When we first start writing, we know we're hopeless.
However, in time, we all get to the stage where we're average. What does it take to become outstanding and then an absolute maestro in writing?
The answer doesn't lie in “practice, practice, practice”. Instead, it's something as mundane as a combination of “structure” and “confidence”. But even as you try to get better, your brain won't let you progress. Why does all of this happen, and how do you get out of this rut?
Let's find out in this article.
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Re-release: Why We Struggle With Writing Well (And How Your Brain Is Trying to Drive You Crazy)
Original: Why We Struggle With Writing Well (And How Your Brain Is Trying to Drive You Crazy)
(Note: This is an unedited transcript)
Pretty much all my life I've taken colour photographs.
I mean, black and white didn't exist. People didn't want to be part of black and white anymore because color was everything. At first I started out with a camera and then we got iPhones that got better and better and better to the point where a camera seemed just too much luggage, too much stuff to just walk around a city or a place and take pictures in color.
One day I discovered that you could take pictures on the iPhone, you could seed in black and white and you could take pictures on black and white. And that's where my fascination with black and white or monochromas you call it. That's where you begin. It was in Vietnam and I took lots of color pictures but just these few black and whites.
And then we have this whole era where I've taken about 20,000 to 30,000 black and white pictures in a year and a half.
And my struggle now is color, which is totally bizarre and ironic, but I'm struggling every time I take a color picture. It doesn't seem to have the same effect. I don't know what it is and probably I'll figure it out along the way.
But that's kind of what today's podcast is about. It's about this struggle that we have and every single time that you and I have gone through it. We recognize that we're at this starting point and the struggle seems almost endless.
This is the kind of feeling that I had when I started writing articles and then later wait, let me not tell you that story because that's what the podcast is about. It's about the struggling writing and as usual we will cover three parts.
Let me start out with the first part and this is the one I'm most excited about, the most passionate about and that is that a skill like writing, I think all skills are but I think a skill like writing is doable. And here's what doable actually means.
If you would draw a line from left to right and then on the left hand side you would put hopeless.
That's kind of where we all are. We start out with hopeless and then on the extreme right-hand side is whatever genius, amazing, whatever. And people usually go from hopeless to average in about three months. Why three months? Because article writing has a particular structure. You have to fill in blanks as it were. Everything that you do, you have to fill in blanks.
But there are a whole bunch of things things that you have to learn. And it takes about three months for your brain to figure out, “Oh, I've done this. I'm confident with this. I'm going to move to the next thing. Confidence with that. A plus B, B plus C, A plus B plus C.”
And you learn, like that in layers.
And in about three months, you go from hopeless to average. You can put everything together. You can't make it sing and dance, but it's average. It's a whole lot better than hopeless. What gets you past that state of hopelessness is when you're not thinking about the structure all the time.
For instance, if I were writing this article, I would not be thinking about it. I would know what comes next. Just like you do with sentences. You're just speaking to somebody and you're just rattling out sentence after sentence. you're not necessarily thinking about it, because you know the structure of the language.
And when you're thinking about it, that takes a lot of time, because you have to construct it somehow. You have to slow down to construct it to make sure it's right. But when you're talking like I'm talking right now, I can go really fast and you can understand everything.
So you can understand the structure, I can understand what I'm saying in structure.
And I know everything's right, and you know that everything's right as well. The reason why it takes about three months is because the brain is working all this out. It's going A plus B, A plus B plus C, A plus B plus C, or I don't know D plus A plus C. But it's doing all of it to the point where you're not thinking about it that much.
And there is another barrier, a hiccup, if you want to call it. Even when we become very good, when we become outstanding at writing, we can't sense the change that we've undergone. That metamorphosis, that change was too quick. So let's say you didn't take three months, but you took one month, you will not think that you're writing is so good.
Even though it might be excellent, you might have gone from hopeless to average average to very good, but you brain won't let you think like that because it goes, you were supposed to put in all the hard work.
You were supposed to spend all of those thousands of hours to get really good at it.
And if you get there in one month or two months or even three months, then well you've spent a lot of your time being hopeless so that jump is too quick and you can't reconcile. Your brain doesn't reconcile. Our brain refuses to cooperate and it lets us think that we're not outstanding. It thinks that we're not good at the skill. So we look over our shoulders if someone's going to tap us and go, “Oh no, not you, that was one good article.
You're not writing good articles. So the core of article writing or anything for that matter is structure, but a bigger factor, way bigger than the skill itself is confidence.
And we can only understand this level of confidence by looking at what happens when someone loses confidence. Think of a sports person, any sports star that you know, any athlete. And you would say they've spent all the time, they've gained all the confidence, they've gained all the skills, they've won a few gold medals, whatever. And then they lose form.
Now they have the skill, they have the best coaches, they have just one job to do that is to run that race or play their game, but they struggle because they have lost confidence. They haven't lost skill, the skill is still there, they have lost confidence.
That can go for one month, two month, six months, they have lost confidence.
And then when the confidence comes back, and it doesn't come back magically, it has to be worked with. So they come back. That's when they're back again on the race track. That's when they're winning everything. So confidence and structure both have to work in tandem. Right as block is somewhat like that. It is, I don't have enough structure, and I don't have enough confidence.
So yes, I'm going to stay, I'm going to hover around the hopeless to average for a very long time. Right now, you feel how you feel because both structure and confidence need a boost. both need to work in tandem. This isn't about practice. This isn't about what people tell you.
Oh, you should practice practice practice.
What are you practicing? You don't have the blocks. You don't have the Lego blocks. You're not going to build the structure. So there is no question about practice. There is no need to do any hard work. You have to have the structure.
Once you have the the structure once you have the confidence, it automatically comes together. It's at this point when you're not thinking about it, that you go from hopeless to average average to very good.
And when you get to very good, you can probably stay there for a very, very, very long time. Why? Well, we'll explain that in the second bit, and that is the gap. gap is the second problem. Let's find out how the gap works.
When we compare ourselves with others we do so with the best in the field. When we aspire to become great in music we don't say I want to become like daddy or mommy.
That's what a young child with a limited view of the world would say.
Once we have enough exposure, we say, “I want to become a famous conductor like Alondra de la Parra.” “I want to be as good as Beyoncé or Jay-Z.” We don't look at the person just in front of us. We look at the far end. That's what I did as well.
In my world, I wanted to become a copywriter. But before I became a copywriter I was a cartoonist and I wasn't looking at my friend's drawing cartoons I wasn't looking at cartoonists who I knew No, I was looking at the comic strips like Haggah the horrible or the far side or Calvin and Hobbs.
I was looking at the best in the field.
That's what I wanted to become. When I became a copywriter or when I inspired to become a copywriter I went to the second hand bookstore and bought some books and there was David Ogilvy And I wanted to be David Ogilvy.
I didn't want to be all those steps from where I was, which was pretty hopeless, and I didn't want to take those steps. Nobody wants to take a journey of 1,000 miles.You want to go from hopeless to whatever happened to Cinderella straight away. When we were very young, we aspire in stages. We started with Daddy, Mommy, Teacher, friend.
But very soon, our net-wide ends and we go regional, national, and finally to the top.
If we take that scale of daddy, mommy teacher, then we're on the scale of hopeless average, or maybe we'll get to outstanding. But at the top of the scale, those people seem almost mystical at using their skills. They, those people, have done so much for so long that they're in the game for a reason that no one can understand.
They don't need the money, they don't need the fame. They're solving a problem for the sake of solving it. And so we have this massive gap. This gap is best demonstrated with the concept of the solar system.
The goal should be to get from Venus to Earth to Mars, not a huge gap, but instead we keep comparing ourselves with the people from Jupiter.And the distance between Earth and Jupiter is humongous. I mean, we can get to Mars, it's a challenge, but we can get there to Jupiter takes forever.
And these people from Jupiter, these are the kind of people that we want to be.
They have just been playing the game for a long time and they have reached the stage where their ability is second nature, where they aren't thinking anymore, they aren't thinking of the structure or anything. They seem to be in a perpetual state of flow or greatness and we are quite a distance away from that level of mastery.
So the goal should be whether it's writing a dancing or singing or anything that you're doing, it should be to go from hopeless to average. That takes about three months and then from average to quite good or outstanding and that can take another three months and other six months it all depends on what's happening around you how often you write, how much your work gets corrected, how much you put yourself out there, how much feedback you get, that all depends.
But there's a good chance that you can go from hopeless to pretty much outstanding in a year and a half. thousands of hours, just a few hundred hours. And this takes us to our third part. We started out with the factor that you're writing, or any skill is doable.
You have to understand what doable is, which is the stage after average, hopeless average doable.
And doable sounds very average, but it's actually outstanding. It's really good. People look at it and go, “Oh, wow, I didn't know that you were so good.” The second thing is this big gap that we never seem to figure out. We don't figure out that there is this huge gap between Mars and Jupiter.
So we can jump planets, but Jupiter, that's going to take a lot of time. And not all of us want to get there anyway, so it doesn't matter. I mean, if you're outstanding at five, six things, it's much better than being one Jupiter.
It's much better trying to get to five or six planets close by then one Jupiter, which is going to take the rest of your life and you don't know whether you'll get there. That's what we've covered so far.
The third thing is understanding that you're always changing languages, both Literally and sometimes metaphorically, big woods. Let's find out what it's about. Language is usually referred to when we go from saying English to Spanish or Spanish to English. We are changing tracks as it were.
However, even if you write in whatever your mother tongue is, whatever your first language is, let's say it's English, you're still getting the feeling of changing languages because what you're doing is your changing media or the size of the media.
Let me explain. When I started, I was writing in English, but my articles were just about 500 words. Then in time, I could write over hundred words but not consistently. If I stopped the way, lost confidence then I could struggle for months.
But at one point I was able to write for several months.
It was just easy. And then for no particular reason my confidence disappeared. Just their one day not there the other day. I think it was because I stopped reading, it was because I stopped trying to do stuff and not enough Now preparation not enough outlining, just went out of the window.
Luckily I'd written quite a few articles by then and so we would just re-running those articles for a while. Months passed before I could get the confidence back and it came back after a lot of reading answering questions, lots of that kind of thing. But this chaos did not occur at the start of my writing career. it was almost 7 to 8 years later.
I'm writing, writing, writing, getting better, going from hopeless, going to average, going to whatever, and then suddenly it's gone. But if you have the structure, you can start off from a lower level and then get back again.
However, when I moved to podcast in 2014, I had to write scripts that were 20 to 30 minutes. Now, we speak about six words a second, so that's about 3,000 words in 20 to 30 minutes.
And the challenge of jumping from 800 to 3000 words that threw me into a loop.
It took not just one month or six months or nine months but two whole years before I was comfortable. And then one day I turned to my wife right now and I said, “I can do this podcast stuff in my sleep. I can do this script in my sleep.”
I was exaggerating of course, but it was easy. The point that I'm making here is I had the capability, the structure and the confidence to get to that level every time. I ran into a rough patch in 2022, but other than that, I've been able to write consistently.
So the point here is that working things out for yourself is fine, but it's a pain in the bum and most times. Jumping from one medium to another is like moving to a different language.
There is always going to be that adjustment period.
How long will it take you to be confident in that new medium. So you've been writing five hundred words and you've got to eight hundred words that's like a new language. Eight hundred two a thousand that's a new language.
You somehow have to figure out how long it's going to take and sometimes it could take three months and if it's a really big leap like I did with podcasts from eight hundred to three thousand words, well that took me two years before I could go, I can do this every day, any day. But it's a lot worse if you're writing in a language which is not your first language.
Now you've added a whole level of difficulty.
So my suggestion is to figure out, are you writing well rather than are you writing well in English or are you writing well in Spanish? And the way to do that is to write the article in your mother tongue in your first language.
And when you show it to people, do they say, “Oh wow, this reads really well?” When you finish that article, do you feel confident? Maybe not super confident, but confident enough.
If both of those parameters are met structure and confidence, then we know it's just the matter of learning outright in another language or to expand from 500 to 800, 800 to 3000 and so on.
When we look at learning any skill, we are very quick to remember the things that were told to us, which is, you know, good at this. You have weaknesses and strengths and this is not your strength. that's your weakness.
Believe me, it's rubbish.
If you go back in time and you look at all the things that people did, well, they were all good at sword fighting and using bows and arrows. None of us can do that now. We would call it a weakness. But is it a weakness?
It's just something that you do. It's just that everything you do, whether it's learning to shoot a bone or use the sword and go into battle, there's a structure to it, there's the confidence hurt and every battle is different, a big battle is different from the small battle.
So it's jumping phases and getting comfortable with those situations and really that's what this wordcast is about. It is understanding that things are doable, that you're going to be hopeless for a while, months later you can be pretty average and then from there to outstanding doesn't take as much time as you think but you brain won't let you do that.
So you have to show to other people get their feedback and in general if you tell people that this is what you're going through, they're kind of them we think. It's more important to rely on their kindness and to get through that blockage that you're feeling right now and that gets you to that part of fluency.
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