what they do afterwards. After you’ve moved to New York, after you’ve started your business. Then they tell you they always knew you could do it. Sometimes they take credit. That, I criticise.

But the rest of this is just practical: no advice from friends, just don’t do it.

If you want to do something, if you want to start something new and your friends cannot give you the advice or help that will get it going, then you’d think that you would turn to strangers.

Unfortunately, if you find a stranger who knows all about New York and starting businesses, the odds are that they sell relocations to New York and they sell services to new businesses. They don’t see you the way you were because they’ve never seen you before. But they also cannot be looking out for you as well as your friends are. 

Which means, sorry, you’re on your own. It’s a horrible place to be because you are a composite of your friends and these strangers: it’s easier to stay where you are and it’s easy to find falsely rose answers too.

Look for people who have done or who are doing what you want to do. Work with them. I believe now that this is why writers’ groups can be so useful: writing is an illness and nobody understands that more than other writers. I say I believe it now because I’ve only recently found a kind of group that works for me. Proper, traditional, meet-every-Friday groups have never done it for me: I’ve not fitted in or the group doesn’t want the same things I do. (Example: I’m a professional writer, I write to be read, but two groups I tried were more into the cathartic nature of writing for oneself, writing for pleasure.  Fine, but not for me.)

Earlier this year I earned a place on Room 204, a programme run by Writing West Midlands. It’s a programme without an overt agenda: they even say there are no meetings and sessions, but there end up being meetings and sessions and they are terrific.

I come away from those enthused, fired up, certain that I can do whatever mad idea I currently have – and then I do it.

Thereafter, I’m the guy who does that mad thing. 

I’m being fairly specific about Room 204 here when I wanted to talk in much vaguer generalisations. I’m talking about all of your friends and everything you do.

But hopefully there is one friend who both wants what’s best for you and sees that it is this new mad idea you have to pursue. If you also see both what’s best for her or him and you see that it is their new mad idea that they have to pursue, marry them.

Best word of the day: Schumpeterianism. And how it can help you be productive

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It apparently means “creative destruction”. I’d not heard the word before and I still can’t pronounce it with confidence, I also have a bit of doubt that I can spell it. So think of this paragraph as my making a run up to leaping straight in to it and seeing if I can write the word Schumpeterianism.

I need tea. Don’t ask me to do that again.

I’d like you to nip straight to this Lifehacker article rather than listen to me but so you know what you’re getting, it’s really a piece about how to take criticism and use it. How to take criticism without it hurting. For some reason this week I’ve been in several conversations where something similar has come up: my The Blank Screen book has a whole chapter called How to Get Rejected and it’s helped people. A reader tweeted at me that this specific chapter had ignited him. Oh, that felt good.

But hang on, you can read The Blank Screen any time. (If you’re in the States, it’s waiting for you here instead.) Have you already seen this article about – deep breath and no, I hadn’t thought of copy-and-paste until you just said it – Schumpeterianism?

If I got that word wrong the first time, I’ve now just copied-and-pasted the error. So much for your great idea, thanks a bunch. I blame you.

The you who I hope is now nipping off to read the original piece here on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/apply-schumpeterianism-to-push-through-criticism-and-1473769363

Time Your Power Nap Naturally with Einstein and Dali’s Key Method

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Not one article about power napping but several – take a look through this from Lifehacker:

http://lifehacker.com/time-your-power-nap-naturally-with-einstein-and-dalis-1476441918

That article includes the Einstein and Dali methods of the title but it also begins with links out to other rather good Lifehacker pieces about the best time for a nap – and the best duration too.