Today, let's talk about writing and success.
In Neil Gaiman's incredible Make Good Art, he shares a lesson about the (good) problem that follows success:
“The biggest problem of success is that the world conspires to stop you doing the thing that you do, because you are successful.
There was a day when I looked up and realised that I had become someone who professionally replied to email, and who wrote as a hobby. I started answering fewer emails, and was relieved to find I was writing much more.”
Brandon Sanderson, one of the most prolific authors of all time, shared the same thing in "It's time to come clean."
He spent four months of 2019 traveling to conventions to meet his fans. He had "dreams, plans, and ideas," but he couldn't write them because he was traveling so much.
Like many of us, he had burned himself out:
I was really beginning to feel overwhelmed by everything I had to do. However it wasn't the stories doing this, it was all the non-writing work, particularly the traveling that was exhausting."
Then 2020 hit, and suddenly Sanderson found himself, like all of us, unable to travel. As a result, he could increase his writing time, and his time with his family. This led to him writing a book in secret, which rejuvenated him...
And then he wrote four extra novels in secret too!
In that video, Sanderson shares an equation that simplifies the hell out of it:
Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash and other amazing sci-fi, similarly explains why he's a bad correspondent:
If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels.
But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly.
What replaces it?
Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.
These authors, unbelievable successes, all reached the same conclusion:
If you have any amount of success, the world will conspire to keep you from doing the thing that made you successful.
The Main Thing
Author Stephen Covey calls it “keeping the main thing the main thing.”
I used to be good at this.
From 2009 to 2017, I built Nerd Fitness into a site that received 1.5 million monthly organic visitors.
Over those 8 years, I published 1000+ well-researched, long form essays. Many of those essays jumped to the #1 result for many of the biggest search terms in health and wellness.
And then I stopped.
Instead of writing new articles, I started spending my time updating old popular articles, because that was the “highest leverage” daily action I could take for the business.
This led to me hiring a marketing team, ops team, designers, developers, and so on.
Pretty soon, I had days full of meetings and a team of 40+ people.
A few years later, I woke up and realized I hated my job.
The job I built for myself.
In the company I owned.
Finally in 2022, I used 20 seconds of courage to take back my life. I parted ways with key team members. I dramatically scaled back my meetings and availability. I let the rest of the team know I was personally rededicating myself to writing. It led to some big challenges and multiple reorganizations of my company.
By 2023, I had backed way off the business of Nerd Fitness and shifted my focus entirely to writing again.
Cal Newport's recent Slow Productivity does a great job of distilling my strategy into three simple points:
- 1) do fewer things
- 2) work at a natural pace
- 3) obsess over quality
I cut out the unimportant, sure. But I also cut out the alluring, interesting, and unaligned too. Essentially, I put horse blinders on to keep my focus on honing the one craft I’m excited to struggle with get better at:
Writing.
It's amazing how much we can overcomplicate and justify why we must do all the things. The reality, is often far simpler, if we're willing to step way back and look at it:
I hope you're keeping the main thing the main thing too.
-Steve
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