- One of my favorite parts of my morning routine
is the time I spend reading.
Every single morning, I sit down in this office chair,
I grab a book, and I read, accompanied by
a few essential tools: a cup of freshly-brewed coffee,
a pen for marking in my book
so I can take notes on what I read later,
and perhaps most importantly,
this little green notebook that sits near my feet.
This is my distraction journal.
Whenever something pops into my head and pulls my attention
away from what I'm reading, I simply jot down
a note about it in this journal
so my brain can safely dismiss it
without being worried about forgetting it.
But there's something odd about my distraction journal.
In between the pages of little notes about distractions,
you know, buying a deck umbrella,
or checking with my team about something,
there are pages upon pages of notes
about my most creative and most significant work.
In fact, my most recent entry in this distraction journal
has nearly six pages about a video that I'm working on,
nearly outlining the entire thing.
So this is a distraction journal,
this is meant for jotting down quick little notes
and then getting back to what I was doing,
and yet I find myself using it
to do real, serious, significant work,
even when I don't intend to.
Meanwhile, half the time I sit down at a computer
with the intent to do some quote-unquote serious work,
I find myself staring at a blinking cursor.
I'm kinda like, if you've seen the movie "Limitless",
I'm kinda like Bradley Cooper's character, Eddie Morra.
You know, I put in the time, I stay in the room,
and yet nothing.
Now, unlike Eddie, my solution to this problem
is not taking a small translucent drug,
though while we're talking about "Limitless",
I do have to just take a second to admire
the way the filmmakers used the change in color grading
to illustrate the change in his mental state
after taking NZT.
That from a filmmaking perspective is just (smacks lips).
It is, it's great, but I digress.
My solution here is not a drug, it's an idea.
Creative work, or difficult, challenging work
is kind of like a non-Newtonian fluid.
Now if you've never heard this term before,
you've probably at least seen
one of these substances in the past.
A non-Newtonian fluid acts just like a normal fluid
most of the time, but when it's struck really quickly,
its structure, its molecules become very rigid
and the entire substance acts like a solid.
So imagine if you had an entire bucket of this stuff
and you wanted to submerge your hand into it.
Well, you could do it very easily
if you did it slowly, if you eased your hand in,
maybe started with the fingertips first,
but if you punched it,
if you just slam your hand into it very quickly,
the substance is going to tense up
and it's gonna be basically like punching a wall,
it's not gonna work.
And this is exactly how I think of creative work as well.
When you make these giant, sweeping statements
like Eddie Morra in "Limitless":
"Today's the day.
"I'm gonna write the entire book today",
you slam into the brick wall.
The task you've set for yourself
is so big, so intimidating, that you just can't get into it,
but ease into it, and you sometimes find yourself
immersed in what psychologists call the flow state:
a place where you're completely focused on your work.
In this state, the act of creation is all-encompassing,
it's fun, and you sometimes find yourself
losing track of time until you come out of it.
Now, getting into the flow state is not always easy,
but it does seem like you can do it more consistently
when you ease into your work.
It's almost like you're tricking your brain into doing it.
So, for the rest of this video,
I wanna share three ideas that you can use
to trick your brain into getting into the flow state,
and the first one is very simple: start incredibly small.
Don't make these grand, sweeping gestures
that just make your work very intimidating,
and the example I wanna give here is actually about the book
that I wrote a few years ago.
So, if you know anything about my work,
you know that I've written a book
called "10 Steps to Earning Awesome Grades",
but this book was actually not
my first attempt to write a book.
It was my second.
My first attempt was a complete and utter failure,
again because I just intimidated myself,
and I never got started.
And I made what I thought was a very big, grand gesture
that would force me to write the book.
I literally bought a ticket
to a conference down in Texas, and flew down there.
The conference was called Finish Up Weekend,
and the entire point of that event
was to get a bunch of creatives, a bunch of entrepreneurs
into a room, and have everyone pick one task,
and work as hard as possible
for like 54 straight hours to get it done.
So I showed up with the intent
to write an entire book,
thinking that being surrounded by all these people
and having a grand intention
would make me get the book done,
but instead, I came out of that event
with nothing to show for it.
I remember staring at my word processor on my laptop,
just unable to write anything that I was happy with,
so for this book, I took a completely different approach.
Number one, this was not even intended to be a book
when I started it.
This was gonna be like a 5,000 word max PDF,
like a bonus download for people
who joined my email list over my website.
And my approach to writing that PDF
was to first create a big outline in Evernote
that had 10 different sections,
and a bunch of little sub-bullets beneath them,
and then with my habit-tracking app,
I set a goal of writing 500 words per day.
So every single day, I would pick one of those sub-bullets
from the outline and sit down to write 500 words,
and because that goal was so small, on a daily basis,
just write 500 words about one tiny little topic
from my outline, I wrote consistently.
So consistently, in fact,
that my 5,000-word PDF eventually ballooned
into a 27,000-word book,
which is now in print and in audiobook,
so again, if you can start small,
that will help you to put in effort consistently,
and over time, those small little efforts will add up,
and you'll get something that is just as grand
as you intended in the first place.
All right, tactic number two
is to assume that you are creating garbage,
or at least allow yourself to create garbage,
and this is another thing that really helped
the process of writing this book.
When I sat down to write my 500 words per day,
that was my only goal: just write 500 words.
They didn't have to be 500 beautifully-edited words,
they didn't have to all make it into the book.
I just had to hit 500 words,
and on some days, I really did not feel like writing,
so I would spend, you know, the first two or 300 words
of that writing session writing about
how I really didn't wanna be there,
and I really didn't wanna be doing that,
but eventually, I would build some momentum,
and I would usually get, you know, at least one or two
usable paragraphs out of that writing session.
Finally, tactic number three: jot things down
in non-ideal places.
Do work in places that don't feel like
they're made for work.
This brings us back to the distraction journal.
This thing is not meant for intense writing.
I don't use this, or at least I don't intend to use this
to outline full videos,
and I definitely don't intend to outline full videos
while I'm sitting in my reading chair
trying to get some reading done in the morning.
I also don't intend to outline full videos
as I'm coming out of the shower,
or when I'm taking a voice note in the car,
but nonetheless, full videos get outlined
in all those places sometimes, and again,
it's because I'm in a non-ideal place.
I'm in the least intimidating place in the world,
and I think that the environment,
the setup can be just as intimidating
as the task you set for yourself,
and can be just as paralyzing,
so do things like keeping sticky note pads around the house,
or keep a note-taking app on your phone
that you don't consider to be the final place
where your writing is going to live.
Or if you're not a writer,
for whatever task you often find yourself paralyzed on,
find a non-ideal way to do it
in just little tiny bursts,
and you're sometimes gonna find yourself
working more than you intended,
because you've slipped into the flow state.
So, in summary, number one, start incredibly small.
Number two, allow yourself to create work
that might be garbage,
because some of it is not going to be,
and finally, number three, do work in non-ideal places.
Keep sticky notes around, keep voice recorders around.
Whatever you have to do.
Don't always force yourself to do work
in the place you have designated for work,
because sometimes that place is a bit intimidating.
And if you want an example that isn't writing,
another thing that I find quite intimidating
is music production, especially as somebody
who's spent a long time working with audio
for my videos, for my podcasts.
I know probably too much about music production
for my own good, so when I think about the process
of writing and producing a song,
I'm already thinking about automating reverb parameters
and adding in tons of different additional tracks,
and it can get intimidating,
and cause me to never start,
so the music I've actually produced
has almost universally started
as me just messing around on my guitar,
or messing around on my piano,
getting something that I liked,
and then gradually adding layer upon layer,
just sort of playing around until I get something
that actually sounds pretty good,
and if you would like an example of that,
I recently put a track called "Icicle Swords"
over on my music YouTube channel,
so I'll link that down in the description below,
and you can take a listen if you are curious,
and maybe subscribe to that channel
if you wanna see new tracks in the future.
Also, if you wanna see additional music stuff
and some more bonus videos related to the kind of content
I do on this channel,
you may also wanna follow me in Instagram over @TomFrankly.
Beyond that, if you enjoyed this video,
hit that Like button, show the YouTube algorithm what's up.
Get subscribed right there,
or check out one more video on this channel
right over here, or of course, don't do any of that
and go do whatever it is that you wanna do,
'cause as always, I'm not your dad.