I’m often asked how long it took me to write Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life. The answer is that I wrote the main corpus in about three weeks. This, of course, shocks people. The more complicated answer is that, while it took me three weeks to write it, it actually took me 25 years and three weeks to come up with it.
But, the three weeks remains true and that then brings about the most often asked follow up question: “How on earth did you do that?”
Answer: I was committed to MY commitment.
There are more than ample words written about efficiency, productivity, and focus. So, I won’t waste your time or mine on that. (Note, there’s a hack right there: don’t waste time on what’s not your main message, what’s been done already, or what’s oh-my-god-didn’t-I-already-read-this boring.)
Instead, I’ll give you my tricks on how to actually get that massively nauseating, overwhelmingly mangy project done.
Build a sidecar and put the biggest ass-kicker you know in it. If you want to be productive, make a public commitment to complete your project by a certain date, so says every single article on the interwebs about getting things done. Snore.
If you want the thing you get done to be great, make a commitment not for the date, but for the quality, too. Swing for the fences, baby. Intentionally build yourself a sidecar, and make it worth your words. If your goal doesn’t scare the shit out of you, if it doesn’t feel just a hair unachievable, if there isn’t a bowel shake or two every time you think about the failure and a goosebump or two every time you think about the success, it’s not a big enough goal. And if the person who is giving you honest — even painful — feedback along the way isn’t pushing you to be better than you think possible, you need a new Ride or Die.
When I wrote my book, I swung for the fences. I called the biggest, baddest, most brutally honest woman I know. (How tough? She was the first female F-14 Tomcat Fighter Pilot in the US Navy, that’s how tough.) I asked her if she would be willing to provide a blurb, and when much to my surprise and delight she said yes, I send her my draft and held my breath. She called me two days later and said, “Your book is really fucking good. And you are really fucking smart. But you are too fucking smart for your book just to be really fucking good. Make it really fucking great, and then I’ll blurb the shit out of it.”
She held me to the standards that she (and yes, I) knew I was capable of upholding. She didn’t let me settle for mediocrity. Your Ride or Die shouldn’t either.
Stop giving away your gold. Each of us have a time of day where we are at our most productive. And most of us squander that time away emptying — yeah, right — our inboxes. We hand over our most creative, imaginative, articulate time to unimportant people discussing irrelevant topics. What if you put yourself first, carving out your best time for yourself, rather than them? Instead of giving your most important project your least important brain space, make a date with your best self and woo the pants off you.
Productivity experts tell you to eat the frog first. Do the worst things immediately, get them over with, and then move on to what matters. Screw that. Why fritter away energy on the drudgery of everyone else’s perceived emergencies? Here’s a universal truth: no one is going to die if you don’t send that email about the kindergarten bake sale right the hell now.
Instead, use your freshest energy for that thing that matters to you most. Grab Monday morning by the nuts, take Friday afternoon to the dance. What works for you is what works for you. Move the flexible clients around, shift your commuting schedule, postpone the meeting where the person you can’t even remember is planning to pick-your-brain. Give yourself the gift of yourself. Every day, every week, as often as it takes.
These are your habits. Your habits drive your goals. Your goals drive your success.
Get clear on what you want to say or be before you sit down to write or do. Three weeks, 42,000 words. I’m a fast writer. But 25 years? I’m a slow ass thinker. There is simply no way to write something long, whether it is a book, or a term paper, or a thesis, without getting the brain fog of word swirl. And the best antidote to brain fog word swirl is getting the shit beaten out of your ideas.
(I bet you thought I was going to say organization and outlining, right? See above, not a blog post on productivity.)
Any idea worth your words should be one that you know to be true deep in your bones, defensible through research, shaped by life experience, and carved into a useful framework by repeated discussion and debate. The words that went into my book were not just spit onto the page, articulated by me for the first time ever in the process, but the result of the advice that I’d given over and over and over, smoothed and polished like old stones from the river, so that they glistened and landed perfectly for the intended audience.
There are writers who believe that if you want to write, you need to write. Write every day. Don’t give up! I’m going to get hate mail for saying this — they are writers, after all — but I don’t think writing every day is the way to write. I’d offer this advice instead: think. Good thinkers make good writers. Think! Think everyday. Oh, and don’t give up!
