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The First Step to Being an Entertaining Storyteller
What’s the first step to becoming an entertaining storyteller?
In a recent ZOE Nutrition podcast, James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, suggests the key to starting a new behavior, like telling entertaining stories, is doing four things:
- Make the cue to the behavior OBVIOUS.
- Make the behavior more ATTRACTIVE.
- Make the behavior EASY.
- Make the behavior SATISFYING.
But what’s the FIRST step?
It’s mastering the art of showing up.
That’s it.
What does that look like?
He shared an interesting story in the section where they were talking about making the behavior easy.
START
Let me give you two examples that’ll probably help clarify. So the first one this is just a really simple tactic, a very actionable thing, that you can use for building better habits. I call it the two-minute rule, and it just says take whatever habit you’re trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes 2 minutes or less to do.
So read 30 books a year becomes read one page. Do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat.
Now sometimes people resist that a little bit because they’re like, okay buddy, you know I know the real goal is not to just take my yoga mat out. I know I’m actually trying to do the workout, so this is some kind of trick, and if I know it’s a trick, then why would I fall for it?
I have this reader his name is Mitch. I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He lost over 100 pounds. So what is that? 40 or 50 kilos? And he kept it off for more than a decade. And he had this strange little rule for himself where he first started going to the gym, and for the first like 6 weeks he wasn’t allowed to stay for longer than 5 minutes.
So he would get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car, and drive home, and it sounds ridiculous. You know? It sounds silly. It’s obviously not going to get the guy the results that he wants, but what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up.
He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for 5 minutes, and this is a pretty deep truth about habits. Which is that a habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can scale it up and turn it into something more. You need to standardize before you optimize.
And so the two-minute rule kind of helps push back against that perfectionist tendency that we have sometimes, or against that tendency to try to do too much, and encourages you to master the art of just showing up.
END
That’s the answer!
If we want to be entertaining storytellers, the first, most powerful identity we can adopt is being the creative who shows up every day to work on his or her entertainment. Or maybe it’s five days a week. Or six days, four days, whatever your number is.
The first identity is that I’m the kind of creative that shows up to work. This awesome work of entertainment.
So what’s a two-minute behavior that might go along with that?
Here’s mine. After I come back from weighing myself in the morning, I set my writing session timer, open my writing document, read a bit of what I wrote in the previous session, and identify the task for this session.
That’s it. Nothing more.
That’s showing up.
If I show up and do that, I’ve shown up.
If, for some reason, I miss showing up. I identify the next slot in that day to get it done.
I can master all the other parts of writing entertainment later. But I must master the art of SHOWING UP first.
So tell yourself you’re the kind of creative who shows up to write entertainment every day.
Make that your identity. You can expand that identity later. But let’s start here.
Write your two-minute behavior. Get specific on the time and action.
Then be like Mitch. Show up and celebrate showing up.
And if, like Mitch, it takes you six weeks to master the art of showing up, then it takes six weeks. Big whoop.
Writing fiction is a long-haul game. That means the name of this game is playing the game until you win the game. And to do that you first have to master the art of showing up.
This is the key. When you master this, everything else is possible.
“I am the kind of creative who shows up every day to create.”
Tell yourself that. Repeat it when brushing your teeth. Make that your identity. Be that guy.
If you have a two-minute action for showing up, share it.
If you don’t have one yet, identify one and share it. And if your action doesn’t work? No biggie. Act like a scientist and tweak it until it does.
NOTES
ZOE Nutrition podcast with James Clear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcdzK8BOfBY or https://zoe.com/learn/podcast-how-to-master-healthy-eating
Baen interview about Gun Runner
A WHOLE HEAP OF SF ACTION coming your way this Tuesday!
That’s the date Gun Runner, my collaboration with Larry Correia, will be released.
In conjunction with that Baen recently interviewed us about the book.
Catch the interview here.
Good Stuff! Atomic Habits, Let Me Finish, a Political Taxonomy
Habits are one of the most powerful forces in our lives. If we could consciously harness them, there’s no telling what we can do.
The problem is that we keep going about it all wrong.
We keep trying to motivate ourselves into behavior change. Sometimes motivation works, but motivation is fickle. And more often than not it leaves us hanging just when we need it the most.
So are we doomed?
No.
Because motivation is just one of four parts of creating habits. And it’s not even the most important one.
What are these other parts? How do you harness them?
Well, that’s the subject of Atomic Habits by James Clear.
And one of the neat things is that Clear reveals that tiny changes can lead to remarkable results. No Herculean efforts. No getting yourself amped up. Something else that’s much easier to do and much more effective.
The book’s been a New York Times bestseller.
An Amazon bestseller.
It’s been on the USA Today bestseller list for twenty-two weeks.
If you want to build some good habits, if you want to stop some bad ones, if you want to make any behavior in yourself or others more likely, let me recommend you find out what Clear has discovered in his research and give it a try. I think you’ll be happy you did.
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Chris Christie, the two-term governor of New Jersey, is an interesting figure.
He was a federal prosecutor who cleaned up a ton of government corruption in New Jersey.
And then he became governor. He might have come and gone like hundreds of governors, but a video went viral, showing his direct, in-your-face politics.
Many begged him to run in the 2012 presidential election, including a whole bunch of billionaires.
He turned them down. Said he wasn’t ready. You’ve got to admire someone who does that.
Then he did run in the 2016 election, but failed to get the attention and votes he might have because Trump was sucking all the media out of the room. And that might have ended it. But Christie dropped out of the race and was the first to endorse Trump, who’d been a long-time friend.
Trump almost picked him for vice president. The choice ended up being between Christie and Pence. Ultimately, he chose Pence and asked Christie to create the transition plan.
Christie spent six months with a whole team of people creating that plan. It was a plan that would have helped Trump avoid so many disasters in appointments and policy during his first two hundred days. But when it was finished, the Trump team decided to throw it away.
Why? What was going on?
Christie is unlike Trump in many, many ways. Why would he support him?
Christie reveals all and much more in Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics.
In the book he sets the record straight about his tenure as a corruption-fighting prosecutor and a Republican running a Democratic state, as well as what really happened on the 2016 campaign trail and inside Trump Tower. It’s a fascinating book that gives insights into the Trump team, Trump himself, and Christ Christie who I think would have made a terrific president.
If you’re interested in politics, larger-than-life figures, and a view from the inside, I think you’ll love this book.
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In less than three minutes, you can amaze your friends, cut through a lot of political blather, and clearly assess what’s being proposed over the next eighteen months as the presidential campaign heats up.
How?
By understanding the simple taxonomy below.
Every day folks in the media make accusations and claims about socialism, Sweden, Venezuela, capitalism, and the United States. Unfortunately, a lot of the time it’s clear they’re a bit muddled. So let’s cut through the confusion.
Whether you’re an independent, Democrat, or Republican, you’ll want to know these three terms.
SOCIALISM
The state owns and directs huge portions of the economy. The government in these schemes is the old-fashioned Soviet, Mao, and Nazi style dictatorships.
These types of socialists did so much good in the 20th century. No other scheme was better at piling up dead bodies. Millions and millions of them.
An interesting tidbit. Did you know that “Nazi” is the abbreviation in German of “Nationalsozialistische”? That word means “National Socialist”. It comes from the name of Hitler’s political party, the “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” or “Nationalsozialistische der Deutsche Arbeiters Partei.”
Nobody running for president today is advocating for this type of government.
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM
The state owns and directs huge portions of the economy. The government in these schemes is supposed to be democratic, which means you should be able to vote the bums out and put other bums in. Venezuela supposedly uses this model, although some wonder if it is a true democracy or a sham one.
For those who like socialism, this is supposed to be the good way of doing it as opposed to the bad way of the old fashioned authoritarians. I will let you determine whether the “good” scheme actually leads to any better economic outcomes than the “bad” one.
SOCIAL DEMOCRACY
You rely on lots and lots and lots of capitalism (private ownership and direction of companies in a free market) to fund government social programs. The funding is done via high tax rates. You have elections and can vote the bums out and put other bums in. This is Sweden.
A lot of people in the current presidential race are advocating for this type of government. Although, if they say that any system that allows billionaires to exist is immoral, you will need to scrutinize that candidate carefully because Sweden’s system allows billionaires. It may be that candidate actually wants some form of democratic socialism.
One last point. If you think about it, the United States and Sweden are similar types of governments. They’re on the same continuum. The difference is that the United States is simply much less of a welfare state than Sweden is.
There you have it. Three terms you are going to hear a million times over the next eighteen months.
Amaze your friends by actually knowing what they mean.
Be proud of your knowledge.
And use it to carefully consider the candidates.
PDF of “Make ‘Em Beg For More”
I had a terrific time preparing this for the 2020 StoryMakers conference. A number of people in the session wanted the slides. Here they are.
If you have questions, feel free to ask them in the comments or click the contact link above and send me an email directly.
Good luck!
All you need is a little beating and robbery
Mrs. Brown, my wife, teaches language arts for the 7th and 8th grades as well as reading comprehension. She’s big on reading. She wants to provide every opportunity for kids to not only get good at it, but also learn to love it.
And so her walls are lined with bookshelves full of awesome books teens love. She reads the first chapters of books to her classes to let them sample various stories. She features their book reports. She has them paste the covers of the books they’ve read on pages displayed around the classroom. And the school’s awesome librarian supports with her own programs.
The 7th and 8th grade students at Rich Middle School are marinated in a big celebration of reading.
In Mrs. Brown’s class, it’s fairly straight forward to get an A on reading, which is a huge part of your grade—all you’ve got to do is read.
But how much reading do they need to do? How do you track it? And what books should they read?
Check this out.
First, she tests each student to see what his or her reading speed is.
Next, she takes the number of hours they’re supposed to be reading each week for homework (I think it’s 2 or 2.5), then does the math to get a feasible reading word count for the trimester for each student. She may adjust it a bit, depending on the student’s ability.
Third, she presents that number to the student, and the two of them set a word count goal for the trimester. Talk about an individualized goal.
If you want to get an A in reading, all you have to do is reach that word count goal.
How do you know how many words a book has?
The Accelerated Reader program provides that information.
But how does she know that they’ve read the books?
She uses the Accelerated Reader tests. And if there isn’t one, the student can write a report.
And what books do the students read?
Any dang book they like.
I love this. The kids get to select their own books and just read, read, read.
Another part of this is that she pings each student once a week to ask them what book they’re reading, what page they’re on, and what they think of the book. This weekly check-in provides the more frequent accountability students of that age need.
Yesterday, she received this report from one of her 8th grade boys who is reading Prey, the first book in The Drovers series.
Oh, yeah.
I’ll take that any day (grin).
Rock on, budding reader.
Billenkoek
So I lived for almost two years in the Netherlands and Belgium and learned the Dutch language, which is full of delights. Today’s delight is billenkoek.Now koek means cake. A koekje (small cake) is a cookie. Boterkoek is butter cake, this delicious sweet, to-die-for Dutch version of shortbread.
So what does billen mean?
Back in the day when I’d visit various Dutchies (the people, not political territories), they’d always ask if I was thirsty. And very frequently when I’d ask for water, someone would say, “Water? The frogs wash their billen in that.”
Billen means bum as in behind, butt, buttocks. Bil is singular, one half of the full billen, if you will.
So what do you think a billenkoek is?
No, not that.
It’s a spanking.
“Honey, you’ll clean the dishes, or you’re going to get a little bum cake. What will it be?”
Gotta love the Dutch.