All You Need Are a Few Small Wins Every Day
There’s no magical process for creating something of magnitude
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We have a false picture of how success happens. Because we often see only the results and almost never the process involved to achieve them, we tend to think that the finished product — a new film, a popular podcast, a fitness accomplishment — is impressive, and therefore the process by which the product was created must have been equally brilliant.
In fact, it was likely the opposite. Success, like the proverbial sausage, is much less pretty when you see how it’s made.
As an author, I know books well. I also remember equally well how I thought books were created back when I was solely a reader. I assumed there must be some magical, special process. If only that were so.
The single best piece of advice I’ve heard about writing a book is to produce “two crappy pages a day.” It is by carving out a small win each and every day — getting words on the page — that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right. (I actually have those words on my wall as a reminder.)
While it would be wonderful if books could be created through raw genius, if we could spit fire each time we sat down at the keyboard, that’s not how it goes. Instead, the best writers have routines that get their asses in their chairs and create opportunities to move the ball slightly forward each day. Enough of these small actions strung together — reviewed, dissected, iterated upon — produces publishable work. Sometimes it even produces something that takes readers’ breath away. The same rule applies to anything of value. Realizing this might strip away some of the mystique of the things you love, the upside is that the path to brilliance turns out to be more accessible than you may have previously thought.
Businesses are built by humble means — good businesses, anyway. Sure, the WeWorks of the world get all sorts of attention for their ambitious plans to take over the world, and their stratospheric valuations can make people believe that they will. But often, these companies implode, and in the end, not even the bones remain. Why? Because they never existed in the first place. They were fictions, created in a…
