Watch out for your LIMITING personal beliefs - #EvansBook ep. 2

Watch out for your limiting personal beliefs. When you find yourself saying, "I hate doing this, but I have to," or "There's nobody else who can help me," or "That's the way it's always been done," chances are it's a limiting personal belief that you have, and it's not the truth. It's just the truth that you've created for yourself and therefore becomes your truth. And so I was reflecting on my last episode talking about the book where I said I hate writing and and I have to just grind it out. I enjoy the end result, but I don't enjoy the process. And the past week now has been less about writing and more about trying to get people on my team involved in the process to help make it easier for me. And while nobody on my team can speak for me and can get the information out of my head, and I'm a much better writer than I am a speaker, I tend to think by writing it down. There's a lot of stuff in the book that they can help me with. There's a lot of research, there's a lot of quotes, there's a lot of examples that people on my team can help me with. So for the past week, I've been spending my time updating my team, explaining the process I'm going through, and having them think about how they can contribute to my project. And right now it's basically a team of 4 of us. There's myself, obviously writing, uh, there's one person who's helping convert all of my content into a document that we can all edit. There's one person who is my copywriter, and she's looking over what I'm writing, and I'm probably going to hand chunks of stuff to her. For example, when I do an interview with somebody, condensing all the information and knowledge that came from the interview and putting it into story format. You're making weird faces. What are you doing on my video, huh? You having fun on my video? That's Hayden. And then one other guy, Jason, who's helped out with basically all the projects involved in my company, and he'll find ways to help make the project rise. So, yeah, that's my quick thought on it today. That's the update, and I want to get to your questions. I promised I would answer your questions, and so I got a whole bunch of them that came in from you guys. So first up, Jarhead 6: What program or application are you using to write the book? Jarhead, I started off in Word, and I have a really unique format that I wanted to try to keep to, so it was easy for me to design in Word. now that I'm involved my team in it, it makes it much more difficult because I don't want a Word document bouncing around to different people and you can't keep track of who's edited what, especially when people are working on it at the same time. So we're transitioning everything to Google Docs, and that's what one of my guys on my team, that's what he's basically doing, is taking everything I've written in my Word doc and moving it to Google Docs. And I'm sure at some point when it gets to the publisher, they'll use whatever software they're using, but I just have to give them a manuscript and we're going to use Google Docs for now. Crazy6256: "Find the solution as I hate writing. I can speak to anything, but when it comes to writing, it seems I hit a roadblock. Help!" Maybe you shouldn't be a writer. You know, that's maybe the easy answer. If you're not feeling writing, don't write. If you're a much better speaker, then speak. Do you. Don't try to do something just because somebody says it's a good idea. But if you really have to write a book, you really want that as part of your goals but you don't want to actually write it, then speak it out. There are a lot of ghostwriters that can help you and you just do interviews with them and talk to your points. They'll take it and condense it and write it out for you. I wish I could do that. I wish I could just speak from the top of my head and have that turn into a book. I have to be a lot more I'm a lot more— I take time with my words. I'm a lot more pensive, so not very good at that. But yeah, honestly though, if you're not feeling it, if you have a hard time, you have roadblocks all the time, maybe writing isn't for you. Next up, Ronak Vausoha. Vausoha. Wow, I butchered that name. My apologies. Do you have any framework or process that you use while writing to curate and elaborate on an idea? As an aspiring writer, "I would find it very useful if you could share any tips on the same." So this is— when you get into a big project like a book, you can easily get lost in it and you can get caught up in the weeds. So what I try to do when I'm starting it— and I'm no expert, like this is my first rodeo at writing a book— so what I've done is I create— I start with a template. There's 3 main sections to the book and those break down into different chapters. And I started with what ideas do I want to— what ideas do I want to make come across in the book? And then I start working downwards. I start really high level, start with the chapters, start with the section, then go to the chapters, and then go to the individual pages. And there's a format that I follow for each one. And I then— I found that really helpful because if I just start writing without a clear direction, then you'll find you get lost. You'll find you get lost and you lose sight of the bigger picture. And I find that when I'm writing, it helps to be able to just get lost. I like having a clearly defined role for what I have to do today when I'm writing. I don't want to have to think about the whole structure and the bigger picture all the time. I want to get lost just on the one page that I'm working on or the two pages that I'm working on. And so I find I have days when I'm focusing big picture and lining everything up, and then days when I'm just in it writing the content. Next up, Stike96: Great video. Know what you mean about hating the process but being proud at the end. I've experienced that loads of times. As for the book, I really don't know where to get started, even if it's a good idea, because as you mentioned, people are moving over to other forms of media. Looking forward to seeing you as you progress. This video is a nice start to the process of writing your book. Yeah, I would say, unless you really— examine your motives. I covered this a little bit last week, but why do you want to write a book? Is it something that's just on your goals list, your bucket list, something that you want to get done in your life, something you want to show your grandkids that you wrote a book? Then do it. You can self-publish it and you've got it out there. If the book is only for marketing purposes, you want to get your name out there more, then I would look at it in a slightly different way. That's the approach that I'm taking. The projects that I work on, I want to be able to reach millions of people. If it doesn't have a big potential impact, I'm not interested. And that's why I wasn't interested in self-publishing. And if I wasn't going to get a deal with a publisher with a significant advance, then I wasn't going to do it because I wanted somebody committed who was going to help me make this thing big. And so that was my motive for doing it. I have a popular YouTube channel. I'm very active on Twitter and Facebook and I have a newsletter, I had a website, I do all the digital stuff as well. I just felt that there's still some relevance in the book world, but I wanted— I didn't want my book just to come out and sit on the shelf and die. I would only do it if I got the support of people who were committed to making it happen. So that could be the same criteria for you. If you are writing a book only for footprint, only for credibility, only for marketing your brand, there may be better ways to do it. But if your goal is to really reach people and you can get this commitment of a serious publisher, then that could be an avenue worth pursuing. Next up, Vanessa, "Great tips for writing the book. How do you start to write a book?" I don't know. How do you start to write a book? You start writing one page at a time. For me, I guess it started with— I'll tell you this story and maybe this helps. My agent really wanted me to have a book. And at the start, I thought, "Ah, I don't really want a book." Just like the last question, I felt like there might be better ways to do it. And we came up with a topic that I was okay interested in, but wasn't really falling in love with it. And so I didn't— I put a little bit of work into it, but it wasn't really consuming me. And I like to get lost in my projects. Whatever I'm working on, I like to get lost in it and be consumed by it. You want to follow your flow, follow your passion. And then Throughout the process of writing that book and the proposal, I discovered the one-word concept and thought, "You know what? This is where I really want to focus." And the whole book is about finding your one word and how to apply it to your business and using tons of examples and case studies. And that got me excited. And then I just started thinking, "Well, why do people need this book? What's so different?" from this book than all the other books out there. I started writing my outline and template. I think a lot of people fall in love with the idea of having a book, having their name on something, having their name in a bookstore, and that wasn't a motivation for me. If that's your only motivation, you're probably not going to have a great book. Like anything else that you do, you want to do it because you love the idea behind it. For me, I want to have a big impact. I want to reach a lot of people. I want I want more people to find their passion, find their one word, and apply it to their companies. I feel like a book with the right publisher is a great way to reach more people. That's why I'm doing it. If you're doing it just because you want to have a book out, that may be why you're having a hard time writing it. So tap into something you're excited about. Tap into a message that you want to share, and I think you'll have a lot more success in putting words down on paper. I will do one more question. Empowering Medicine Herbalist, "Looking forward to your tips. I have an academic article I want to write, but I am a perfectionist and this gets in the way, obviously. Tom, any tips on just writing?" Tom, this is a great question and I kind of face that too. I tend to be a perfectionist and I see minor details. Just today, I was asking Christina, we are working on some new thumbnails for the videos and I asked her to put two thumbnails, two little icons on the thumbnail, and one of them seemed a little bit too far apart. I said, "Can we move it 2 pixels over?" And she did, and she said, "Nobody's gonna notice that difference," and she's right. She's probably right, but I notice, and so it makes me happier to see it as I think it should be done. And I'm reminded of a quote from Henry Ford, which is, "Quality is doing it right when nobody's watching." And so that applies to a lot of the stuff I'm doing, including writing the book. What I find helpful is not to stress out and have to have the perfect thing out the first time. And that may seem like a juxtaposition or opposite, but what I find is, yes, I like to be perfect. I like it to be exactly as I want it to be. I don't expect perfection the first time. A lot of times the end result that you get is a result of experimentation. I'll try tons of stuff, and each time I try it, it gets better and better and better, or I'll kill it and it won't. If you're turning your papers into a book, I would suggest Don't worry so much about your first draft. Just get it out of your head, put words on paper, and then go back and edit it and fix it because a lot of the magic happens in the editing. And I would think about videos and movies. Think about movies and songs that you like. A movie isn't done in one take, right? Oh, you are. You sad? What happened? You just making faces? A movie isn't done in one take. You take pieces and then you string them together and you edit them together. And so the same thing applies to your book. Write something down and know that it's just a brain dump. It's just getting out of your head. And if you tell yourself, "Nobody's going to see it until it's perfect," that's fine. But don't make it perfect the first time through. I think that'll really help you. Just get something down on paper. All right. That's my update for the week. Hopefully I'll have more writing done next week and be able to give you a further update on how things are going. Maybe a little bit lengthy compared to last week's video. I had a little bit of a distraction. I had a distraction this week. Thank you for joining me on my journey, and if you have any questions about writing the book or my process, I'm happy to answer them in next week's video. Leave a comment underneath. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to— Breathe! And we'll see you soon. Bye-bye! Bye! Bye! Bye, magic finger! Who has a magic finger? You! This is the magic finger? Gotcha!