Running Down a Dream: Your Road Map to Winning Creative Battles

Constantly trimming away inefficiencies in the way you work is a powerful tool. What’s even more powerful is that very few people have the discipline to do it.

In my consulting, I was so used to cutting ideas off at the knees before they even got started that I never thought to consider what would happen if everything went right…what it would be like to focus on realizing the big goal instead of worrying about the little bugs that would come up as I was moving toward it.

“Failure is an event, not a person.”—Zig Ziglar

I built up a good toolbox of options to use whenever fear started holding me back. 1. I focused on creating for one person. 2. I promised myself to keep it a secret. 3. I wrote affirmations to combat specific fears about my character 4. I always kept my worry list close by.

First, for simple tasks—things that have less than five steps to them—I just make a decision and do them the same way every time. My keys go in the same spot every single day. Even if I forget to put them in and find them in my pocket upstairs, I go back downstairs and put them in the silver dish. The simple task system extends to everything with l

I thought about that movie with Jack Nicholson where he plays an obsessive-compulsive novelist who, through a long series of events, ends up back at his therapist’s office. After an unsuccessful interaction on the couch, he walks out into the waiting room, looks around, and then delivers the line that gave the movie its name. “What if this is as go

But Jill helped me realize that figuring out when the book was ready to share wasn’t my job. My job was to do the work and trust the people I had assembled around me to not only keep me on the path, but to let me know when I was finished.

I STARTED TO UNDERSTAND THAT ALL OF THE SUCCESS I SAW AROUND ME WAS THE EDITED VERSION OF WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

I could relax, be the expert on the things I was good at, and let other people be the expert on things they were good at.