In this week’s Extraordinary Business Book Club episode I talk to Alan Weiss, the author of Million Dollar Consulting and more than 60 books in total. He also blogs and vlogs regularly. That’s a significant amount of content generation for someone who’s running a multi-million dollar consulting firm as the day job. It turns out that his secret is not wasting time self-editing and rewriting, which probably for me takes up approximately three quarters of my total writing time. He’s scathing about the excuses we allow ourselves, such as ‘writer’s block’.
There’s no such thing as writer’s block. It’s a myth. What you do is you sit down at a keyboard and you type a letter, and then you type some more letters, you have a word. Then you type some more words, you have a sentence. A few more sentences, you have a paragraph. What you write is better than you think, but what stops people is the self-editing, this little person in your head who keeps critiquing you. You got to kill that person, you just got to flick them off your shoulder, stomp on them ’til they’re bloody. You have to sit down and write, and stop worrying whether people will like it. Just write for yourself.
I do a weekly column, my Monday Morning Memo, and it creates more feedback than almost anything else I write on a regular basis. People say, “I don’t always agree with you but I love reading this,” and my reaction is, “I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing this for me. If it provokes you, that’s good.” You’ve got to be able to hold opposing thoughts in your head and still function. Don’t worry about pleasing people, just please yourself.
…The easiest path is to sit down and write what you believe, not what you think will sell, what you believe and that pleases you, and stop worrying about whether others think so because that’s a hopeless pursuit of external validation.
You can hear the full interview here: it’s a fascinating and challenging discussion on platform, brand and self-esteem and what that means for you as a writer in your business. Nobody ever said The Extraordinary Business Book Club was Easy Listening.