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Practicing Creativity Every Day with Todd Henry · The Daily Writer

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to the Daily Rider Podcast, where we bring you tips and inspiration each day to help you build habits for writing success.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: For more resources, including your free Daily Rider Starter Kit, visit DailyRiderLife.com.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: If you've been listening to the Daily Rider Podcast even for a little while, you've probably noticed that we place a pretty high value on habits around here.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just about the result of what you're writing, it's about the process of doing the regular daily work that gets you there.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I'm thrilled to interview one of my creative heroes on this episode.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_01: His name is Todd Henry, and he describes himself as an arms dealer for the creative revolution, which I love.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_01: Todd teaches leaders and organizations how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he's the author of five books, which include The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, Louder Than Words, Hurting Tigers, and The Motivation Code.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_01: And those books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: In addition, Todd is the host of the Accidental Creative Podcast as well as the Daily Creative Podcast.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Now, today we're here to talk about his brand new book, which just released a few days ago.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's called Daily Creative, and it's a year's worth of short daily entries about doing your best creative work.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I have followed Todd's work for a long time, and in fact, his Accidental Creative Podcast was one of the very first podcasts that I listened to many years ago, even before iPhones came out, if you can believe that.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: So it was a real honor to get to speak with him on this episode.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Todd shares why daily practices are so important, how he used his daily writing time to write a draft of this book in just three months, which is really amazing.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: And he also shares the specific morning routine that he has followed for many years.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And we hit on a lot of other related topics as well.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Todd is one of those guys that you can just talk to for hours because he is such a well of wisdom.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And everything he says is based on his own experience and practice of being an author, a podcaster, and this brilliant creative for so many years.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: So this was an absolute blast, and I hope that you get as much value out of this episode as I had doing this interview.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: So here's my conversation with the amazing and brilliant Mr.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: Todd Henry.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Todd, it is so fun to have you here on the Daily Writer Podcast.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: I've been following your stuff for a very long time.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's an honor to chat with you.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for making time to do this interview.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Ken, it's so good to be here with you.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for the invite.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: So you were one of the very first podcasters that I started listening to.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you have been doing your accidental creative show since 2005.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Is that correct?
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: That is correct.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: So it was, you know, back then, what's really funny about that is that I thought I was late to the game in 2005.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I thought, oh no, maybe, maybe, maybe I shouldn't even do this because you know I'm I'm just gonna be another person piling on to this podcasting space.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I started it kind of as a a side project.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was leading a team of creative pros and I wanted to teach a little bit about some of the things I was learning about building practices and ways that our team was structuring itself to be effective under pressure.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And I started this podcast called The Accidental Creative, which is about how to build creative accidents into your life, these moments of serendipity.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I put it out and I kind of forgot about it, honestly.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, there was no website, there was no business, there was nothing.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was just basically me talking about creativity.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: And about a month later, I go back and I'm looking for podcasts to listen to.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: And there's one called The Accidental Creative, that's one of the top podcasts on iTunes.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, honestly, at that time, I thought, oh no, I stole someone else's idea.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can't believe I didn't check first to make sure I didn't steal someone else's name, right?
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it was my podcast that was one of the top podcasts on iTunes.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I realized in that moment I had really stepped into an area that people were craving, you know, information and conversation about, which is how do we create under pressure every day?
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I started getting a little bit more formal in terms of how I was organizing the podcast and the website and all of that.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_00: And uh then a couple of years later, stepped out into my own business because I was getting invitations to go and speak and train and all these things, and everything just kind of took off from there.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: The first book came out in 2011, and now I'm on my sixth book.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's kind of been an interesting ride for sure.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what we're here to talk about, of course, is your new book, Daily Creator, which I'm really, really absolutely thrilled that's coming out.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: And it's so funny because, and I didn't tell you this when we kind of connected about this interview.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: So I actually have a book coming out in January called The Daily Writer, which is the same format as yours.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh which is actually the same format as Ryan Holiday's Daily Stoic and other similar books.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it it honestly, it really uh sort of validated to me this concept of well, gosh, if Todd Henry and Ryan Holiday are doing these kinds of books, it's like a daily meditations format.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, there really must be something to this.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I am super thrilled to put your book there alongside the Daily Stoic and Robert Green's The Daily Laws as these sort of daily meditation books that I'm going to be able to go through every day for inspiration and knowledge.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I'm super excited about this book.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, there's something very powerful about digestible daily applicable wisdom, you know, and I think that we crave that.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I the analogy I keep using is um, you know, if somebody is drowning and you're standing on a boat, you don't throw them a manual for how to swim, right?
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's not the time to give them swimming lessons.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: What you do is you, you know, jump in and you save them and you pull them into the boat.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you know, I feel like a lot of us right now, coming out of the pandemic and dealing with some of the stuff we've been dealing with for the last couple of years, people feel like they're drowning in uncertainty.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: You know, where's the world going?
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_00: Where's my work going?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: I think people ask a lot of questions that maybe they hadn't asked in a while.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so they might feel like they're maybe up to their neck at this point.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_00: And the last thing I want to do is say, hey, here, read my 300-page book, Herding Tigers.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: That'll answer your question.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, so I wanted to write a book that felt very practical and useful and uh would take maybe a minute or two a day to go through, but it gave some really meaningful prompts.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's really a distillation of all of my other books, um, some of the core concepts, and just really puts them into daily digestible bite-sized chunks for people that they could easily access and then apply to their life, because you know, inspiration without application has a shelf life.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's okay, it's fine, but it doesn't really last if you don't put it into practice.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so really wanted to write an essay each day that would challenge people, but then a an action step that they could take to apply that what they learned that day.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So, because this is a writing podcast, uh, our listeners, and including myself, of course, were always interested in people's processes and how they actually crafted their books or their content, particularly a book like this that's a longer book, but of course it's made up of short daily segments.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Can you walk us through how you actually wrote this book?
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, did you do one a day for a whole year?
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: Did you take a few months and just knock it out?
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: How did this actually happen?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this book is the manuscript itself, and we'll get really technical if you want, because you know, again, this is my sixth book.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I've written, yeah.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very familiar with the manuscript process and the drafting process and the editing process.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so this book is about a third longer than any of my books, and I wrote it in about a third of the time that I've ever written a book.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I wrote this book over the course of about three months during the pandemic.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: I wrote it in May, June, and July of last year, and then spent a little bit of August um writing, but mostly editing.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then I think I had to turn it in in September, um, which was about a year before the release.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um so my, I mean, basically the way I normally approach my books, because I normally take about a year to write a book, and I normally have about a year contractually to write a book.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and what I'll typically do is I'll figure out my target word count and I'll sit down and I'll figure out how many words a day I need to write in order to hit my target word count by a certain day.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And usually it breaks out to about 500 words a day, is what I'll write five days a week.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: So 2,500 words a week.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_00: And then um I'll go back and I'll revise and I'll edit and I use Scrivener to write, and um, which is great because I like to write books from the inside out.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: I don't write them sequentially.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: I don't start at the beginning and write all the way through.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'll typically write, you know, chapter six.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna write a section of chapter six today, and then tomorrow I'll bounce into chapter nine.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but Scrivener allows me to do that because it's all text file based.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: And um, but yet it still keeps track of word count, which is great.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: So typically what I'll do is write about 500 words a day.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, for this book, it was a very different thing because it wasn't about word count, it was about the number of entries.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: I had to write 366 entries.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, what it really amounted to was I needed to write about, I think it was five point six entries per day, every day Monday through Saturday, over the course of three months in order to write 366 entries.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's what I did.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, I would sit down and write five entries a day, um, every day, you know, six days a week for three months.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's basically what I did.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if the math works out exactly right, but that's that's something similar to what I did.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, knowing that, you know, I'm gonna have some time on vacation, I'm gonna have some other time that I need to take off.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, I sat down and figured out here's exactly what I need to do in order to hit my my um deadline.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I am a stickler about deadlines when it comes to writing.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I tell every editor I work with, you give me a target, you give me a deadline, I will hit your deadline like a hundred percent.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I I may come screeching across the finish line at 4:59 p.m., you know, Eastern on the deadline, the day of the deadline, but it will be turned in on the day of the deadline because I just I think that's you know, we need to have some structure and predictability in order to work with one another.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so yeah, so in order to hit that deadline, it was a Herculean feat.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I did actually write on vacation.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I told my family ahead of time, listen, I know we're gonna go on vacation.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: We went to uh Northern California for vacation.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: Like, listen, I'm gonna have to take like an hour every morning because I'm working on this book.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's got I've got to get it done.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Like it, you know, I'm under deadline.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there were some days I took off for other reasons, you know, for other things we were doing.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but yeah, so I I'm I'm a firm believer in Stephen Pressfield's philosophy and mindset of, you know, you you show up with your lunch pail, you put on your hard hat, and you sit down and you do the work and you don't always feel like it, and you crank through it.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: And some days are great and some days aren't, but that's what editing is for in the end.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And you typically find inspiration in the midst of your work, not before you work.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: You work and then you find your inspiration in the midst of doing the work.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm a I'm a huge believer in that.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: So when you were crafting this book, and particularly with the first draft, did you outline the topics for all the days, or how did you go about that?
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_01: Was it just kind of day-to-day?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: Here's what I'm thinking, feeling today, or did you have the whole thing kind of outlined and then you are filling in the cracks?
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: What was your approach to that?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: So um, there are a couple of things that were to my advantage in writing this.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, I was basically distilling what I've been writing about for a couple of decades now.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the, you know, the good news was I didn't need to come up with a brand new structure.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't need to come up with a brand new content.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I came up with different ways of talking about that content for sure, but it wasn't like I had to come up with you know brand new insights on creativity or leadership.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know, a lot of this stuff is what I've been teaching for a very long time.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's just distilled into new ways of presenting it.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that was helpful.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, no, what I did actually is uh on Sunday evening, once a week, I would sit down and I knew I had to come up with 25 topics for the week.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I would plan out those topics, five topics a day that I was gonna write about five essays a day.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: And the essays were around 250 words each.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Five essays I was gonna write um each day, five days a week, you know, uh, in order to get to my goal.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: And I found it was best if I did that a week at a time instead of trying to plan too far in advance, um, because often I would have a spark of inspiration or I'd hear a story or an anecdote.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, oh, that'd be perfect to share this as part of this book.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, I would sit down on Sunday evening and plot out the week, basically.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: So I knew each day I kind of had a game plan going into it for what I was going to write about.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_00: But often I would, in the midst of my writing, would be inspired by something else and would write something completely different.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's you you think, you look back and you think, boy, I've got so much to write about.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've been doing this for a long time.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: But when you get into the mechanics of writing 366 unique ideas about something, it gets really challenging.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so um, you know, it it was definitely not an easy book to write.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: It was, as a matter of fact, it was this was easily by far the most challenging book that I've written to date.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the good thing is that you only have to do one of these in your life, you know, unless you do uh this type of book on a whole different topic or something.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: Right, that's right.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: So again, because this is a podcast for writers, we talk about habits and routines a lot on the show.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And because obviously you talk about that a lot as well.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: Can you speak to the importance of habits and routines, particularly for writers, and what kind of habits and routines you have found most helpful in your writing life?
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so a couple of things.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: I so I have a morning routine that I've had for 20 years now, really since 2002.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same every single morning.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I get up, I make coffee, um, I do a little like French press coffee.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I have the same breakfast, I go to my home office and I sit and I study for an hour.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I, for a big chunk of that time, I'm reading whatever I happen to be reading at that point in time.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I spend some time reflecting on what I've been reading and journaling about what I've been reading that morning.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, often people, the the part of the writing process that people overlook is the studying and thinking part of the writing process.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's funny, about um maybe 12 years ago, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, my kids were younger, and I heard my son, he came downstairs and I was sitting on our back deck, and I was thinking about what I was gonna be writing.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: And um, my son yelled to my wife in a different part of the house.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: He said, I found him, mom.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: He's on the back deck.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: He's supposed to be writing the book, but unfortunately he he's not, he's just thinking, right?
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought that was so cute.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: But that's but that's a big part of the writing process is thinking and processing.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to give ourselves a space to be able to do that, to think and to process.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um that combined with the necessity of sitting down and just going clickety clack on the keyboard and just pushing words onto the page.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, again, our big, our best inspiration is going to happen in the midst of our work, not before our work often.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna happen in the midst of our work.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's in the midst of our work that we connect those dots.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: And so as as it comes to writing, the very first thing I do when I'm under deadline to write a book is I write in the morning.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I do my morning routine.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then the very first active work I do whenever I'm under deadline to write a book is I work on the book and I get my word count in for the day.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I've basically pretty much been under deadline since 2009.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: So that's pretty much the first thing I do every single day.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I actually relish the moments when I'm not under deadline because it's kind of nice to have a little bit of space and freedom to not feel that pressure.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's really important that I get that work out of the way early in the day, very first thing before I do anything else.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so my schedule when I'm writing a book um is typically my mornings are typically blocked off.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_00: I don't do interviews in the mornings.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: And even when I'm not writing a book, I usually block off the morning for creative work because I've found that that's the most important and valuable time for me is that morning time for getting um getting my most important work done.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: So my encouragement to writers is A, understand what your daily word count is, make it small enough that you can hit it every single day.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: So even if you say I'm gonna start with 250 words, you know, or even a hundred words, it's kind of hard to do a hundred because you almost can't even get anything out in a hundred words.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, 250 words, or for me, it's 500 words, but do it every single day, no matter what, right every single day.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, some people say a thousand words, some people say 2,000 words.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that's just too daunting to me.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, there's a um concept that Jim Collins calls the 20 mile march, right?
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: And it's based on um, I want to say it was the team that got to the North Pole first, might have been the South Pole.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: I forget.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, right, right.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but the idea was, you know, they started um every single day, and and one team said, every day we're gonna we're gonna do 20 miles.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care what the weather's like.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care if it's a good day, a bad day, a sunny day, easy day, hard day, what the terrain's like, we're gonna do 20 miles a day.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: The other team, when it was sunny and it was nice out, they would go, you know, 50 miles.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: But then the next day it would be rainy and nasty, and they decided not to march because it was, you know, it's not good weather for marching.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, the team that gets there first is the team that does the 20-mile march because every single day they're doing their 20-mile march, no matter whether they feel like it or not.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think that 20-mile march is really important for riders.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whether you feel like it or you don't feel like it, whether you're inspired or you're not, whether you have ideas or you don't, you have to write every single day.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you have to get that 20-mile march done.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so don't make it a 300-mile march because that's gonna be exhausting.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_00: And don't make it a five-mile march because that's too easy.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: But but do something that feels challenging to you, but isn't so challenging that you're gonna dread it every single day or that you're gonna miss it.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: The most important thing is that you hit it.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, that sweet spot has been 500 words for years and years and years.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, again, now I'm on my sixth book.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, so it's worked out pretty well.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I would say, you know, to get to a 60,000, 70,000 word manuscript, I probably write 100 to 110,000 words.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, for my book, Herding Tigers, it came out in 2018.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_00: About, I don't know, three weeks before we locked the manuscript.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: My editor, Nikki, said, Hey, we're we're dropping chapter six.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, What?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: Nice, like, what do you mean we're dropping?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_00: She said, Yeah, we're dropping chapter six.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: And this is like 6,000 words or something.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is I spent weeks working on chapter six, and it's like, we're dropping chapter six, you know, because it it's valuable, but it just doesn't fit with everything else.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she was right, it was the right, right decision.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But, you know, you have to be willing to do that, and you have to recognize that just because you do the work doesn't mean the work belongs in the finished piece.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: The the most valuable part of the writing process is the editing and getting it down to its most distilled form and most useful form.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: So um, yeah, so I would, I would um just encourage people to have that 20-mile march, understand what that is, and you know, just to go clickety clack on the keyboard till you get there.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: So this episode's going to release around the time that your book comes out.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Can you share your best practices for doing a book launch?
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_01: No matter now, I realize you know, certain authors are at higher levels.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_01: You have more things that you're doing, a larger audience, and all those kinds of things.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But in general, are there some things that you have found that work really well and really consistently when you're launching a book?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I would say a couple of things.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, number one, you know, everybody focuses on the launch, and the goal isn't to launch a book, the goal is to have a book that continues to have impact over time, right?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Like a perennial seller, like Ryan Holiday talks about.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Well, exactly right.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I think that, you know, so often people obsess over how do I get people to buy this book instead of creating conversation about the book, you know, instead of creating a product that people want to talk about and that they're gonna continue to talk about for a long time to come.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: So I would encourage people, first of all, to just release the pressure a little bit around the book launch itself and recognize if you create a uh something that's good, it's going to find its audience over time if you continue to be present.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: The most important thing you can do is sort of like they say, you know, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is today.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: Perhaps.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, and I would say the same thing about starting an email list.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't have a following, if you don't have people who are regularly receiving from you um ideas and insights, if you're not regularly building into people, you need to do that now.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so start building that that audience of people who are connected to you now.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because when the time comes for a book launch, you know, uh it's a lot harder to generate momentum if you're just kind of screaming out into the wilderness, hey, buy my book.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: You should check out my book.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um so that's another big thing.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: As it relates to launches and pre-orders and all of that, pre-orders are really important.
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason they're important is because they signal to retailers, hey, this is a book that we probably should pay attention to and we might want to order more copies of so that we don't run out.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I've had instances where I've spoken at big events before where I sold you know thousands of copies of the book in like a day and we ran out for two months, you know?
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, those kinds of things can happen uh around book lines.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: If publishers or uh retailers aren't ready for the demand.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: And so it helps to start talking about the book a handful of weeks ahead of time, you know, get people to pre-order it so that that demand is met, so that the additional demand of demand of launch week, if you're doing interviews and all of those kinds of things, um, can be met by the the retailers when the book launches.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I I I would just encourage people you to to think clearly about how much, like what is the unique value that your book offers to the audience that you wrote it for.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: And the most important thing I think on that front is ensure that you're writing it for an audience, specifically for a person.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: The way I encourage people to think about writing is, you know, think about one person that you're writing this for, and that is your intended audience, period.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so write everything through the lens of how would this person react if they were sitting across the table from me right now while I'm writing.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then just think about that one person, because the more precise you can be in how you target what you say, the more likely you are to create something that other people will see themselves in, which it's kind of a strange irony, a strange twist.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: But the more precisely you write it to one person, the more other people will see themselves in it.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I wrote The Action Creative to one person.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that book was written to one, all of my books have been written to one person, different people, each book.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: But often people come up to me and say, Do you have cameras on my office wall?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how do you know that I'm, you know, it's because I wrote so precisely to one person that other people feel folded in to that.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so that that would be my advice.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And if you do that, it's more likely that your work is gonna resonate with people.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, I would say that that's those are really the most important things is, you know, write a book that is gonna resonate with people.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_00: That's the most important thing.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, make sure you're building your audience now, and then you know, make sure you talk about it a little bit ahead of time so that people can pre-order and you know, you don't end up with a distribution problem.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and recognize it's a long game.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Books are a long game.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you're you're gonna sell a lot more copies over time than you're gonna sell during your launch window.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I have you know, the the copies of the Axel Creative that sold um are many, many, many, many multiples of what sold during that launch window.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, it's just grown in influence over time.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: And we can really obsess about things like hitting lists and things that we think are really important.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the reality is, you know, the Axel and Creative has sold more copies than a lot of books that hit New York, the New York Times bestseller list, you know, because they sold a bunch of copies and then they didn't sell any more after that, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um happens all the time.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it happened it does.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_00: It happens all the time.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: Your goal as a writer is not to sell a bunch of copies, your goal is to have influence, which means you want people to read your books, not just buy your books.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, a book that's read and applied or a book that's read and enjoyed is going to spread.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: You're gonna sell more copies than a book that's bought and sits on somebody's shelf.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so you know, that's the other thing I encourage people to consider is you want to try to find ways of encouraging people to read your books, not just buy your books.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's that's really the goal.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Todd, I want to respect your time.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: I know you are in the midst of a super busy book launch with all the things that are happening because of that.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: I just want to take a second though to really just affirm and acknowledge the impact that you've had on so many people's lives.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_01: You were one of the very first podcasters that I listened to.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_01: Way back in the day, whenever I had, this is even before iPhones came out.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: I remember having my, was it an iPod Touch or something like one of the, you know, when I'm like one of the very first iPods and I'm walking around and I'm downloading podcasts from my you know, from my computer, syncing those to my iPod, walking around.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: I remember listening to your show back in the day and just thinking, man, I just I love this guy's content.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: He's so inspiring.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: At the time I was a college professor, and that was really uh that was really impactful for me way back when.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I appreciate your consistency over the years and just investing and writing, and it's just like it's just incredible how you have stayed so consistent.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: That really means a ton.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, it's funny.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, well, it's my 20-mile march, right?
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's the every day you do your thing.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was just I just did an interview before you with uh before this one with Eric Fisher from Beyond the To-Do list.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, I love it.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: Chatting about um uh back in the day, you know, some of the the older podcasting people and some of the things we had to do back then in order to get people to listen.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, today podcasting is like, oh, you push a button and you can listen to anything.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_00: And back then it was like I was hard coding an XML file to upload to a server so people could subscribe to my show and download the podcast and like hosting our own little thing.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then like you had to describe to people like, okay, here's how you do it you you download these files and then you drag them via Firewire to your iPod or whatever, and it's so easy, you know, versus now where literally every show is available at the touch of a button, it's just such a different thing.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there are beautiful things about that, and there are not so beautiful things, like uh, you know, the accidental creative, I think, was featured on the iTunes homepage for years because there just wasn't a ton of competition back then, right?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was like uh, you know, and so we we gained you know tens of thousands of listeners just from being on the iTunes homepage being featured because we were, you know, a relevant podcast.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_00: And now it's like, I mean, that's a much taller order to get featured in that way in the Apple Podcast space.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: But um, yeah, so it's uh I really appreciate those words.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for those kind words and thanks for being a longtime listener to the show.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, totally my pleasure.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_01: And I I just appreciate all that you have done and continue to do to help creatives, writers, artists, entrepreneurs, basically everybody who wants to do anything meaningful, you know, your your content and your books and podcasts can really speak into their lives.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: So thanks for making time to do this.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm super excited about the book.
• 28:18
  SPEAKER_01: I cannot wait to get my print copy here in a couple weeks when I get it from Amazon.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: So congrats and let me know how I can continue to support all your amazing work.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Really appreciate that.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I hope you enjoyed that conversation.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: As you can see, Todd is not just a really smart guy, he's also a very practical guy, and he actually lives what he preaches.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's a lot of people out there, and this is not going to come as a shock to anybody who uh who lives and breathes, but there are a lot of people out there who don't really practice what they preach.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_01: They write books or they speak or they do a podcast on a certain topic, but they don't really internalize those things and they just kind of say things, but they don't really do them in their own life.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Todd is the complete opposite.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: He is a guy who actually does these things, and that's why he has been so, so prolific and so brilliant for such a long time.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I really enjoyed this.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if I had to pick one takeaway from this, uh, from this conversation, I would say, man, it's just the importance of those everyday habits, of having that routine, whether it's in the morning or night or afternoon or whenever you do it, but it's the absolute importance of having that writing routine every single day where you get in there, you do the work, and that's what produces the amazing results over the long term.
• 29:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I want to thank Todd for being a guest on today's episode, especially he we recorded this just about a week and a half before this book came out.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I know he uh he was in a very, very busy season.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: So I greatly appreciated Todd making time to do this conversation.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I want to encourage you to grab this book called Daily Creative.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: It is really going to be an essential book for your library.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've ordered actually multiple copies of it because I'm going to be doing some giveaways of this book.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope that you will grab your copy as well.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_01: Before I wrap up here, I want to let you know that today's episode is brought to you by the Daily Writer Club.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: Are you looking for a community of enthusiastic and success-minded writers who are launching books and growing their writing businesses?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: If so, the Daily Writer Club is the missing piece that you've been searching for.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: Members have access to weekly writing sprint and live calls with expert teaching, an active online community, access to retreats and in-person events, and a clear pathway for growing your writing platform and business.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: You can check it out at dailywriterlife.com/slash club.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much, and I'll see you tomorrow.