An Unbeatable Combination for Success

Recently, in a class I’m taking, my teacher took a vote: “How many people begin writing something and don’t finish it?” To my surprise a lot of people raised their hands.

I’m not claiming to have a secret or claiming I’m special. If anything, I tend to sway the opposite direction. I’m someone who waits for the muse to whisper in my ear.

In my experience, once I have an idea it harasses me. It’s almost exhausting because the task of putting it all on paper is daunting. By daunting I mean that I know I’m going to lie in bed wanting to sleep, but my muse happens to be a night owl. Her favorite time to talk is when my head hits the pillow and then she’s up and running, twirling my head in scenes, connecting dots, observing characters, throwing me lines.

Finally I must get out of bed and jot down notes because I will forget the smallest jems if I do not. This happens multiple times during the course of “going to bed.”

When one of my best friends and I lived in Costa Rica one summer, we slept with our beds covered in mosquito netting so we didn’t get bit by any of the wonderful, and possibly deadly, insects living there. Quickly enough I learned to sleep with a flashlight, a pen, and scraps of paper so when I’d jolt awake groggily with words humming in my head I could write down a few wobbly sentences and go back to sleep, hoping they seemed as brilliant in the morning as they felt right then.

My teacher tell us, “There are no bad ideas, just bad execution,” and I think about a T-Shirt I recently saw that had a picture of King Henry the 8th and said, “It’s all in the execution.”

The famous Napoleon Hill said: “Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success.”

At a writers conference I attended, one of the authors spoke about persistence, because putting material out to literary agents can be difficult.

I’ve never met one person that has told me, “Oh heck yeah. I love rejection. It’s the best.”

The author told the group that, it isn’t always the most talented that get published (because face it there’s a lot of talent in the world- the world is huge), it’s the people who do not give up.

So what does this mean? Well it means two things to me.

#1. I might want to revisit my definition of rejection.

Everyone can thank Thomas Edison for the invention of the practical incandescent, electric light, but did you know that he “failed” 10,000 times before he discovered the commercial light that made him famous. In an interview, someone asked him how he felt about his failing all those times and he replied,

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

According to Thomas Edison, each “failure” is just an opportunity to say, “Ok well that didn’t work, but based on what I learned, what can I try next?”

#2. Persistence is a must.

In our culture today we are technologically trained to have a 20 second attention span and multitask like crazy lab rats. Being consistent is HUGE. To use a metaphor it would be like gung-ho pushing a heavy rock halfway up a hill on Monday and then taking the rest of the week off to sunbathe at the beach, OR pushing inch by inch, day by day, and staying on the hill so the rock doesn’t roll back down.

People, did we learn nothing from Aesops’s Fables? The tortoise and the hare? Slow and steady wins the race? Consistency is key.

All this reminds me that, just because my muse likes to whisper sweet nothings in the midnight hour, I must set a schedule and my writing schedule like it’s important. It’s like it’s a relationship that I need to be there for and nurture healthy habits so it can grow. No normal person has a partner that they leave in the closet and take out when the moment strikes them.

Anyone in a relationship with anyone can attest to the fact that to form a relationship you must give energy to it. My best friends, in my inner circle, are there because we have both agreed to invest time and energy into our friendships. We show up, share, laugh, teach, learn, and grow. And so must it be with my writing, a commitment to a relationship, saying yes to showing up and giving it my best on a consistent basis.

DO start now and DO work with what you have. If your time constraints are such that you only have two hours a week, be consistent with those two hours. I once heard of a woman who wrote and entire book during the fifteen-minute increments her baby was napping. (Now that’s commitment).