Episode 093 - Valuing the Creative Process with Nicholas Erik
August 17, 2021
Nicholas Erik talks about Valuing the Creative Process and the importance of factoring in the enjoyment you get out of the process. We talk about the dangers of trying to increase productivity by taking shortcuts, and the importance of making the puzzles and challenges that you have to solve ones that you want to solve, not ones you dread. And we talk about why Nick places less emphasis on goals, where you set an end date for an activity, and more emphasis on objectives, or how you want to spend your days today and in the coming years … because as Nick says, “If you just want to make money, there are a lot easier ways to do that than writing.”
Nicholas Erik is the author of science fiction and urban fantasy, with over 20 books, including THE FINAL COLONY series and THE REMNANTS trilogy. He also writes comprehensive guides for his fellow indy authors on how to sell more books, build your fanbase, and be more productive. He runs 1-on-1 ads workshops and provides ads management for select clients. Nick previously joined me for Episode 052 - Five Keys to Building a Resilient Indy Business with Nicholas Erik, which I believe is a must-listen for any indy author.
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[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Nicholas Erik. Hey Nick, how are you doing?
[00:00:06] Nick: I'm doing well, Matty. Thanks for having me on again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Nicholas Erik is the author of science fiction and urban fantasy with over 20 books, including THE FINAL COLONY SERIES and THE REMNANTS TRILOGY.
[00:00:20] He also writes comprehensive guides for his fellow indy authors on how to sell more books, build your fan base and be more productive. He runs one-on-one ads workshops and provides ads management for select clients. And I am a happy client of Nick's Facebook ads consulting and Nick was last on the podcast for Episode 52: Five Keys to Building a Resilient indy Business, which I think is a must listen for any indy author.
[00:00:46] I of course think all my episodes are a must listen, but that isn't a special must listen. and I invited him back to talk about optimizing your time and content. So Nick, just to give us some context for this conversation, I was wondering if you could describe what's on your plate these days? What's the pool of work that you're working for yourself to prioritize and make more productive?
[00:01:10] Nick: Sure. What I do is I've gotten back to writing. And so I released my first book in a little under three years, just under three years, about a month ago. So that came out, that's doing well. So I'm glad that that's doing well. And then for the non-fiction stuff, I do courses for authors, and I do consulting as well.
[00:01:35] I have a weekly newsletter and then I also do ads management, where I am hands-on in the ads manager doing the actual tweaks to the bidding and things like that. So it's a variety of things at this point and basically have just been working on how to balance those over the course of multiple years. I think with productivity, it's just an evolving process and you try to expand your capacity as time goes on or try to figure out where you're trying to get that capacity to. And it's an ongoing process. So it's just been trying to balance the writing and the other stuff. Didn't quite have that nailed down exactly, which is why the writing took a back seat for a little bit, but that's okay.
[00:02:28] I learned a lot in the meantime, not just about productivity, but about marketing for other authors have seen a lot of different genres. I've seen a lot of different things in this business. So all that experience is useful and has been useful when I returned back to the writing. But hopefully have that a little bit more figured out at this point. I think it's just an ongoing process where you take some steps forward, you take some steps back and you're always at a different point in your life, but working on this next book now, and I have to get it done in a week or so. So that's the current project.
[00:03:07] Matty: Was there some epiphany you had or experience you had that enabled you to get past what sounded like was a bit of a barrier in terms of your fiction writing work?
[00:03:16] Nick: I don't think there was necessarily an epiphany type of moment. It just, you'd try a bunch of different things. A lot of it's just trial and error and eventually you hit on the right combination or you're at a point where you can get enough momentum going with the projects that you can finally get it done. So here I just really focused on the book for about seven to 10 days and started slower than I was trying to. ...
[00:00:06] Nick: I'm doing well, Matty. Thanks for having me on again.
[00:00:08] Matty: It is my pleasure. To give our listeners a little bit of background on you, Nicholas Erik is the author of science fiction and urban fantasy with over 20 books, including THE FINAL COLONY SERIES and THE REMNANTS TRILOGY.
[00:00:20] He also writes comprehensive guides for his fellow indy authors on how to sell more books, build your fan base and be more productive. He runs one-on-one ads workshops and provides ads management for select clients. And I am a happy client of Nick's Facebook ads consulting and Nick was last on the podcast for Episode 52: Five Keys to Building a Resilient indy Business, which I think is a must listen for any indy author.
[00:00:46] I of course think all my episodes are a must listen, but that isn't a special must listen. and I invited him back to talk about optimizing your time and content. So Nick, just to give us some context for this conversation, I was wondering if you could describe what's on your plate these days? What's the pool of work that you're working for yourself to prioritize and make more productive?
[00:01:10] Nick: Sure. What I do is I've gotten back to writing. And so I released my first book in a little under three years, just under three years, about a month ago. So that came out, that's doing well. So I'm glad that that's doing well. And then for the non-fiction stuff, I do courses for authors, and I do consulting as well.
[00:01:35] I have a weekly newsletter and then I also do ads management, where I am hands-on in the ads manager doing the actual tweaks to the bidding and things like that. So it's a variety of things at this point and basically have just been working on how to balance those over the course of multiple years. I think with productivity, it's just an evolving process and you try to expand your capacity as time goes on or try to figure out where you're trying to get that capacity to. And it's an ongoing process. So it's just been trying to balance the writing and the other stuff. Didn't quite have that nailed down exactly, which is why the writing took a back seat for a little bit, but that's okay.
[00:02:28] I learned a lot in the meantime, not just about productivity, but about marketing for other authors have seen a lot of different genres. I've seen a lot of different things in this business. So all that experience is useful and has been useful when I returned back to the writing. But hopefully have that a little bit more figured out at this point. I think it's just an ongoing process where you take some steps forward, you take some steps back and you're always at a different point in your life, but working on this next book now, and I have to get it done in a week or so. So that's the current project.
[00:03:07] Matty: Was there some epiphany you had or experience you had that enabled you to get past what sounded like was a bit of a barrier in terms of your fiction writing work?
[00:03:16] Nick: I don't think there was necessarily an epiphany type of moment. It just, you'd try a bunch of different things. A lot of it's just trial and error and eventually you hit on the right combination or you're at a point where you can get enough momentum going with the projects that you can finally get it done. So here I just really focused on the book for about seven to 10 days and started slower than I was trying to. ...
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[00:03:51] So I've written 3000, 4000 words a day before. Couldn't do that, at the beginning of that, I was really challenged to write maybe 500 words, 600 words. But just kind of sat down and decided I was going to do it no matter how long it took. And it didn't take that long once I had that ramp up period. But whenever you have a layoff in something, whether it's to do with writing or something else, productivity related, or if you haven't gone to the gym in a while, you can't just hop back into where you were when you left off, you have to work your way back to that.
[00:04:27] And the muscle memory comes back quick. The writing memory comes back quickly, but perhaps not as quickly as you might want where you want it to be instant. And it might only take a week, but just skipping that part of the process was stalling me out a little bit. So once I just sat down and committed to that, then it was surprisingly fast and by the end of that, I was doing 3,000, 4,000 words a day. Again, it wasn't a big deal, but just trying to skip ahead. That's a common problem with productivity where you're trying to always shortcut the process or find a way to do things faster. And it's not that's necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can lead you down a path that's much, much longer than just taking those extra few days to start slowly and build up.
[00:05:21] Matty: I think one of the biggest challenges of productivity that I experience is looking at the trees and missing the forest. So just getting up in the morning and looking at my to-do list and saying, 'Okay, I see that item number one is this' and jumping right on it, versus stepping back and taking a look and seeing if that task just in general is supporting my goals and the direction I want to take. So do you concur that understanding one's goals, you know, you kind of have to understand what the desired destination is before you pick the route you're taking, and how does that play in with productivity?
[00:05:58] Nick: Yeah. I'm not a huge proponent of traditional goals, which is where you set an end date for something that is going to be completed by this point, or you're going to be this skill. That is something, everyone learns skills at different rates. There are so many things that can get in the way of finishing things that I don't think that's necessarily a great approach.
[00:06:17] I'm more of a fan of, I call them objectives and that's really to just separate them from goals and that whole thing that basically ensues whenever you say "goals," like everybody has an idea of a goal, but what I think of objectives as is just a destination, not necessarily a destination, but how you want to spend your days in maybe a few years’ time and really how you want each of those days to generally go.
[00:06:48] If you don't like writing a book a month or something like that, then if you're setting this short-term goal for yourself to write a book a month, that doesn't make any sense because that's what your life is going to be made up of. It's going to be made up of writing X number of words a day, sprinting to a deadline, all that sort of thing. And that may be really good for one person and terrible for another person, not just in terms of productivity, but in terms of quality of life. And I think that a lot of people miss that when they're thinking of all the stuff that they can possibly do and all the outcomes that could possibly transpire.
[00:07:26] What do you want your day-to-day to be like? Because that's how your life is going to be. It's not going to be defined by these singular moments where you release a book or you get an award or you hit number one in the store or whatever your mega goals are, stretch goals is they're usually referred to as. All those things fade really quickly. So it's more about how can you align what you're doing today to facilitate how you want to spend your days in the future.
[00:08:01] And how you're spending your days now, you may have to eat it a little bit and basically buckle down and grind it out and figure out, 'okay, this isn't exactly how I want to spend my life but if I really focus here six months, in a year, in two years, then I can get to a place where I have the freedom to do what I want to do.' And I think that's really what productivity is more about than anything else. And what working for yourself is more about than anything else. People set all these monetary goals and all these sorts of things, which is fine, but they never think about how hitting this amount of income or selling this number of books or releasing this number of books is going to allow them to have what they want out of life.
[00:08:53] And I think it starts with really thinking about how you want to spend your time, because most of your time as an author is going to be spent writing and marketing and things like that. So you want to figure out what in those realms you can do that's enjoyable and how you can structure your day so that you like waking up in the morning rather than dread whatever it is that you have to do.
[00:09:19] And you always have to do some things that you don't want to do. But if your list is just wall to wall things that you hate, that's pretty dumb to set it up that way when you have control over it.
[00:09:32] So I think people miss the mark with that because they read productivity books and all these sorts of things that just say, you got to want it more and no pain no gain all these sorts of things. I don't really believe in that. Yes, there's certain level of discomfort sometimes. Yes, you have to do things that you don't want to do. Maybe in the beginning you have to do more of them just because it takes a lot of energy to get moving and spur momentum in the beginning when you're starting with no fans, and you don't have the marketing knowledge and all that sort of thing. And you don't maybe even have the craft knowledge that you need to succeed at a professional level. But once you have that, then hopefully things, I wouldn't necessarily get easier, but you're more solving puzzles and challenges that you want to solve rather than a bunch of stuff that it's like, I don't really like doing that. Like hopefully you're doing that less as time moves on.
[00:10:29] Matty: Yep. If you were out for a beer with a friend and that person said, 'Oh man, I just feel like I'm not getting anything done,' said something that suggested to you that in some sense they were thinking of it as a productivity issue. Are there questions you would ask them or advice you would give to help them understand what their situation was and what they could do about it?
[00:10:53] Nick: Probably not, because I think most people don't want unsolicited advice and unsolicited productivity advice. So it's probably not something that I would do. But in theory, let's say that they did want said advice. I think I would start with just asking them what they wanted and how they wanted to spend their day. It's not what they want like a Lamborghini or a certain television or whatever. That stuff, again, that can be fine, but it's going to be a singular point in time that fades. How do you want to spend the 16 hours, 15 hours, 14 hours, however long you're awake each day? What do you want to do during that time? And then really go from there. And once people start thinking about that, then it chops away all this extraneous stuff, because there's so much stuff that you can be doing, both in your business and hobby-wise and all this sort of thing.
[00:11:46] And then really, I think the next question, after you figure that out is what level of expertise or craftsmanship do you really want to obtain? Is it really important for you to reach master status or expert status in something? Or do you want to kind of spread things out or what really drives you there? And I think that that's an important consideration because if you want to be a master craftsman or something, then the amount of things that you can do is very limited. You can't be spreading your time out across all these sorts of various endeavors and have 18 different hobbies. That's just not the way it works. You really got to focus on a few things. So I think that those are the two main things that you want to consider.
[00:12:38] And especially with writing, the main choices you have are what genre are you going to write? Because you're going to be spending a lot of time writing that genre. So it's kind of a waste of time if you're thinking, 'Well, I can make a lot of money doing this,' but you set yourself up for basically a long-term loss where you're spending all your time doing something you don't enjoy. So if you just want to make money, there are a lot easier ways to make money than writing.
[00:13:11] So you want to think of that and then things like your release schedule and stuff like that as well. Those are important because again, maybe you don't want to write six books a year or 12 books a year, whatever number anyone's tossing out in the Facebook group or forum. If you like doing that, then great. If you don't like doing that, then you got to kind of design your marketing strategy and everything else in context with that. But those are the two main ones, really. How do you want to spend your days and how good at this do you want to be? And then you can really structure everything from there once you know those two things.
[00:13:54] But I think people don't have a real idea of that and that's where they go wrong and where you can get whiplash from just following all the productivity advice you see online or in books, 'Oh, you should do this, you have to try this thing, you have to experiment with this.' Like you can drown out a lot of that noise or you can drown in it, but the way you drown it out and ignore it is just by knowing exactly what you're about, what you want out of your days, and what you personally want to attain on an internal level.
[00:14:32] Matty: I think that that kind of writing advice is a great example. And I've seen evidence of writers who are always chasing the better way to do it to the detriment of actually producing anything. So I'm going to try plotting, that didn't work. I'm going to try pantsing, that didn't work. I'm going to try writing a thousand words a day and that didn't, so I'm going to, you know, sort of thrashing around, or missing a productivity opportunity because they're sort of entrenched in the way they do it and they're not considering other options.
[00:15:09] So, I know for me, I'm always sort of treading the pantser versus plot or line and I think I'm a more efficient and productive author the more I outline, but I don't want to spend so much time forcing myself to outline that I'm missing kind of little bursts of inspiration that I might get if I just sat down and started typing and see what I came up with. It's a tricky question, both recognizing when you should try something different and then for how long, and when you should decide it's not for you, for example.
[00:15:40] Nick: You've got to be inefficient before you can be efficient because you've got to learn what works for you. And you’ve also got to go through various iterations before you settle on what the best approach is for you or what personally works best. Maybe it's not ultimately the most efficient, but efficiency is zero if you get nothing done. So what's most efficient in theory is not ever going to be actually what you end up executing because everyone's different in that regard.
[00:16:13] And you just got to do the thing, no matter what the theoretical maximum output is, 'Oh, you can write 2000 words, or this person writes 3000 words using this method.' Most of the stuff you read online are just high scores and a snapshot in time where that person doesn't actually do that thing for a sustained period of time. If I toss out my highest word count here ever, which I won't do because someone's going to, if I tossed that out, it's really high, but that's not what my normal daily output is. It's an interesting anecdote, but that's all it is. It's not actually a piece of data that you can use to pinpoint what my real capacity is, and my real production is on a daily basis.
[00:17:06] So I wouldn't worry about all that stuff. Again, just focus on what you want to do daily and what you want to achieve craft wise. And I think that everything really gets very quiet from there and you can get locked into what you want to do. Whether that's writing some stuff and have it be a side income and writing occasionally and not really worrying about attaining whatever level of craft is the highest level. You know, everyone's going to have a different opinion on that. Or if you want to just be really writing these books that are lyrical and beautiful and intricately plotted and all this sort of thing, figure that out.
[00:17:53] And then you can slot in what you need to do to get to that, but it becomes very easy once you do that. Easy from a sense of knowing what to do, not in terms of actual execution, because to get better at things, it's always going to be a challenge and your mind is going to resist that because it's energy intensive to push beyond what you're doing. It's very easy to get locked into the same exact place and live on the plateau, but it's hard to keep pushing because it takes effort and it takes a lot of energy and your brain is trying to conserve that to survive, but it doesn't know that you have a refrigerator and all this sort of things. So you're battling against that.
[00:18:44] Once, you know these sorts of things, though, then it's easier to have the mental models in place to kind of combat that were you're like, 'Oh, I'm tired' or 'Oh, I don't want to do that,' then you're like, no, that's just really some sort of evolutionary instincts kicking in or that's me lying to myself, all that sort of thing. So that comes with time and some days you don't show up and then you figure out why, and you just get up the next day and hit reset and start again.
[00:19:16] Matty: Your reference to what I'm interpreting kind of as comparisonitis takes me back to when I took one of your courses that was co instructed by Lee Savino. And at the time at the end of the course, we would have the opportunity to discuss a personal business plan with you and Lee. And my goal was to write a novel every six months. And most of the other people in the class were trying to like write a book in six weeks. It's just, all the conversation felt like it was on that much shorter timeframe. And of course I can say every six months to other people, and they say, 'oh my God, how could you possibly do it?'
[00:19:55] But one of the things that I appreciated was that when we had that conversation with you and Lee, so I still had the goal of every six months, plus I had a goal of putting out a non-fiction book, or maybe two. I think it was like two fiction and two non-fiction. And you both kind of said in a nice way, 'okay, just calm down for a minute,' because I don't know what signals you were getting, but that schedule wasn't for me. And so that is probably one of the most useful and pain-preventing pieces of advice that anybody has given me on the writing front. So thank you. Thank you to you and Lee for that.
[00:20:29] Nick: Oh, I'm glad it was helpful. And you know, two books a year times 10 is 20 books and that's a lot of books. So it adds up over time. The main thing is the execution, whatever timeframe that's on. Most people are setting goals where they're saying I'm going to hit a book a month or release a book every six weeks and then they don't do it. And it ends up being zero books for the year, one book. And it's better to write two or three or four, rather than plan for eight and get zero. Like that's not a good outcome.
[00:21:04] The main thing is to get them out, because if you're not doing that, then you're not getting better as an author. And then you're also not getting better as a marketer because you don't have anything to market. And obviously you're not improving your overall business prospects either because the money is in the backlist. As that builds up, you have more marketing opportunities, you have more business opportunities with the rights that you can sell to the various formats and other things associated with the books. So it builds really quickly over time.
[00:21:36] I think the main thing that people kind of imagine is that they can almost hit pause and then wake up and have it be like they entered cryogenic stasis and they don't have to live the interim five years or 10 years. If the interim 10 years between when you get the thing at the end and where you are now, if that all sucks then was it worth it?
[00:21:59] And there are certain timeframes, I think, where it potentially it is worth it. One year of your life is about one and a half percent of your overall life lifespan, if you're looking at lifespan that's usable, it might be 2%. But it's relatively small in the grand scheme of things. Ten years is 15% of your life.
[00:22:21] So you have to also calibrate what you're willing to pay in terms of costs and kind of grinding it out. Cause all these books that you read, it's like, oh, you just sit in your room for 15 years and just don't talk to anybody and make it happen. And then you'll be good at the end.
[00:22:41] But is that worth it? That's the question. I'd say for almost no one, that scenario wouldn't be worth it. So you have to come up with plans that actually interface with reality and try to acknowledge that certain things are going to take longer. If you only write one book or two books a year, you have to structure things differently with your marketing. And it's probably going to take longer than if someone writes 12. That's just reality.
[00:23:06] But the question is whether that person can sustain that and whether that's enjoyable for them. I'd say a lot of people doing that aren't thrilled about doing that. Some people really enjoy it, and if you do enjoy it, awesome. If you don't, then maybe you want to think about how can I get this to a production level where I am happy with my day to day, because that's really what it's all about.
[00:23:29] And maybe happy isn't the right word. I think that is a buzzword these days, it's thrown out there too much. But satisfied and where you're actually either looking forward to it or at the very least not dreading what you have coming up. Because if you do, then probably change something or plan the coming days to figure out how you can change that in the future.
[00:23:57] Nick: And the other thing that I kind of filter it through is what hourly rate am I trying to hit? And is this going to be a skill that can be kind of a $500 an hour skill, a thousand-dollar hour skill, potentially higher? Can I get leverage on it? So with my books, I can get leverage in that I can invest the 40 hours or a hundred hours or however long it takes now. And I'm 32, I have that copyright unless I sell it to someone or something like that until I die, and that could be, I mean, hopefully let's say a while from now. And that means that I can make money off that work that I did now this week, when I get the book done, not if, it's going to say if, when I get the book done, then I can make money for that for a long time.
[00:24:52] Whereas if I do ads management for someone potentially the rate that I'm getting paid is higher now, which it is, but I can't bank that work in any way. I can't leverage it going forward. I can't resell it. It's something where I have to sit down and do it, which is totally fine. You're going to see a lot of resources out there. If anyone's a freelance or anything like that, don't trade time for money, all this nonsense. It's not that easy to just make a course or something where you can sell it perpetually and bank the work.
[00:25:20] Also courses, if you do them correctly, a lot of times they require more updates and maintenance than probably you're used to seeing in the online course realm, if anyone's had the displeasure of buying a subpar online course.
[00:25:37] So there's a lot of noise out there that you have to tune out, but it's totally fine to trade time for money or have to do the actual thing, but you can't resell that. I can't say, okay, I did this Amazon ads management yesterday. I can get paid for next month. I can't. I have to do it again and I have to come in and make the tweaks. And that's one of the best things about writing is that you have that leverage going forward. That's why creating content is so powerful, no matter how long it takes you. If it takes you six months to write a book, that's fine. You can still sell that book for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 30 years, et cetera, and make money.
[00:26:21] So I think people overlook that and they're way too focused on the short-term and not what this can do in the long term. And I get it, you have to make money now, the landlord or the bank doesn't take IOUs that go into the future. I totally get all that. But sometimes by focusing way too much on what is going to happen in the immediate short-term future, you cut yourself off from the real upside and the real gain. So that's something that I really filter that through.
[00:26:56]
[00:26:56] So one of the best ways to become more productive is to invest into assets that can work while you don't have to. And that doesn't mean passive income, that's kind of another one of those internet things that's mostly nonsense. You're not going to release a book and then have it make you a million dollars a year for the next 30 years of your life. Like you still have to put in some work, but compared to the rewards and compared to the payoff, when you look at it versus other things that you could do, one hour spent there when you have a back catalog of 40 books and by one hour, I mean one hour, say, spent marketing, that's going to get you a lot more leverage and a lot bigger of a payoff usually than one hour spent doing graphic design for someone or some sort of other tasks where you're paid hourly or you paid a salary or something like that. Usually that's going to cap much sooner.
[00:27:54] So that's how I really think about how to spend my time. And also what skills that I like to build. It's not so much the website design or graphic design doesn't interest me, but the reality is that I can get paid a lot more for the writing than I can for any sort of graphic design. So it doesn't make sense to really invest a ton of time there. It's better to outsource that. And then invest more time into getting better as a writer and figuring out ways to market that writing.
[00:28:32] Nick: It's so hard to measure all this stuff. You measure what you can in business, but a lot of it is going to pay off five years, 10 years from now. So you have a book that doesn't sell many copies, let's say, and you can easily track that, but you also don't know what its future value will be. It might be zero. Sometimes that becomes pretty apparent. When you either flip through it and you're like, this wasn't written correctly for the market or whatever, or it has some sort of other problem. But a lot of times you don't necessarily know, and so much of that benefit is from the compound interest that builds over time and you kind of have to let that play out.
[00:29:11] So whenever I say "you," by the way, for anyone listening and I'm answering Matty's questions, but I'm not actually saying you as Matty, or even maybe generally as like you as the audience. More so I'm thinking about where I was 10 years ago and almost talking to my past self and saying, 'Hey, this is a long game and so much of what you're doing now you're not going to be able to see how this pays off and you can really cut things off at the knees by not allowing things to play out.
[00:29:52] And the main way you let things play out is you try and launch a different stuff and you do get rid of the things that clearly don't work or that you can adhere to. That's one of the main things, if you just can't show up, then it's got to be adjusted or pushed off the board because can't get any results if you don't show up. It's such a long process. And once you're showing up, you need to actually not just show up, but do things that are going to pay off long-term.
[00:30:22] Matty: Well, Nick, thank you so much. This is lots and lots of food for thought, and I'm going to bake it into many of the things I'm doing. So, let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you offer and do online.
[00:30:35] Nick: Yeah, I think the best place to find me is my website. You can sign up for the weekly newsletter there at nicholaserik.com, and that's about marketing primarily, some productivity stuff and semiweekly, sometimes weekly, sometimes not, sometimes back-to-back daily.
[00:31:00] Matty: As the inspiration moves you.
[00:31:04] Nick: It comes when it arrives, but that is where I'd start.
[00:31:11] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again.
[00:31:13] Nick: Thank you for having me, Matty.
[00:04:27] And the muscle memory comes back quick. The writing memory comes back quickly, but perhaps not as quickly as you might want where you want it to be instant. And it might only take a week, but just skipping that part of the process was stalling me out a little bit. So once I just sat down and committed to that, then it was surprisingly fast and by the end of that, I was doing 3,000, 4,000 words a day. Again, it wasn't a big deal, but just trying to skip ahead. That's a common problem with productivity where you're trying to always shortcut the process or find a way to do things faster. And it's not that's necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can lead you down a path that's much, much longer than just taking those extra few days to start slowly and build up.
[00:05:21] Matty: I think one of the biggest challenges of productivity that I experience is looking at the trees and missing the forest. So just getting up in the morning and looking at my to-do list and saying, 'Okay, I see that item number one is this' and jumping right on it, versus stepping back and taking a look and seeing if that task just in general is supporting my goals and the direction I want to take. So do you concur that understanding one's goals, you know, you kind of have to understand what the desired destination is before you pick the route you're taking, and how does that play in with productivity?
[00:05:58] Nick: Yeah. I'm not a huge proponent of traditional goals, which is where you set an end date for something that is going to be completed by this point, or you're going to be this skill. That is something, everyone learns skills at different rates. There are so many things that can get in the way of finishing things that I don't think that's necessarily a great approach.
[00:06:17] I'm more of a fan of, I call them objectives and that's really to just separate them from goals and that whole thing that basically ensues whenever you say "goals," like everybody has an idea of a goal, but what I think of objectives as is just a destination, not necessarily a destination, but how you want to spend your days in maybe a few years’ time and really how you want each of those days to generally go.
[00:06:48] If you don't like writing a book a month or something like that, then if you're setting this short-term goal for yourself to write a book a month, that doesn't make any sense because that's what your life is going to be made up of. It's going to be made up of writing X number of words a day, sprinting to a deadline, all that sort of thing. And that may be really good for one person and terrible for another person, not just in terms of productivity, but in terms of quality of life. And I think that a lot of people miss that when they're thinking of all the stuff that they can possibly do and all the outcomes that could possibly transpire.
[00:07:26] What do you want your day-to-day to be like? Because that's how your life is going to be. It's not going to be defined by these singular moments where you release a book or you get an award or you hit number one in the store or whatever your mega goals are, stretch goals is they're usually referred to as. All those things fade really quickly. So it's more about how can you align what you're doing today to facilitate how you want to spend your days in the future.
[00:08:01] And how you're spending your days now, you may have to eat it a little bit and basically buckle down and grind it out and figure out, 'okay, this isn't exactly how I want to spend my life but if I really focus here six months, in a year, in two years, then I can get to a place where I have the freedom to do what I want to do.' And I think that's really what productivity is more about than anything else. And what working for yourself is more about than anything else. People set all these monetary goals and all these sorts of things, which is fine, but they never think about how hitting this amount of income or selling this number of books or releasing this number of books is going to allow them to have what they want out of life.
[00:08:53] And I think it starts with really thinking about how you want to spend your time, because most of your time as an author is going to be spent writing and marketing and things like that. So you want to figure out what in those realms you can do that's enjoyable and how you can structure your day so that you like waking up in the morning rather than dread whatever it is that you have to do.
[00:09:19] And you always have to do some things that you don't want to do. But if your list is just wall to wall things that you hate, that's pretty dumb to set it up that way when you have control over it.
[00:09:32] So I think people miss the mark with that because they read productivity books and all these sorts of things that just say, you got to want it more and no pain no gain all these sorts of things. I don't really believe in that. Yes, there's certain level of discomfort sometimes. Yes, you have to do things that you don't want to do. Maybe in the beginning you have to do more of them just because it takes a lot of energy to get moving and spur momentum in the beginning when you're starting with no fans, and you don't have the marketing knowledge and all that sort of thing. And you don't maybe even have the craft knowledge that you need to succeed at a professional level. But once you have that, then hopefully things, I wouldn't necessarily get easier, but you're more solving puzzles and challenges that you want to solve rather than a bunch of stuff that it's like, I don't really like doing that. Like hopefully you're doing that less as time moves on.
[00:10:29] Matty: Yep. If you were out for a beer with a friend and that person said, 'Oh man, I just feel like I'm not getting anything done,' said something that suggested to you that in some sense they were thinking of it as a productivity issue. Are there questions you would ask them or advice you would give to help them understand what their situation was and what they could do about it?
[00:10:53] Nick: Probably not, because I think most people don't want unsolicited advice and unsolicited productivity advice. So it's probably not something that I would do. But in theory, let's say that they did want said advice. I think I would start with just asking them what they wanted and how they wanted to spend their day. It's not what they want like a Lamborghini or a certain television or whatever. That stuff, again, that can be fine, but it's going to be a singular point in time that fades. How do you want to spend the 16 hours, 15 hours, 14 hours, however long you're awake each day? What do you want to do during that time? And then really go from there. And once people start thinking about that, then it chops away all this extraneous stuff, because there's so much stuff that you can be doing, both in your business and hobby-wise and all this sort of thing.
[00:11:46] And then really, I think the next question, after you figure that out is what level of expertise or craftsmanship do you really want to obtain? Is it really important for you to reach master status or expert status in something? Or do you want to kind of spread things out or what really drives you there? And I think that that's an important consideration because if you want to be a master craftsman or something, then the amount of things that you can do is very limited. You can't be spreading your time out across all these sorts of various endeavors and have 18 different hobbies. That's just not the way it works. You really got to focus on a few things. So I think that those are the two main things that you want to consider.
[00:12:38] And especially with writing, the main choices you have are what genre are you going to write? Because you're going to be spending a lot of time writing that genre. So it's kind of a waste of time if you're thinking, 'Well, I can make a lot of money doing this,' but you set yourself up for basically a long-term loss where you're spending all your time doing something you don't enjoy. So if you just want to make money, there are a lot easier ways to make money than writing.
[00:13:11] So you want to think of that and then things like your release schedule and stuff like that as well. Those are important because again, maybe you don't want to write six books a year or 12 books a year, whatever number anyone's tossing out in the Facebook group or forum. If you like doing that, then great. If you don't like doing that, then you got to kind of design your marketing strategy and everything else in context with that. But those are the two main ones, really. How do you want to spend your days and how good at this do you want to be? And then you can really structure everything from there once you know those two things.
[00:13:54] But I think people don't have a real idea of that and that's where they go wrong and where you can get whiplash from just following all the productivity advice you see online or in books, 'Oh, you should do this, you have to try this thing, you have to experiment with this.' Like you can drown out a lot of that noise or you can drown in it, but the way you drown it out and ignore it is just by knowing exactly what you're about, what you want out of your days, and what you personally want to attain on an internal level.
[00:14:32] Matty: I think that that kind of writing advice is a great example. And I've seen evidence of writers who are always chasing the better way to do it to the detriment of actually producing anything. So I'm going to try plotting, that didn't work. I'm going to try pantsing, that didn't work. I'm going to try writing a thousand words a day and that didn't, so I'm going to, you know, sort of thrashing around, or missing a productivity opportunity because they're sort of entrenched in the way they do it and they're not considering other options.
[00:15:09] So, I know for me, I'm always sort of treading the pantser versus plot or line and I think I'm a more efficient and productive author the more I outline, but I don't want to spend so much time forcing myself to outline that I'm missing kind of little bursts of inspiration that I might get if I just sat down and started typing and see what I came up with. It's a tricky question, both recognizing when you should try something different and then for how long, and when you should decide it's not for you, for example.
[00:15:40] Nick: You've got to be inefficient before you can be efficient because you've got to learn what works for you. And you’ve also got to go through various iterations before you settle on what the best approach is for you or what personally works best. Maybe it's not ultimately the most efficient, but efficiency is zero if you get nothing done. So what's most efficient in theory is not ever going to be actually what you end up executing because everyone's different in that regard.
[00:16:13] And you just got to do the thing, no matter what the theoretical maximum output is, 'Oh, you can write 2000 words, or this person writes 3000 words using this method.' Most of the stuff you read online are just high scores and a snapshot in time where that person doesn't actually do that thing for a sustained period of time. If I toss out my highest word count here ever, which I won't do because someone's going to, if I tossed that out, it's really high, but that's not what my normal daily output is. It's an interesting anecdote, but that's all it is. It's not actually a piece of data that you can use to pinpoint what my real capacity is, and my real production is on a daily basis.
[00:17:06] So I wouldn't worry about all that stuff. Again, just focus on what you want to do daily and what you want to achieve craft wise. And I think that everything really gets very quiet from there and you can get locked into what you want to do. Whether that's writing some stuff and have it be a side income and writing occasionally and not really worrying about attaining whatever level of craft is the highest level. You know, everyone's going to have a different opinion on that. Or if you want to just be really writing these books that are lyrical and beautiful and intricately plotted and all this sort of thing, figure that out.
[00:17:53] And then you can slot in what you need to do to get to that, but it becomes very easy once you do that. Easy from a sense of knowing what to do, not in terms of actual execution, because to get better at things, it's always going to be a challenge and your mind is going to resist that because it's energy intensive to push beyond what you're doing. It's very easy to get locked into the same exact place and live on the plateau, but it's hard to keep pushing because it takes effort and it takes a lot of energy and your brain is trying to conserve that to survive, but it doesn't know that you have a refrigerator and all this sort of things. So you're battling against that.
[00:18:44] Once, you know these sorts of things, though, then it's easier to have the mental models in place to kind of combat that were you're like, 'Oh, I'm tired' or 'Oh, I don't want to do that,' then you're like, no, that's just really some sort of evolutionary instincts kicking in or that's me lying to myself, all that sort of thing. So that comes with time and some days you don't show up and then you figure out why, and you just get up the next day and hit reset and start again.
[00:19:16] Matty: Your reference to what I'm interpreting kind of as comparisonitis takes me back to when I took one of your courses that was co instructed by Lee Savino. And at the time at the end of the course, we would have the opportunity to discuss a personal business plan with you and Lee. And my goal was to write a novel every six months. And most of the other people in the class were trying to like write a book in six weeks. It's just, all the conversation felt like it was on that much shorter timeframe. And of course I can say every six months to other people, and they say, 'oh my God, how could you possibly do it?'
[00:19:55] But one of the things that I appreciated was that when we had that conversation with you and Lee, so I still had the goal of every six months, plus I had a goal of putting out a non-fiction book, or maybe two. I think it was like two fiction and two non-fiction. And you both kind of said in a nice way, 'okay, just calm down for a minute,' because I don't know what signals you were getting, but that schedule wasn't for me. And so that is probably one of the most useful and pain-preventing pieces of advice that anybody has given me on the writing front. So thank you. Thank you to you and Lee for that.
[00:20:29] Nick: Oh, I'm glad it was helpful. And you know, two books a year times 10 is 20 books and that's a lot of books. So it adds up over time. The main thing is the execution, whatever timeframe that's on. Most people are setting goals where they're saying I'm going to hit a book a month or release a book every six weeks and then they don't do it. And it ends up being zero books for the year, one book. And it's better to write two or three or four, rather than plan for eight and get zero. Like that's not a good outcome.
[00:21:04] The main thing is to get them out, because if you're not doing that, then you're not getting better as an author. And then you're also not getting better as a marketer because you don't have anything to market. And obviously you're not improving your overall business prospects either because the money is in the backlist. As that builds up, you have more marketing opportunities, you have more business opportunities with the rights that you can sell to the various formats and other things associated with the books. So it builds really quickly over time.
[00:21:36] I think the main thing that people kind of imagine is that they can almost hit pause and then wake up and have it be like they entered cryogenic stasis and they don't have to live the interim five years or 10 years. If the interim 10 years between when you get the thing at the end and where you are now, if that all sucks then was it worth it?
[00:21:59] And there are certain timeframes, I think, where it potentially it is worth it. One year of your life is about one and a half percent of your overall life lifespan, if you're looking at lifespan that's usable, it might be 2%. But it's relatively small in the grand scheme of things. Ten years is 15% of your life.
[00:22:21] So you have to also calibrate what you're willing to pay in terms of costs and kind of grinding it out. Cause all these books that you read, it's like, oh, you just sit in your room for 15 years and just don't talk to anybody and make it happen. And then you'll be good at the end.
[00:22:41] But is that worth it? That's the question. I'd say for almost no one, that scenario wouldn't be worth it. So you have to come up with plans that actually interface with reality and try to acknowledge that certain things are going to take longer. If you only write one book or two books a year, you have to structure things differently with your marketing. And it's probably going to take longer than if someone writes 12. That's just reality.
[00:23:06] But the question is whether that person can sustain that and whether that's enjoyable for them. I'd say a lot of people doing that aren't thrilled about doing that. Some people really enjoy it, and if you do enjoy it, awesome. If you don't, then maybe you want to think about how can I get this to a production level where I am happy with my day to day, because that's really what it's all about.
[00:23:29] And maybe happy isn't the right word. I think that is a buzzword these days, it's thrown out there too much. But satisfied and where you're actually either looking forward to it or at the very least not dreading what you have coming up. Because if you do, then probably change something or plan the coming days to figure out how you can change that in the future.
[00:23:57] Nick: And the other thing that I kind of filter it through is what hourly rate am I trying to hit? And is this going to be a skill that can be kind of a $500 an hour skill, a thousand-dollar hour skill, potentially higher? Can I get leverage on it? So with my books, I can get leverage in that I can invest the 40 hours or a hundred hours or however long it takes now. And I'm 32, I have that copyright unless I sell it to someone or something like that until I die, and that could be, I mean, hopefully let's say a while from now. And that means that I can make money off that work that I did now this week, when I get the book done, not if, it's going to say if, when I get the book done, then I can make money for that for a long time.
[00:24:52] Whereas if I do ads management for someone potentially the rate that I'm getting paid is higher now, which it is, but I can't bank that work in any way. I can't leverage it going forward. I can't resell it. It's something where I have to sit down and do it, which is totally fine. You're going to see a lot of resources out there. If anyone's a freelance or anything like that, don't trade time for money, all this nonsense. It's not that easy to just make a course or something where you can sell it perpetually and bank the work.
[00:25:20] Also courses, if you do them correctly, a lot of times they require more updates and maintenance than probably you're used to seeing in the online course realm, if anyone's had the displeasure of buying a subpar online course.
[00:25:37] So there's a lot of noise out there that you have to tune out, but it's totally fine to trade time for money or have to do the actual thing, but you can't resell that. I can't say, okay, I did this Amazon ads management yesterday. I can get paid for next month. I can't. I have to do it again and I have to come in and make the tweaks. And that's one of the best things about writing is that you have that leverage going forward. That's why creating content is so powerful, no matter how long it takes you. If it takes you six months to write a book, that's fine. You can still sell that book for the next five years, 10 years, 15 years, 30 years, et cetera, and make money.
[00:26:21] So I think people overlook that and they're way too focused on the short-term and not what this can do in the long term. And I get it, you have to make money now, the landlord or the bank doesn't take IOUs that go into the future. I totally get all that. But sometimes by focusing way too much on what is going to happen in the immediate short-term future, you cut yourself off from the real upside and the real gain. So that's something that I really filter that through.
[00:26:56]
[00:26:56] So one of the best ways to become more productive is to invest into assets that can work while you don't have to. And that doesn't mean passive income, that's kind of another one of those internet things that's mostly nonsense. You're not going to release a book and then have it make you a million dollars a year for the next 30 years of your life. Like you still have to put in some work, but compared to the rewards and compared to the payoff, when you look at it versus other things that you could do, one hour spent there when you have a back catalog of 40 books and by one hour, I mean one hour, say, spent marketing, that's going to get you a lot more leverage and a lot bigger of a payoff usually than one hour spent doing graphic design for someone or some sort of other tasks where you're paid hourly or you paid a salary or something like that. Usually that's going to cap much sooner.
[00:27:54] So that's how I really think about how to spend my time. And also what skills that I like to build. It's not so much the website design or graphic design doesn't interest me, but the reality is that I can get paid a lot more for the writing than I can for any sort of graphic design. So it doesn't make sense to really invest a ton of time there. It's better to outsource that. And then invest more time into getting better as a writer and figuring out ways to market that writing.
[00:28:32] Nick: It's so hard to measure all this stuff. You measure what you can in business, but a lot of it is going to pay off five years, 10 years from now. So you have a book that doesn't sell many copies, let's say, and you can easily track that, but you also don't know what its future value will be. It might be zero. Sometimes that becomes pretty apparent. When you either flip through it and you're like, this wasn't written correctly for the market or whatever, or it has some sort of other problem. But a lot of times you don't necessarily know, and so much of that benefit is from the compound interest that builds over time and you kind of have to let that play out.
[00:29:11] So whenever I say "you," by the way, for anyone listening and I'm answering Matty's questions, but I'm not actually saying you as Matty, or even maybe generally as like you as the audience. More so I'm thinking about where I was 10 years ago and almost talking to my past self and saying, 'Hey, this is a long game and so much of what you're doing now you're not going to be able to see how this pays off and you can really cut things off at the knees by not allowing things to play out.
[00:29:52] And the main way you let things play out is you try and launch a different stuff and you do get rid of the things that clearly don't work or that you can adhere to. That's one of the main things, if you just can't show up, then it's got to be adjusted or pushed off the board because can't get any results if you don't show up. It's such a long process. And once you're showing up, you need to actually not just show up, but do things that are going to pay off long-term.
[00:30:22] Matty: Well, Nick, thank you so much. This is lots and lots of food for thought, and I'm going to bake it into many of the things I'm doing. So, let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and everything you offer and do online.
[00:30:35] Nick: Yeah, I think the best place to find me is my website. You can sign up for the weekly newsletter there at nicholaserik.com, and that's about marketing primarily, some productivity stuff and semiweekly, sometimes weekly, sometimes not, sometimes back-to-back daily.
[00:31:00] Matty: As the inspiration moves you.
[00:31:04] Nick: It comes when it arrives, but that is where I'd start.
[00:31:11] Matty: Great. Well, thank you again.
[00:31:13] Nick: Thank you for having me, Matty.
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