383 How To Get In The Habit of WRITING (and why you should)

The theme of this week, how to take back control of your time and ensure that we're investing it in the most valuable things possible. Gang, this is. This is a flyer. This podcast is probably going to get, like, very few listens, but it's something I'm passionate about enough that I want to cram it into your ears. Clear back to when I was running an accounting firm. I started writing, and there is just. There is a, like, on the. On the. On the line graph of my life. I don't wanna say I went hockey stick after I started writing, but there's a bend there. Like, things changed when I made a habit of writing. I bombed all of my writing classes in high school. Everyone along the way told me, you are not a writer. You do not have the gift. This is not a thing. Writing is extremely hard for me, just like I think it is for most accountants. Like, in no way does it come naturally to me, but writing is probably the most valuable thing that I do every day now. And so I want to tell you why that is and why I think there is a place in every entrepreneur's life for writing. And I'm going to tell you how. Like, very practically, I've got five tips for you for how to wade into that and do it consistently. That should hopefully make it easier rather than just the extreme suffering of staring at that blank page. So come on in today. Let's talk about writing. Oh, okay. Why, Jason, I got enough things to do. Our brains are just a collection of so many disorganized thoughts and emotions and voices. Like, we've got our internal monologue shouting at us all the time. And one of the most helpful things I ever heard there was, like, don't treat that voice as if it's you. Like, that's actually a real trap. When the internal voice says something and you tell yourself, oh, I feel this way, that's. That's a bad move. That sort of monkey brain then kind of takes over your actions and you don't have control. Then instead, like, treat it as almost this separate voice and analyze it for what aspects of it are true and useful and what aspects of it aren't. Almost like an Internet comment where even when they're pretty unhinged, there's a degree of truth to them and something to take from it if you're willing to wait in the uncomfortableness of it. But our brain's just a mess of all those things. And until you take the time to pause and organize that stuff, your frameworks for how you approach, approach Those things will be equally messy and misguided. You end up living a incredibly meandering path if you never stop to consider, like, how do I feel about this thing? And how do I ultimately make the right decision? I. I think that this has maybe gotten worse too, as we are so overstimulated as a culture. And I have a really hard time giving myself any space to just have silence. Like I'll be putting clothes away and have a podcast in, like, just kind of every idle moment. There's so many things that I enjoy consum that my brain never really turns off even going to bed. Many of us listen to podcasts now, right? Are you going to bed right now? Aw, what a fun little. Okay. Really, the. I think the people that we most look up to in terms of thought leadership have taken the time and put in more effort than other people to clarifying and organizing their thoughts. And writing is the way to do that. And there's even like a very real element of, of like therapy here where it's not a replacement for therapy, but there's so many fleeting thoughts that we have and fleeting stresses that left unresolved are not additive to where we're trying to go. And if you consider the other side of that writing practice and the benefits of sort of wrinkling out or ironing out those thoughts in your head. Wrinkling out what? Ironing the wrinkles? You know what I mean? Not to end up with like a smooth brain, but if you iron out those, like, disorganized thoughts in your head, on the other side of that is the opportunity to create cohesive things that will connect with people, opportunities to find folks. Because these days everyone has a platform in a way that's never before been possible in society. And the only thing standing between you and a whole bunch of attention, hopefully the right attention, targeted attention, is having something to say, is having a clear framework for how to approach something that people struggle with. The notion of creating is hard for most of us because we don't identify as, you know, influencers, influencers. And unfortunately, social media started as, like, you have just these mega influencers. And the impression became if I am going to create on a social media platform, than I am a, quote, unquote, influencer. It's kind of like the person who won't strength train won't lift a weight because they, quote, don't want to get big. Oh, gosh, I love that they look at, like bodybuilders who've like, devoted decades and unbelievable amounts of effort and restriction and all these different things, and they look at them and they're like, I don't want. I don't want to end up like that. So I'm not going to lift a weight. That's akin to saying, I'm not going to post on social media because I don't want to be an influencer. The reality is today I really think society boils down to, you are either a consumer or you are a creator. And I say this a lot. The notion that virtually no one is not online anymore, even that how will I find clients who are offline? Like those people, they are online now more than ever before. They may not be, like, consuming thought leadership content, and none of that stuff may have found them yet. I would argue that actually, in most cases, that is a result of the supply not keeping up with the demand. Because if beekeepers are all on social media and nobody is supplying good content to beekeepers, that's a massive opportunity. And most commonly, that is why, like, beekeepers don't consume business content online. I'm generalizing with beekeepers. I don't know if that's the case or not, but I'm thinking of, like, the folks who have come online. Oftentimes we're like, well, they just, they watch cat videos and stuff like that. That's oftentimes a signal that there isn't anything valuable to them. Like, nobody's making that yet. But if society really does boil down to, you're either a creator or a consumer, boy, I would, I would really rather be on that creator end of the spectrum. Even if I don't identify as a, quote, creator, influencer, or whatever it is, I don't want to just. I don't want to be the consumer. I don't want to just sit there and, like, have an algorithm feed me all of this stuff and so that we can agree to that. But then we're like, oh, the notion of creating things, like, what would I even say? I don't have anything to say. Meanwhile, a client calls you and they're like, hey, we're gonna move our accounting ledger to a different system. Just a heads up. Oh, you got something to say now? I sure bet you do. So we have a tremendous amount to say in our heads, and we have a bunch of expertise from having these conversations every single day. But how do I channel them into something that's useful for people online? Um, writing. The solution is writing. There's an old, old saying, the more you write, the more you have to say. I mean, everybody, when I started Jason Daly. Oh my gosh. He said Jason Daily. When I started, Jason Daly said, wow, is there really that much to talk about counting firm running every single day? Yes, there is. We're still here talking about it because the more you talk about it, the more you write about it, the more there is to say, the more you get into the nuance. And that that might be the greatest benefit of developing a writing practice and committing to writing every single day. It makes creation easy. And in 2024, heading into 2025, the best way to find people and to attract folks to your essence and what you have to offer is to create value. Everyone is spending the idle moments scrolling social media algorithms. Everybody's subscribing to industry newsletters. The people who are winning in this new paradigm, like traditional television and cable, is like cratering. Folks are transitioning to trusted voices more than ever before rather than media companies. And so more than ever before, there is a tremendous amount of value in having clear frameworks, having things to say. And when you make a practice of writing, it is much easier to create from a place of abundance. Right? So if, if I'm going to go and sit down and write a 500 word blog post, I have a very big advantage because I have 300 and, you know, 80 episodes of a podcast where I could draw on any of those and start with the transcript and kind of reduce from there. That is writing from a place of abundance. That's an extreme example. But when you write every day, that creation you'll find comes very naturally. How do you actually do it? Even if you are convinced it boils down to the how, how much time is this going to take me? I don't know how to do it right now. Five tips for you. 1. Every night, write down three things that you would like to find an answer to. We all have those things that we are blocked on. What should our discovery meeting script be? What's the most actionable takeaway for beekeepers from that state tax update I went to yesterday, who would be the perfect hire for me in my firm right now? Maybe not the next tax preparer or bookkeeper, but the person that would take some work off of my shoulders. All hard questions that require consideration. Right? And we're not putting any pressure on ourselves to come up with answers right now. But before you go to bed, write those questions down and in the morning, those are your writing prompts. Which of those get you excited in the morning? You'll find oftentimes you'll gravitate to one or to a couple. And in the morning when you're at kind of your peak brain activity, oftentimes that jumping off point is enough to get started. Because the worst thing you can do is just rock up to an empty page and be like, okay, now I will write. And writing is suffering. Like there's no way around it. Like writing is painful. Like even for writers it's suffering, but there's also like a level of satisfaction that comes from it. Like a good kind of suffering. But those prompts ensure that you start off the next day in like a constructive direction, actually solving a problem. This episode is brought to you in part by the fine folks at Live Flow. I may unapologetic lover of notion. In fact, my whole like personal and business life runs on notion now. And the reason I like it is it's just like a very open ended tool for like doing data and database stuff, but also narrative things like writing. If you're a notion nerd, you get it okay. Live Flow's new financial dashboards are the closest thing I have seen to finance notion in terms of I can build like open ended narrative docs that I sent to my clients with all the words and explainers that I want to include, but embedded with very real financial data from their QuickBooks or their 0 file. And I can publish these reports either as snapshots that are static and never change, or even publish like continuously updating reports that are pulling in live data from the ledger. So as long as the accounting file is up to date, it continues syncing that stuff in. If that's a, you know, a dashboard that the client looks at on their phone every morning or report they check in on every week. Super flexible reporting platform. Not like this. Sort of pretty templatized. Here are the 12 different types of reports you can present. It's totally open ended. You can connect it back to anything in the accounting ledger. But because it's Live Flow, they also give you a bunch of templates if you don't want to have to build it from scratch. Gives you a much easier way to get started. And that's why I like liveflow. Learn more Check out the link down in the show Notes this episode is sponsored in part by Ramp Gang New Year's resolutions. They are just around the corner. They're creeping up, creeping up any old day now. And my resolution for you is for your clients to stop using stanky old financial products. Okay, so many bookkeeping, workflow issues and even fraud issues could be easily presented today. Presented, prevented. That's what they could be today easily prevented by a better banking and card stack. Did he just. What did he just say? Yeah, banking and card stack. It's tech buddy, your client that just bumbled on into the Wells Fargo across the street. The Chase, whatever it is, is a better option. Ramp. It's a spend management platform. It's going to save you a whole pile of headaches when it comes to your bookkeeping workflows and when it comes to your clients being able to allocate spend to members of the team. I'm not talking about the office card that they can go out and get donuts with and buy staplers. No, like responsible spend management. And you, the accountants, like, we're actually in a pretty good spot where we could be advisors here and help them modernize their money. Tech stack, okay. I'm a happy user myself. We actually use Ramp internally. It's a good tool, good platform. Learn more the link down in the show notes. Sometimes we can even be blocked on these prompts. And so my second tip here is capture what those prompts ought to be. You got to have a really good capture system. I talked about this, like, early days in the podcast, but we haven't talked about it in a while. I think there's a tremendous amount of value to having the ability to capture notes in any context, whether you're in the shower, whether you are driving, whether you're sitting on the train, whether you're working, and you just need to file that away to circle back to it later. Having a solid capture system is tremendously useful, even with me having kids and trying to be present in whatever I'm doing. And I've explained this to my wife, to my kids and all that stuff. I will regularly make a note when I'm doing a family thing, because making that note gives me the freedom to then release it from my mind, because we've all thought of those things or started trying to work through a problem where you're at lunch with your mom or your partner or something like that when you really need to be engaged. I think the solution to being able to be present is when those things come up, because they will come up. Like. Like, that's just how our brains work. I need to capture that so that I can get back to what I'm supposed to be focusing on. When you have an abundance of those prompts, you'll find it's never hard to, like, start writing again. Also, the trap that I make here is I always think that I'll remember, like, I'll be like, oh, this would be a great podcast. I got a good podcast idea and literally three minutes later I'm like, oh, what was that? And then I'll never think about it again. You massively overestimate your ability to remember that thing. You just won't unless you capture it. I heard recently Neil Gaiman, he's an author, he's like counter capture systems and like to understand his context. Like for authors, I suspect it's a little different than it is for people like you and I. But he says not to, not to. Basically not to make notes because you'll remember the most important things. And that's a valuable filter. I will say when I go back through my notes and my capture, like I, I delete half of them and a lot of them were like. And end up being superseded by something else. Or as I'm like, in a clear frame of mind, I'm like, eh, that's, that's just probably not interesting enough to merit my time. But there's a lot of really good things that I would still miss if I didn't capture them. So I lean super heavy on capturing stuff. Third tiparoo. Anytime you're writing, just plan on coming into it and writing a really, really bad version. That's just, that's where everything starts. Every copy you hear in a commercial, every book that you've ever read, like every meaningful thing that has been written, what you are reading is the 20th version of that thing. And the biggest mistake that we make is never getting the first version done because it's not good enough. But if you disassociate yourself from the notion that the first version is what is going to be published and you can give yourself permission to make a crappy first version, it makes it way easier just to start getting something onto a page. I would actually argue, and I could see counter arguments to this, but this is where voice memos and AI can be helpful to get you a first draft. And I will occasionally do this where I'm just like feeling spirited about a specific thing and I'll do a three minute voice memo and you know, have AI drafted into, you know, a 500 word blog post or something like that and then use that as a first draft. AI is definitely not good enough to ship that at the moment. But if I treat it as my first ugly draft, that's pretty helpful to me. Tip number four, give yourself a fixed amount of time to write the book. Atomic habits. One of the big things it talks about is just forcing yourself to start. Like, even if the Deal with yourself. Take something else that maybe we're less opinionated about. Let's say you're trying to learn piano and you make a deal with yourself. I'm going to practice piano five minutes a day. That's kind of dumb, right? Like, are you really going to get good at piano if you practice five minutes a day? The hard part is the starting. And you find that oftentimes you do it for longer once you're into it because you've started. And so if we can optimize our systems to acknowledge the fact that, like, the hardest thing is just to get into it, then it becomes much more likely that you'll actually do it. So make a deal with yourself to write, I don't know, 400 words a day. And once you're into the flow of writing, you find it comes much easier. But I find it helps to have that constraint on it because if you're like, I got to be out of here in 10 minutes, like, you could still do it. If you have a little more time, you may give yourself that time. Some people do this, like, time blocking to say that, like, you have to write for 20 minutes. Other people will do it by word count to say you have to write X number of words. Time might be better in the beginning once, like, the words aren't really flowing and you have no idea, like, how many words will actually get out. I don't know, maybe. Maybe adjust that for what you're blocked by. If you need to push yourself to write more bad words, which is a prerequisite to writing good words, then maybe do it on word count. Because if you're like, I just got to get to 400 words, then you're just going to let that. I mean, you're just going to throw it up all over the page, right? But if your issue is, I have to make time for it, then maybe time is the move. Last number five, don't talk yourself out of it. Like, this is kind of the thing that we all struggle with. You think about all the other things that you can do with that time. But, man, if we just think about our days and the things that we spend time on, I. I think. I think we went through this in yesterday's podcast. But if you think about your last work day, what you got done, what percentage of those things were ephemeral, and you will never, ever think about that thing again versus what things are. An investment in yourself and your ability to show up online to help people find you, to attract better clients. Like, writing. It is an upgrade to your brain that sort of supports all those other things. So like this is a video game where like you've got sort of these innate abilities like strength or something like that, and trickling down from that is how good are you with a sword and how much stuff you can carry and stuff like that, like writing, upgrading that brain like that is the kind of top hierarchy thing that supports everything else that you will do. In addition to having some real like mental health benefits, in my opinion, like to organize those thoughts and be able to approach your day in a more structured and clearly thought out way. For me at least it puts me in like a better, healthier frame of mind rather than kind of racing along with, with the day and whatever my mind is, is shouting at me. For two given professionals, the one who today is taking time to invest in the long term opportunities, they're the ones that went out in the end, right? And it's a very hard thing to do. I don't mean to diminish what a challenge it is to make time for the right things, you know, on the, on the kind of line graph of your life as if it is linear, it isn't. Or you know, it's not, not one dimensional. But the person who is making time for the things that they truly feel convicted are what will yield not just solving a client's problem today, but will yield long term benefits to you on your career trajectory, whether it continues in what you're doing today or not. The person investing in that, like if that is how you're spending your time every single day, obviously they are going to lead a more optimized life. Maybe that's financial, maybe that's enjoyment, maybe that's fulfillment, whatever that looks like for you. I mean your future self is literally a product of the things that you decide to do today. And so if you get to the end of the day and you solved everybody else's problems and you were the hero, where did that get you to? It's not to say that that's a bad thing to do and you learn and you develop skills by doing that for other folks as well. But if that's exclusively what you're doing rather than investing in yourself, then you already know the difference between those two future paths. Right? We just got to be realistic about how much self control that requires, how it requires a level of selfishness that sometimes can be hard to lean into. To say that like, no, I'm, I'm actually going to disappoint this other person and be selfish with my time to do this because it is what I need. Knowing that putting my own mask on first like that is ultimately what's going to be in service of the people around me longer term. If there's like a the proof is in the pudding sort of statement here it is that the people that we look up to, the thought leaders, have spent more time writing than you have. Like that's just like the most prolific people. Like they're tremendous writers. And if we aspire to have a more clear level of thought like that to be able to more clearly communicate our frameworks, we will not get there without writing. And it's not a sexy thing, but it is one of those really high leverage skills that will aid you not just today but but in anything that you do in the future. And those are the things that are worth investing in. Gang, thanks for coming and hanging today. I'll see you back here tomorrow. Right? Okay, see you there. Bye.