All Writers Need Motivation

All writers need motivation to start and finish the book hidden within them.

In this excerpt* from Stephen A. Schwarzman’s book, What It Takes: Lessons on the Pursuit of Excellence, replace entrepreneur with writer and you’ll grasp the significance of his motivation.

While building the world’s largest alternative asset management firm (i.e., Blackstone, $1.2 trillion of assets under management), Stephen Schwarzman learned many things, but the most important came from the inflection points.

If Schwarzman’s topic was on writing instead of finance, think about how his words could inspire you to write a book readers will love.

The Motivation Writers Need Now

My posts have mostly focused on turning writing tips into prompt-based worksheets.

• That worked then, and the Trellis Method still works now.
• What’s different today is Artificial Intelligence summarizes a search engine’s answers to basic writing questions, and the content is only as accurate as the source. Caution: AI hallucinates, making up answer to fit the questions.
• However, AI does not nuance adequately the separation between actionable tips (wisdom) from common definitions (knowledge), and that’s the core difference between bestselling authors and debut writers.

That, my writing friend, is why all writers need the motivation to dig deep, going beyond mere knowledge and adopting actionable wisdom.

The Motivation to Dig Deep

The stick-to-it motivation that keeps you writing is the one thing you can use again and again to succeed.

When we lack the motivation to accomplish something, we stagnate. It’s not that we don’t recognize the importance of a task or goal, but as humans, we too often behave like water. Our behaviors flow along the channel of least resistance, forming a stagnate pool of useless activity.

That easy-street attitude wastes time and energy, increasing self-doubt and stealing away motivation.

Turn Inspiration into Motivation

I learned motivation centers on the wants and needs of the individual.

Hidden within the pages of books, you can find such motivation. Sometimes that inspiration comes like lightning. However, most of the time, it’s like milling flour to make pancakes. After grinding away, the effort produces the chief ingredient, offering the opportunity to achieve the goal—melt-in-your-mouth pancakes!

I’ll share a page from my corporate career to illustrate how motivation can shape your life and those around you.

Turn Inspiration into Motivation 

Years ago, I accepted a career opportunity to coordinate a team with the goal of saving the company millions of dollars.

• Scary? Oh, yeah!
• Impossible? Seemed that way.
• High stakes? The software conversion could cripple the company’s billing system, risking over a billion in annual revenue.

Clearly, I needed motivation, not just for me, but for all team members. The initial inspiration and ultimate motivation came from a single book*. Perhaps you’ve read Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t.

Please keep in mind today’s post is about motivation, and Collins’ 300-page book covered a lot of ground, so I had to mine for the nuggets of gold that would motivate me and the team.

The same goes for today’s writer. For example:

• Find your inspiration.
• Distill what motivates you.
• Then, turn the motivation into a plan (i.e., your writing system).

For the project team, I put together a 9-page presentation deck (download here).

Identify Your Motivation

Within the presentation deck, one page stood out.

As we sat for hours in our War Room, brainstorming how to solve the stickiest (and stinkiest) problem any of us had come across, page 4 of the presentation deck became the team’s inspiration.

• One person joked the challenge was like nailing jello to a tree.
• We laughed when another said, “No problem. We’ll freeze dry it and nail away.”
• We had our lightbulb moment.

Here’s my hand-drawn copy of the whiteboard that turned the Good to Great inspiration into actionable motivation.

The key to solving the problem was getting the right team members into the right seats (i.e., roles) on the project bus and then driving diligently toward our goal.

After a year of non-stop work, the team successfully converted the system and they enjoyed not only the satisfaction of pulling off what seemed impossible, but also the steps up in their careers.

Note: Just as the Trellis Method gives writers opportunities to declare a GO/NO GO choice before writing their novels, the project team’s reporting mechanism safeguarded the billion-plus in annual revenue by helping us make a decision whether to do the software conversion.

You’ve Got This!

No matter where you are on your writing journey, I want to encourage you to identify your motivation.

Search for the right book for you. Explore and you’ll discover an author has already written a book that speaks to your heart. It doesn’t matter whether it’s brand new, a classic, or fiction. What matters most is you finding the book that voices what you need to hear, and so you can then distill the essence into your motivation.

Above all, don’t let anyone tell you can’t turn the impossible into possible.

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