One year ago I set a goal for myself: finally learn how to properly play the guitar by practicing every single day for a year.

Today I want to share what that process has taught me about what it takes to establish a creative habit, reach your goals, and share your work. The insights below be applied to any creative craft, including writing.

If you are like me, you may have found it difficult to establish a solid routine with your writing or creative work amidst an otherwise busy life. In March of 1991, my parents bought me my first guitar. For a quarter century I dabbled with it off and on. Sometimes I would learn a few of the basic chords, then I would take three years off, forgetting everything I learned. The guitar would sit for years in storage, only to be brought out again for a feeble attempt at learning it.

My days are spent with writers, helping them to put writing first, and then developing meaningful connections to their audience. This year of playing guitar every day has taught me a lot about how to ensure you can reach your creative goals.

Let’s dig in…

Step #1: Get Out of Your Own Way.

Working with writers and artists, I have seen the clever ways that we can distract ourselves from creating. Creative work can scare us, inviting in judgement and fear of who we are, what we are capable of, and how the world sees us.

So sometimes we avoid the real work — writing and sharing — with all kinds of smart-sounding excuses and activities.

For me with guitar, I had become a Jedi Master of sabotaging myself.

In college, I was in a band, where I mostly made strange noises on a keyboard, or would repeat the E and A chord on a guitar with lots of buzzing and mistakes.

My friends and I would practice twice a week, but most of that time was spent at local music stores checking if any interesting used gear came in. The ease and thrill of the hunt for gear was more enticing than trying to learn how to play.

I would get caught up in the planning and preparing to make music, fiddling with knobs and dials, all at the expense of craft.

Nowadays, these distractions are compounded by the web, where we can immerse ourselves in blogs, podcasts and videos that feel like we are learning.

For my goal of practicing guitar every day this past year, I needed to get out of my own way. So I told myself that I wasn’t allowed to buy new guitar gear until I have practiced every day for a year. That removed a lot of distraction, and allowed me to put my full focus on  the next step.

For your creative goals, I want to encourage you to remove your biggest distractions, even if you can justify that they somehow help. Often, we describe our barriers as outside of ourselves, yet the opposite is often true. Analyze what really keeps you from creating, then challenge yourself to rewrite the script.

Step #2: Practice.

To help me learn guitar, I have relied on some instructional videos  from four or five different teachers. Every time a guitar instructor talked about how they learned to play, I heard the same line again and again: “I would spend 10 hours a day practicing. For years.”

They would share stories of how they would struggle with an aspect of guitar, and the only way to solve it was hours and hours of rote practice. To me, this was terrifying because it was a reminder that the only thing standing between me and my guitar dreams was  practice.

There wasn’t a shortcut, a piece of gear, a hack, to what I wanted. That made me resign myself to focus on the basics: practice.

Step #3: Create Ridiculously Simple Rules to Succeed.

I created a simple rule to define my year of guitar playing: I must practice each and ever day for at least one minute.

That’s it.

The one minute rule was meant to make it ridiculously easy for me to find success. There isn’t a single day where I couldn’t justify picking up the guitar and strumming a G chord for 60 seconds. Some days, that is honestly all I did.

To make it easy, I placed a guitar within arms reach of two places I am very often:
1. In my home office
2. In my private studio

In fact, I own four “good” guitars, meaning there is never an excuse to not be near one. In the attic, I even have a few crappy guitars that I picked up at yard sales. The kind of guitar that I could take somewhere and lose it and never worry about it.

When I speak to writers who are able to write book after book, they tell me about all of the ways they surround themselves with tools to write: a laptop, an app on their phone, in a pocket notebook, dictation software, and the like.

No matter where they are or what they are doing, they make it possible to write because they make the creative process easy and accessible.

If you tell yourself that you can only create on a single computer, with Scrivener loaded, with access to all of your research and notes, when you are alone, at a time of day when you are inspired, and when nothing else is going wrong in your life, you are basically setting yourself up for failure. Because every star has to be aligned in order to write.

Instead: take control of your ability to create and identify small ways you can create wherever you are.

Step #4: Track Your Progress.

In the first weeks of practicing, I would see how many times I could move from one chord to another. What I found is that on the first day, I could switch from an A chord to a D chord 15 times in a minute.

A week later, if you asked me how I felt about my guitar playing, I would tell you that I was still horrible. But my feelings overshadowed my true progress. When I looked at the chart where I tracked progress, I was astounded: I could now play the same chord change 41 times in a single minute. For that one skill, I had improved nearly 300%!

That is the power of tracking things. Don’t just rely on your feelings to measure progress. I have spoken to writers who have published multiple books who still say, “I’m not a real author yet.”

For my “minimum of 1-minute per day” rule, this was my reality on many days:

It seems silly to see how little I practiced on some days. Yet, one thing I don’t feel is any shame that I haven’t practiced. When I look at this chart, what I know is that I showed up each and every day to this craft. While I may sometimes feel progress is slow, I am reminded every day that progress must be happening.

It took me eight months to feel, “OMG, I’m actually going to learn to play guitar!” That is 240 days in a row of practicing before I finally felt that.

Do you have to be obsessive about tracking? No. But I have found that helped me stay connected to my craft, even when I worried I wasn’t doing enough.

Step #5: Invest in Collaborators

After a year of playing every day, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I’m hitting a wall in my guitar practice routine. I have all of these disparate skills that haven’t allowed me to feel fluent in my playing.

I have plateaued because I’m falling into familiar routines with my playing, and I’m not sure how to break out of them.

I thought about buying new gear, but I realize that what I need is an expert to guide me and accountability to help me keep momentum.

So I am investing in a collaborator.

I hired a guitar teacher whose videos I have enjoyed on YouTube. He literally lives on the other side of the world from me in New Zealand, but once per week we have a live session together via video Skype.

What I’m realizing is this: access to information is not what is tripping me up. In fact, I’m drowning in information. YouTube is filled with tens of thousands of high quality instructional videos.

What I am missing is a guide: someone who can pull together my skills and give me a clear direction, and provide accountability.

That is the value of working with a collaborator or support group.

It’s funny, everything I’ve been experiencing above is also what I bake into my Creative Shift Mastermind. It’s a great reminder that making your writing a priority is really a process of: clarity, simple steps, accountability, mentorship, and a true creative community to help you get there

Thanks.

-Dan

A decade ago, I sat down on the floor of my old apartment and took out a stack of index cards. The floors were crooked, and whoever installed the carpet in the living room did it wrong — there was this harsh ridge running diagonally across the floor. There I sat, on one side of the carpet ridge, and on each index card I wrote down a goal for my life.

After I had around 10 cards, I organized them into a pyramid where the single biggest goal was at the top. Since that time, I have turned this process into an exercise I call “Clarity Cards,” and I often take writers through it in order to help them get radically clear about their priorities.

The other day, I found my original Clarity Cards. They included a mix of goals around health, time with family, and infusing my life with creativity. But one card jumped out at me:

At the time, my wife and I did not yet have kids. I was working a job at a large publishing company, commuting about an hour and a half each way to work.

With these index cards I was reassessing the distance between my daily reality and the life I hoped to lead.

The “stay at home dad” thing was my way of saying that I wanted to be present in the lives of my family once we had kids. To not always be on a train, or in an office 30 miles away from my wife and kids.

The second part of that card is what jumped out at me today: “Earn money from home.” And then the frantically written word: “How?!”

Since that time, I left my corporate job in publishing, and have run my own company for eight years. I work in a private studio less than a mile from my home, and spend loads of time with my family each day.

The question of “how?!” feels like a less frantic question nowadays, but still an important one I ask myself often. It’s astounding to look at this index card and consider the moment I wrote it, and then look at my life today which has answered that question, and lived up to the intention of that goal.

I’m thankful for this every moment of every day.

In my work with writers, we sometimes focus on similar questions. They want to define their own version of what success looks like, and how they can achieve it.

In my conversations with writers each day, they often come to me hoping to:

1. Create meaningful connection with readers
2. Find more time to write
3. Define their creative identity

These people are mapping out the distance between where they are and where they hope to be. Together, we navigate that path.

In doing so, a simple question of “How?!” is turned into a structured process. I have worked with hundreds of writers in this manner. The focus of much of this work in the past few years has been my Creative Shift Mastermind program. The feedback has been astounding:

“I am inspired by the amazing folks in this Mastermind. The adage that you become who you hang out with is true and I can become a better writer and creative person by spending time with this group. This Mastermind is far more than I imagined it could be.”
– Barbara Boyd

“I thought I’d signed up for the Mastermind to get my career back on track. Seems like we’ve delved into getting my whole life onto a better track.”
– Kimberli Bindschatel

“This Mastermind has given me a sense of direction with the business side of my writing that I’ve never had before.”
— Dawn Downey

 

“In the Mastermind I have gone through profound creative growth. I learned new things about myself, making experiential, intellectual and emotional connections that surprised me and enriched me. That’s the secret power that Dan’s Mastermind unleashes. He is a master weaver of collaboration. Magic occurs in the Mastermind.”
– Simon Maple

“Dan’s encouragement and insights helped me to change my approach to connecting with my readers and my community. He helped me stay true to my values and my self.”
— KJ Dell’Antonia
 
 
“I started the Mastermind because I was stuck. I thought about writing all the time–but I didn’t actually write. Dan and the Mastermind of creatives helped me get out of this tremendous slump and into the most productive creative period I’ve ever experienced. I’m writing, I’m submitting, I’m confident. The Mastermind is a priceless experience.”
– Rachel Barry

When I see the faces above, I think of the months we spent working together in collaboration. There is a richness to that experience, especially when it is focused on such wonderful creative goals.

For your own creative process, consider how a simple question can lead you creating work that matters to you and those you hope to reach.

Thanks!
-Dan

My days are spent talking to writers, and delving into the reality of what truly works in ensuring they:

• Find more time to write and create.
• Define their creative identity.
• Forge a meaningful connection with readers.

In those conversations, I hear a lot about what trips up writers in the process. They struggle alone, without any colleagues or support system. They bounce between different creative ideas, unsure which to focus on. They get stuck on the hamster wheel of social media trends to try to reach their audience. They wallow in impostors syndrome, unsure if their work is good enough. They feel overwhelmed by all they are told they have to do, and frustrated that nothing they try seems to work.

The challenges that many writers face is that they are drowning in too much information, presented to them in an endless series of emails, courses, webinars, Facebook Groups, podcasts, blog posts, and conferences. They get distracted by the wrong milestones, leaving them feeling bad that they don’t have “enough” followers on social media.

Writers who struggle spend a lot of time studying what works for others, instead of honing what works for themselves. They forgo actually writing and creating because they are busy looking for “best practices” and shortcuts.

In the process, they hide their work from the world, because they are waiting for someone else (an agent or publisher), or some milestone (a book launch), to magically do that work for them.

The reality? Successful authors are their own best advocates.

What Does Work

So what does work? What is missing in everything I listed above? How does someone find more time to write, feel clarity in their creative identity, and reach the their audience? In all of my years of working with thousands of writers, these are what I have found these to be essential ingredients:

• Don’t go it alone. Develop colleagues and professional collaborators that provide accountability and true guidance.
• Connect with one reader at a time instead of trying to game the system for followers. Focus on true connections with real people.
• Hone your creative process, and in doing so, develop a support system around your creative work.
• Experiment with ideas that feel authentic to you instead of copying best practices that thousands of others are also copying.

For years, I taught self-paced courses to try to help writers do these things. But I noticed something: people signed up for courses, but didn’t finish them. I’ve heard that from many others who teach online courses as well, the would report that a small fraction of students made it to the end of their courses.

I’ve had writers tell me that they signed up for a $2,000 course because they didn’t want to miss out. Yet months later, they had yet to find even a moment to open the course. They hoped to get to it at some later date, when their life magically had more free time.

I talk to writers all the time who hop from course to course, yet never seem satisfied — they are always searching.

Focus on Skills Not Just Information

I want to encourage you to develop your skills and your support system, don’t just collect information.

I have this quote on my wall from Fred Rogers:

“I am much more concerned that our society is interested in information, instead of wonder.”

I feel like it applies here as well. If you are only focused on information, you are missing out on the fulfilling experience of what it means to be a writer:

1. To feel comfortable with your own clarity and creative process.
2. That you have colleagues and a support system of others.
3. You have a meaningful connection with real people who like your work.

In the past three years, I have been honing the system that I feel provides this. It’s a three month program called The Creative Shift Mastermind.

Here, I provide personalized guidance, welcome you into a small group of writers and creators who become your support system, and we all work together towards your creative goals.

We dig into how to find more time to write and create, define your creative identity, and forge meaningful connections with your audience.

The bottom line of what it provides:

• It runs from January 1 – March 31, 2019
• Join a small group of 9 other writers & creators who will become your creative community.
• I show up in this group every single day. You get tons of access to me for feedback, brainstorming, and guidance.
• We schedule two one-on-one phone calls with me.
• Receive a free package in the mail that includes 15+ worksheets and guides, a copy of my book, Be the Gateway, and more.
• This is a virtual group, you don’t have to show up anywhere at any specific day or time.
• Price $297 per month, with a three month commitment.

You can find full information on The Creative Shift Mastermind and register here.

If that doesn’t work for you for any reason, then I encourage you to do this: find a collaborator in your creative work. Someone who will become your accountability partner and the start of a support system. Become a student of your own creative process. Learn what works best for you, and where you can find margin in your life to create more. Reach out to actual readers and writers to learn what engages real human beings about the types of work you create. Don’t just rely on marketing trends. Find a mentor who you trust to help guide you in the areas where you are unsure of how to proceed.

Are these steps easy to do on your own? Not always. Which is why I created the Mastermind, a support system that helps you truly succeed with your writing and creative vision.

Thank you.
-Dan