My newest book, Simple Self Defense: Empower Yourself with Proven Techniques, Strategies and Skills (Wish Pulishing) is on sale now! Click the title for the Amazon.com page.
I’m proud of this book because it’s as much about how to think about self defense as it is about the actual techniques of self defense. If you’ve read my work, you know I’m all about dealing with real risks and not what is sensationalized on the television news or by well intentioned but misguided fear-mongers.
Enjoy!
You may think I mean hiring someone overseas to handle your customer service. I don’t. While I have used virtual assistants in the past, most of the work I do these days doesn’t lend itself to that approach. Pitching an editor, writing a novel, posting regularly on my blog – none of this is something someone else can do for me. I’m guessing it’s pretty much the same in your life.
Still, that doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. And I’m not talking about the obvious stuff, like having a web guru deal with website issues, because you don’t need me to tell you that you can hire someone to put together your website for you.
I mean things like . . . having other people do their fair share of the work. I admit that this is a hard one for me, because I’m a control freak, so all anyone has to do is look at me with a somewhat helpless expression and say, “I’m not sure I know how to do this,” and I’m all, “FINE. I’ll do it.”
But no more, my friends. I have learned to say brightly, “Then you’ll get a chance to find out, which I know will be very helpful for you down the road.” Then I smile like mad, and go about my business.
How does this work in specifics? I get e-mails every week from writers who want to know how to break into the business. There is more information available to aspiring writers now than there has ever been, and yet instead of heading to the library or the bookstore or to one of any of four million websites or five trillion blogs (including this one), they e-mail me directly for advice.
“How to get published” is not something I can answer in an e-mail. I don’t even try anymore. Now I say, “Read a few books on the subject and let me know if you have a specific question about the way I do something.”
99% of the people wander away, because time spent reading a book is apparently more time than they’re willing to invest in themselves. They don’t mind me doing all the work, but they don’t want to do it themselves.
When that 1% does return, I am more inclined to help because they’ve shown they’re serious, and I will spend time helping serious people reach their dreams. In fact, I am committed to it.
I also do this in my personal life. My daughter is not a finicky eater but she likes to know what’s for dinner today, tomorrow, and next week. I’m the kind of person who figures out what’s for dinner by looking in the cupboards when my stomach starts to growl. This is not that satisfactory of an approach, because the cupboards can get pretty bare pretty fast, leaving me with a few things that do not go well together: graham crackers, eggs, and ketchup, for example.
Thus I recently put Jessica in charge of menu planning. Once a week, she figures out what she wants for meals, lists the ingredients we’ll need, writes one list for the stuff the Schwan’s guy delivers and another list for me to pick up at the grocery store and ta-da. Done. I spend about twelve minutes a week handling my share of this chore. To Jessica it’s not a chore at all, but an activity that she loves to do, leafing through cookbooks and the Schwan’s catalog, putting together all the information she has learned in health class on good nutrition . . . stuff that makes me want to weep. We’re both happy.
What is your favorite way of outsourcing the work in your life?
“True originality eschews its trappings.” That’s about the only thing Freud ever said that I agree with. Being a creative person — writing books, painting pictures, developing the theory of evolution — is incredibly time-consuming. It’s hard. It’s an awful lot of work. If you’re spending all of your time on appearances, on the trappings, you simply don’t have enough left over to do the work.
A few days ago, a writer I follow on Twitter sent out a link to a wonderful essay by Jennifer Crusie on protecting the work. I first read this essay several years ago, and it resonated with me because I have always been a firm believer in finding your Three Most Important Things, and doing those, and not really anything else. Jennifer Crusie has a similar approach to setting priorities and making sure she is working on them and not on things that don’t matter. So we will pause for a moment while you read the Other Jennifer.
Back so soon? Now I want to connect the idea of protecting your work with some information that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (of Flow fame) writes about in his book Creativity. This book is actually more useful than Flow for creative types who are interested in developing best practices for their work. Although it came out in 1996, every sentence in it is as relevant now as it was then.
For our purposes today, here’s the concept that most interests me: in interviewing creative types for the book, Mihaly (yes, I’m being overly familiar but I’m not typing that last name more than once) found that they had fairly conformist lives outside their work. Why? Because it’s simpler. And having a complicated life is the enemy of creative work. Now, neither Mihaly nor I contend that this is true of all creative people throughout history, but for a good portion of them, a key ingredient to their success is not having to pay much attention to life outside their work. Creative people, whatever their field, need a lot of unstructured time for staring out the window and coming up with the Unified Theory of Everything or at least this week’s plot twists. Time spent trying to figure out how to update WordPress is not conducive to this endeavor (as I can attest from personal experience).
Keeping life outside work simple doesn’t mean you should send your kids off to boarding school, nor does it mean you will never see Paris again. It simply means the more we can build habits into our lives, the more time we have for the creative work. Here’s the thing: every morning I get up, brush my teeth, take a shower, get dressed. Depending on my habits, this can take fifteen minutes or it can take two hours. It used to take two hours, because first there was the necessity for hitting the snooze alarm a time or ten (I am not a morning person), then of staggering out of bed and finding the coffee pot. Then trying to remember what I did with the toothbrush, and discovering I was out of toothpaste, so now what. Not to mention blow drying and styling the hair, putting on the makeup, picking out the right clothes, putting them back, picking out other right clothes, discovering the stain on the shirt that I meant to do something about but forgot — well, you can see why I had to get up at 5:45 to make it to work by 8:30.
When I realized how much time all this dithering took, and how much it ate into the little time I had for doing the work I wanted to do, I simplified it. I got up when the alarm went off, period (despite the fact that I am still not a morning person). I changed my wardrobe so that everything I owned went with everything else and everything fit. If you look in my closet now, you will see four pairs of shoes: loafers, boots, casual sandals, dressy sandals. That’s it. I spend no time in making decisions about my clothes at home; all of the decisions are made at the store before I buy a single thing.
I make these kinds of habits in all areas of my life. I put the keys and my wallet in a dish by the door every time I come into the house. That way I know where they are every time I leave, and I don’t have to spend time or energy thinking about it. Anything I have to take with me (a check to mail, a book to return to the library) goes by the wallet and keys so that they’re never forgotten. I do the laundry every Saturday morning and only every Saturday morning. It is washed, dried, and put away before my daughter and I go off on our Saturday afternoon adventure. I have the Schwan’s guy deliver most of my groceries (on Wednesdays). The things he can’t deliver I can pick up on my way home from dropping Jessica off at school. I do that on Tuesdays. The dishes are loaded into the dishwasher and the kitchen cleaned every evening after dinner, no matter what. I don’t own a television so I don’t have to try to make and enforce rules about when and where television shows can be watched. (I call that a nonhabit.)
This approach may sound overly rigid and too orderly for a free spirit like you, and that’s exactly what I thought before I started making these changes. The thing is, the management of our lives eats up a lot of time if we let it. If developing the habit of doing the laundry every Saturday and only every Saturday sounds like something only a drill sergeant could love, consider this: It’s not like there’s another way to get the laundry done that’s going to be more fulfilling. But not having a habit guarantees that laundry issues will become a lot more frustrating and time-consuming. For example, when you don’t do it regularly, you run out of clean underwear. If you don’t put it away routinely, you have to dig through piles of clean laundry in a basket to pull out the insanely wrinkled shirt you were planning to wear for that important presentation. And so on.
Developing these habits not only helps you free up time elsewhere in your schedule, it gives you ways to protect your time by shunting those habits into their specified zones. If you do the laundry on Saturday mornings, that means that Sunday through Friday mornings you are free to work on your book or your painting or your garden without thinking, Gee, I really need to get the laundry done. The habit ensures that you will get the chore done and that you don’t have to do it at any other time. Giving yourself the gift of mental space is just as important as giving yourself the gift of time.
Next time: Protecting the work by outsourcing.
An online writers’ group I belong to recently had a discussion about saying no — how to do it, how to mean it, how to deal with people who try to negotiate after you’ve already said no, and so on.
That got me thinking about the other side of the coin — when people say no to us, or at least say no to our queries and proposals and manuscripts. There’s a right way to deal with those, too, and keeping in mind the process that goes through your mind when you say no helps ease the sting.
For example, when someone asks me to help with a school fundraiser, I may very well see the value of it, but simply not have the time to participate. I have other priorities that take precedence. Turn this around: when someone says no to my idea, it’s not always because my idea sucks or because I do, but rather that the agent already has a house full of clients or the editor already has something similiar in the lineup. In other words, it isn’t about me personally.
When I say no to someone, I don’t want them to argue with me about it or find reasons to overcome my objections, unless I’m clearly inviting them to do so. “No, I can’t help at the fundraiser” is different from “I’d like to help at the fundraiser, but it’s being held on a day I’m out of town.” The first means I’m not able to help; the second means I may be willing to do something as long as you don’t expect me to show up on the day of the event.
In the same way, “No, I’m afraid I can’t take you on as a client” is different from “I really like this book idea, but I don’t think it can reach a big enough audience as you currently envision it.” Understanding how to differentiate between these kinds of responses is crucial for writers. One is an opportunity to show your creativity and ability to respond positively to criticism; the other is an opportunity to move along.
One of the most important things I learned to do as a writer was to make a plan before I ever started submitting a project. So if I was going to submit a manuscript to agents, I didn’t just pick the top three or four I really wanted to work with. I researched fifty or seventy-five, then sent letters to my top ten. As soon as I got a rejection from one, I sent the pitch to another (always pausing to ask myself if the pitch needed to be reworked).
The other thing I learned to do was detach from outcomes. All I could control was the writing and submitting part of the process. Once I had the submission plan in place for a particular project, I moved along to the next project. Moving along to the next project is the most important part of dealing with rejection. I know some people will say, “But you have to be committed to this project! You have to do everything you can for this project!” And while that’s true to some extent, the six months it takes between starting to pitch a project and finding a home for it cannot be solely devoted to that project, unless that project is your life goal. I don’t let any one project be my life goal. My life goal — to make my living as a writer until they pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands — requires that I move along until I find the project that hits the sweetspot: I love it, an editor loves it, and an audience loves it.
And sometimes it takes a lot of rejection to get there.
My friend Marilyn, at Simmer Till Done, told me a story from her culinary school days that has stuck with me for months. Her instructor used to say to those who didn’t work quickly and efficiently, “you scrape the bowl like a housewife.” That line made me laugh when I first heard it and it makes me chuckle every time I remember it. I like to cook and bake, at least sometimes (the impulse comes and goes) and I am the first to admit that I scrape the bowl like a housewife. That is, I take my time turning over the pages of the cookbook, trying to decide what to make, usually in intense consultation with my daughter. Then, we gather the ingredients, notice that we are out of baking powder, and wander over to the market, collecting some bagels and milk while we’re at it. When we get home, we remember that the big mixing bowl is full of apples and so we have to relocate the fruit. After that we may start measuring and chopping and stirring, possibly pausing in our labors to answer the phone or check online to find out how to substitute cocoa and vegetable oil for baking squares, which we forgot to get when we went to the market for the baking powder.
I love the Sunday afternoons when Jessica and I do this, and when I’m feeling particularly engaged in the process, I dream of shiny kitchen tools and gadgets that would make preparation easier, although I know all I really have to have is a good knife, a big bowl, and a couple of pans. Some years ago, I used to think about going to culinary school so that I could master the tricks of the trade. I would really like to make a better ganache than I know how. And I’d like my pie crusts to turn out right every time, or at least more often than they do.
But Marilyn has cured me of my culinary school daydream. Culinary school, she tells me, is like bootcamp, only more dangerous. The purpose is to turn talented individuals into chefs, into professionals, into people who can run restaurant kitchens. I only want to figure out how to avoid Jessica asking me, “Are meringues supposed to be flat as a pancake?” In other words, I’m a hobbyist who’d like to be a bit more accomplished than I am. I have absolutely no interest in becoming a professional. Running a restaurant kitchen bears only the most passing resemblance to my Sunday afternoons with Jessica, and that only because they share the common denominator of food.
I think of this a lot when I talk to writers who are trying to make the leap to being professionals. Being a professional is a world away from being a hobbyist and doing something just because you enjoy it. And there’s nothing wrong with preferring to keep your writing as a hobby and not trying to turn it into a paying proposition. And if you do — be prepared for the profession to have not a lot in common with the hobby.