Legos, Trains, and Haunted Houses

The Limiting Truth of Unlimited Possibilities

How to Overcome The Adversity In Your Life, One Lego At A Time

In a room, two boys are playing, each with their own Lego set. Each boy has an equal number of pieces, identical in every way.

The only difference is that one boy has the box that shows a picture of what the parts can build. It demonstrates the potential that using the particular pieces as depicted can form.

The other boy has all the same pieces in a clear, plastic baggie. He has zero guidance, no scaffolding to work from, and has an unlimited set of options in front of him.

For the first boy, we think of his options to be more limited by being given the display. While he may choose to build something unique, the probabilities are that he'll build something derivative of the display.

While he's been given a head start on what he is potentially able to build, it would seem that it also limits his creativity by creating a preset image of what should be done. One would think that this is the fallacy of expectation; that by showing what is possible, it creates limits on his creativity.

But for the other boy, the one with an unlimited set of options with what to build, how many pieces to use and for what purpose, the task is actually much more limiting.

He lacks any frame to focus his creative energy on. The limitlessness of his options actually works to hinder his creativity.

He has too many options, too many choices to make. He can build tall, he can go wide, he can make anything he imagines, and that analysis leads to a paralysis of action.

Trains In Vain

How Designers of Disneyland Overcame Physical Limitations  

Take a look at another example. When Walt Disney was growing up, he had a fascination with trains. 

He was so keen on trains; he made the designers of his theme park build a railroad track that circumnavigated his property line as an attraction.

When Disney was designing the park, he placed a train track that went around the perimeter of the park for people to get a tour of everything that was offered. But as the popularity of Disneyland grew, and Disney wanted to include more attractions, the property limitations placed a huge burden on the designers and architects. There was a finite amount of space and an unlimited number of options for more rides and attractions.

So what were the designers and architects to do?

If you've ever been to the California Disneyland, you've seen some of the creative solutions to these property limitations. Most likely, without even being aware of the problem in the first place.

If you've ever entered the Haunted House, you know that you walk into an octagonal room that closes behind you. As the doors close, a pre-recorded voice streams over the loudspeakers and sets the tone for what comes next.

As the tape is played, the room elongates and stretches before the audience's eyes.

But it's all an optical illusion.

What's happening is a creative solution to the limitations placed on the designers.

To add an attraction without taking away from other existing rides and structures, as well as the train that circumnavigated the perimeter of the park, the designers realized that they couldn't build upward -

- they had to build down.

So the magical stretching room is an elevator that goes underground to a tunnel that is the ride.

It was only through the limitations placed on the designers that they created one of the most memorable, popular attractions in Disneyland.

And it was because of the restrictions imposed on the developers that a solution was formed, not from them having unlimited options.

So, when you're confronted with endless options, ask yourself what are some parameters that you can work within.

What are some things that can confine you, to help you devise a plan, an option, a strategy?

Learn to set limits, you'll discover that you'll need to be more creative with them than without.

(I first read about Walt Disney, Trains, and The Haunted Mansion "Stretching Room" on the Nerd Guru blog)

The Only Way To Develop Expert Habits Is To Fail At Developing Them

Just This Once You Should Look To Fail

If you want to make a change in your life, there's only one way to do so.

If you were to go for a hike on the local trails, how'd you get started?

How about losing some weight, get in better shape and become healthier?

What's the first thing you'd do?

How about wanting to make more money?

Would you get a new job, pick up additional shifts at your existing one, or start a business?

In every example you're making a trade-off.

You're making a trade-off of something, it may be time, or money, for the idea that there's a payoff at the end. You're giving up something in order to receive some type of reward.

If you were to make a lifestyle change, such as living healthier or making more money, how would you get started?

What's the first thing you'd do?

No matter what expert habit you hope to develop, no matter what new skill you want to master, and what change you wish to see in your life, there's no fool-proof method.

Regardless of what you want to accomplish, or wish to change, there's only one way to get it accomplished.

Get started.

There's only one way to be successful.

To get started.

Will you fail?
Possibly.

Will you learn?
Absolutely.


What you do with your experience(s) after you learn is up to you.

When asked how he persevered to develop the light bulb after almost 10,000 different versions failed, Edison is quoted as saying

"I didn't fail. I just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

If you want to make an effective change in your life, you need to act.

It's only through action that we learn, and through the trials and errors that we experience, is how we succeed or fail.

Another American innovator Henry Ford is quoted as saying, "whether you think you can, or cannot, you're right."

It won't be easy. It probably won't happen when you need it to, but if you try, fail and learn, you're further along than if you didn't get started in the first place.

In other words, the only way you can develop expert habits in your life is to fail at developing them.

But it's by failing that you learn what doesn't work and puts you one step closer to finding what does.

How To Process The Stupid Out Of Your Project

How To Overcome Any Obstacle In Your Way

There are many reasons to get serious about anything you care about, your passion projects, from creative writing, to painting, business and entrepreneurship.

But first ask yourself, what is it about theses things that you actually enjoy?



We often get in our own way.

We focus on the outcomes, forgetting about the steps necessary for our own success.

Do you get lost in the moment?

Is it something you can do in your own time, if left to your own devices?

Musicians are a great example of this.

They can practice for hours on songs and scales, perform for a couple hours in front of an audience that ranges from zero to huge, and afterward, sit down and play some more for the sheer joy of music.

How do you think about your passion?

Is it something that like David Foster Wallace wrote in his metaphor about two fish swimming by each other, one fish asks, "How's the water" and the other fish replies "what's water?"

In other words, is it something that you can just do, or do you have a self-limiting belief holding you back?

If you struggle with starting and maintaining your passion projects, you may be putting too much emphasis on the outcome rather than the necessary steps to get there.

Writing is not simple, and every writer - which due to schooling, the Internet and email, we are all writers - has to find a way to overcome the obstacles of momentum, motivation and inertia.

Think Of The Process Like Sailing

You pull out of your slip, cruise through the harbor and set out on the water.

If you constantly stare at the port, it's going to seem like you're never getting anywhere.

The gradual distance between you and the dock seem like it's taking forever to create any real distance.

But, if you look forward, focus on all the little things like wind, setting the jib and steering; enjoy the scenery in front and next to you, once you look back, you'll be amazed how far you've travelled.

Or imagine a cross-country flight.

You walk down the tunnel, board, stow you carry-on luggage, sit down and buckle in.  Luckily you have a window seat and can look out while you're on your way.

Do you spend the entire flight staring at the clouds and watching the square lots on the ground, wondering if there are people down there?  If so, where are they going? What are they doing? Are they looking at you as you fly at cruising altitude, bouncing around in your seat from a little light turbulence?

It'll seem like the flight lasts a life time if you try to count each lot as you fly overhead.

But if you strap down, watch a movie, read a book, or take a nap and only look out the window after you get up to use the bathroom when you need to, the flight will seem like it's passing in no-time at all.

It's All About The Process Not The Product

3 Authors That Will Help You Overcome Your Adversity To Writing

1) In his book on writing, The Lie That Tells a Truth, John Dufresne opines that when we focus on the end product, it's difficult to see it through. He encourages us in his preface that;

"Remember when you were a child, and you were stuck in the house on a rainy day, and Mom sat you at the kitchen table, gave you a pencil, a sharpener, a box of crayons, and a ream of paper, and you went at it? You drew all day long and never got blocked..."

The idea here is that as kids, we never thought about the outcome of our passion.  We used it to lose ourselves in the moment.  To act as a pastime when we could.  It was about the enjoyment of the process not the end result.

2) Similarly Austin Kleon writes in his books, Steal Like An Artist and Show Your Work, that it's the process that people don't see when they think about creative work.

People enjoy the finished product, but as creatives we should focus on enjoying the process.

He suggests getting out in the world, carrying a notebook and making notes of the sights, sounds, smells, that you experience. You can use them at a later date.

I wrote a post about this process of stealing and borrowing for ideas on a blog post that you can read here: My Kindle Publishing Lesson: Beg, Borrow and Steal Your Way To Becoming A Better Writer.

The point is, you can borrow from people around you and utilize it to make your projects better.

3) Finally author Johnny B. Truant of The Smarter Artist Podcast (as well as the Self-Publishing Podcast and Write, Publish, Repeat) claims in his episode titled "Talking About Writing Is Not Writing" - he mentions the work that a carpenter does.

A carpenter doesn't spend their time talking about carpentry, they're actively working on the craft.

So find a way with your passion project to get deep into the trenches of doing the actual work.

The band Pearl Jam says that when they started, they're rehearsal space was in the basement of a warehouse that other creatives used during the day.

They'd walk past the artists, climbing down the stairs smelling the paint and tincture, and feel inspired to match what was going on around them.

In all of these examples, there is the reinforcement to focus on the process, the daily act of sitting down and writing.

No one is saying that following your passion project is going to be easy.  Or simple, or fun all the time.

There's no guarantee you won't fall on your face, lose your shirt, or fail.

Get Lost To Find Yourself

Set a goal.

Perhaps it's finding a new client.

Or writing 500 words a day.

Perhaps it's running 3 miles at the end of a long work day.

Set a goal that you can realistic do everyday.  Don't worry about the outcome of those goals.

For this exercise focus on small, micro-accomplishments that you can do and maintain daily.

The point is, create the process of doing little things that moves you , step by step, toward your goals.

The act of getting down in the trenches, of digging into the words and what you're trying to say, is one you need to be willing to do.

Teach yourself how to be preoccupied with the act of doing, how to get lost in the moment, knowing that you'll get there some day and some how.

Just don't worry about the outcome. How it'll be received, or whether it'll be any "good."

That's a burden that's too great to carry.

And one that, often, you don't have any control over.

So focus on the necessary steps, and diligently get lost in the process (an oxymoron for sure!).

3 Keys To Maximize Productivity And Improve Your Unintended Consequences

How To Be More Productive Without Meaning To Be

The Cause And Effect Of Unintended Consequences Toward Our Productivity 

Funny thing about a blog. 

The law of unintended consequences states that our actions create effects that were not what we had in mind.  It could be that you choose to sit down and watch an "innocent" film with the family, only to find out that there's a love-making scene in it. 

Hard to explain what's happening to a six year-old.

This law applies to writing as well. 

So you wrote another blog post or story.  

You write something, publish it and promote it everywhere and then wait.  Sometimes you wait and you wait and wait some more. 

Constantly refreshing your browser to see your audience and traffic results, you wait for someone to read it, you wait for someone to comment on it, and you wait for someone to promote it for you.

And while you're waiting, another funny thing happens. 

The unintended happens.

In this post, we'll discuss the law of unintended consequences as an effect of our actions.  By knowing your target goals, making small incremental gains that happen in the correct order, you'll prevent negative results and making it ten times easier to stay productive. 

The Law Of Unintended Consequences

Your blog post has stirred an emotion, a thought, an idea in someone else.  An idea that wasn't part of your intention when writing. Duh, that's why it's called unintentional.

Since beginning this kindle publishing journey and, more importantly, began to document it on this blog, I've stumbled upon a few interesting conversations.

Just recently a friend and I had an intriguing conversation about how she could get started writing.  
She asked how she could find the courage to get going, as if I had some secret confidence or potion to making it work.

As she spoke, I felt more and more like a fraud. 

I knew that it didn't take much courage to write.  

All it takes is just making the time a priority.  

Sit your ass down and write.    

What the conversation reminded me of was that we have to make it important.  Make it so important it's a habit. Like breathing. 

Then and only then would the words get put down on paper.  

Our conversation reminded me of the critical nature of staying focused on the goal. Also it was a reminder to think about the mini-steps needed to be taken, the lines that needed to be written in order to finish the novel, blog or story, that was started.

Another thing the talk reminded me of was the discipline needed, even if it meant taking a few minutes here and there between other tasks in the day, of stealing a couple minutes to get the writing down.

Life will get in the way.  That's one of the truisms, that what ever we want to do will be interrupted by things beyond your control.

There're always bills to pay, phone and text messages to reply, and emails to answer. 

Hello? Is Anybody There?

You published it, promoted it on all the Social Media platforms.  

Tried to connect with others in your area of interest and you wait.  

Again you refresh your browser and wait for the traffic. 

But still crickets. 

Anybody who writes knows the anxiety of first sharing your content and second waiting for a response from an audience. 

Another conversation I've had is with a friend who likes to tell me that they enjoy reading the posts, but never go into detail about what the theme or point of the post may be.  

While I enjoy the compliments, I get an uneasy tension as we talk.  

It's uneasy because the conversations amount to nothing more than platitudes, empty calories that are neither sustaining or nutritious. They're like a snickers bar when I'm starving.  But hey, I'm not really me when I'm hungry. At least they're reading, which I do enjoy hearing about.

In yet another recent conversation with another friend, she was telling me that she felt that she wanted to read a book.  

That's not surprising considering that in 2002, a survey as reported by the New York Times claimed that 81% of Americans claimed to have a book they wanted to write.  

The dicks at the editorial board of the New York Times and the writer Joseph Epstein epistemologically dictates that you shouldn't waste the energy, time or paper it would take to create a book.

But that's a sidebar for the point of my conversation with the friend.  

She was claiming how difficult it would be to write a book, how precious little time she had, yet how important it would be to write her book.

My advice to her was simple. 

1. Focus But Don't Obsess On Your Target: Decide on the outcome you want but don't start out trying to handle the full load, rather, find a way to work backward. This reverse planning will help you anticipate some missteps to avoid along the way that you may otherwise stay blind to with an outcome based perspective.  

Think of it like a marathon - Ugh, the thought of running makes my stomach churn and shins hurt - but if you know your distance to the finish line, and work on the steps leading up to it, the marathon is much, much easier - so I'm told. 

2. Succeed Greatly By Taking Small Steps:  You can't stand at the base of Mount Fuji and expect to get to the top in one super stride.  It takes the collective number of many, many small steps to cover the height and distance. 

Take the task at hand of writing a book, divide it up into micro-phases such as chapters.  It'll help you organize your thoughts, and organize the direction of your thoughts. 

 Think of it like eating a pizza. 

 It comes out of the oven, the cheese is boiling hot, the vegetables gleaming, and the pie is uncut.  

Looking at the size of the pizza may be overwhelming and you're unsure how you're going to eat it, much like starting out on a novel.  But just like the pizza, the cook cuts the pizza into slices, 8 pieces most likely, and now you're salivating for one.  

It's the little things that add up.

3. Pants First, Shoes Second: If you plan on going for a run, you need to put on your pants or shorts before you put on your shoes.  Know the proper sequence of events before taking on the tasks. I've written about how to put things in proper order in a previous post that you can read by clicking here: 3 Tips To Conquer Your Fears And Become The Person You Deserve

In effect, target those micro-phases, and divide them into even smaller phases.

Just like the pizza above, you can't eat a whole pie in one bite, and you can't pelican a slice in one bite either.  You're going to fold it and take one bite at a time, or if you're "cultured," you'll cut a piece off the slice and swallow it, after chewing of course. 

And my point to my friend was the same.

Take the idea of a book and divide it into small slices, then take those slices and make them into smaller pieces still.  It'll be more digestible and easier to find the time to get those mini-projects done.

Her response was that, "Wow, that doesn't seem as tough."

It's not.

The mountains we perceive are really just a molehill.  But the more we stare at the task, the more we obsess over the outcome, the greater we make the challenge for ourselves.  

By writing about my Kindle Publishing journey, it's led to conversations about time management, productivity, habit formation, and the importance of knowing your ONE thing to focus upon. 

Those are the unintended consequences of putting myself out there. 

If you're struggling with a task or goal, focus on the steps you want to take, put them in proper order and get started.  

To quote Joe Strummer of the band The Clash: 

5 Tips To Make A Change For A Better You

Small Behavioral Changes That Will Help You Become A Better You

This post is about behavioral modification and habit forming.

We need to define habits and behavioral modification as making subtle changes in our unconscious actions (habits) and learning new behavior through regular conscious activity until it becomes automatic behavior (new habits).

So, how does this apply to you and my writing and Kindle Publishing journey?

It's about ways to overcome challenges that seem too grandiose and too large to otherwise accomplish.

It's about making major changes in how we create and reinforce actions, good and bad, and how we can make small changes for major accomplishments.

It's about learning new tactics, taking shorter decisive actions to achieve greater mastery and improved productivity.

As I've written previously, practice makes permanent.

The trick is about taking small detailed steps that you can build upon.

Slow And Steady Wins The Race

In a popular, well known book by Jim Collins called "Good To Great," he writes a story about two groups of people that are attempting the overcome the same challenge in two distinctly different ways.

What both groups were were attempting to be the first to reach the South Pole during a time when luxury was low and the risk was great.


Get It From Amazon - Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't

One group led by British explorer Robert Falcon Scott would "batch" their efforts.  They would hike as far as they could and for as long as they could maintain it, weather permitting.  Trudging upward of 40+ miles a day on nicer days, they'd hunker down and rest on days where the weather was too large a challenge to overcome.

The other group of four hikers led by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen set out on their itinerary with a more manageable, reasonable goal.  The second group chose to hike 20 miles a day, the weather being accommodating or not.

The winner was Amundsen's second group, who beat the British by a full 5 weeks!

So what does that mean for us to improve our productivity?

It's proof that taking large tasks and breaking them into smaller, more manageable tasks is a great productivity tip.

Another example of this tactic is in Major League Baseball (MLB).

 In a recent study, MLB points out that starting pitchers that go the full game, called a complete game in the parlance, is down in recent years.

In fact, in the MLB study, they claim that of all the 2,700+ games or so, only 60 complete games were recorded. That equals only one complete game for every 45.6+ starts.

Of course, there are factors that come into play with these statistics, such as highly specialized relievers or games being broken up by the offensive team in the late innings for examples.

It also means that it's much, much harder to do something of quality over long periods of time.

Sustainability is one of the keys then.

Most MLB pitchers work about 5 innings or have a total pitch count before they're substituted for, with another 4-5 days off before their next start. Simply put, shorter durations of pitching with longer recovery as a tactic is supported by the previous data.

To Make A Change Requires A Conscious Choice

So what do the Antarctic expeditions and Major League Baseball analogies have to teach us about behavioral changes and improve our productivity?

They teach us that having short, obtainable goals can get us further than running to our limits of endurance or trying to do things only when conditions are near perfect.

So how do we make the incremental changes to have monumental gains?

In a recent blog post on the Psychology Today website, they discuss the problems of changing habits and how to make long-term behavioral changes more effective.

The slant of the article was that there are some concrete steps that have to be taken to make positive changes in our behaviors, and that without these steps, behavioral modification - habit formation - can be extremely difficult.

5 Tips To Make A Change For The Better

1. Decide To Make A Change:  

To make a substantial change, you need to make a clear decision that there is something that needs to change.  It could be something life altering such as eating healthier and beginning an exercise routine, or something minor like waking up 15 minutes earlier every day.  The point is that there needs to be something that you recognize as a problem and one that you want to correct.

The next step after deciding you want to make a change is the hardest.  Believe that change is possible.  If your habit is being late for everything, and you believe that you're destined to be tardy to things, you'll never make that change.  So the struggle is to decide that the bad habit is something that needs to be changed, and you need to change your thinking about tackling that problem.

2. Think About Why The Problem Exists: 

If you're chronically tardy, why is that?  Is it you're easily distracted and lose track of time, traffic is poor in your area, or something else?  It could also be a subtle issue of control - controlling the times of other people's involvement with you, placing a subconscious hierarchy that places yourself over others.  Perhaps it's a subtle grab for attention.  Take a hard look at why tardiness is a chronic condition. If it's attention, think about ways to get that attention in other, more positive ways.

3. Inning by Inning or Step By Step: 

Just as it's difficult to win a baseball game from first pitch to final out, making a behavioral change requires a lot of small, adjustable steps to make it permanent. The focus at this point should be to set goals that are closer to where we're starting off rather than where we plan on ending up.  For example, the article discusses a scenario where if the problem is being tardy by 30 minutes, try to set a more obtainable goal of only being late by 10 or 15 minutes.

By establishing shorter goals, you'll see quick victories and that sense of achievement will build momentum toward the next goal. Master one small step then add on a new step, like climbing a set of stairs. It's the process of meeting small goals on a step by step basis that helps you reach your destination much easier, and much more permanent.

The reason for this is that we are hard-wired in our brains to make regular actions into habits over time.  By making small improvements, we're building the neural pathways that help establish a new routine and that routine is what we're doing to establish new habits.

In other words, think about habit formation as a baseball team.  Win the game with a majority of pitchers in each inning rather than relying on one pitcher to carry the team to the final out.

4. Accept Slip-Ups:  

The mistake that most people make when changing their behavior and habits is that they approach it from an absolutist approach.  Absolutism is the "all-or-none", black or white approach.  The problem with this is that there isn't room for mistakes and slip-ups, which is part of the process of behavioral modification.

One of the biggest mistakes dieters make is focusing on the short-term benefits and goals of changing their eating habits rather than the long-term benefits.  We choose to lose 5 extra pounds and are really good for a few days.

But then we slip up.  And then we beat ourselves up about the mess up.

The absolute approach is one of the problems.

Knowledge is experiential.  We learn by doing, but more important, we learn by making mistakes through trial and error.  Making a change in our habits is a process of learning new behavior through regular conscious activity until it becomes automatic behavior.

Diets that stick are ones that follow the guidelines outlined above. Steps that successful dieters take are deciding to make a change, examining why they've adopted the negative behaviors, to creating a process of smaller victories over large changes.

One other thing that helps lifestyle diets make the biggest change is the ability to understand that mistakes are going to happen.  You're changing a habit, which takes time and concentrated effort, and so mistakes are inevitable.

So the best advice is to plan for those slip-ups.

We can convince ourselves that it's ok to have a "cheat day" once a week.  Over time that cheat day isn't so important, and we can eventually limit those days to twice a month and then to never after we achieve new habits.

5. Make Your Habit Accountable: 

After we realize that there’s a need for change, and we decide to take action, the next step is to make our goals accountable.

There are two ways to make your goals and habits accountable within the guidelines we’ve discussed already.

The first is to make a small table or calendar to chart your progress.  For example, as a writer there’s a number of directions each character could go within the plot of the story arc.

If you write each one out, we end up with pages of unnecessary deviations from the central point and waste a bunch of time.

Perhaps it’s the thought of writing the book in your mind that’s limiting you.  By taking small, decisive steps each and every day, the word count stacks up over time.

A good example is to take a calendar and put a large “X” for every day you write.   Jerry Seinfeld spoke about this as his way of holding himself accountable for his creative work.

What it requires is marking a calendar with an “X” every day you write to a word count or duration of time eventually the calendar becomes blotted by all the marks.

It becomes a tool to hold you accountable, one with its own momentum, a chain of action that you can see and reflect upon. In his discussion of his creative technique, Jerry Seinfeld said, “don’t break the chain.”

The second way to hold yourself accountable is to set your goals and tell others about it.  Ask friends and family to give you subtle reminders any time that they see you slipping up or not making headway in your process.

Be careful about this, however.

Asking friends and family to help you can also become annoying if you only tell them the overall goal.  The further you are from where you want to be the more it will appear to them that you may not be working hard enough.

So give them small goals to help oversee with your behaviors rather than the final destination of your goal.

This is an example why business coaching is such a lucrative profession.  Business coaches work with individuals, typically entrepreneurs, to hold them to small goals for their business and professional growth.

The coaches may have an idea of the overall goal for the business growth, but they focus on more manageable steps that the individual can accomplish.  This helps the entrepreneur stay on task and keep clear metrics in mind.

In Conclusion

We all want to improve at something.  From losing weight, playing a piece of music, to writing and business productivity, setting small manageable goals will help create regular actions that will develop into new habits.

And by taking decisive actions with the help of professionals and friends, we're apt to follow through with our plans, making our goals much more realistic.

It's by deciding what we want to change and the small steps we need to take that the impossible becomes possible.  It's true in sports and business, it's true in writing and other creative endeavors, and it's true with health and fitness.

So decide what you want to change and get started now.

2 Simple Ways To Overcome Your Greatest Challenges In Minutes A Day

Become A Master In Just Minutes A Day

The greatest challenge to anything we want to achieve, whether it's my kindle publishing journey, an athlete trying to win a game, or a musician to master the lines of a play or musical score isn't what you think.

It's not money, or time, or passion.  Those are all great hurdles that must be overcome.

But for you to accomplish anything that matters, you have to over come one obstacle that is greater than the rest.

Doubt.

It's easy to doubt what we know in the heat of the moment, or what we have done countless times before.

How is it that doubt has such a strong pull on us?

Whether we're playing music, or as an athlete, a writer, actor or even a fireman, doubt serves a number of purposes.

We all experience doubt at some point of our lives.  It usually stems from a feeling of being overwhelmed, unprepared or not ready for the task at hand.

I recently published 3 short stories on Amazon's Kindle Publishing platform and wasn't sure how they would do.  These were stories I wrote some time ago and had multiple readers on so I was aware of how their general reception may be.

But I still had doubt.

Doubt in my abilities as a writer. Doubt in whether I could get them uploaded properly onto the Kindle Publishing page and promoted through Amazon.

Worse yet, I doubted whether anyone would notice.

Doubt is natural, yet it plays a malicious role in our minds.

However, on one level, doubt also serves as a survival mechanism.

It tells the baser, lessor part of our brains what traps to avoid, and what to fear.

In essence, doubt serves as the catalyst to fear.

For example:

It's 2 a.m. and you're dead asleep in your bed.  In the other room, the smoke detector sounds and you shoot up like a jack-in-the-box from bed with your heart in your throat and ears, deadening the sound. The room is still and dark. You don't smell any smoke and there doesn't appear to be the orange hue of flicker-flames lighting your room.  As the alarm stops and you listen. You listen some more. There's nothing but your breathing making any sound, and you still don't smell any smoke. Do you get out of bed to check around your place, or do you lay back down and fall asleep, only to wake again and again, unsure if the house is on fire?

Doubt can also prove to be a positive thing as in the example above.  Doubting whether all is calm, or whether you should examine your house for flames is a way of protecting yourself.

Doubt can also cause us to overreact.

Paralysis By Analysis: The Comfort of Staying On The Sidelines 

Paralysis by analysis, the process of overthinking before taking action.

Usually it's a coping mechanism that we use to stall our perceived fear of being unready, of being afraid to fail.

Too often it can dominate the mind of even the most accomplished individual.

To overcome this stalling technique, you need to leap before you feel ready.  There's always something more to learn, to study, to know.  But by taking small detailed steps, you can be confident in the area's you've mastered.



As athletes we can doubt our preparation.  The doubt could be in conditioning, or in the tactics or game plan.

We may worry about missing our relay exchange, or making a bad throw to a receiver, or missing the game winning free throw, even though these are relative tasks performed hundreds, if not thousands, of times in the daily ritual called practice.

For an actor or singer, flubbing a line that's rehearsed over and over again is akin to standing naked in front of the audience.  It ruins the moment, we "fall on our face" in front of a crowd.  Nothing is more terrifying than standing out in front of people you know, and some you don't, being ridiculed and recognized as a failure.

This doubt is an experience we all share.  The problem is that if we focus our energy on it, then becomes metastasized to something multiple times greater, fear.

And fear can also lead to paralysis by analysis.

"Paralysis by Analysis" is the process of overcompensating our fears by studying and preparing on our weaknesses without ever taking any action.

Thing is, once a little doubt creeps into our thoughts, it can grab hold and become insidious, wreaking havoc on your confidence in even the mundane tasks such as your personal warm-up routine.

It's a slippery slope, one that is easy to fall down.

Questions about out abilities and our preparation evolve from ones such as "am I good enough" to become "I'm not good enough to do x, y, z" in short time.

The onerous grip that doubt can play on our minds can lead to confusion, fear, and lack of action.

My own doubt about my writing and kindle publishing journey has made me rethink my ideas and how I've promoted my stories.

I've read countless books, blog posts and articles on the subject, trying to understand more about how to write, how to publish and how to promote the stories.

All because the doubt made me stand on the sidelines versus getting in the game.

So how do we conquer our doubt before it transmutates to overwhelming fear?

(Yes, I know "transmutates" is a derivative of tranmutation: the act of changing from one to another form and relates to shifting physical forms from one shape to the next. In physics it deals with the change that stems from an external force creating some new form or shape. As I'm using it here is a version I stole from a song that is a conjunction of transformation and mutation).

The key to overcoming doubt before it transmuates into something greater is to have detailed plans on how you prepare and to implement those plans in small incremental doses of time to allow mastery to take place.

Practice Makes Permanent  

Along with others such as Malcolm Gladwell and James Clear, I've written before about the concept of planning as relates to practice and mastery.


In order to achieve desired results that are born of confidence, you need to create small, incremental actions that are highly detailed for practice.

Perfect practice makes perfect.


So, in order to overcome doubt, there are two things we need to do.

1) First, create small, detailed lists of tasks that you can replicate over and over with regularity.  Think of a musician practicing their scales on the guitar.  You can go through the motions, learn the fingering and play a scale in a major key without problem.

But to become truly exceptional (or at least competently average) you need to practice a specific scale, in time, and with rhythm.  To play the scales forward, then back, perhaps only playing the root and second note of the scale, or starting at a different note and working around the scale from there would all be detailed tasks that you could learn to master in short time.

2) The second thing to building confidence and overcoming doubt is mastery through duration.

No, I don't mean playing the scales over and over again until rote memorization.  That may work for naming dates from a history book, but won't help you master the scales in any tangible way.

You need to work on a small selection of details that you hope to master in a short duration spread over time.

Our brains are an organ, true.  They are also considered a muscle and like all muscles they have a finite amount of energy and constantly need to be replenished.  To think that we can focus for long periods of time without fatigue is a failure of understanding of how the brain functions.

Short periods of highly focused time with breaks and rest-in-between activities is invaluable.  In past articles on time management, I've detailed the concept of the Pomodoro Technique - a technique that places focus on short intense periods of work, followed by short rest breaks.

Spend 10 minutes on a task.  Make your focus laser-tight. Take a short break from that activity and begin again.  Eventually you'll build up enough "endurance" to move onto another skill.

As Earnest Hemingway is credited with saying when talking about writing; "Write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence you know."

The concept of writing one true sentence a day is a better way to master the art and skill of writing than trying to sit down and write a 600 page Russian opus.

The volume of pages, the quality of writing are all too daunting.

It's the small doses of highly focused practice that makes the biggest difference over a long period of time.

In other words, short, intense durations of highly focused activity have been proven methods to achieve mastery.

As proof, Charles Duhigg writes in his outstanding work about the power of habit formation and the reason behind what we do in his book, THE POWER OF HABIT. He details the science behind how we build habits, and that the key to establishing new patterns is to understand how habits are formed in the first place.

The point being, by taking short focused actions, we can achieve mastery of smaller functions.  By mastering smaller functions, we adopt confidence in our abilities, which in turn gives fuel to our performances.

No matter how accomplished or studied we are, doubt creeps in from time to time.

For creative types, it happens moment to moment and second by second.

Doubt can serve as a powerful survival mechanism and it can also be debilitating.

Regardless of how you feel doubt, the key to overcoming it is in mastering small details.

The 3 Things I Learned Releasing 3 Short Stories In 3 Months

My Kindle Publishing Journey Updated

In 3 months I released 3 different short stories and focused all my attention on promoting just one title.  

Here's what I learned:

Lesson 1: Promote The Hell Out Of It

The first thing I learned was the need for promotion. 

In June 2015, I released The Ballad Of John Walker through Amazon's Kindle Publishing platform.

For those unfamiliar with Kindle Publishing, it's an eBook delivery service run by Amazon that offers millions, perhaps billions of titles.  The best part is you don't need to buy a Kindle to read their offerings. You can access their library by downloading a free Kindle Reader App for all devices, PC, Mac, Android, Windows and iOS.

And I promoted the HELL out of it.

Places I promoted the title were:

• Google Plus
• Facebook - private and in groups
• Facebook Ad
• Good Reads
• Daily Free ebooks
• Addicted To eBooks
• Just Kindle Books
• That's My eBook
• Book Praiser
• Free Discounted Books
• Reddit 

I promoted the story on these format as well as the programs that Amazon offers on their Kindle Publishing platform - KDP Select - an exclusivity program that allows for free and discounted pricing.

For two months I spent my entire time promoting the title to free and paid platforms and may have received a lot of virtual pat's on my back, but actual downloads of the book?  About 100 titles in all.

While 100 readers may seem like a lot, it's a small trickle in the bucket that is floating in the sea that is the Kindle Publishing platform (among others).

And Then...

Lesson 2: Nobody Gives A S#IT If You Don't Promote

Shortly after I published "The Ballad of John Walker", I quietly released a second collection, a three-story title, Mayonnaise and Other Stories and the downloads were about 1/10th of what I experienced previously.

The main difference? I hardly promoted the title compared to "The Ballad of John Walker".

Mayonnaise and Other Stories was enrolled in KDP Select. I made mention of it on G+ and Facebook.

That was about the extent of it.

And the downloads and reviews were stagnant.  Sitting online waiting to be stumbled upon, to be discovered, but was more like a lonely Pygmy Tarsier looking for a lover.  What's a Pygmy Tarsier?  Google it, they're a primate that was thought to be extinct until one was inadvertently killed in a trap.

It was a shock to the farmers who found the Pygmy Tarsier, and even more so for the scientists who had claimed it an extinct species.  But I wonder more about the possible remaining Pygmy Tarsier, waiting for her date to come and sweep her off her feet.

So the lonely Pygmy Tarsier can't just swipe right on Tinder or sign-up on Ashley Madison, but just has to sit around waiting.

She's without any loved one and probably, like most of us who've been stood-up before, crying into the night. Sad.

Much like the collection "Mayonnaise and Other Stories".

By not promoting it, the collection is sitting around waiting for a date that may never arrive.

Especially if it's considered extinct.

But Wait, There's More...

Lesson 3: Keep At It, But Don't Over Do It

In late July 2015, I uploaded another title, It's Not The Things We Say with the same little, to no, marketing and advertising.

Like all things in life, momentum is created by exerting energy.  I did nothing to create any momentum behind the titles, in part because I was concerned about "Promotion Fatigue" and "Banner Blindness" on the part of any readers here.

"Promotion Fatigue" is what I call the process when we're inundated by too much advertising and marketing.  We get tired of it and tune out the messenger.

"Banner Blindness" has been defined as the blurring of banners and ads online from the original content.  It's the visual representation of Promotion Fatigue.  We know that there is something like an ad being displayed but we have become so inundated by their constant placement, we tune them out.

So between my concern about Promotion Fatigue, Banner Blindness and looking at the ROI - Return On Investment - that slowed my marketing and promotional reach.

But with a few more titles on the near horizon that I'm working on right now, "A Fine Day For A Swim" and its sister accompaniment, "The Palm", as well as "Gunner", I'll have to rethink my promotional strategies.

Additionally the long-term plan is to comprise these published stories into a larger collection and place it on a few other platforms such as iBooks, Barnes and Noble and Kobo.

So, if you've been one of the few who have downloaded my short stories so far, a huge THANK YOU.

For those that haven't - I don't take it personally.  I'll just cry into my pillow until you do purchase one.


If you'd like to download a copy of any of my titles, click the titles below:

The Ballad Of John Walker

Mayonnaise And Other Stories

It's Not The Things We Say

3 Tips To Conquer Your Fears And Become The Person You Deserve

The Secret To Becoming Superhuman

Change Comes Slow While Excuses Are Fear By Another Name

(click HERE To See The Outstanding Book: The Power of Habit)

Not many of us can be born as Superman.  There's only one. And he was an alien at that.

Peter Parker wouldn't have become Spiderman except by accidental happenstance.

And the winner of the most recent lottery may have been handed a HUGE financial windfall from the Universe, but for most of us, change isn't a lightning bolt from the blue.

You lie awake at night thinking about how you can get xyz done at work the next day or how you need to exercise first thing when you wake up.

The alarm goes off and wham! You're too tired to lace up your shoes to go for a run.

Or the kids come running into the kitchen screaming for breakfast and poof!

There goes the time you had planned to read that chapter in your sci-fi novel that you were hoping to dig into before hand.

It's easy to think about change.

But hard to act to make those changes.

To make a change in your habits, routines, productivity and health is really about making a change in YOU.

Work, Love, Health, Wealth (or lack thereof) - All Roadblocks To Change

If something matters, if something is really important to you, you'll find a way. 

There are roadblocks and obstacles in all our lives. It could be our jobs, our families, our state of health. 

Other things that may hold us back from making a change all fall under the umbrella of fear.  We're afraid we could be wrong.  Or that we're not capable of reaching our goals.

We all share in the fear.

The key is to identify those fears:

• Fear: We're afraid we may fail
• Fear: Afraid of the discomfort that comes with change
• Fear: Scared of the unknown and what may come from it
• Fear: Doubt in your skills and abilities
• Fear: Terror in not being "good enough"

And the biggest FEAR of all?

Perfectionism.

It does NOT exist.  It's something to dream about, to aspire toward, but too often we use it as a crutch, as a distraction from what we are capable of doing.

It prevents us from getting started.

So how do you avoid these little distractions becoming major obstacles?

The key is to set realistic and identifiable metrics that you can meet.

Follow these 3 tips to become Superhuman.

1. Decide what you want to get done.
2. Break the task into smaller steps that you can do in less time with less effort.
3. Prioritize those steps into 3 things you can do right away, number them from 1 to 3.

Don't worry if there's more than 3 things.  You're focusing on the 3 steps you can take right away.

Set aside a realistic amount of time to get these done.  It may be 10 minutes, or more if you need it, but this time is immutable.  It can't be negotiated away or ignored.

It is absolute.

Don't have 10 minutes?  Bullshit.

Set an alarm to wake up 20 minutes earlier.  If you're normally a 7 a.m. type of person, you are now a 6:40 a.m. type of person.  Or if you go to bed at 11 p.m. (or 1 a.m. for some), then you're now 11:20 p.m.

This needs to be the same routine every day.

You need to LOVE Change.


You need to commit to the process.


It needs to be an everyday thing for you.


You're trying to make the change a new habit.









From there you're trying to make it from a habit to involuntary action.  Like taking a breath or a heartbeat.

You're establishing a daily routine that reaches the point of Automacy - the state of action that is automatic. In other words it doesn't take mental energy or focus to take action.

The most important factor in behavioral change is the discipline and focus on daily, manageable action.

It's dedication.

It's a commitment.

And it's practice.

But highly focused practice.

Until it's no longer necessary to focus on the actions, or until you just find yourself doing those actions without even knowing you began.

When you catch yourself "in the moment" and don't remember how it began.

A very smart person once told me, "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect".

Said another way:

Practice makes permanent.

And permanence will make you merely human, or superhuman.

How To Stop Sucking At Your Time Management

The Challenges Of Time Management

This is not a post about kindle direct publishing.

It is about a necessary skill to learn - time management.

Time management is a skill learned and honed through decisive actions.

It's a juggling act of three things: Prioritization, organization, and self discipline.

Finding the right balance will help you improve your productivity.


We all are busy.  Research shows that Americans LOVE - in all caps - to be, and feel busy.


Perhaps its the consumer culture we are raised in.  To keep up with the "Joneses", we feel we have to work harder to get more things.

It could be the poverty of time and how we perceive to be busy, even when we're not.  It's all perception born of leisure.

It could be the Puritan Work-Ethic we were taught as kids. It's a status symbol of dystopian proportions.

The first step in any journey is to get organized.

Self Discipline, Time Management And Increasing Productivity By Doing Less

Everyone of us knows what it's like to have too many tasks and not enough time to do them all.

It's like dining at an all-you-can-eat buffet.  You take a little sample of vegetables, some pasta, a little chicken or fish, some salad and bread.  Before you know it, you have too much food on too little a plate.

This post is more about self-discipline, time management, and tactics to help you improve your productivity regardless of your tasks than anything about my Kindle Publishing journey.

I believe that these are not mutually exclusive concepts.

Actions take discipline and discipline requires organization.

But what do we do when there's more than just one action that's required?

For a writer, self-discipline is just as much a struggle as it is for a tuba player.

Or a student with homework; or a UPS delivery driver just starting their daily route.

The Burden of Demands

With any task or job, it's easy to get a sense of overwhelming.

We all have someone we're responsible to, a boss, teacher, coach.  If you're independent, congratulations, that's great!  But with that independence comes a different struggle. That's the distraction of freedom.

Whatever the demands, the only way you're going to get anything of value accomplished is by self-discipline.

There's too many details in the report; there's not enough time to get that project done in time for close of business; I have too much homework are all great examples.

We all feel it from time to time, what I think of as "the burden of demands."

So how do we overcome this challenge?

By setting up an organizational outline that places emphasis on the important things and minimizes the less important tasks we have.

This is a process of prioritization.  It's an important aspect of time management skills.

What Is Prioritization? 

Prioritization is the process of putting order to things. Of making a choice.

The most important is first, then the next important and finally the least important thing comes in last.

The idea here is that you place what is of greatest value first.  It could be a homework assignment, or it could be a phone call you need to make to a supplier for your product line.

For writers, it's placing the order to how you're going to write that next chapter in your story arc. In a story, you wouldn't place the climax ahead of the character development and expect to elicit the same reaction from your readers.

Prioritization is instinctual, but for some reason we allow the burden of demands to overwhelm our thinking and short circuit our organization.

Once you've decided on the order of importance, you need to stick with it.  Don't let S.O.S - Shiny Object Syndrome - distract you.

Stay on task until you finish one, and then move on to the next one.

Again, don't let S.O.S. become your message.

I like to think of this quote I was given by a friend a long time ago: "just because it's important to you doesn't make it urgent for me."

Prioritization Is Set and Done, What's Next?

Once you have the order of importance set - prioritization - the next step is to take your task and cut it up into smaller, more manageable portions.

Think about it like a pizza.  You're hungry, with some cash in your pocket, so you walk into your local pizza joint and order a large pizza with the works.

After about 10 minutes the pizza arrives, hot and ready.

You can't just shove the whole pie in your mouth.  It doesn't work that way - besides, you'd burn the $h!T out of your mouth!

You take a slice, cool it down and take one bite.  You eat the pie one bite at a time!

So micro-prioritization is the next step in your process.

So how does this work?  Let's say you have three projects to get done.

• First, list them in order of importance, that is, what is the one thing you need to get done.  
• Next, think about how you can break that task up into a couple easier manageable, smaller slices as it were. 
• Finally, take that bite-sized task and begin.

The Pomodoro Technique - 80 percent activity/20 percent recovery

By organizing your tasks into the order of importance and then breaking them up into smaller and smaller pieces, you're making it easier to be more effective in less time.

Your efficiency does have limits, however.  It's not just a matter of organization that will help you.

Understand that we all have limits on our productivity, our performance, and our attention spans.
The trick then is to take your tasks and manage your energy with them.

There's a little technique that is called the Pomodoro Technique.

It says that to increase your productivity, you need to set manageable tasks within a finite amount of time.

What the Pomodoro Technique stresses is high, intensive levels of activity but in short duration.

It's the Crossfit of time management!

For those that don't know about Crossfit, it's a H.I.I.T program of fitness.

The routine is High Intensity Interval Training (H.I.I.T) that calls for extreme action followed by intervals of short rest.

For those of you not too worried about fitness and wondering what that has to do with productivity, time management, and self-discipline, here's how it works:

Take a small project like we discussed already.

Say it's a chapter in your book. You've organized what you're going to write about, the general path you want to go, and you sit down to write it out.

You need more skills and organization than just the ability to write. You need to set manageable pathways that you can follow to become more efficient at your task of writing.  In so doing you'll increase your productivity.

Set A Time Limit

Before you begin to work, however, the technique calls for setting a timer. Preferably a short time limit, like 20 minutes.

When the timer goes off, stop writing and walk away.

Give yourself 5 minutes off.  No exceptions!

It's the 80/20 rule of time management.  80 percent of your time is actively focused with 20 percent completely devoid of that activity.

As you can break down the tasks faster and much more efficiently without any loss of concentration, you can slowly increase your time to work but need to keep the 80/20 rule in place.

The Rule Of Three

In writing, there's a principle called "The Rule of Three".

What the rule claims is that things that appear in three's are more appealing, funnier and easier to remember for the audience than any other combination.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a prime example of this concept.

The form dictates that there could be three lines, or three repetitive words. Three acts are better developed, have more action and more power than a novel or play with Four acts.

That's why when we talk about writing, we claim that there's a beginning, middle and end.

For Time Management And Self Discipline, the" Rule of Three" can be broken down another way.

In the popular blog, Paid To Exist by Jonathan Mead - he writes about time management skills from a different perspective.

In an article about morning routines titled HOW TO WAKE UP ON FIRE - he writes that you have to have a plan of action for the morning.

Furthermore he writes that the tips he has for being at his most productive is having clearly defined goals, setting down and getting to work and limiting actions to the most important things on his check list to just three things.

His biggest point is stick to the rule of three.

Get the three things MOST IMPORTANT done.  Then if you have time and energy you can do more.

But only after the three things are done.

Time Management Is Easy - If You Can Get Organized

Time management is not inbred.  We are evolutionarily designed to eat, sleep and procreate.  

Time and the demands we place on it are modern constructs, sacrifices we choose to live in a civilized world.  

And time management is a skill that is learned over time, one to be honed to a fine edge like a razor on the grindstone. 

Tasks, responsibilities and obligations can all seem like burdens that overwhelm us; a 50 pound bag on our shoulders while we walk through the metaphoric mud of the day. 

Finding the right balance between doing what we have to with the right order to do them is an intractable part of honing that skill. 

By using prioritization then breaking the tasks into smaller portions with focused attention for manageable durations will allow us to make huge strides in our productivity.   

Additionally, if we abide by the rule of three, we'll see specific metrics achieved easier and more efficiently. 

Combining these concepts will help you with your time management, become much more efficient in your day and increase your overall productivity. 

The first step is getting organized!  

Kindle Publishing Tip: How To Conquer Overthinking And Become More Productive

Ready, Set, Wait...?

You've developed an idea and created a plan.

It's not perfect, and not airtight but a plan none-the-less.

There's a definite beginning, somewhat of a middle, and a hoped for, predicted end.

But you can't sit down and get the first word written. Or make the first pitch or sale's call.

You're frozen.  But why?

We're innately born to avoid risk.  It's a survival instinct and one that we are ingrained to abide.

Whether you're trying to build a clientele, promote your services or use a platform like kindle publishing for your self-publishing goals, the most important step to take is the first one.

Let me say that again.


The most important step to take is the first one. 

Without taking the first step, action is impossible and you won't be able to meet your productivity or kindle publishing goals.

Analysis by Paralysis

Too often we're risk adverse and try to wait until we have all the answers and every solution figured out before we proceed.

You can spend hours, days, weeks, months and even years waiting to know it all.  And guess what?

You never will.

There's always something to learn, to tweak, to optimize.

The more you analyze all the factors and wait to act, the further you are from achieving your goals.

The guys at Self-Publishing Podcast are great at being distracting, but also offers tons of advice that can apply not just to writing, but productivity as well.

Sean Platt partners with David Wright and Johnny B. Truant, and on the podcast Sean likes to say that when it comes to writing "perfect is the enemy of done".

If you think about it, that's perfect advice for everyone. You don't need to make something perfect before you launch it, design it or promote it.

To get started, make a plan and take that first step.  You can change course once you begin.

See where the path takes you.  Evaluate where you are and then decide if you're on the right path.

But you'll never get where you want to go without that first step.