Are you ready to get out of your head and the ideas bouncing back and forth between your ears? The first step is to decide:
Decision one: What game are you playing?
Let’s say you’re with your family or with your friend and you’re about to play a game. You walk to the tall cupboard where all the games are stored. It’s time to pick one. You can’t play three games at once. As a writer, your first decision is that you need to decide, what game are you playing?
- Are you going to write a lot of books?
- Are you going to be providing a service where you also write books?
- You’ve got to decide – what is success to me? What is the game that I’m playing.
Can you imagine if your friends all decide they’re going to play Monopoly, and then you’re over on the side with the UNO cards trying to jump into the Monopoly game. It’s confusing – you can’t play multiple games at once. You have to pick a game and then stick to it.
This also applies to being as specific as you can about your audience.
- Who are you going to serve? You’ve got to pick your game.
It’s hard picking a game. You worry that it will be the wrong game and you worry that it means you can NEVER play other games. None of this is true. If you pick a game you don’t like, you can ALWAYS return the game to the cupboard of inspiration and pick a NEW ONE!
It is never too late to pivot.
Decision two: Start playing.
My brother is very detailed and scientific, he loves information. Growing up, our family would pick a new game to play and he would self-appoint himself (we were happy to let him do it) to read the directions on how to play the game, sometimes for over an HOUR. Meanwhile the rest of the family is telling him, “We have enough information. Let’s just start playing, we’ll figure it out as we go!”
As writers, we create false first steps and procrastinate with the lie, I need to know more FIRST. We want to know exactly what success is going to look like, if we can make it, if we’re going to be rich and famous – we want all the information.
The result is that we are not writing or creating. We sit around gathering information which we move from pile to pile because we are not ACTING on it.
We squander our time going to webinars for information we won’t be ready to implement for at least another 6 months or more, reading random books because they helped someone ten steps ahead of us, and not actually writing, because we are AFRAID we don’t know enough to start.
The truth: you have EVERYTHING you need RIGHT NOW to take the next step with your writing.
This is where you get to decide. You get to decide that you are going to start playing, start writing, and that you are just going to take the next small step. Because I am sure that you have enough information right now, to take the next small step. And so, instead of making this step bigger than it is, or procrastinating by thinking you need more information, more time – just do the next small step.
Decision three: What cards will you create: consume less, create more.
Think of a game where it BENEFITS you to have MANY CARDS in your hands. It’s time to start creating so that your hands are full of your created content. When you create a piece of content, you have a powerful tool to use as a lead magnet, to build a connection to your audience and to tell a story.
Each one is a card that you’re getting into your hand so that you can play. And sometimes when we’re beginning, it’s easy to think, ‘I haven’t published a book yet, I don’t have a website, or I don’t…’
Don’t worry about the long list of what you haven’t done yet.
FOCUS on ONE THING that you will complete: the one card you are going to get into your hand.
Maybe it means you’re going to get your website up, maybe it means you’re going to work on that book project. But decide: which card am I going to pick up and complete so that I have it in my hand to powerfully participate in the game.
Now it’s your turn. You can forget about these decisions the moment you click away from this page, or you can PAUSE and DECIDE.
- Decide what game you’re playing. What is success to you?
- Start playing. What is your next small step forward?
- Which card are you going to create first? A book, a blog post? Remember, you are a writer, a creator. It’s time to start consuming less and start creating.
Tell us what you decide in the comments. And if you haven’t joined the Unstoppable Writers Revolution yet, click here. We are writers committed to one another’s success.