Productivity Is Not the Answer

Progress and motion are not synonymous.
Tim Fargo

What haven’t you done yet?

Here’s my (partial) list:

  1. Write a novel and a screenplay
  2. Get 100 views/day average on this blog
  3. Sell my house
  4. Sell some (I dunno, 10?) copies of my first ebook
  5. Get a fully remote/flex-time job
  6. Get a motorcycle license

Actually, scratch that. Those are immediate goals, but let’s aim bigger for this post:

  1. Write a bestselling novel and a summer blockbuster screenplay
  2. Get 10k views/day on this blog (or its successor)
  3. Own an apartment in Singapore, where I live when I’m not traveling
  4. Be able to spin out an ebook that’ll do $5k in sales at will
  5. Be financially independent, so that I can make my money however I like
  6. Ride my motorcycle across the United States
  7. Achieve black belt in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu and the equivalent in Muay Thai

I’m making progress, but progress is bullshit. I want to accomplish everything, faster, sooner, better so I can quit the things I hate and chase – with reckless abandon – the things I love. I want to escape mediocrity and routine and achieve greatness.

I welcome the challenge – I embrace the Obstacle – but I’m tired of these silly, petty lower-case obstacles.

So I’m just like most of you. We want to be Mike Tyson, Voltaire, Bill Gates or Cato the Younger (insert your female counterparts here (heh)) instead of Joe Blow – but our daily lives don’t look like that of someone people would call “the Great”, except maybe sarcastically.

We slack off, we sleep in, we stop short. We never seem to win the war – in fact, we have a hard time knowing where the battles are and what time we’re supposed to show up.

I don’t know the way from here to there yet – but I know one path that doesn’t go there, and it’s the one you’ve got bookmarked under “41 Amazing Productivity Tools”. It’s the one that suggests it’s probably worth pulling all your notes out of Evernote and into Google Drive, and from there into Wikia and from there into Workflowy. The one where you create a carefully organized tag system for every possible email, with behavioral rules around each. The one where you obsessively tweak your HabitRPG system or your blog feeds until you’re certain you’ve optimized everything.

These are dead ends, false leads.

The difference between myself and Voltaire has nothing to do with which writing app I use. He wrote Candide without Scrivener – without a computer at all, in fact. He dictated it to his secretary and edited it by hand. Notepad alone vastly outweighs every tool available to him throughout his entire life.

So why do we think finding the right writing tool will make us the right writers?

Iron Mike didn’t kick ass because he had a careful system for washing his workout clothes or tricks for making sure he goes to the gym every day. He won because he’d train 50-60 hours over six days a week, beginning four or five weeks before a fight, and because he had top-shelf coaches.

So why do we think the right running shoes will get us into Boston?

And finally, Cato isn’t remembered for his top 10 lifehacks, his SEO skills, or his perfect resume. He’s known for his upstanding character, his constant refusal to participate in the corruption around him, and his dedication to the Roman Republic.

So why do we think one more article about communication will make us leaders?

There is a place for incremental improvement, for little tricks, for optimization – but it’s not at the beginning.

If you’re like me, you’re not a published author. You’re not a famous blogger, industry leader, or renowned competitor. You’re average – still stuck in the fat part of the bell curve, trying to wiggle to the right. For us, a 1% improvement isn’t even worth talking about – unless it leads to 10, then 100, then 1000%.

There’s a path from here to there – maybe. From middle of the pack to outlier, from unknown to renown, from cage to freedom. But while there might be a path, there isn’t a shortcut. The longer we sit at the start looking for the shortest path, the less time we have to run.

Review: James Altucher’s “Choose Yourself”

It’s another thing to actually go out and create opportunities for yourself. You’re definitely not going to find them reading a book.
– James Altucher

Continuing catch-up on my reviews after my hiatus – I finally got around to Choose Yourself, James Altucher’s seminal book about escaping the 9-5. This one’s been recommended by a lot of people and I immediately saw why, as it resonates with just about everything I write about here.

Without further ado: What I learned:

—

Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.
– James Altucher

The mediocre entrepreneur understands that persistence is not the self-help cliché “Keep going until you hit the finish line!” It’s “Keep failing until you accidentally no longer fail.” That’s persistence.
– James Altucher

Altucher chants several mantras throughout the book, and this is one of them – rejection is key to success. Rejection is how you know you’re pushing, it’s how you know where you need to improve and your only metric for whether or not you are improving.

This is the kind of message you can never hear too many times, so though I’ve read it and said it before, it remains an important belief – and I’m still not nearly good enough at chasing that rejection.

—

For our entire lives, we have been fooled by marketing slogans and the Masters of the Universe who created them. I don’t say this in an evil way. I don’t blame them. I never blame anyone but myself.
– James Altucher

This reliance on others has to come to an end. It was always a myth. Everything we hoped for. The society that we were told would be here, waiting for us, is completely gone and is never coming back.
– James Altucher

Sure, the world is wildly unfair – sure, it’s fucked you over in half a dozen ways before you’re even old enough to know what “fucked over” means. So what? You are the measure and the cause of your success (or failure).

So acknowledge the lies, the injustices, the traps, but only so you can adjust for them and keep moving forward.

—

And nobody says you get special marks in death if you wrote a great novel at the age of fifty. Or came up with a great chicken, or a way to stuff lots of people into factories. I’ve stumbled and fallen and gotten up and survived enough that I’m sick of goals and purposes and journeys. I want to cut out the middleman. The journey. The desperation and despair that focusing on “purpose“ entails.
– James Altucher

Hold your breath. Try holding your breath for just thirty seconds. That’s all it takes. Try it right now while you are looking at this line. Now…on the twenty-ninth second, do any opinions matter?
– James Altucher

I don’t think the point of life is to be happy, and no matter how much I achieve I expect to die dissatisfied. Sure, no one else gives you extra points in death for what you’ve done in life, but I give myself those points, and I’m the only judge that seems to exist anyway.

But it appears to be an observable fact that most people get more and better things done when they’re satisfied and at peace. The creative ache is fine, and we know pain pushes genius and poetry both – but if you David Foster Wallace at 46 you haven’t reached your full potential.

So like many things in life, true success here requires a carefully balanced paradox. You have to have some emotional stability, some peace, to achieve true greatness – but you also have to let go of achieving greatness to get that stability. Like an athlete who only makes truly amazing plays when he isn’t thinking about it too hard, you have to let go with one hand to seize with the other, and that’s strange.

I don’t think there’s a succint answer, here, so nudges in both directions are necessary, and the mental discord that might cause has to be handled.

—

External changes in your life are like the final ripples of the ocean that lap onto distant shores.
– James Altucher

Change starts within, and your outer life reflects your inner life sooner than you think. Altucher advocates a Simple Daily Practice (an idea I like and will be writing about more) to slowly change your internal life, and he asserts that external changes will come naturally when your internal state gets better.

It’s not The Secret bullshit – it’s that when you change your nature, your new nature automatically leads you to change your circumstances. I’ve seen this in my own life over the past two years, and I firmly believe it’s the best way to think about life changes.

(Check out the Simple Daily Practice)

—

My overall reaction: this is a riffing, freewheeling, self-referential kind of book. It’s much more about James Altucher than it is about you. In that way it feels similar to its predecessor, The Four Hour Workweek – it’s more inspirational fable than how-to book.

But that’s okay. If you haven’t figured it out by now, hear this: there is no how-to book for building the life you want, except for the one you write yourself. The claims of an easy, pre-mapped way forward are just marketing.

That doesn’t make this kind of book worthless. Every chapter is full of inspiring quotes and applicable advice, so as long as you don’t go into it expecting a blueprint for your own transformation, you’ll be satisfied.

—

Bonus Quotes:

In poker you can spot the amateur at the table if they complain when they lose a hand. They’ll look at the guy who won the hand and say, “You are so stupid! You played that hand totally wrong. You just got lucky.” And they might be right. But the reason that it’s an amateur (and insecure) move is because you WANT people to play the hand wrong. You want them to play the hand wrong every single time so that the odds stay in your favor if you don’t go insane. What do you gain from calling them out, educating them on their foolishness?
– James Altucher

Whenever some guy says something very hateful I imagine: what was it like the first time that person kissed his wife? Did a warm gush of chocolate fill his heart? Did he say to himself, “This second, I am the happiest man alive?” Did he have an erection? Did she kiss him softly on his lips and then his cheek and then his neck? And then, erection intact, did he log onto the Internet as “Guest” and post, “James Altucher is a fucking douchebag.”?
– James Altucher

There are no chains on me as I write this. But the feeling is immense: all I want is freedom.
– James Altucher

Review: Neal Stephenson’s “The Diamond Age”

Lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right.
– Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

I don’t usually do novel reviews here, though I alternate between fiction and nonfiction in my reading. There are a couple of obvious reasons to change that: I write fiction, I hope to make money from it, and I have fiction-related goals on the blog.

The other reason might not be quite as obvious, and it ties so nicely with the particular book in question that I wish I could say I’d planned it.

—

In The Diamond Age (or, a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer), Stephenson tells the story of a very young girl named Nell – a ‘thete’ (read: welfare-class. ‘thete’ refers to landless freemen in ancient Greece. Appropriate, but I digress). Nell is living a typical poor child’s life – an unreliable mother and her carousel of abusive boyfriends leave her to be looked after by her gangbanger older brother.

But before she can be completely subsumed by the destructive culture she was born into, Nell’s older brother steals the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer – a ‘book’ (actually a nanotech supercomputer) designed to instill upper-class values in a young girl through interactive fairy tales.

The Primer was commissioned by an Equity Lord – one of the planet’s most elite aristocrats, a self-made man concerned about his granddaughter’s future. The Equity Lord believes that his success was not due to luck, innate intelligence, or even his education – he believes that he was successful because of his personality and his values. In short, it was what he believed and how he felt – not what he knew – that propelled him to the heights of greatness.

He wanted the same outcome for his daughter, and he didn’t trust her parents or the school system to bring her up to be the right kind of person to succeed and conquer. He designed the Primer as a sort of moral mentor, meant to guide the young girl’s development and mold her psychology into that of a champion.

Much of the book recounts Nell’s experiences with/in the Primer – a kind of video-game storybook that leads her through traditional-style fairytales, often with grim morals. The book maps Nell’s psychological state and adjusts the stories to match her current life (her four companions, for example, are based on her four stuffed animals).

Over the course of the story the Primer guides Nell out of her abusive home environment and into further (real-life) adventures beyond it.

—

The second half of the book veers into a dreamier, abstract kind of futurism that I didn’t find nearly as interesting, but Stephenson’s writing stays compelling throughout and there are dozens of moral lessons in the book.

So – like Nell herself learned who to be while reading about Faery Kings and Queens, we can learn a little about who to be while reading about Nell. And like the Primer revealed the character of its architect, we can learn something of Stephenson’s philosophy from The Diamond Age.

A handful of lessons:

—

It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation—we learned this in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things.
– Neal Stephenson

The Primer’s architect correctly identified the root cause of all glory. It is on a foundation of moral qualities – virtue, courage, tenacity – that an individual, and thus a society, builds its house.

No number of college degrees, iPhone apps, tax reforms or subsidies can propel a person – or a nation – to greatness. It takes a higher virtue.

—

[like] many universities at the time, ISU insisted that its students study a broad range of subjects, including arts and humanities. Finkle-McGraw chose instead to read books, listen to music, and attend plays in his spare time.
– Neal Stephenson

Study is fine, but study and leisure are different things – and in all subjects, practice is often preferable to study.

—

Now, this was clearly unfair, and I protested that the birds were obviously trying to favor Pteranodon. This kind of argument might have worked with ants or even shrews; but the King of the Birds would hear none of it. For them, virtue consisted in being birdlike, and fairness didn’t enter into it.
– Neal Stephenson

Three lessons here:

  1. Reality doesn’t care about your idea of fairness. In this case, the Dinosaur (a T-rex, one of Nell’s fairytale companions) was being asked to cross a chasm of lava and retrieve a flower from a mountain. Apparently impossible for him, as he could not fly – but that was the challenge, and railing that it was impossible for him and easy for someone else got him nowhere.
  2. A King’s virtue is absolute. The King of the Birds valued grace and flight, and it didn’t matter to him that the T-rex was ‘unfairly’ unable to embody these virtues. When developing your morality, you don’t need to account for others.
  3. You don’t have to accept others’ opinions on your methods. The Dinosaur rerouted a river to ‘freeze’ the lava so he could cross on foot. The King of the Birds wasn’t pleased that the spirit of the challenge had been undermined, but he was forced to give Dinosaur his reward for completing the task.

—

The seed of this idea had been germinating in his mind for some months now but had not bloomed, for the same reason that none of Hackworth’s ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness.
– Neal Stephenson

It’s not enough to be brilliant or even driven. You have to be willing to break the system, to proceed without permission (and perhaps against orders), if you’re going to be truly great.

—

If a well-written, brilliantly thought out sci-fi morality play sounds good to you, pick this one up.

And remember – who you are and what you believe do matter. They probably matter more than your degreee, your latest productivity hack, or your network. So if you want to change your life, start from the inside – and don’t ignore books like The Diamond Age. They may not teach you how to build your next website, but they might teach you why.

—

Bonus quotes:

A honeybee cruising for nectar is pretty despite its implicit threat, but the same behavior in a hornet three times larger makes one glance about for some handy swatting material.
– Neal Stephenson

But Mom broke up with Brad; she didn’t like craftsmen, she said, because they were too much like actual Victorians, always spouting all kinds of crap about how one thing was better than another thing, which eventually led, she explained, to the belief that some people were better than others.
– Neal Stephenson

Too Much Too Young Too Fast

Too much, Too young, Too fast
I’m gonna drink it up while it lasts
– Airbourne, Too Much Too Young Too Fast

(Despite the hard rock quote, this one’s kind of journal-y. But as Socrates allegedly said, ‘Let him that would move the world first move himself’.)

I guess it’s time to address the elephant in the room. I’ve been on radio silence for about two months, with no advance warning. I’d like to tell you I was in the basement working on some great and terrible breakthrough; or at least that I was injured in a streetfight to save a baby and I’m still recovering. I’d like to tell you that I thought about the blog every day and tore my hair out because I couldn’t post.

None of those things are true, though. I’m fine, there’s no amazing new project about to be unveiled (quite yet), and my hair looks better than ever.

I stopped posting for two full months because, to put it bluntly, I was too happy. Then I was too sad.

—

My girlfriend moved out of the state a couple weeks ago – pretty much all the way across the country, to go to school.

I stopped blogging a few weeks before she left, and kept not-blogging a few weeks after that – her departure was the midpoint of this silent gap.

Without going into detail, what we were beginning to achieve in our relationship is something that’s been near the top of my bucket list for almost forever. We were filling a desire that, for me, was too big to even put on the list yet. I felt I had to work my way up to it.

But as they say – the wise man waits for his opportunity, but never hesitates. I saw the thing I wanted crossing my path and I seized it.

Before she left, I was just too content to want to blog. Don’t get me wrong – I still should have been blogging, but I was mentally unprepared for the loss of the hunger that drives me to this blank page every day. I’ve been lucky in my discontent – it’s much easier to do what you know you need to do when not doing it burns.

I still pursued my other goals. I still wrestled, read and wrote, worked on my finances and on selling my house. But none of those things involved changing myself. Here on the blog I’m really trying to unearth the foundations of my being so they can be examined and, perhaps, fixed. I don’t often achieve that depth, but even the surface posts are meant to be digging towards something beneath.

That digging takes a certain kind of destructive will. If you want to replant your garden, you have to be willing to ruin what’s there, for a while. Even if you plan on putting it back, there’s a phase where new construction always makes things uglier.

Do you follow? My mental garden was so pretty, with my girl by my side, that I wasn’t willing to dig it up to extract the broken glass and rocks that still sat beneath it.

—

Then she moved away. We’re trying long distance (because the things we had when she was here were worth it). That’s buried half a dozen new obstacles in my subconscious, and dredged up a few old ones that were buried too deeply to matter, before.

It also bumped “love life” back into the category of “things in my life that require significant work” – I had planned on waiting to achieve satisfaction in that area until finance, location, and other things were more settled. But as they say – a wise man turns chance into good fortune, and this has been a hell of a chance.

So for a while I had a few more pots than I had burners, and I let the blog get cold (you can tell by how stale my metaphors are. Puns are creeping in.)

—

These problems aren’t solved, but they’re balanced – and balance is enough to move forward.

The Obstacle is The Way

One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles.
– Ryan Holiday, The Obstacle is the Way

I just finished Ryan Holiday’s new book, The Obstacle is the Way, and I was hugely impressed. The book is a collection of short essays based on lessons from the Stoics and historical figures who lived up to their ideals.

Read the book yourself. Read it slowly, and maybe multiple times.

But before you get time to do that, here are three of my favorite lessons from it:

Make Victory Inexorable

His victory wouldn’t be pretty, but it was inexorable.
– Ryan Holiday, on Ulysses S. Grant

Stop looking for an epiphany, and start looking for weak points. Stop looking for angels, and start looking for angles.
– Ryan Holiday

If you push long enough, and hard enough, everything gives way. In many struggles, the victory goes to the last man standing. Grant embodied this by refusing to acknowledge that a military goal was impossible. He’d try again, and try again, and try again until something got through – and the string of failures would be forgotten in the glow of victory.

Love the Grind

Behind mountains are more mountains.
– Haitian proverb

You should never have to ask yourself, but what am I supposed to do now? Because you know the answer: your job.
– Ryan Holiday

Some see obstacles as temporary, negative situations which we can escape by hard work, perseverance, or luck – and once they’re gone we’ll be productive/peaceful/happy again.

Holiday – and the Stoics and others he profiles – see them differently. The current obstacle you face isn’t an enemy and it isn’t a temporary condition. When it’s gone, the next obstacle will loom, and will seem just as daunting as this one.

Only by accepting – in fact, loving – life’s onslaught can we achieve our potential. Only by relishing each obstacle as it comes, from its initial intimidating arrival to its eventual defeat, can we really make a masterwork of our lives.

There will always be another obstacle. We are called to not only accept that, but to be grateful for ti and excited by the challenge.

Let Challenges Prove Your Worth

Only in struggling with the impediments that made others quit can we find ourselves on untrodden territory.
– Ryan Holiday

What will be revealed when you’re sliced open by tension and pressure? Iron? Or air? Or bullshit?
– Ryan Holiday

Following on the point above – one reason to be grateful for challenges is that they allow us to prove our true worth. Without difficulty, there is no excellence.

You do want to be excellent, don’t you? Then you should rejoice at every difficulty that arises. Each is an opportunity to get one step farther than those who quit here.

Bonus Quotes

Only self absorbed assholes think they’re too good for whatever the current situation requires.
– Ryan Holiday

It is given to me, to feel where the enemy is weak.
– Rommel

If thy faint in the day of adversity, thy strength is small.
– Proverbs

If you are not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.
– Mike Tyson

Viris acquirit eundo – we gather strength as we go.
– Ryan Holiday

It’s a cliche question to ask:

What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: well, thank God I don’t have cancer.

But we do.
– Ryan Holiday

A Brief Tribute to Failure (Or, Get Punched)

“No one seems to realize that failing is just the point.”
– The Legionnaire, A Word on Morality

“Nope. Has to be an inside kick.” We did the combo again. Left, right – step the wrong way, outside leg kick. “Damnit, sorry.”

“No problem man, go again.”

Left, right – then a long hesitation where I forcibly stop my leg from stepping the wrong way, followed by an awkward inside kick. My partner takes his turn, not much better than my own. I go again.

Left, right, step the wrong way, don’t bother throwing the wrong kick. Fuck me.

This repeats half a dozen times before I’m reliably throwing the right kick. There’s something about my balance that makes me want to step to the right after throwing a cross, and I’m in the bad habit of running with that.

Finally I throw the combo perfectly, at a good pace. The coach comes by and says “Give me the 1-2 leg kick like you were”. I do it, proud of myself for getting the timing and balance right.

He punches me in the head. Not hard, but hard enough to get the point across. My teeth clack shut. “Your dropped your hand on the kick. Gotta keep those hands up.” I nod, and on the next round with my partner I miss the kick but my hands are up.

Around the mat, everyone is doing this, more or less. Some of them have the basics down better and are going faster or trying to hit harder, but everyone’s consistently not doing as well as they’d like to.

That’s the point.

—

It’s a given that our brains hate failure, especially public failure. We’ll do a hell of a lot to avoid it – and for most people, this means avoiding things where the chance of failure is high. It’s why everybody gets hung up on what they did in high school, why we’re surprised when our work buddy quits to become a painter, why we say Bob “is creative” and Dan “is strong” as if these were built-in properties rather than developed skills. We don’t want to put in the tens or hundreds or thousands of failures it takes to reliably stop failing.

But we can use this terror/hatred of failure to our advantage. The human brain is a wondrously adaptable organ, and it will seek new channels when old ones are closed.

If you cut off your brain’s retreat – if you fully commit and take away your ability to quit (say, by jumping in front of a class of twenty to practice) – your mind will find another way to avoid failure.

It will scramble, desperately, to succeed.

—

If you want to keep your hands up, thinking about it, checking yourself, and drilling are fine practices. None of them will teach you as fast as a gloved fist to the face. Get punched in the head enough times and you’ll keep your fucking hands up.

Learn to see the gloved fist, the mocking laughter, the empty bank account and the breakup note for what they are. They are your Chiron – your Socrates – your Athena and your Parmenides. Failure is your cleverest teacher, and it has lessons you can’t learn anywhere else.

Getting Feedback in Hearthstone

The bad news is that 50 people died in a hotel fire; the good news is that we got exclusive footage.
– Jessica Savitch

I’ve written before about feedback. It’s so important for learning that it’s almost futile to begin your practice without it – especially in practices where the immediate result of your choices aren’t obvious.

When you find yourself in that situation – not being sure of the origin of your results – you can hugely speed your learning by finding a way to improve that feedback. Here’s an example:

For relaxation lately I’ve been playing Hearthstone with some of my friends. My favorite mode of play is called Arena – you draft a deck of 30 cards, one at a time, by choosing from sets of 3 at a time. Then you’re matching up with other Arena players and you try to win as many games as possible before losing 3. The more you win, the better your prize (though I’m only really interested in in-game gold used to play Arena some more).

There are a couple things that make Arena challenging. First, there are 30 individual decisions to be made during the drafting process, each with a huge combination of options and each influenced by the class you’re playing, the choices you’ve already made, and your predictions about what’s coming. There are a LOT of opportunities to help or harm your cause.

Second, while playing each game there are even more choices – what to play, in what order, usually 8-14 times a game.

Finally, you don’t often get immediate feedback about your plays – everything seems okay while it’s happening, and when you lose on turn 14 it’s not at all obvious that anything that happened on turn 3 had anything to do with it (though that might have been the deciding turn). Even worse, by the time you’re drawing and playing cards you drafted you probably have no memory of the draft itself, and what you could have done differently there.

So: You can win or lose games on turn 14 based on a card you played on turn 4 that you drafted 3/30, several hours ago.

This makes getting better almost impossible without some help. You’ll just never know why you *really* won or lost each game.

Until you wise up and feel the ground. In this case I needed a way to associate wins and losses with choices I’d made much, much earlier, so I could remember those wins and losses the next time a similar choice came around. I did it this way:

I downloaded Microsoft Expression Encoder, which records up to 10 minutes of video free (and also allows you to edit and merge them, neat.) Then I started recording all my Arena runs, and periodically I watch them and note the apparently pivotal moments of each.

Here was my first recorded run. I didn’t start this one until the drafting part was over, silly me – and I won’t bore you with the notes I took rewatching it. Still, I wanted to put my video where my mouth was, so here’s my video.

(NB: This also marks my first foray into YouTube uploading since I was a kid making smoke bombs. Firsts!)

I learned three times as much from watching this run as I did from playing it – and even my errors are positives, when I know they’ll be recorded for my later improvement.

Do you have an example of going out of your way to get feedback, so you can get better? Do you play Hearthstone (so you know how bad of a run that was)? Let me know by email or in the comments.

How to Break Promises

“Promises were like laws; smart men knew when to break both.”
– C.J. Hill, Slayers

You’ve seen a little bit of Scrivener stuff on the blog already – it’s the tool I used to write The eBook, and I use it to write anything longer than a couple of hundred words. There are a lot of guides to its use out there – blog series and even a solid-looking book (David Hewson is a bestseller and has a writing blog).

In the last post, I told you I’d tell you how to write your next eBook with Scrivener – but as I sit down to do that, I realize it’s not a good idea. I’m not an expert – I haven’t yet written a full-length novel with Scrivener – and there are actual experts out there telling you how to do it.

So I’m going to leave it to them. Google “Scrivener” and give it a shot – I promise it’s a hell of a lot better than Word, Evernote or whatever you’re using to write right now. It’s probably overkill for blogs (and it doesn’t help you with WordPress formatting anyway), but for long form stuff it’s great.

—

That’s not the only writing promise I’ve broken lately.

I also said here that I’d soon write a post about dealing with sleep schedule problems. I didn’t write that post, and I’m not going to, see the reasons above. I’ll figure it out eventually, and I’ll tell you how I did it – but that’ll probably just be a link to whichever brilliant solution I eventually stumble on.

—

This is part of the reason I dropped the Progress page – I have a bad habit of saying I’ll do something just so that when I do it later, I can check it off of a list and feel accomplished. I’m trying to get away from that – from mindlessly checking off lists, clearing inboxes, chasing that dopamine rush. That means not getting attached to post possibilities or todos that have gone stale.

So. The next post will be different from, and better than, either of those possibilities.