The Secret Formula, Writing, and "The Machine"

Hi, this is Steve Barnes talking to you. I'm sitting here in my house, and tomorrow we're going to be taking off our worldcon, and I promised everybody that I was going to have a present for you, that I was going to have a very special gift for you. So I'm just sitting here drinking a smoothie. Good. And getting ready to share with you a very specific formula. Actually, a couple of very specific formulas. I've talked about them before, but I'm going to talk about what. Where they came from and how they connect in a very, very specific way. So hang on to your hats and if possible, take notes because you're going to want to watch this multiple times and you're going to want to understand how to adapt this to your life. Everything that I'm saying here has to be adjusted to what your goals are and what your needs are. Make no mistake about that. But if you will apply them to your life, and we're going to very specifically discuss applying them to the writing life, the results are going to be miraculous. And the first thing we're going to talk about is the question of miracles. So let me take another sip, put the smoothie down, and then we're going to talk about something. Several years ago, due to a family emergency, we moved back to Atlanta for three years. And this was the kind of thing where you couldn't get around. It had to be done. But it, quite frankly caused me a lot of or I gave myself endless grief about it because it was a disruption of my life plan, the way I saw it. So I was putting a tremendous amount of work into trying to understand, well, how do I. How do I do this? The New York publishing industry seemed to be in chaos because of E Publishing, and I was separated from my Hollywood work, so I couldn't continue my career there. So I literally was having fear of how am I going to support myself? How am I literally going to make enough money to survive? So I was digging deeply into everything I could find on keeping my mood high and focusing myself and so forth and so on. And one of the books that I was reading during this process was a book called the Science of Getting Rich by a gentleman named Wallace D. Wattles. I believe that the book was written in about 1929. At any rate, I read this book, and then I read it again. And I realized to my shock, I could not remember a single thing in that book, not a single word. It scared me because I knew that either I had a tumor or there was something going on. There was Some deep emotional block. And that was the conclusion I came to, that there was something in that book that my unconsc. Not want to read. Now, the book the Science of Getting Rich was one of the source materials for the book the Secret and that entire movement, the Secret. And I felt there was something in this book that had been left out of the Secret. So digging more deeply into it, basically what I did was I would read one page at a time, and then I would synopsize that page in like, a couple of lines, and then I would read the next page. And luckily, because the book is only about 90 pages long, I could go through the whole. It only took me, you know, an hour, less than an hour to read it initially, but it took me a couple days to just go through it a page at a time. And I ended up with about five pages of notes. Then I would synopsize those notes, and then I would synopsize the synopsis of those notes until I boiled it down to just basically five words and some mathematical symbols. And what I boiled it down to was very interesting. I hope that you will think it's very interesting. And if you haven't been exposed to this before, I'm going to have a good question for you to ask yourself. And here was what I came up with. Goals times faith times action times gratitude equals results. This is what I got once I had boiled it down and boiled it down and boiled it down, and I looked at this and I realized with shock why I had not been able to remember anything about the book. Now, this is a question for you. What I'm going to ask you to do is to consider this question. Turn off the video, think about it for a minute, and then come back. Remember, goals times faith times action times gratitude equals results. And the question I have for you is, why do you think that it was times as a multiplicative symbol as opposed to an additive symbol? Why didn't I say plus? Why didn't I say goals plus faith plus action plus gratitude equals results? All right, if you need to. Actually, I recommend turn off the video for a second and then come back. So please do that. Okay. Hopefully you turned it off and you came back. If you didn't, you're going to miss something here. Now, what was the conclusion that you came to? I will tell you the answers that most pretty smart people have come up with over the years when I've asked them that question. And usually it's something effect that you need these things and that each of them adds upon the others. That they have an effect where if you have all of them, things get much, much, much better. Some answer such as that, and whereas that's a good answer, it's not the one that I came up with. And it doesn't explain why I had a hard time actually grasping what was in the book. And I ask you, I'm going to give you one more clue. What if each of these things, the clarity of your goals, the depth of your faith, the consistency of your action, and the magnitude of your gratitude equals results? What if you gave each of these a numerical value from 0 to 9? Do you now understand the significance of the multiplicative symbol? Well, the significance is this. What happens when you multiply by zero? Nothing. It zeros out the entire equation. You can add zero and it doesn't really change anything. But if you multiply by zero, everything else is dead. So what I was being told was unless I had clear goals, unless I had deep faith, unless I took consistent action, unless I took. Unless I had a deep well of gratitude, I was going to get no results. The specific result I wanted was, get me out of Atlanta. I want to be back in California. And what I was being told was unless I had gratitude to be there, I could not get out. That was shocking to me. It was a revelation to me, and it was the beginning of a fantastic change. Because every time I've used this formula, the results have been close to magical. In fact, it is the closest thing to magic I have ever encountered in my life. All right. One of the advantages, one of the things that I had to be grateful for in Atlanta was that my wife was working at Spelman College. And while she was there, she was pulled into many academic activities, including film festivals. The students, students were actually making films. And I was asked to be a judge of films at another college. And we both came to the conclusion that these films, some of them were very, very good, and they were made on very limited resources. And so we said, well, why can't we make our own film? And so we actually put together a script for a short story we'd written called Danger Word. And we decided to raise the money using social media. And through social Media, we raised 15, $16,000. And we were able to use this money to actually put together a film crew, hire real actors, go up into northern New York State and actually film our movie over two and a half days. When we got back, we had the footage, we had the sound, we had everything together, except we ran out of money for post production, and we tried to Access our social media again. And people were tapped out. There simply was no more money out there. And so we began to panic. Tananeri, myself, Lucina Fisher, our director, and her producer, we were all trying to brainstorm what were we going to do. And we basically, like I said, we were panicking because it looked like our entire dream was falling apart. So I decided that on our next conference call, I was going to apply this formula. I decided that my best job was to act as sort of a spiritual guide for the entire thing, to not only be producing it and writing it, but to help guide the emotions involved. So when we were on the phone, I asked Luchina and her director, her producer, Z, how much do we really need? And they said, well, we need $30,000. That's the budget. I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. How much cash do we need? And so we thought about it and said, well, you know, I said, because not cash to completion. Think about something. We raised most of this money without anything on vapor. Now we've actually got footage. There are completion funds out there. There are grants out there. What would it cost for us to cut together a trailer or a rough version of this so that people can see that we're serious and might give us completion funds? And so we thought about that, and it was something like, well, we could probably do that for another $10,000. Okay, now ask me this. Of that $10,000, how much do we need to actually come up with in cash? In other words, how many people might be willing to edit or provide production services, sound services, so forth and so on, color, balancing on credit or as an investment in the project or in exchange for their credit on the project? And as we talked to this, we realized, well, maybe we could do all of that for about $4,500. I said, how much money do we have in the bank right now? And that answer was something along the lines of about $2,000. And I said, wait a minute. You're telling me that all we need in order to cut something together, to be able to present it to the people who have the kinds of money that we're looking for to be able to complete this is about $2,500. And all of a sudden, the tension broke on the phone. I said, listen, we raised 15, $16,000 already. Is there anyone on this call that doesn't think we could raise another 2,500? And all of us, of course, believed we could do it. We'd raised five times that much almost. So it was now we were having a joy. We had a clear goal. What do we really need? We had faith that we can do it. And then we started coming up with action plans. Z was going to do this. As soon as we got off the phone, I was going to do this, Tanari was going to do this, and Lucina was going to do this. So we all knew exactly what we were going to do. We were laughing and having fun and talking. And then I said, look how far we've come. In other words, gratitude. Look at all we have accomplished, everything we've done so far with this family that we put together. And now we were just having a great time because we had absolute faith. We knew what we needed to do. Everybody knew what their role in it was going to be. And we were feeling wonderful. Now we hung up the phone. I'm going to ask you to guess what happened next. And you probably can. Within two hours after that conversation, we got a $5,000 donation. And not only that, but when we got in touch with the person who had given us that donation, she said that her mother was going to match it. All of a sudden, I saw that this plan works fabulously well. And this is what you need to make it work. You need to have clear goals. You need to know exactly what it is you need to accomplish, and you need to have a sense of what the end point. The end point of your goal needs to be something you can visualize. It's not make more money. It's make an additional $10,000 a year. Whatever it is, your goal needs to be quantified. You need to be able to see the end point of it. Graduate high school, get married, lose £50, whatever it is, be able to see yourself doing. What is the symbol of that? Because your brain works on solid things that you can see or sensorilize. Faith. You have to have belief that you can and should do this and that your efforts to do it will bring you more pleasure than pain. Faith is not necessarily religious faith. Spiritual faith. It is belief in things unseen. That means you have to believe that there's something deeper inside you that you've never tapped into, that you have allies that will help you, that you have resources that can come to you. You must believe that you can and should do it, or you will fight yourself. You'll have your brakes on the whole time if you think it's going to cause more pain than pleasure to accomplish something. Action. Let's say a good goal, a really good goal is something you can accomplish within two years if you look, two years out, where do you want to be in two years? Then you move back. Where do you want to be in a year? Where do you want to be in six months? Where do you want to be in three months? One month. One week. And then what do you need to do tomorrow to make it happen? Because one of the core principles in the book, the Science of Getting Rich is that you must do today what there is to be done today. And if you do every day the best that you can do that day, you don't have to sweat about what happened yesterday. You don't have to worry about what you're going to do tomorrow. Tomorrow will come. Yesterday is gone. Today is what you can handle. All you need to do to have a fabulous week is have seven great days. All you need to do to have a fabulous month is have four great weeks. All you need to do to have a fabulous year is have 12 great months. So all you need to do to have the best life you can imagine is every day you do what can be done that day and then chill. Rejoice. When you've done the things you can do that day, make sure to have fun. It was every day of your life. You should learn something, you should improve something and you should have fun. So actions you need to know what you need to do today and tomorrow in order to make your dream come true in two years, such that if, or three years, if you do this kind of excellent day every day for 1000 days, you will accomplish what it is you're trying to accomplish. You'll be there. If you can see that, then all you have to do is handle one day at a time and that will get your life done. And then the gratitude. Gratitude is the antidote for fear. It is the antidote for stress. Non clinical depression is basically fear and anger with nowhere to run and no one to fight. When you can see that you have so many things to be grateful for in life that makes the fear and the stress go away, the anger. You can see. I start literally every day of my life with a morning ritual where I'm doing Tai chi and I'm moving my body and at the same time I'm thinking, I am so grateful to have a strong, healthy body. I'm so grateful to have a strong, healthy mind. I'm so grateful for the people who love me and trust me. And I start with my son and my daughter and my beautiful, brilliant wife and cinematographer Tananarive do and my sister Joyce and all the people who love me and trust Me moving outwards from my family and my body and my healthy mind to the entire universe. And I go out and every single day I bask in that gratitude, bask in those positive emotions, because we all know that as days go by, stuff is going to happen, stuff is going to hit you. You're going to knock off balance as soon as you walk out of your house. It's like life collaborates against you to knock you out of balance. So you have to find your balance every day if you're going to have your dreams and if you will do these things. Clear goals, deep faith, constant action, and a well of gratitude, connecting yourself to whatever sense of the divine or what is more powerful than you just get that sense of it that will determine your results. Now this is where the rubber meets the road. We're going to apply this specifically to the question of writing, because I know that a lot of you are writers, but no matter what your goal is, once I've adapted this specifically to this, hopefully you'll be able to see how this works. And. And we're going to apply this to one concept that has two names. We call it the machine. You know, people who think like guys, your typical guy thinking might like machines, or the garden, which is in some ways a more feminine way of looking at the same question. But it's what is the thing that you have to maintain every day? Whether it is a matter of maintaining an engine, or it's a matter of pruning and nurturing a garden, Such that if you do these things every single day, in two years or a thousand days, three years, you will be where it is that you need to be. In the field of writing, your goals could be a number of different things. If you're unpublished, if you've never finished a story, your goal should be to finish a story. If you finish stories, your goal should be to publish a story. If you've published a story, your goal should be to publish maybe 10 stories. By the time you publish 10 stories, your goal should be to publish, to write, finish, and publish a novel. By the time you've done that, you might either think about just increasing the quality of your work or think about actually promoting yourself. Learning the game of promotion so you can make enough money to have the money coming in from your writing be a substantial proportion of your income or all of your income. If your goal is to be a professional writer, what I can tell you is that the qualities of being a writer and the qualities of making money from your writing are slightly different things. So you're going to have to talk to the people who actually do it and find out what they have to say about that process. But the thing that I'm calling the machine or the garden specifically for writing is a very specific tool. Okay? Now, this is designed for basically a thousand days or two to four years. A machine depends on you. How fast do you want it? The idea is that you need to write about 1,000 words a day. And in order to do that, you need to read 10,000 words a day. That your goal is to write a story a week or a story every other week. Now, we recommend short stories more than we recommend writing novels or even screenplays in some ways. Because what you want to do is you want to move the component skills of your writing from conceptual stuff to unconscious competence to the point where you just feel your way into the story. You can feel instinctively what a story is or is not. And because then you can go into flow state. Flow state could be. Or mastery can be defined as the ability to practice your skills under stress in flow. So you want to be able to just kind of have fun with it. What Ray Bradbury referred to as just sort of running barefoot through the grass on your first draft, just having a good time. And you want a goal of writing 100 stories. The reason that you set that goal is that you're going to get rejected, and you're going to get rejected a lot. And if you think that if you get rejection slips, it means that you cannot write, you will never get to the point of that unconscious competence where you've integrated everything properly so that you can actually flow in your work. And that is the point at which you're achieving art. Art being self expression, expression of the deep self within you. So you need to have a sense of who you are and what the world is and be able to express your ideas fluidly without thinking about it. And if you don't give yourself the room by the time you had 5, 6, 7, 10 rejections, you might say, gosh, I can't do this. But when I was getting rejected and I got rejected a lot, and one of Tananarif's teachers told her that a real writer papers their walls with rejection slips. That's how serious you have to be if you want to do this, I knew that I was getting frustrated. And so what I did was I said to myself, I'm going to write, finish, complete, and put into the mail 100 stories before I even ask myself the question, can I do this or can't I Do this. That giving myself a space of a hundred stories made all the difference. By the time I got to story about number 23, I was selling and I never looked back. I lost count now of what that is, what the numbers are anymore. But I needed the space of 100 stories. You understand that? So how long will it take you to get to 100 stories? Depends on you. Write a story a week, it'll take you two years. You write a story every other week, it'll take you four years. So the question is, how badly do you want it? They can be very short stories, they can be five pages, I don't care, three page stories. But stories that you can actually publish and get paid for because there is no compliment so sincere as a check that clears the bank. Some editor somewhere whose profession is running a magazine or a web magazine or whatever it is, they need to publish good stuff in order to keep their doors open. And they trust your work to help them do it. So this advice is a combination of advice from Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. Roughly, it's you write a story a week or a story every other week. You finish what you write. You do not edit, except to editorial request. You put your story in the mail and you keep it there until it sells and you move on to the next story. Which means if you want to spend eight months working on a story, that's fine. As long as you're finishing another story every week or every other week. You can have overlapping stories. You could be working on a novel at the same time. I don't care. But you get these smaller pieces and you finish them, you complete them. This stuff is critical. It is also no matter what you want to do, whether it's finding a mate, losing weight, earning a black belt, getting advancement at work, there is some way to break it down into a machine. The things you need to do every week, every day, such that if you did that for 1,000 days, you get where it is that you're going, you do it that way. And it's like the idea, how do you eat an elephant? One fork full at a time. Okay, so these ideas will work for you. They have worked for me fantastically. Worked for one way or the other, directly or indirectly, consciously, unconsciously. This is what successful people do. And I am just delighted to be able to offer this to you and just give this to you in this way because I think that it is important for us to have the best tools possible if we are going to build lives of meaning. So what I'd like you to do is I'd like to invite you to go to check out our other thoughts on this question of writing. This is a very, very brief clip of what we've got to offer you and if you will, go to lifewritingworkshop.com lifewritingworkshop.com we have wonderful things for you and we invite you to share in them. We invite you to participate in them. We invite you to become part of a community of of artists who are concerned with the world, concerned with their own dreams, and are using these tools in order to make their own dreams come true and make the world a better place. Lifewritingworkshop. Com I love you guys. Thank you very much for listening. I will see you later and I'm off to worldcon. Thanks for listening.