Becoming An Author
The journey to becoming an author was daunting. I’ve known since I was 17 years old that I wanted to become an author and a speaker who inspires others…just like a speaker did for me when I was a senior at Tustin High School. I remember daydreaming about having the same effect on others that the speaker had on me. My next thought was, “nobody is going to listen to a 17-year-old, I need to have more life experience first.” So, the dream got put on a mental shelf.
Over the years, I would remember that dream and felt the same longing to make it happen as I did when I was just a teenager. Each time I thought about the dream, my rational brain would push it into the “someday” category. Someday…I’ll make it happen. My career and my family were growing rapidly. I barely had time to read a book, let alone write one. So, back on the shelf it went time after time, hoping that eventually “someday” would come.
As an early employee at ZipRecruiter.com, the dream rolled around in my head more frequently as I realized the company’s success could put me on a path to early retirement. In May of 2021, it happened. Suddenly “someday” became “today”. I found myself at a loss. Where do I start? What should my writing process look like? Can I even write enough to call it a book?
I spent weeks researching the best writing process for writing a book in a timely manner. Each time I tried to implement the strategies I’d read about, I found myself frustrated. Being newly retired but still having my home office, I attempted to write where I used to work full-time. Nope. That didn’t work. I attempted to write for a set block of time each day. Nope. That was a no-go also.
I couldn’t even decide on the right medium to use…pen and paper, laptop, digital notebook. At one point, I realized I had outlines, ideas, and full paragraphs on a combination of all three mediums. Trust me, I was not thrilled to have to spend my writing time finally combining them all into a digital document.
It was at that moment that I decided to let my intuition guide me on where to write (short story: anywhere but my office). And I leveraged the lessons I’d learned from a mental toughness challenge (75 Hard and Live Hard) I was in the midst of completing. The game-changing lesson I learned through Andy Frisella’s challenge was the power of micro tasks. Essentially, it’s just completing a daily task each day with a minimal time commitment. For me, that task was to spend 15 minutes a day on the book.
Yes, it seemed absurd. But I’d already learned through the challenge and my own research that the act of marking a task as complete releases what are known as the happy brain chemicals (dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin), which help to develop discipline and strengthen motivation. During the challenge, I realized how quickly the chemical response to checking off tasks allowed me to create new habits and feel motivated to continue doing so.
Day after day, I tackled my daily task. Some days, I only worked on the book for 15 minutes. Most of the time, I spent considerably more time. But either way, as long as I worked for at least 15 minutes I got my happy brain boost, felt accomplished, and felt great for maintaining my habit and continuing to make progress. It wound up taking me less than a year from start to publisher submission.
Lesson: Micro tasks work.
If you’re struggling to make headway on a goal, or just don’t know where to start, I highly recommend starting with micro tasks. They are so minimal that you can’t come up with an excuse not to get them done, so you build discipline, motivation, and amazing habits in the easiest way I’ve ever known.