Hello and welcome to my free audio series, 5 lies that are keeping you from writing your book. This is lie number one, and the lie is, I don't have enough time. Well, let's think about this for a second. Do you currently have enough time to spend 8 hours a day writing? Probably not. And that's okay. That's actually an advantage. Because often when we give ourselves 8 hours or we think we need more time than we actually do, we fill that time with more fear. So having less time is a bit of an advantage here. All you really need to do to write a book is have consistent time, whether that is one day a week that you can give this, and I'm not saying one day the full day, I'm saying one hour, one day a week, or 2 days a week, for an hour, or 3 days a week for 30 minutes. The real thing here is not time. Most people do have the time because if you audit your time correctly, you'll see that maybe you're spending it, you know, on on your phone or watching things or just not using your time and directing it in the place that you want to prioritize. Usually what we're saying when we say we don't have enough time is maybe we don't feel we have enough creative capacity because if you're working like a 9 to 5 or a demanding job or you're already doing something creative with your time, The feeling isn't you don't have enough time. The feeling is your creative capacity is perhaps at its limit. So you need to figure out, if you truly, truly, truly want to write a book, You need to figure out when is your creative capacity freer than normal? Is it a certain time of the day? Is it a certain day of the week? If you want to give it a Sunday, for example, maybe, maybe it sounds really great to allot time on a Sunday morning or a Sunday afternoon, to take an hour or 2 at a coffee shop or, you know, with the door closed in your office or in your bedroom or something, to allot that time, because what you really need isn't less time or more time. You need a true commitment, like a true timing your schedule, that you're gonna allot to this thing that matters to you because, I mean, chances are the time is not going to come to you, uh, in any way until you prioritize it. And so it needs to become a priority in your mind and, you know, even I'm sure there are people listening to this that have kids or, you know, have a demanding job or they do, obviously they're doing other things. Writing isn't their full time thing. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible, and it doesn't mean that the only way you're ever going to write a book is if you have 8 hours a day to devote to it. Most people that write books don't do that. I, one of them. I have never, I don't think I've ever, ever spent 8 hours riding. Ever. And I've finished multiple books, multiple. I've written, you know, multiple 100000 word manuscripts. I have written things that I won't ever even publish. That's how much I've written. And most of that was done in an hour or 2 a day when I had other things going on. It's never been that all I do is right. And I don't want all I do is right. And so I think that, unfortunately, this idea of I don't have the time. It's also a sort of romanticizing of the life of a writer, of, you know, you steal away to the woods and you're in a cabin and that's all you do is write. I mean, I'll tell you right now, one time I worked on a revision for a book proposal, a book proposal. Yes. And I did go to Big Bear, which is a mountain town here in California. And I was the least productive. I've ever been. So that kind of romanticizing of what it means to be a real writer, capital R, capital W, is the one thing that's really preventing you from just writing, you know, and doing the thing. Um, because, you know, if you're more, I guess, enamored with the idea of what it means to be a writer or whatever writer looks like on social media or, you know, that kind of just idealized version, then, yeah, you don't have enough time because the idealized version is 8 hours a day to sit in your pajamas and drink cold brew and do nothing but write. Most people are just not doing that. Even the writers you look up to are not doing that for the most part because they have other things. There's other things that go into a life that aren't just writing. That's just not really. It just doesn't make sense. And so when I hear people say, I don't have enough time, I think, well, then how much time do you think you need? That's the real question that you have to tease out. How much time do you really think that you need? And a lot of times the, I don't have enough time, is a delay tactic. It a fear of getting started. It's a fear of, you know, not being good enough and what's, you know, what I talk about in the write that book course. especially my, it's my, it's my audio course on getting that 1st draft finished. Um, what I talk about is, uh, you know, often what happens is we sit down to write and there's a big gap between our taste, you know, I mean, most people they want to write because they love reading. And so, you know, your book, your 1st writings are never going to sound or feel like a finished published book because that finished published book has probably gone through multiple, multiple rounds of revisions and changes, gone through the hands of several different people, not just the actual author. Um, and so that's that's really what happens, is you're, it's less about the time and it's more about the fact that when you sit down and you're starting something new, even though you have great taste, and you, you know, do have writing ability. What happens is it just doesn't come out as flowing as you expect it to, and as you think it should. And so you get, um, sort of scared and you get down on yourself and there's doubt that comes up. And that's why having a regular writing practice of any kind is so helpful because if you put that time in your calendar, red pen, you know, don't skip, no, you know, you have to do this, even if it's one hour per week. And you just commit to that. Those feelings will subside as you stay consistent in the writing practice, um, because what happens is often you will write, and it'll just not match up with what you expect, and it won't flow the way that you expect, and you get a little like gun shy, and you start thinking like, what am I doing? This is foolish. And the thing is, is that, Writing a book or writing anything or doing anything creative is kind of foolish. Like, who needs it? It's like, I mean, you look down, you look at like 72,000 books come out every Tuesday. Literally every Tuesday, and that's in traditional publishing. And so it does seem like a futile, silly prospect, but the thing is, is that ultimately, you write because you're called to write. You you want to write a book, then you're qualified to write the book. You know, I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to go in the direction that you think it's going to go. You don't know what's going to happen down the line. But if this is something that calls to you, The process of doing it is the important part. That is the part worth doing. Because the time is going to pass anyway, you know? So if you say, oh, it's gonna, if I only have X amount of time per week, it's gonna take me like a year to write a book. Well, the year is going to pass anyway. It, it will, the, the time, time doesn't slow down for you. So the year is going to pass anyway. Would you rather in a year have written the book? and have a draft and have those words every single week, even if it's an hour a week. Piling up and you're seeing progress. Or would you rather that time go by and in a year you're still going, oh, well, I wish I had written the book. Because what that's what's going to happen if you wait a year and you think it's too much time, the only thing that will probably be true, the only thing that you could probably rely on, is you're going to go, I wish I had started a year ago. Because then I, the time will have passed and you would have a year's worth of writing. And I also think that the sneaky thing about making your goals kind of small in the beginning, basically like, maybe you say an hour a week, is that once you get used to that and that starts feeling really good, and you're doing that so consistently, you get the confidence to keep up that momentum, and so you can start adding more time, and suddenly your schedule opens up more. And you get excited and you want to add another day to that and maybe another day and suddenly it's just working. That's how I got started on a regular writing practice. It started with one hour, one day a week, and now it's completely, I mean, I can write any time of day, anytime, I don't need to be inspired. I don't need something to hit me like a lightning bolt. If I need to sit down and write, I can write anytime anywhere. And that's because I built that muscle up. So I think when you're telling yourself, I don't have enough time, Maybe for some of you, it could genuinely be true that there's just not even an hour to squeeze out in the week. I think that's probably pretty rare. Because there's there's always time. There's always time for something that's important. What's hard is carving that time out and not letting yourself get distracted by, you know, someone wants to go to lunch or someone, you know, there's a new show on or there's the phone to look at and there's TikTok and, you know, if you do an audit of your time, you're probably going to see that some of it is being used in other directions, which is totally fine. But it's all about if you actually want to do this and prioritize this, you will make the time and you will be a different person. Even if you spend an entire year just writing once a week, one hour a week, if you commit to that and do it as much as possible, and you stay as consistent as possible. That will not just improve, you will not just improve as a writer, you will improve in your life in general because that consistency is so valuable. So, think about it. All right. Thanks for listening.