How do I Overcome Writer’s Block?

I was just listening to an amazing interview with the incredible Seth Godin on Marie Forleo’s Marie TV show on her website. Seth Godin is one of my absolute favorite bloggers for a very particular reason: he blogs every day and even when his blogs are one sentence long he almost always has something thought-provoking to say.

Hearing Seth talk in this interview was quite amazing, as he went more in depth on his philosophies on life and blogging than I’d heard before- or maybe I’d seen him write these things before, but it always helps me to hear brilliant people share insights once again, especially in a different format.

One of the things Seth said that stuck out at me was his solution to writer’s block. Marie asked him how he blogs every day without running out of topics and thoughts to write about and he said that he writes how he talks, and that works because no one ever gets talkers block.

Interesting! I guess it’s true that -unless you’re feeling social phobia when you’re talking in public- you don’t really get talkers block. If you were talking to your best friend, you probably wouldn’t get talker’s block. I definitely love the way writers sound when they write the way they talk- there’s an honesty and a rawness to that kind of writing that makers me feel closer to the author.

Here’s a link to the absolutely brilliant interview, filled with many words of wisdom including Seth’s advice about how finding your ‘true calling’ is ultimately bullshit, and how you shouldn’t wait around. I’m actually going to listen to the interview again tomorrow and take notes.

Hope you enjoy!

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A Beautiful Frustum In Your Thirties

Seth Godin, one of my favorite business bloggers, recently wrote a blog about pyramids without a top. In geometry, these types of shapes are called frustums.

We spend our career lives trying to get to the top of our pyramid- we want to be the career elite, the famous, the special, the 1%. And why not? Fantastic career success is a big and beautiful possibility.

However, with the advent of the digital age, more and more of us will find it easier than ever to get our work out there in some form, but harder and harder to gain the fame and well-known 1% type of success (because everyone else is getting their work out too). For example, it’s easier than ever for anyone to publish a book all by themselves, but now there are more books available than ever before. Instead of waiting to get a book published, you can publish your book and sell it on Amazon or multiple other internet sources completely free. You can do the same with music and web tv (webisodes)- you can quickly and easily get your music or webseries online and direct to users all by yourself and for almost no cost.

Will you be the next Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga? The next Stephen King or Tina Fey? Maybe. Maybe not. But can you be a success and make good money and have a powerful, impactful, positive life without being a headliner like the above names? Absolutely.

The hard part isn’t in being in a frustum of an industry- where there’s no real peak, just more and more opportunity for entry- the hard part is in accepting the frustum and knowing you can still make a great life. There’s lots of room in frustums for lots of people to be successes- it’s just a different kind of success.

Even when you’re not well-known or at what you think is the peak of your career pyramid, you can still be a pretty damn good school teacher or time-share seller or yoga instructor or animal shelter manager. You can write amazingly good books or make insanely gorgeous music and get it all out into the world easier than ever because the base of the frustum is wider than ever. If you can accept this shapeshifted new world change, you may just realize that you’re more successful (and happier) than you ever dreamed you could be.

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