To accomplish anything, you have to focus your attention on it.
When you focus your energy on a deliberate goal driven by a deep-rooted desire, you will have
far more success in your actions.
Napoleon Hill discusses the concept of “focus” in terms of “concentration,” which he defines as
“the act of focusing the mind upon a given desire until ways and means for its realization have
been worked out and successfully put into operation.”
And once you have narrowed in on what you want, you have to build out a framework in which to
operate. Habits serve as the guardrails on our own autobahn; the guidelines to help us reach our
destination.
This is an area that, I think, lacks sufficient transparency. I think sometimes we discount the
power of habits both to ourselves and when talking to others. And I think it behooves us all to
understand the value that habits hold.
HABIT
To help establish focus, very little is as powerful as your daily habits take the time to establish
good habits in the beginning. It is not easy to do change very rarely is, and the change
necessary for longterm good benefits (like studying or working out) is even harder yet. (This will
be especially true if you believe that you do not have the time to write.)
New habits are new mental paths and, as with any new path, the terrain must be traveled over
and over and over before it becomes apparent to the traveler. Just as one would not cut across a
field only once and expect for a dirt trail to emerge behind him, we have to trudge along our new
desired courses every day until they become wellworn and easy to follow.
To effectively build new habits:
1. Invest a lot upfront. The first, earliest attempts are always the hardest. I promise: it gets
easier over time. You are coming at the forest with a machete here. It will be tough at first.
2. Remind yourself why you’re here. When you feel like the effort is overwhelming, recall your
desire from Lesson 1. And the confidence from Lesson 2.
3. Do it even when you don’t feel like it. Once you decide when you want to write, always
write at that time. Do it whether you feel like it or not (there were plenty of days on which I
absolutely did not want to write. Looking back now, I am so happy that I still did.) Hold fast to
them on weekends, too, as weekends can easily become a black hole of lost productivity if you
let them.
4. Resist temptations. Do not let yourself procrastinate until late evening or the weekend. It is
not going to feel fun at first. It may not even feel natural. Once you have formed those habits,
defend them. Protect them against intrusion, and do not allow them to be deprioritized. Just
keep at it.
5. Do not doubt yourself. Once you have defined what you want, do not waver and allow your
heart to throw in the towel.
Nothing helps your longterm success quite like daily habits. Carve out the time. Make it happen.
Because once you develop the habit, it is easy to let the habit build upon itself. It is easy to plant
a seed and let that seed develop into something that you love, and continue to water and feed it.
Once you wear down a path, following it becomes increasingly intuitive over time.
Behind the curtain: a word on my own schedule
I began writing “seriously” in November 2012. I signed up for nanowrimo (National Novel Writing
Month) two days into it, and started working on my first novel that night. I had no plan; no outline.
Up until that day, I did not even know that I was writing a novel.
I work as a consultant and was staffed in Boston at the time. It was not yet the hectic part of the
project, so I would typically write after I got back to the hotel at night, from about 79 pm. I would
get back to my hotel, grab some dinner and eat while I wrote. I never pulled an allnighter or
stayed up past 11 or so. I always had the threat of work the next day and wouldn’t have been of
much use to anyone had I arrived exhausted.
December: brought holidays, holiday parties, birthdays (both my boyfriend’s and my own), a lot
more travel (both business and personal),
January: on Jan. 2 or 3, I decided that I wanted write one million words in a year. At this time, we
were nearing the deadline on the Boston project, which meant 12hour work days. When I
realized that getting home at 8 pm and writing late at night did not appeal to me, I started getting
up at 5:30 every morning and writing from 67:30 am.
February: transitioned to a new project, which was “local” but involved a twohour train commute
each way to and from the suburbs of Chicago. I wrote on my morning commute, from about
6:308, and read on the way home.
March: I quit my job. I did not realize how powerful my writing habits were until I no longer had the
morning structure. Waking up later suddenly meant that I could write at 10 am. Or 10 pm. Or not
at all. I still wrote about 100,000 this month, but none of it was at 6:30 am. Much of it was thrown
together, haphazardly, in the moments before going to bed. It only took a few weeks of midnight
suffering to reestablish some routine.
I think this wide variety of work schedules generated a wide variety of writing schedules, and I am
fortunate to have a number of different solutions to offer you – all kinds of different ways in which
I fit my writing into my life as it changed, and ways that may also work for you, depending on
your own schedule
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