Accidental Genius

You Have Twenty Books in You

Whether you are planning a book, or are in the midst of writing one, I have some advice that could be a life saver. That is:

Don’t look at this current book as the only one you’ll ever write. If you do, it’ll mess with your head.

How so?

If you’re convinced this is your only book, you’ll stuff it with everything you know – and it’ll grow unwieldy. You’ll try making it perfect – and it’ll end up dull. You’ll want it to be a permanent monument to your very existence – and it’ll turn into an embarrassment.

Trust me, I’ve seen it happen. The harder a writer presses, the more their work suffers.

When I’m coaching a would-be book writer, I put things in perspective. I tell them: “You have twenty books in you. This is merely one of twenty. Treat it that way.”

If the book you’re working on is only a twentieth of your eventual output, that’ll change your approach. Your writing will become focused, your words will flow more easily, and most importantly you’ll be willing to take chances, because your entire life isn’t resting on this one throw of the dice. HiRes

Now, you can take my word that you have twenty books in you, or you could give yourself a dose of proof.

Suppose, for instance, you’re a strategy consultant. What books might you write?

You could write a general book on strategy, but you could also write a dozen separate books on strategy’s subcomponents, such as market selection and business unit strategy.

You could write books for different audiences, such as strategy creation for the CEO and strategy creation for a team.

You could write books on capturing different markets, like winning business in newly industrialized countries and winning business with members of Generation Z.

You could write books in different formats, such as a primer, a field guide, a workbook, a 30-day guide to building a strategy, a six-month diary on execution, a 365-day guide of strategy wisdom.

And those are just for starters.

Since we’re looking ahead, you’ll be learning methodologies that don’t exist yet, and you can write about those. You’ll be having experiences you haven’t had yet, and you can write about those.

What’s more, you can write books that are outside the realm of your current business, or that intersect with it indirectly.

If I gave you a couple of hours, your list likely wouldn’t be twenty books long. It would be double or even quadruple that number.

Of course, listing books and completing them are two wildly different matters. Still, taking a stab at this exercise will show that you have a lifetime’s worth of information and expertise to write about — and when you write one book, you build the capacity to write the next.

I have two questions for you, then:

  1. What are your twenty books?
  2. Which one will you work on today?

 

Come Attend the “Accidental Genius” Book Launch Party

On Wednesday, July 21st, the wonderful Lolly Daskal and I will be hosting a party in Manhattan to celebrate the release of the expanded edition of my book, “Accidental Genius.”

There, I’ll be signing books and talking about freewriting and creativity.

A bunch of cool people from the worlds of business, publishing, social media, and entertainment will be stopping by.

If you’re in the area, I’d love to meet you. It’s a meet up/tweet up type of thing. Informal, and should be lots of fun.

The details:

Date: Wednesday, 7/21/10

Time: 6 pm to 9 pm

Place: Lily’s Bar at the Hotel Roger Smith (501 Lexington Avenue, New York City, which is 47th Street and Lex.)

A cash bar will be available

Freewriting and "Accidental Genius"

Yesterday, straight from the bindery, I received a couple of hundred copies of my latest book: the revised and expanded second edition of “Accidental Genius: Using Writing to Generate Your Best Ideas, Insight, and Content.”

Here’s me opening a box. (My wife, by the way, hates that I take photos in our kitchen. I’ll remember next time.)

The book, which is published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers, hits bookstores over the course of the next two weeks.

Early readers enjoyed it.

David Meerman Scott said he devoured it “in one sitting, even though I had to pee really badly near the end.” He went on to say that he “couldn’t work without the ideas in this book.”

Michelle Davidson, the editor of RainToday.com, got caught up reading it, too. She told me she was on an airplane, and planned on watching her favorite show on the miniature TV embedded in the back of the seat in front of her. She started reading my book, though, became absorbed, and forgot to catch her program.

What’s the book about? It teaches readers a liberating, freestyle form of writing, called freewriting, that does two things for them:

1. It acts as a problem-solving tool, which helps them think through business problems.

2. It serves as a tool of thought leadership, which enables them to write one-of-a-kind books, posts, speeches, and anything else they need to stand out.

Here’s a piece of the introduction:

“Freewriting is one of the most valuable skills I know. It’s a way of using the body to get mechanical advantage over the mind, so the mind can better do its job.

“As expansive and impressive as the mind is, it’s also lazy. Left to its own devices, it recycles tired thoughts, takes rutted paths, and steers clear of unfamiliar and uncomfortable territory. You could say one of its primary jobs is to shut off, even when there’s important thinking to be done.

“Freewriting prevents that from happening. It pushes the brain to think longer, deeper, and more unconventionally than that it normally would. By giving yourself a handful of liberating freewriting rules to follow, your mind is backed into a corner and can’t help but come up with new thoughts. You could call freewriting a form of forced creativity.

“The technique will work for you even if you don’t consider yourself a gifted writer or thinker. The writing itself generates thought, which is why some refer to this technique as automatic writing. It often produces intriguing results without labored effort on the part of the writer. At times, the thoughts seem to pop up on their own.”

I’ll be writing about “Accidental Genius” and its techniques in many of the upcoming posts.

If you get a copy and try freewriting, please let me know how it works for you.

Strengthen Your Business Through Journaling

When I started doing positioning a decade ago, I didn’t have a defined methodology. I worked intuitively.

I’d hang out with a client, talk to their customers, study their marketing materials, and scan their field. A few weeks, and dozens of phone calls later, we’d have their marketplace position, competitive advantages, elevator speech, talking points, and case studies.

My informal approach worked well. The client got what they wanted, and I was able to conduct business in a way that felt natural.

One day a colleague asked me how I got my results, and I told him about my loose approach. A heavy-duty structure guy, he assured me that clients would be more at ease if they knew I had a codified process with predictable steps.

Since I was relatively new to consulting, I decided to take his advice. What I didn’t want to do, though, was create a process that was phony, mundane, or that got in my way.

That’s when I turned to my old freewriting files.

Freewriting is a way of thinking onto paper that helps you get to your best problem-solving ideas. Whenever I had a client positioning project, I’d open an empty document and would use freewriting to clarify my thoughts and create ideas. It was scratchpad thinking done for my eyes only.

Fortunately, I’d saved much of this exploratory freewriting. It sat in my computer throughout dozens of throwaway documents. I sifted through them.

Not only did I discover that I, indeed, had methods I’d called upon again and again and, therefore, had a kind of rough process; I also found I’d used tactics and had insights I’d completely forgotten about. For me, reading through my rough writing was revelatory. By studying it, I created a process and steps that were based on who I was and what I actually did.

What I stumbled on, you might want to do on purpose.

That is, keep a project journal that you can write in daily or at least a few times a week. The journal can be a physical book, or a file in your computer. Whatever format you choose, use it to talk to yourself about what’s happening in a particular project.

You can, for instance, write about a session you held, a question you were asked, a piece of advice you gave, a discovery you made, an insight your client had, a road block you experienced, a process you created, a list of things to stay away from, a list of things to do again, big successes, small successes, bits of dialogue, or an image that flashed into your mind.

The act of keeping a project journal can help you immediately, as you’re doing the writing. It can also help you long after the fact – as you review it days, months, or even years later.

Consider, too, asking a client to keep a project journal. Doing so will help them work out problems, remind them of strategies and ideas that they can use over and over, and get them focused on how things are changing due to the work you’re doing together.

Each week, you could schedule time to review their journal with them. They don’t have to read the actually writing, unless they’d like to. Instead, ask them to summarize interesting findings.

By the way, make no bones about asking them to look for changes and results in their writing. Say things like, “What problems have you had? What solutions have you tried? And what results have you seen?”

If you do this enough, people start focusing on results. They start looking for progress.

Without a results-oriented focus, some people forget how far they’ve come. When you point it out to them, or when they discover it for themselves, it inspires them to do more.

Make sure you point out all the ways they’re progressing personally, their company is progressing, and their own customers are progressing.

If you or your clients have kept a project journal, I’d love to hear about it. What insights did you gain? What snags did you encounter? What might we learn from your experience?

Uncovering Your Own Career Biases

One of the readers of the first edition of my book, “Accidental Genius,” is Allan Bacon. Allan told me the story of how he used exploratory writing to change the course of his life.

With a PhD in Physics, Allan was working as an R&D engineer for a defense contractor that built lasers which, in his words, “knocked things out of the sky.”

The contractor encouraged its employees to stay up to date on their learning and seek out advanced degrees.  Allan decided to go for an MBA — figuring it would help him become a better manager of people and projects.

As part of his MBA application, Allan had to write a personal essay. He’d never written much about himself, but tried freewriting as a means of thinking about the jobs he most enjoyed. When he looked over what he’d written, he saw a pattern he’d never noticed before.

All his favorite previous jobs – including the work he did as a volunteer and as a representative for his college at career fairs — in one way or another involved selling.

Allan hadn’t thought of himself as someone who liked to sell. He had spent his career to that point in an academic culture that looked down on salespeople. In fact, if you had approached him before he did the writing and suggested Sales as a career for him, he’d have been offended. Why go into sales when you have a PhD in Physics? He always considered the field beneath him; it was something you went into when you didn’t have other skills to fall back on.

The exploratory writing woke him up, and exposed a perceptual block that kept him from doing something he loved. As Allan says: “We tell ourselves emotional stories about who we are. I was telling myself one. Making that perceptual shift from engineer to sales professional is probably the biggest shift I ever had to make.”

Since then, Allan’s career has taken off.

He began working for high-tech start-ups as that rare sales expert with a PhD who knows how to speak to and persuade engineers. He’s also an author, and is working on a book on how to use experiments to create a more fully realized life. The working title is “Start Something You: How to Discover, Develop, and Fund Your Own Version of the Good Life (Without Quitting Your Job).” It’s due out in the next few months.

Allan’s choice has been happy and lucrative, and was triggered by writing. Perhaps you’d like to try a similar writing experiment?

For the next week, take twenty minutes a day to explore your work life through writing. For each session, set a timer, write quickly (as Ray Bradbury says, “In quickness there is truth”), and don’t stop for any reason whatsoever.

Write about every job you’ve had – even those you normally think of as inconsequential. Talk to yourself on paper, or through your computer keyboard, about who you worked with, the tasks you accomplished, the things you enjoyed, and the things you hated. In particular, jot down any stories or images that come to mind.

At the end of a week, read over all your writing. Do you see any patterns? Can you make anything connect? Have you had any insights that might suggest a new way forward?

Lean-in Moments

A few months ago, the publisher of my book, “Accidental Genius,” asked if I’d like to revise my ten-year-old work. I figured revising it would be easy. The book, after all, already existed. Reworking it would be like cheating off myself. I said sure.

They emailed me the original manuscript, and let me have at it. I opened the file, clicked out after three minutes, and didn’t open it again for weeks. Why? In scanning the text, some questions hit me:

What if my skills have deteriorated, and I was a better writer then than I am now? What if I’ve been fooling myself all these years, and the book wasn’t as good as I remembered? What if I couldn’t think up enough new material to warrant a revised edition? What if the book comes apart in my hands while I’m revising it, and I make it worse than when I began?

I didn’t have answers nor the mettle to return to the manuscript to hunt for them. Instead, I moved the project forward through the best way I knew how: through freewriting.

“Accidental Genius” is a book about freewriting so, as you can imagine, I’ll be writing about the technique at length in future posts. For now, though, I want to mention what my earliest freewriting sessions centered around: images of unusual client interest, concentration, and surprise.

What I call “lean-in moments.”

Through my writing, I tried conjuring up every scene I could think of where a client leaned forward in their chair, because what they heard me saying intrigued, startled, or delighted them.

  • What had I told them?
  • What had I asked them to do?
  • What insights did they have?
  • How did they build on what I said in a way that excited them?

You could say I was looking at my consulting past for moments of intense client reaction and emotion. I figured these moments might lead me to stories and ideas for the book. They did. In the forthcoming edition of “Accidental Genius” you’ll find these moments seeded throughout.

Thinking about your own lean-in moments is a great way to develop books, posts, talking points, speeches, products, and services for your business. The key?

Don’t think about your material first. Instead, think about your clients. See them in your mind’s eye. Hear their voices on the phone.

They experienced surprising moments that made them laugh, clap, or focus on what you were saying with an almost supernatural intensity.

What did you say? What did you do?

Start from there.

Is Your Brand Intentional or Unintentional?

In my last post, “Make Your Elevator Speech Distinctive,” I said I’ve become known as “the guy who helps his clients raise their fees by up to 2,000%.” That’s true. People refer to me as the 2,000% guy all the time.

It’s important to note, though, that my 2,000% “brand” or “promise” had to be invented. That is, I had to dig through my projects and study the facts, after which I discovered this result I’d been producing but hadn’t been advertising. If I hadn’t dug, the market wasn’t going to come up with that fee-raising benefit on its own.

You could call my 2,000% moniker a feat of intentional branding. I manufactured it, and pushed it out there through my materials, networking, workshops, and speeches.

At times, though, I’m not sure we have to work so hard coming up  with a brand. Sometimes a brand finds us. Call it unintentional branding. I have a story about that kind of branding, too.

I wrote the first edition of my problem-solving book, “Accidental Genius,” ten years ago. At the time, I was 37 years old, and let me tell you: For the first 37 years of my life, no one ever called me a genius. Not once. Enthusiastic, yes. Creative, yes. Funny, yes. A genius? No.

When “Accidental Genius” was released, that changed. Suddenly, people were calling me a genius right and left. Since the book came out, I must have been called by that name five hundred times.

Understand, I’m not knocking it. Every time I’m called a genius, I’m grateful. But here’s the thing: In the ten years since that book came out, I’m no smarter than I was the previous 37. If anything, I’m not as bright as I once was.

The word, though, became associated with me through repetition. 25,000 copies of my book were sold with my name and the word genius on the cover. I gave speeches where I talked about ways of accessing your genius. I did dozens of interviews where I talked about how people could have “a genius moment.” The association was unintentional, but it stuck.

My questions to you, then are these:

  • What happy branding accidents have happened in your career?
  • How have you been tagged by your audience in ways you didn’t expect?
  • Is there a brand growing around you that you’ve been ignoring or resisting?

Telling the Same Story Differently

A few years ago, Matt Madden wrote and illustrated a book of cartoons called, “99 Ways to Tell a Story.” In it, he tells a single story 99 times – in 99 different ways.

The single story is itself uneventful. A man, working on his laptop, gets up and heads towards the kitchen. A voice at the top of the stairs calls out, “What time is it?” The man glances at his wristwatch and says “It’s 1:15.” He opens the refrigerator and scowls, because he’s forgotten what he was looking for. End of story.

Madden first tells it as a monologue. He then tells it from the man’s point of view. He also tells it as a how-to, a flashback, a comedy, a calligram, a public service announcement, a political cartoon, in silhouette, in close-ups, from the refrigerator’s point of view, as if it were overheard in a bar, and as a homage to Marvel illustrator Jack Kirby, among other inventive ways.

Any story can be told from dozens of angles, in countless styles. Each angle and style reveals something previously hidden. It’s an important principle to remember, and doesn’t only apply to cartoons or even fiction. The idea of differing angles and styles is something to think about for your business communications.

Two weeks ago, Kristen Frantz from Berrett-Koehler Publishers asked me to make a video about the forthcoming edition of my book, “Accidental Genius.” The reason: Berrett-Koehler uses a prominent outside sales rep group, Ingram Publisher Services, to sell its books to bookstores, and Kristen thought it would be good if at sales conference the group saw how committed to selling the book I am.

I never before made a video. The result was too long, even though I had left out some important information. I’d have to reshoot it. The thing puzzling me, though, was this:

How could I make a shorter video while giving my audience more information?

Kristen and I came up with a simple strategy. I divided all my information into talking points. Some of those talking points seemed like they should come from my mouth: the book’s main idea, the philosophy behind it, the story of my eighteen years as a bookseller and my understanding of what a crucial job the sales rep has in the selling of a book. Those I filmed, and are in the video below.

Other points, like who’s in my network and how I plan on supporting the book, were important, but didn’t seem like they needed to come directly from me. Kristen, we decided, would talk about those points live at the conference.

Our solution wasn’t a complicated one, but it did the trick. We took a video with too much information, and made it more palatable by breaking its points into recorded and live moments. An optical illusion of sorts.

Take a look. Perhaps my video or performance skills aren’t what they should be yet, but the idea is still valid: Don’t think you’re stuck with one or two ways of delivering information to your audience. Try a different angle. Graft together uncommon styles. You may be surprised at the result.

By the way, near the end of the video you’ll hear me say, “I told you I’m a magician,” and then I perform a small trick. Unfortunately, I had edited out an earlier part of the video where I discussed my background as a magician and professional illusion inventor. Kristen told me not to sweat it. She’d add that to her talking points during the live session.

Writing and the Functional Hero

In the book, “Which Lie Did I Tell?,” William Goldman writes about his younger days as an awful writer. He was so bad, in fact, that in college he was one of three editors of the school literary magazine, and even then he couldn’t get a single story into his own magazine.

Things changed when he read a short story collection by “Rich Man, Poor Man” author, Irwin Shaw. Goldman thought Shaw’s tales were among the best he’d ever read. More importantly, they were told with such ease that Goldman said to himself: “I could do that.”

Shaw’s writing helped make Goldman into a professional writer. Years later, Goldman would write the novels and screenplays for “The Princess Bride,” “Marathon Man,” and “Magic,” as well as the screenplays for “Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men.”

Heroes come in different styles. We have heroes who do near-impossible things, like win a batting title, forge a peace agreement, or walk on the moon.

Then we have another type of hero: one whose works seem wondrous but doable. They give us a model to follow. Call them functional heroes. Irwin Shaw provided a functional hero for William Goldman.

When I have to write something ambitious, I often call on one of my functional heroes for assistance. I read their work over and over, so I can dope out their methodologies and pick up their cadences.

For the first edition of “Accidental Genius,” my hero and role-model was Nicholson Baker. In particular, I idolized the self-conscious, self-deprecating honesty he showed in his book about John Updike, “U & I,” and tried to introduce that into my work. For the second edition of “Accidental Genius,” I called upon the aforementioned Goldman to serve as my muse. His long chatty sentences and focus on story inspired me to loosen up as I told my tales about liberating the mind through freestyle writing.

The funny thing about my use of Baker and Goldman as guides? Neither edition of “Accidental Genius” sounds anything like the work of those two gentlemen. It was enough for me, though, to hear them as I wrote.

How about you? Who are some of your functional heroes? Who are your muses?