Success

All Sorts Of Advice About Writing

Garth Beyer

Writing is hard.

Writing is easy.

You’re bound to get writer’s block.

Writer’s block doesn’t exist.

You need to write at least 2,000 words or a chapter a day.

As long as you get one sentence down, it’s a successful day.

Connections don’t matter at first, focus on content.

Content doesn’t sell, connections and personality do. Content comes last.

 

These are all pieces of advice I’ve gotten from successful writers and I’m sure they are also pieces of advice you’ve read online too. You know what? Believe in the one you believe in. They all work as long as you believe in them.

If you believe writing is hard, don’t take suggestions from someone who thinks it’s easy. If you don’t believe in writer’s block, how do you plan to apply the tricks to overcoming what you don’t think exists? It doesn’t make sense, confuses you and breaks your momentum.

There are a hundred different paths to follow to become a successful writer. You only need to take one. The one you believe the most in.

 

Stay Positive & Remember There’s No Shortcut*

*Not in doing what you believe in and not in doing what you don’t believe in. It’s more about which one you can enjoy more and be more passionate about.

 

Step Into Your Artist Pants

Garth Beyer

You’ve got to flip the switch on, you’ve got to bully yourself into it, you’ve got to step into your artist pants and walk with confidence. You can’t expect to do remarkable work if you don’t feel it, if you’re not in love with what you’re doing.

The most common thread in all the writers’ institute workshops this weekend is to do only what you will really love doing. If you don’t love the novel you’re writing, scrap it. If you don’t like a particular social media outlet, avoid it. If you don’t love what you need to sacrifice to go the route of traditional publishing, don’t try to traditionally publish.

Yes, you need to try each pair of pants on, but when you find the right ones, the artist pants, don’t exchange them for any other pair no matter who holds up a different pair and says “you need to wear these if you want success.”

 

Stay Positive & Stride With Passion

Who Are Your Sponsors/Investors/Donators

Garth Beyer

My SO and I listen to the same radio station. She mentioned to me the radio station is asking for $2,000 donations. The two grand donation can be given at once or over a period of a year. She thought it was a lot to ask of people to donate. Why not ask for smaller donations so more people will be willing to pitch in, she suggested.

She’s right. They would get more donations if they requested a smaller donation and reached out to more people. But why? Why spend more money on advertising to the mass who may or may not donate a little bit to the radio station when the radio station can meet their yearly goal with a handful of large donations. It’s truly niche marketing.

If Ferrari really wanted to (heck do I wish they would), they could cut the price of their cars to a quarter of what they are now, sell a ton and still make loads of profit. Why, though, when they can produce a few hundred cars and sell them at high costs.*

Even certain news organizations could put ads on their sites, put up paywalls and charge submission fees for freelance content, but why when their journalism is so thorough and desired that they can meet their expenses just by asking for donations.

I think there are grand benefits in figuring out how much it is you want to make from an idea, invention or business and how exactly you want to make that much. You can follow the steps of selling a product or service and charge what everyone else is charging in hopes of gaining the attention of the mass public. Or (or!) you can find the condensed group of people who will pay top dollar for what you offer.

Might be worth mentioning there is a profit differentiation between the two methods. I think you can figure that out for yourself, though.

 

Stay Positive & Remember, The Less There Are, The More You Can Focus On Each Individual

*Quality of course matters. Yamaha wouldn’t be able to sell their mopeds for half a million dollars. The quality just isn’t worth that. But, there are products and services I see regularly  I would pay more to have than what they are charging. Macs, Mizuno shoes, Biofreeze… Despite this post encouraging increased pricing, I can’t contest there’s beauty (and profit) with the effect of selling something for less than it’s really worth. (Something I’m sure we’re all thankful for.) Discretionary note: never price lower to the point people assume cheapness.

The Bucket

Garth Beyer

Drip, drip, drip, drip, tip and everyone watches.quassy-bucket-dump

A bucket slowly filling with water doesn’t appeal too much to anyone. As the bucket gets filled to the brim, more people begin watching. As the bucket tips, everyone wants to be a part of the experience.

It’s a lot like doing what you love. No one pays much attention at first. You can write a novel, draw a master piece, give the greatest speech, but the audience is so small and they are watching from afar.

Write 50 novels (drip, drip, drip), draw 100 master pieces (drip, drip, drip), give 20 remarkable speeches across the U.S. (drip, drip, drip) and the more people will show up to  be part of the experience.

The tough part is we never know when our bucket will tip. Alas, if you keep creating (drip, drip, drip) there’s no doubt in my mind the bucket will tip. (It also does well to remember here that there are always people watching you fill your bucket. Again, you might not see them, but they are watching you.)

No one likes being sprayed with water. But everyone loves to be there when the bucket tips.

 

Stay Positive & Are You Filling Your Bucket?

Photo credit

Not Everyone

Garth Beyer

In a world filled with people making choices based on the size of the competition pool, it does well to remember not everyone wants to be a public speaker. Not everyone wants to become a plumber. Not everyone wants to do what you want to do.

There’s competition no matter where you go, but it does well to remember your competition isn’t everyone in the world even though it feels that way from time to time.

 

Stay Positive & Your Chances Are Better Than You Think

Where You Start

Garth Beyer

What can you make from this chart?

Where you start

There are businesses, writers, artists that start when they still haven’t perfected their craft. They create crap art and develop sketchy business models. They write well but make countless grammatical and mechanical errors. But according to this chart, there’s no correlation of where you start in terms of a perfect craft to how successful you are down the line.

What about those who are perfect at their art when they start. What about those writers who practice in the shadows and refuse to come out until their novel is perfect? How about those businessmen and women who study model after model before they develop their “perfect” model. Is there any guarantee of success for them down the line? Nope.

Where you start doesn’t matter much down the line.* What matters is that you start.

 

Stay Positive & Go Start

*If you’re looking for a short-term investment or if you’re looking for a place to perfect your practice before you truly launch yourself, where you start matters very much.

 

 

 

“I Don’t Have Time To Read”

Garth Beyer

Words made famous by almost everyone.

Consider this by Michael Ferber, there were about 350,000 new titles or new editions published in the U.S in 2012, of which perhaps 75,000 were in adult fiction. The number of self-published books and print-on-demand books form extensive backlists. Britain published more than 200,000 books. Add Canada, Australia, and so on, and we can safely assume that about 1,000,000 new titles in adult fiction appeared in 2012 in English alone.

What does this mean for reading and becoming successful? It means that if you spent all of your time reading, you wouldn’t have any time to act on what you learn to become successful.

I’ve met so many people who think they need to sit in a library every day and read up on all they can. Alert! Here’s a cool chart that reflects what happens to your likelihood of success the more you read.

Reading Your Way To Success (Or Failure)

Malcolm Gladwell covers the inverted-u concept. Zig Ziglar and Seth Godin tell their audience if they want to become successful, they should read a book a week. It might work perfect for them, might even work perfect for you. It doesn’t work perfect for me. I’m a two books in a day then no books for a week kind of guy. I don’t advise this for you. What I advise is you try to find how many books a week you can read to get you at the top of the inverted-u. Success.

 

Stay Positive & I Know You Can Do It