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Begin with the End in Mind · The Daily Writer

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, thanks so much for joining me for this episode today.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: A few days ago, one of my email subscribers named Christina sent in a question.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: She said this Dear Kent, I am dying to work at home and to do something related to writing, but when I think of what I could do, I hit a wall.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I know God can move mountains, and I also know that He is not going to drop the quote unquote fried pigeon into my mouth.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: So how does one pursue something like this?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: I know God wants me to write.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: The blessing and ethereal peace I have since I took my writing talent seriously is phenomenal.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I know this is from him, but how should I go on?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have any wisdom to share?
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Christina, thanks so much for your question.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And as you can imagine, I do indeed have some thoughts to share.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: And I do want to note that before I say all this, for everybody else who is listening, these thoughts are going to apply whether or not you are faith-based.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got to be honest here, I have always felt like I had a calling, or at the very least, a deep desire, to be a writer.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: But it took me a long time to build up to it.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I was a music pastor back in my 20s, which seems like a million years ago.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: And then in my 30s and well into my 40s, I was a college professor.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I stayed in that job of teaching until I was 46 years old.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: And at that age, I made the leap to being a full-time ghostwriter who also has developed other growing income streams in those years since I made that leap into full-time ghostwriting.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: So to answer your question, I really need to share a little bit about how I got into ghostwriting as the first place.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this will serve as a helpful case study into maybe how you can think about how you want to develop your career as well.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: So my goal was to make a full-time living as a writer, but I knew that it takes a long time to build up significant income from your own books, courses, products, et cetera.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I needed to focus on writing services first.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Now, at the time, this has been years ago, at the time I was feeling a lot of pressure to get out of my college teaching job because our school was declining pretty fast.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew that I didn't have a lot of times before things would eventually collapse and our school would close.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: That much was really obvious to me.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: So way back around 2015 or so, so this is going to be 11 years ago at this point, it was very, very clear to me that I needed to figure out what my plan B was going to be because our school was not going to stay open forever.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I knew I probably only had a few years at best before our school closed.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I knew I needed to really get busy figuring out what the heck I was going to do.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: So in the summer of 2019, so in the years between 2015 and 2019, I did kind of a variety of things.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I built up my client base of doing podcast show notes and writing articles and other kinds of things.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And by 2019, I knew for a fact that I really needed to start getting serious about building a full-time business, but I wasn't sure what that was going to look like.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And in the summer of 2019, I applied for a bunch of writing and education-related jobs, and I got none of them.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: I was honestly extremely frustrated and discouraged by the time the school year started in August in 2019.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of continuing on that course of just applying for more jobs, I decided to look at things the opposite way.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, this is how I function a lot of times is I try something that's not working, and or I try something I think is going to work, and after a while it doesn't work.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just decided to do the complete opposite.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And that's what I decided to do in August of 2019.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: So what I did was rather than asking myself, what kinds of writing-related jobs am I qualified for?
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: Instead, I asked myself this question: if I were going to create a full-time business as a writer, what are the absolute essentials that have to be in place?
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So it really boiled down to five things.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: After a long probably an hour or two of sitting and writing down a whole bunch of things that I thought were essential, I really boiled it down to five critical things.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Number one, I had to be able to work on my own time.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words, I didn't want to be constrained by somebody else's schedule.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, I wanted to have the freedom to work from anywhere.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: Number three, I wanted to be able to set my own income and continue growing it as my talent and sales skills and ability and connections continue to grow.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: Number four, I wanted to spend as much time as possible around financially successful people because I knew I would pick up habits and skills from them.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Number five, whatever career that I chose, it had to be focused on writing, which is my main marketable skill.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the only two writing careers that seemed to fit all of these criteria and also my own interest were copywriting and ghostwriting.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I had written a couple of books of my own by that time, so I figured I could do the same thing for other people.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: And also ghostwriting seemed to me to be much easier to explain to potential clients than copywriting was.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't really have a good handle on copywriting at that point, but I had written a couple of books, so I thought, well, I can do what I did for other people.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: And really, it just kind of seemed that simple to me.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, I tried to put into practice what Stephen Covey talks about in his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: He starts out with, begin with the end in mind.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I started with what I wanted my life and career to look like, and then I worked backwards from there.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: So as you think about what your career is going to be, I would encourage you to think about what things you want out of that career and the kind of life that you want to have.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are all kinds of ways to make money as a writer, and you can't do all of them.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it has to start with what you ultimately want out of the process.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, you have to do what Stephen Covey said and begin with the end in mind.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I would suggest: grab a legal pad and a pen and take some time to get clear on what you actually want out of your writing career and be as specific as you can.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: Because again, we can talk about lots of ways to make money as a writer, but you first have to understand the kind of life and the business that you want to build.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this exercise will really help.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: All right, my friends, that's all I've got for today, and I'll see you next time.