How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

   January 19, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Idea #1: You don’t have a preexisting passion (nor should you want one).

Idea #2: Becoming really good at something and generously using your skills to help the right people is how you quickly succeed.

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In the book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport dispels the myth of what he calls, “The Passion Hypothesis.”

The most common and cliche’ advice about seeking a happy life and prosperous career is to “follow your passion.” Millennials are notorious for seeking fulfilling and passion-filled jobs, only to be left disappointed and disappointing.

The primary problem, according to Newport, with the passion hypothesis is that all the attention is focused on the self. People who want a job they are passionate about are less concerned about what they can give to the world and are more concerned about what the world can give to them.

There Is No “Right” Job

“Everything popular is wrong.” — Oscar Wilde

Most people are unsuccessful for a reason. They operate with faulty assumptions about how the world works.

One of those assumptions is that we as people have preexisting passions we need to “discover” and then follow. Famed psychologist and author of Mindset, Carol Dweck, would call this a “fixed mindset.”

Rather than selfishly seeking a life you’re passionate about, Newport recommends becoming a “craftsman,” wherein you develop rare and valuable skills. Newport calls these rare and valuable skills, “career capital.”

Here’s how this work:

• You determine skills and abilities that would be useful to the world.
• You set clear goals for mastering those rare and valuable skills.
• You engage in deliberate practice, pushing your skills and abilities to mastery.
• As you get better, you begin to develop confidence in yourself (confidence doesn’t create high performance, it is the byproduct of high performance).
• As you develop confidence, you begin to deeply enjoy what you’re doing — and become very passionate about it. As Newport explains, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”
• As your expertise, confidence, and passion grows, you begin to see your work as a “calling” or “mission” (like passion and confidence, your identity and personality are byproducts, not innate).
• Because you have developed such mastery of rare and useful skills, you have the perspective and context to discern the “cutting edge” of your field.
• You can then begin making distinct connections and projections into what has been dubbed, “The adjacent possible” which Steven Johnson described as, “a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.” In other words, this is how you become an innovator and a shaper of societal and global change.

Quick Re-Cap of Takeaways and Then A Road-Map of the “How”

Here is a quick recap of the core ideas in developing mastery:

• You don’t have an innate passion that you should “follow,” instead, your passion follows you
• Confidence isn’t what leads to success, instead, successful behavior is what leads to confidence
• As you develop “career capital” through mastering rare and valuable skills, you’ll begin to develop confidence, passion, and personality
• Thus, your personality doesn’t shape your behavior, but instead, your behavior shapes your personality
• You are the shaper of your identity, happiness, and the impact of your life’s work

If you believe the reverse of any of these things, you have a “fixed mindset,” which assumption will keep you stuck and rigid.

How To Develop Mastery, Make Millions, and Be Happy

“If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (“what can the world offer me?”) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (“what can I offer the world?”).” — Cal Newport

This final section briefly sketches the “how-to” in developing mastery, making millions, and being happy. All three of these things are byproducts of making congruent, aligned, and consistent choices.

Develop Mastery

If you want to become successful, it’s better to follow what successful people did to get there than to follow what they do after achieving “success.”

What people do after becoming successful is often very different than what they did to get there. This is true for a few key reasons:

• “What got you here won’t get you there.” In other words, what got people successful isn’t what keeps them successful. There are levels, and your strategy must change the higher up you go. If you don’t evolve and adapt, you’ll plateau.
• Which is what most people do. They reach a certain level of success, become comfortable, and stop growing. To quote Greg McKeown, “Success becomes a catalyst for failure.”
• In order to get out of a plateau, you must embrace a learner’s mind, leverage your position, and laterally jump into new projects that force new growth and development.

If you look at any person who is honestly seeking a higher level of success, they are usually waking up early, studying and learning lots, seeking advice and feedback, and creating, testing, and failing.

This is harder to do once you’ve gained a certain level of expertise and success. Once you become comfortable, it’s hard to go back to the discomfort of learning and humility. Some of the world’s most famous chef’s continually remake their menu from scratch, even after they’ve become world-class and received global recognition, because for them, it’s about the process of growth and creativity.

According to Tucker Max, many people who become good at something immediately believe they are good at everything. They aren’t. And this is a key reason many successful people plateau. They get “fat and lazy,” and stop doing high quality work and pushing themselves to greater mastery. They stop thinking about what they can do for the world and instead focus on what the world can do for them. According to Cal Newport, if you stop developing more “career capital,” it begins to fade away. You can only use up so much of what you got until you have to get more. Career capital is a resource that you use. And if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it.

Make Millions

“Life gives to the giver and takes from the taker.” — Joe Polish

Developing mastery to the point of making actual impact will not develop until you begin:

• Investing in yourself, and
• Investing in key relationships

If you invest in the stock market, you may be able to get a 10–15% return. However, when you invest in yourself and in relationships, you can often get a 1,000% or 10X return.

According to Strategic Coach founder, Dan Sullivan, growing by 10X is actually easier than growing by 2X.

When you make investments in yourself, you shatter unhealthy and limiting subconscious patterns. You upgrade your sense of what you can be, do and have.

When you invest in key relationships, you put yourself into proximity to the best and most generous mentors available. You gain immediate access to people and ideas that could never have been possible without such relationships.

Investing actual dollars in both yourself and others dramatically changes the psychology of things. When you invest in yourself, you become highly committed to what you’re doing. Investing in yourself is an act that facilitates what Charles Darwin would call, “Selective Pressure,” which is a phenomenon that alters the behavior and fitness of living organisms within a given environment. It is the driving force of evolution and natural selection.

Investing in yourself creates internal supply to match the external demand of the investment. The bigger you invest, the bigger the psychological leap — which then facilitates a radical upgrade in behavior, confidence, harmonious passion, and outcomes.

Investing in relationships creates the optimal level of synergy — where both parties can go higher and deeper than ever before — because both are invested in each other. Crazy stuff happens when you invest dollars into the causes and cares of other people. It changes the dynamics of the relationship incredibly. Those you invest in will go above and beyond to help you in all you’re doing. It becomes more than a relationship — it becomes a mission to help you and what you’re doing.

Joe Polish, founder of Genius Network, has what calls the “Magic Rapport Formula,” which leads to 10X relationships and growth, and includes the following concepts:

• Focus on how you will help them reduce their suffering
• Invest time, money, and energy on relationships
• Be the type of person they would always answer the phone for
• Be useful, grateful, and valuable
• Treat others how you would love to be treated
• Avoid formalities, be fun and memorable, not boring
• Appreciate people
• Give value on the spot
• Get as close to in-person as you can

When you engage with givers who operate by these principles, incredibly synergistic possibilities arise. I’ve engaged in such possibilities, and can honestly attest to the 10X principle. My income has gone up at least 10X the last three years in a row — from making basically nothing to making seven figures — and I anticipate 10X continuing to happen as I humbly engage these principles.

The only way this is possible is by continually honing your “career capital,” investing in the right relationships, and then generously GIVING your rare and valuable skills to the success of other people’s goals.

It is by giving that your rare skills and abilities continue to develop and grow. It is by giving and investing in other people that your network becomes world-class and your ability to make lots of money becomes easy. Your network is your net worth.

Be Happy

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.” — Viktor E. Frankl

Happiness is a byproduct. You cannot pursue it directly. It comes from dedicating yourself to a cause you firmly believe.

In order to dedicate yourself to a cause you believe in, you must invest yourself in the development of rare skills and abilities, which then lead to confidence, passion, and purpose. That purpose is your “cause,” which you now have skills and passion to contribute to.

You love what you invest yourself in.

Happiness comes from investing yourself deeply into something and someone other than yourself.

Happiness can’t come from following a self-centered and obsessive passion aimed only at making yourself feel good. Happiness comes from self-growth and using that growth to make the world a better place.

Either you’re focused on:

• Growth or greed (“what can I give to the world” vs. “what can the world give to me”)
• Giving or taking
• Nurture or nature
• Possibility or rigidness

You’re happiest when you’re growing and giving. When you’ve become dedicated to something bigger than yourself. When you’re engaged in work you have control and autonomy over and which work is making a tangible impact in the lives of other people. You can only have this type of work by developing mastery, investing in others, and being a giver.

You ready?

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10 Pieces of Advice for My Future Self

10 Pieces of Advice for My Future Self

   January 16, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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This seems as good an occasion as any to memorialize some learnings from the past three decades.

Since thirty trips around the sun doesn’t qualify me as wise enough to tell anyone else how to live, I’ll address this to my future self.

That said, I hope you’ll find a few gems in here that will bring you more of whatever you’re seeking.

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1. Control your environment

Don’t trust yourself to make good decisions. Instead, design your environment so the right decision requires the least amount of effort. This might mean you avoid bringing unhealthy food into your home or you turn down a job offer where you may be pressured to compromise your morals. Whatever the case, you’ll have a better chance of making a good decision by setting up the right inputs rather than relying on yourself to create the right outputs.

2. Cure your ignorance

Whenever you’re embarrassed by your own ignorance in a certain subject, resist the urge to convince yourself that it doesn’t matter. Instead, try reading a book about it. Then you can decide whether it’s important.

3. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind

This comes from a quote I like by Maria Popova. History is littered with examples of seemingly smart people who ended up doing or saying dumb things because they were too attached to obsolete mental models. Even for beliefs that have served you well in the past, don’t hold on to any so tightly that they can’t be abandoned in the light of better evidence.

4. Align yourself with those who matter to you

The foundation of any valuable relationship is alignment. This goes for romantic relationships, professional ones, friendships or any other type. You want her to achieve her goals. She wants you to achieve yours. Your relationship works because, together, you both have a better shot at getting what you want. As soon as that that changes (e.g. her professional success damages your ego) the relationship will start to deteriorate. Make sure that you stay aligned with the people who matter to you. Thanks to Russ Klusas for teaching me this one.

5. Create more value than you capture

This quote by Tim O'Reilly encapsulates a great operating principle for businesses and individuals alike. The market typically forces companies to create products that customers value more than the money they offer in exchange. Businesses that can’t accomplish this usually cease to exist. Individuals, however, can hang on for quite a bit longer extracting resources from their relationships without offering much in return. Rarely, however, does this lead to happiness. Eventually, those who extract value without giving to back, end up alone.

When meeting new people, it may be tempting to ask yourself: what can I get out of this encounter? Instead try asking: what might this other person want from our encounter, and how might I deliver it? Whether this impulse strikes you as altruistic or ultimately self-serving, it tends to be a great way to build long-lasting relationships. Put another way, I’ve rarely met anyone who focused on creating value for others that didn’t reap their fair share in return.

6. Use humor wisely

Humor has always served as my defense to keep unimportant things (politics, relationship drama) from taking on too much significance. I’ve found it to be a great way to turn mountains into molehills. Unfortunately, I’ve also used it to prematurely diminish things (like eating healthy, personal finance, exercise, etc.) that later turned out to be hugely valuable. In those situations I used humor to justify my own lazy choices. Ultimately, embracing humor has made for a richer, happier life. Just don’t use it as a way to delude yourself out of trying things that are hard.

7. The obstacle is the way

Few great stories concern a hero who wants something and has an easy time getting it. We instinctually admire those who must overcome massive odds to achieve their goals. Yet, when obstacles show up in our own life, it’s easy to fall into self pity. While I can’t claim to have been tested by truly overwhelming obstacles, I like to challenge myself to take what problems I do encounter and try to identify the opportunity. I’ve found that each time I do this, the next problem feels less weighty. I hope this practice will keep me antifragile in the case that I end up facing something that truly tests me.

8. Don’t react. Respond.

There’s a story I read somewhere that’s always stuck with me. It involves two dining companions at a fancy restaurant. Suddenly, one of the guests screams at the sight of a cockroach in her salad. She swats at the bug which flies off her salad and lands on her dining companion’s jacket. As the bug scrambles around his jacket the man starts furiously smacking himself in an attempt to squash it. Meanwhile, the waiter, alerted by the commotion grabs a wine glass and napkin, scoops the bug off the diner’s jacket with the napkin and traps it under the wine glass. He carries the roach outside and lets it free on the sidewalk.

The diners reacted and created chaos. The waiter responded and fixed the problem. I can’t tell you how many problems in my life could have been better solved by taking 5 minutes to formulate a strategy rather than reacting impulsively.

9. Expand your internal locus of control

Crappy genes. Bad parents. Poorly designed policies. There are all sorts of forces outside your control that can cause you to suffer. Ultimately though, the final layer that reality has to pass through is your own interpretation. You have the ability to reframe whether you feel like you can make your life better or whether you’re at the whim of oppressive external forces. While choosing the latter may feel good, and may even be justified sometimes, it will not better your life. Developing a strong internal locus of control allows you to believe you have the ability to control your circumstances.

While I’m unsure to the extent which I believe in free will, I have seen first hand that those who have a strong internal locus of control tend to fare much better than those who fixate on external forces (regardless of how many problems they are facing). So, while there’s a chance this belief may be rooted in self delusion, it certainly seems to be a useful one.

10. Time is your most precious resource. Spend it well.

If you want to understand what someone truly values, look at how they spend their time. It’s a telling indicator because time is everyone’s most limited resource. Sometimes it may make sense to spend your time doing things you don’t like in exchange for other assets like money or information. However, this is a risky strategy as no one can tell you how much time you have left and there’s no way to get any more of it. I try to spend my days as if I’m going to make it to 100 while still remembering that a satellite chunk could fall on my head at any moment. Balancing respect of death and hope for a long and happy life, seems to have incentivized me to make good decisions about my time, thus far.

While you may not be able to get more time, you can slow down how fast it passes (at least in your mind). To illustrate, have you ever gone on vacation and noticed how the first day in a new place seems to last a long time? This has to do with a theory about how the brain processes novelty. When you encounter new things your brain recruits more cognitive resources to make sense of it and capture details. This extra expenditure of brain power makes the encounter seem longer. Conversely, when you’ve repeated the same commute a few dozen times, your brain doesn’t need to expend much energy capturing details, making the time seem to fly by. I’ve taken this as a license to try new things as often as possible. Traveling to new places or just taking a slightly different route on my walk to work.

I hope next time you read this, you’re still trying new things. At best, it may give you the feeling of just a bit more time and at worst it will make your life all the richer for trying.

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Art of Listening

Art of Listening

   January 12, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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Art of Listening

Listening is an art

I listen with my ears,

Eyes and heart

While addressing students of final year engineering, I asked them a question. My question was:

“You are driving a minibus. At first stop, 20 passengers get on the minibus. At next stop, 8 people get off the minibus and 10 people get on the minibus. What is the age of the driver?”

Some of the answers were — about 50, about 40, do not know as the age is not given in the question, like this, I received many wrong answers and then I repeated the question again and after that I received the right answer and that was their respective age.

One of my teachers asked once the following question:

If a black man marries a white lady and produces a baby, what will be the color of his teeth?

Everybody answered, of course, baby will have white teeth and teacher answered all of you are wrong as baby will not have any teeth at the time of birth.

Once one of the trainers asked a class following question:

Munna worked at a fish shop. His height was 5’6”, his waist was 36”. He worked 10 hours a day and earned 100 Rs per day. What did he weigh?

Everybody started calculating Munna’s weight by doing arithmetic and establishing relation between given digits. Then one person got up and said, “He weighed fish”. Ah! All students sighed. The question was not what his weight was; it was what he weighed!

While teaching the students of B.Tech 3rd year, I asked the question:-

A farmer has five stacks of wheat in one field and 11 stacks of wheat in another field. How many wheat stacks would he have if he combined them all into one field?

All students answered, “It will be definitely 16”. I answered, “All of you are wrong. The correct answer is one stack as these had been combined”.

Above questions and answers bring out the importance of active listening which is a structured way of listening and responding to others. It focuses attention on the speaker. Suspending your likes & dislikes are important to focus on the speaker. Active listening involves the following:

Observe — non-verbal behavior

Focus — Do not do anything else

Acknowledge — Acknowledge the message

Acronym of LISTEN is given as under:-

L — Look interested

I — Involve totally

S — Stay focused

T — Test your understanding

E — Evaluate the message

N — Neutralize your feelings

Every good conversation starts with good listening. It is pertinent to quote Stephen R Covey,

“Most people do not listen

With intent to understand,

They listen with intent to reply”

Hearing vs. listening:-

Listening and hearing are not the same. Listening is a conscious, active process with the mind. The Hearing is with senses.

Listening = Hearing + Focusing on message + Comprehending and Interpreting + Analyzing & Evaluating

We are given two ears but only one mouth because listening is twice as difficult as talking.

Active listening was given utmost importance in ancient India. Thew Vedas used to be called as “Shruti”.

Vedas were never printed as disciples learn by listening and chanting the sutras of the same. Intense active listening was practiced by all in day to day life in ancient India.

In Mahabharat, there is an interesting story of Abhimanyu. While he was in his mother’s womb, Arjuna explained the process of entering in the “Chakarvuh” (Labyrinth) to Subhadra (Abhimanyu’s mother). The listening was so intense and active that Abhimanyu while in womb had also learnt the same but unfortunately when he was explaining the process of breaking the labyrinth (Chakarvyuh), Subhadra was not awake and that had resulted very costly to Pandavas as Abhimanyu easily entered the Chakarvyuh formed by Kauravas but as he was not knowing how to break it and move out of it, he was killed. The story brings out the importance of active listening.

There is another story from Mahabharat itself which also brings out the importance of active listening. Krishna wanted that Dronacharya who was fighting a ferocious battle should be killed and therefore he requested Yudhisthir to announce “Ashwasthama hato naro va kunjro” i.e., Ashwasthama had been killed whether human being or elephant. Dronacharya heard the news of the death of his dearest son and stopped fighting and that is the time Dhristdhumn killed Dronacharya. This was the turning point of battle of Mahabharat.

In Vietnam War, the American army was fighting a fierce battle for capturing a post. It was a battle where they fought tooth and nail to capture the dominating piece of ground. They were fighting last man last round battle. They requested for reinforcement on Radio Telephony — “Send reinforcement on an Op-immediate basis”. But the person who received the message interpreted it wrongly as “Send five dollar six cents on an op-immediate basis” and reinforcement was not dispatched and American lost the operation and posts too.

Above stories gives the lesson, “Success of an operation depends on good listening capability”.

Somebody has rightly said;

“Speak in such a way

That other love to listen to you

Listen in such a way

That other love to speak to you”

10 steps of listening:

· Focus on being interested

· Start by asking questions

· Look for commonalities

· Tune in with all your attention

· Communicate you are listening with a nod

· Paraphrase what speaker says

· Validate the speaker’s emotions

· Maintain eye contact

· Let go of your own agenda

· Turn off the TV

Six Distinct Components of Listening:-

Hearing — Process of receiving sound or other stimuli

Attending — Focusing attention on external stimuli

Interpreting — The process of decoding the symbols or behavior attended to

Evaluating — The process of deciding the value of the info to receiver

Remembering — The process of placing the appropriate information into the short term or long term storage

Responding — The process of giving feedback to the source and/or another receiver

There is a difference between truly listening and waiting for your turn to talk. It is pertinent to quote Dean Jackson, “Listening is an art that requires attention over talents, spirit over ego, others over self”.

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How you can turn your ‘to do’ list into your quest

How you can turn your ‘to do’ list into your quest

   January 11, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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‘To do’ lists can be deadening and demotivating. We all have things we have to do and some of those things are routine and don’t set the world on fire. But all too often we allow those things to take far too much time and energy. So what can we do to transform ‘to do’ lists so we don’t get stuck spending most of our time on the small, time-consuming stuff?

1. Think about your use of time

A great journalling exercise I did recently was to make a huge list of all the ways I spend my time. Then I divided the list into three groups:

• routine things that have to get done, but which are uninspiring and can multiply to take up lots of time ©
• essential tasks that use my skills and are enjoyable (B)
• the core goals that I’m most passionate about (A)

For me, the category C activities are things like emails and routine admin. This includes organising book launches, doing business accounts, buying train tickets etc.

I estimated I was spending around 40% of my time on category C activities. With another 40% on work, that left 20% of my time for family, relaxation, writing … How can core goals and values be so squeezed and thrive? Of course, they can’t. So the questions then became, what could I eliminate? What could I automate or streamline? And what could I delegate?

One of the things I noticed was that I was repeating the same information to lots of people in serial emails. I set about writing a series of information sheets for authors. These covered what to expect during the publishing process, information for launches etc.

They are all online and available for authors to download on a resource page.

We added an invaluable office manager to our team at Cinnamon Press. We employed a virtual assistant to do a routine task uploading competition details. And I started time blocking so that emails are all answered once a day. I batched other admin too, so I’m not wasting time going back and forth between different types of activity.

My category B is either work-related (editing and mentoring, for example). Category B activities are harder to limit in some ways as they are more essential and more enjoyable.

I love my work, but I don’t want to be co-terminus with it. Having supportive authors who help with these tasks makes a huge difference. I gain a lot from editing the work of others, but I’m also grateful to have trusted editors to delegate part of the process to.

I get huge satisfaction from teaching and mentoring, but sharing the load is also rewarding. I have no desire to cut the category B activities from my timetable, but a team can achieve much more than an individual. Once again, time-blocking enables me edit and mentor when I’m most focussed.

And I’m learning to say no. Loving my work does not mean I have to take on more and more until it overwhelms me. Greg McKeown asks:

Have you ever said yes when you meant no, simply to avoid conflict or friction? … the very thought of saying no brings us physical discomfort. We feel guilty. We don’t want to let someone down. … But these emotions muddle our clarity. They distract us from the reality of the fact that either we can say no and regret it for a few minutes or say yes and regret it for days, weeks, months or even years.

We all have the same amount of time each day, but how we use it makes the difference. We can spend a bigger percentage of our time on the important things if:

• we eliminate non essential activities (no one needs to be available to a phone or messages every minute of the day)
• streamline and/or delegate some of the routine activities
• use blocks of time for different types of activity so you focus on the important things first and one task at a time
• build a team to share the more essential and rewarding work
• don’t imagine we can do it all and learn to say no

These strategies have helped me shift from spending 40% of my time on the routine ‘to do’ list to around 20% and I aim to get that down further this year.

This frees much more time for editing and mentoring, but also for my category A activities. These include writing, travel, learning, family time and relaxation.

2. Think about why certain activities are important to you

We all have different goals, different category A activities that are more ‘quest’ than ‘to do’. It’s sad that the pace of life often relegates these to the ‘add-ons’ that we hardly have any time for. But the more passionate we are about these things, the less we will find excuses for not doing them.

As I said in recent post:

Your goals should be your passion and, if they are, then it’s no longer a matter of forcing yourself on by dogged willpower.

It helps to know why we we value certain activities over others. This is what Benjamin Hardy advises:

Think about what it is you want, and ask yourself this simple question:

What about ___________ is important to me?

If your goal is to work from home, then ask yourself the question:

What about “working from home” is important to me?

Your answer might be something like, “to have a more flexible schedule.”

You then put THAT into the previous question.

It’s good to go at least 7-questions deep into this exercise.

Don’t overthink it. Let the answers come and move on and you’ll find your thinking is much clearer than you imagined.

For me:

Writing is the most meaningful and transformative activity I undertake. It’s fundamental to how I reflecting on life and connect with others. Becoming a different story is my life’s work.

Travel puts me in unfamiliar places and situations. This in turn stimulates creativity, writing, thought and deeper work.

Family (including an extended family of close friends) makes my world make sense. These are the people who teach me to live from abundance rather than scarcity. These are the people who confirm for my that generosity is the key virtue.

Keeping fit facilitates other goals. I’m less than 5 feet tall and have a slow metabolism so to maintain my energy I need to be fit, of moderate weight, flexible and well-nourished. It’s about valuing my most basic resource: myself, so that I can give.

Personal development is also foundational to my goals. When my daily rituals, habits, learning, attention to values and relaxation are in harmony, the rest follows.

If we are clear about what matters most and why these things matter, we are more likely to live life as an exciting quest rather than a tedious to do list.

3. Think about building your life on values rather than ‘oughts’

When we face a long list of things we have to do, resistance sets in. Life becomes drudgery sustained by a diminishing supply of willpower. Even if we manage to achieve everything on the list, we’re not likely to take much pleasure of pride from it.

When we manage our time by eliminating, streamlining, delegating, sharing, time blocking and saying no, we find we have ‘more time’.

When we know what we are passionate about and why, we release energy that is much more effective than willpower.

And when we act from our deepest values rather than ‘oughts’ imposed on us from outside, then this energy increases beyond our imagining.

Living from values gives us this bigger vision. Living from values comes from intrinsic motivation rather than from something imposed on us.

As with goals, we will each have different value sets. But something I’ve found useful is to use a system attributed to Benjamin Franklin. He decided on thirteen key virtues and each week of the year would focus on one of them so that over the year he’d concentrate on each value four times.

I’ve written my values into a tiny book (less than two inches square) that I can carry with me. The first two for me are generosity and abundance. It was fascinating to spend time journalling to reach my list of thirteen. And starting each day thinking about how I can show that value in my life is much more motivating than starting the day thinking about a to do list. It doesn’t mean that there are no routine jobs to do, but it keep them in perspective.

4. Think about taking time out

When you know how you want to live and why; when you know the values your life rests on, life becomes a quest rather than a mundane list of demands on your time. This is exhilarating and motivating and it demands that we redirect our energy to what matters to us. How do we do that?

i. We need to take space to think

I’m currently rereading Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own —  it’s an important text and the idea that we need a dedicated space in which to write is essential. Over the last week I’ve set up a dedicated writing room in which to work. It has 23 years of past journals, all the books I’ve bought but still need to read, and important texts that have informed my current thinking. It’s a place I can go to think or write. If you can’t take a whole room, find a desk, a corner, any space that you can call your own and where you can think and write.

ii. We need to create a mindset that helps us to focus

Whatever your daily commitments, journalling morning and evening can make all the difference. Five minutes of writing about how you envisage your future. Five minutes of reflecting on how you have used your time, lived your ‘why’ or values, makes an enormous impact on how you see the world and interact with it. Take time every day to affirm and reflect and watch your world change.

Environment is crucial to our perspective and when we take control of it, things happen.,

iii. We need time in other environments

This is why travel is so important to me. It places me in unfamiliar places and stimulates creativity, writing, thought and deeper work. If you can’t leave the country, go for a long walk; swap houses with a friend for a week. Do something that shifts your perspective and in the unfamiliar situation you will find yourself having new thoughts.

In short

If you want your life to be a quest rather than a mere ‘to do’ list; and want to make a difference, there are a few simple strategies:

• think about your use of time — you have as much time as anyone else and it’s up to you how you use it.
• think about why certain activities are important to you — dig deep until you find what matters to you.
• think about your values and build your life around intrinsic motivation, not what someone says you ‘ought’ to do.
• think about taking time out, whether in daily journalling or unfamiliar environments that challenge you to adopt new perspectives.

When you begin to make these changes you’ll find life is no longer a mundane to do list, but a quest of your own making. Enjoy!

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Want To Be The Best Writer On The Planet? Do These 27 Things Immediately

Want To Be The Best Writer On The Planet? Do These 27 Things Immediately

   January 10, 2018       Hardik Gandhi

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The amount of bad writing advice out there is astounding. People who have never published anything selling courses on how to make a career as a writer. Terribly written Medium articles telling you how to improve your prose. Marketing books from writers who not only haven’t sold many books — but their own marketing books don’t sell. All this bad advice adds up and makes a harder thing — an already difficult industry to navigate — even harder.

Over the last year, I’ve been lucky enough to interview some of the best writers on the planet for WritingRoutines.com. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to ask Pulitzer Prize winners, #1 New York Times best-selling authors, brilliant novelists, talented journalists and expert communicators about how they practice their craft. I got valuable lessons from each one. I’ve collected a few of the best below, alongside some of the insights — or hacks as we call them today to get more people to click — from writers I wish were still alive to interview or ones I wish to interview someday if the opportunity presents itself.

I hope you learn as much from them as I did. Enjoy!

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Devote Yourself to Someone Greater First

“If I am asked today to advise a young writer who has not yet made up his mind what way to go, I would try to persuade him to devote himself first to the work of someone greater, interpreting or translating him. If you are a beginner there is more security in such self-sacrifice than in your own creativity and nothing you ever do with all your heart is done in vain.”

— Stefan Zweig, author of The World of Yesterday and in the 1920’s and 1930’s was one of the most popular authors in the world

Wake Up Early And Read, Read, Read

“I wake up around 5am. I have 2–3 cups of coffee. I read and read and read for two hours. I read high quality literary fiction to be inspired, high quality non-fiction about a topic I am fascinated by in order to learn, I read inspirational or spiritual writing to feel that special something inside, and often I will spend some time studying a game. Then I might read the literary fiction some more. At some point, I get the urge or the itch to put the books away. I go to my computer and start to write.”

— James Altucher, author of Choose Yourself!, which the USA Today’s called one of “Best Business Books of All Time.”

Do Not Chase Exotic Locations to Write

“It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. ‘I have a perfectly marvellous house for you to write in,’ they’d say. Of course no one needs marvellous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

— Budd Schulberg, author of What Makes Sammy Run? and the Academy Award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront

Edit Ten Times

“I repeatedly edit it many times, at least ten. I just keep on doing it, until I can’t think of further improvements. I can’t say that is a process in any formal sense, simply a recognition that the “process” to date hasn’t worked very well and so it must continue. I don’t pretend this is efficient.”

— Tyler Cowen, economics professor, author of Average Is Over and contributor to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and many other publications

Nobody Gets Talker’s Block

“No one ever gets talker’s block. No one wakes up in the morning, discovers he has nothing to say and sits quietly, for days or weeks, until the muse hits, until the moment is right, until all the craziness in his life has died down.”

— Seth Godin, New York Times bestselling author of Purple Cow and more than 20 other books

Do the Three Passes of Editing

“[My editing] rests on three passes. The first pass is when you write the best chapter you can. The second pass comes later once the whole book (or whole part of the book containing the chapter) is done. During this pass, I come back to the chapter on my computer and cut and tighten. The final pass is when I read through a printed version of the chapter on paper. Reading on paper is necessary if you’re going to root out odd constructions or minor errors.”

— Cal Newport, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Deep Work

The Only Way Out is Through

“The way out of this mess is through. A friend of mine who used to do long-distance running gave me some advice on dealing with pain as a writer. “What do you do about the cramps?” I asked. I was noticing they hit my in the gut usually at the three or four mile mark. I thought he’d have some great advice on how to avoid them altogether. In fact, I assumed this was the case. His answer surprised me, though. ‘Cramps? What do I do? I keep running, and eventually they go away. I run through the cramps.’ What do I do when I feel blocked? I write through the block.”

— Jeff Goins, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Real Artists Don’t Starve

Sometimes You Just Need Some Good Earmuffs

“I’m an “absolute quiet” kind of person. If I’m writing at home, and there’s any noise at all, such as my wonderful hubby puttering around and coincidentally clearing his throat, I wear my Peltor Sport Ultimate 10 Hearing Protector Earmuffs. I’m so used to them that when I need to concentrate, I put them on even when there isn’t any noise. Earmuffs are like a signal to my brain — Okay, focus! On planes, I often wear noise canceling headphones.”

— Dr. Barbara Oakley, bestselling author of A Mind for Numbers and former Army Captain

Be So Good They Can’t Ignore You

“What they want to hear is, ‘Here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script’…but I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’”

— Steve Martin, author of Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life and award-winning actor and banjo player

Keep the Best in Mind

“It really depends on the genre of work I’m doing–I always try to keep models in mind, though the model will change depending on what I’m working on. For the book on Cato the Younger, Jimmy Soni and I were constantly referring to Tom Holland’s book on the Roman Republic, Rubicon; for our book on Claude Shannon, to James Gleick’s The Information and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind.For my academic work, people like Danielle Allen are great models.”

— Rob Goodman, congressional speechwriter and co-author of A Mind at Play and Rome’s Last Citizen: The Life and Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy of Caesar

Quit Your Bitching

“Don’t lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don’t have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet.”

― Cheryl Strayed, author of the number #1 New York Times bestseller Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things

Fix The Important Things

“Writer’s block is miserable and part of it can be just being in a really bad place. Sometimes if you’re just in a bad mental place, it doesn’t matter what work you put in. You have to fix bigger things than your writing.”

— Hari Kondabolu, the comic who the New York Times called “one of the most necessary political comedians working today.”

Get a Giant Sketchpad

“Notebooks have always been big for me, both in the early stages of a new project and as a way to get myself unstuck if I’m struggling. But I have giant, chicken-scratch handwriting, and would always end up jotting down thoughts over half a dozen pages and then never really looking at them again. I have probably fifty illegible notebooks sitting in desk drawers, and I would easily have filled fifty more had I not been introduced to the most elegant solution by a friend, the author Ashley Cardiff: A sketchpad. A 9-by-12-inch artist’s sketchpad. This has been my great revelation. It’s unlined so I can read my bad handwriting and large enough that I can group several ideas together on the same page. Plus, it gives me an excuse to buy fancy mechanical pencils.”

— Liana Maeby, author of South on Highland, which actor/writer BJ Novak called “the kind of book kids will steal from each other.”

It’s All Material

“I’m never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, ‘Can I do something with that?’” [By the way, this advice echoes a phrase I’ve learned from author Robert Greene, “It’s all material.” Meaning everything bad that happens, everything frustrating or delayed or disappointing — all of it can be fuel for a book. It can teach you something that helps you improve your business, it can become a story you pass along to a friend.]

— Jerry Seinfeld, creator of Seinfeld and named by Comedy Central the “12th Greatest Stand-up Comedian of All Time.”

Understand How the Pieces Fit Together

“To write a clean and fluent piece of any kind, you have to understand how its various parts fit together — how a change here will affect something over there. With a short piece, you never lose sight of the whole because you can read and reread it many times as you work. That’s what I do. I make a change and then I read the whole piece to see how it works. But I can’t do that with a book, so I have to find other ways to stay oriented. I reread or skim sections of the book that I know relate to the part I’m working on, I keep notes about the larger structure, and I use Word’s phrase-search function to move around and check up on things. I also make a huge effort to commit as much of the book as I can to memory. It’s exhausting and it seems psychologically damaging in some way, but it helps me to understand when jokes need to be repeated, how much space needs to intervene between similar kinds of scenes, how ideas should be patterned, etc.”

— Aaron Thier, author of Mr. Eternity and recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts

Run to Keep Yourself Sane

“The twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.” [This is not unlike many other writers — including Murakami and Malcolm Gladwell — who use running as a coping mechanism.]

— Joyce Carol Oates, author of over 40 novels, including Them, winner of the National Book Award

Before You Write, Crystallize Your Thinking

“If I’m just starting, I never consider the page blank. I’ve been writing in my head long before I sit down at the keyboard. In fact, I sometimes start inadvertently, by describing to someone what I’m doing. Conversation often crystallizes my own thinking far more effectively than solitary reflection. When I put the first words down, I know they’re likely to change, which I find liberating — no need to get it perfect the first time. But I want the first sentence to set a tone or indicate a theme for that chapter, so I have to start with a clear sense of the meaning of the events that follow, and how I want the reader to feel.”

— Pulitzer Prize winner T.J. Stiles, author of Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America

Let the Play Accumulate

“Don’t start writing the play at once, but get a little notebook and put down everything you think about your play in the notebook, just as the ideas come to you without rhyme or reason especially. Let the play accumulate, as I call it; let it percolate and stew in your mind; and write down any ideas, bits of dialogue, descriptions, words — anything you think you might be able to use. Many of these things will come to you unconsciously while you are walking home from school, bathing, mowing the lawn; be sure to get them all into your notebook.”

— E.P. Conkle, professor emeritus of drama whose plays have been produced on Broadway

Take the Necessary Medicine

“I tend to edit heavily and repeatedly as I go along, so I don’t make the distinction, at least by myself. For the books that I’ve written for a larger public, however, I’ve had the help of an immensely gifted editor (Alane Mason, at Norton), so there I do separate out the tasks: in effect my own writing/editing; and then a further editing after receiving her suggestions. I tend to hate the latter experience, though I recognize that it is almost invariably good — a bit like swallowing disagreeable but essential medicine.”

— Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve, a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award winner

To Beat Writer’s Block, Double Down on Research

“When I have writer’s block it is because I have not done enough research or I have not thought hard enough about the subject about which I’m writing. That’s a signal for me to go back to the archives or to go back into my thoughts and think through what it is I am supposed to be doing.”

— MacArthur “Genius” and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed, author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

Always Ask These Questions

“What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?” Then finish with these final two questions: ‘Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?’”

— George Orwell, famous author of 1984 and Animal Farm

You Don’t Need a Vomit Draft

“Writers are usually encouraged to write a “vomit draft” and just get something out, however terrible it is, in order to overcome The Fear, get some momentum, and move to more of an editing mindset, where’s it’s less scary to make progress. I don’t do that. I think that’s just a trick to try and lower the stakes so you can overcome procrastination and The Fear. And while it’s good for that, I think it’s bad in the long haul because you’re producing a lot of junk and that’s going to be hard to fully clean up. I treat writing a lot more like architecture. You wouldn’t work without a blueprint, construct a crappy building, then knock it down and build a better one. That would be ridiculous. You’d put together a really tight blueprint, then construct the building once, the right way, and if it needs tweaks, they’re relatively small. As the old saying goes: ‘Measure twice, cut once.’”

— Eric Barker, author of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up The Wrong Tree and creator of the popular blog of the same name

Keep the Momentum

“Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether.”

— Jeanette Winterson, a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award and author best known for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was adapted into a BBC drama

You Don’t Need to be Kissed by a Muse

When asked if writing comes easy: “Haha, no, I’ve not been kissed by a muse. For me, writing is a craft that needs constant honing.”

— Andrea Wulf, author of The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World, which won the Royal Society Science Book Award 2016 and the LA Times Book Prize 2016.

Write for the Ear

“I’ve got a theory that most writers are either frustrated musicians or painters — and which of them you are depends on whether you write for the ear or the eye. As a former musician and former speechwriter, I definitely write for the ear. I listen to music all the time for inspiration and energy. I tend to make playlists as the sound track for writing different books. They serve as snapshots in time. So, I’ve got one for Wingnuts — lots of The National, Drive-By-Truckers, Radiohead and Randy Newman — and one for Washington’s Farewell that’s more classical, jazz, the Americana series by Chris Thile, Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer and the soundtrack to Hamilton.”

— John Avlon, author of Washington’s Farewell and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast

Learn How to Take Brutally Frank Criticism

“I try to imagine comments, questions, and criticisms that the book will generate. Then I try to rehearse the reply or answer. My friends are great critics of my writing and I always make sure they have read the drafts and galleys and been brutally frank with me about their reactions. They know I can take it.”

— Richard Clarke, former Assistant Secretary of State who has served under three different Presidents in different roles and author of Warnings: Finding Cassandras To Stop Catastrophes

Wake Up and Get After It

“I remember Salman Rushdie telling me how he gives it the first energy of the day. As soon as he gets up, he goes to his office and starts writing. He’s still in his pajamas. He believes there is a “little package of creative energy that was nourished by sleep,” and he doesn’t want to waste it. He works for an hour or two and then goes to brush his teeth. I have a very similar approach. Only I brush my teeth before I start. I guess that’s my pre-writing ritual.”

— Cal Fussman, best known for the “What I’ve Learned” Esquire column and a master interviewer who has talked to the likes of Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali, John Wooden, Richard Branson

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