I’m a professional writer. I work for blogs and the occasional magazine, and in the past I’ve written for clients who wanted website copy. My fiction has also been published, including a couple of competition prizes. Small successes, perhaps; but even these wouldn’t have happened without a strong level of writing confidence.

Since I write for a number of blogs, I often get questions from would-be writers. Something which crops up frequently is a lack of confidence. Many (surprisingly good) writers never send pieces to an editor, or agonise over every post they write on their own blog.

It doesn’t need to be that way. Good writing isn’t the preserve of a few lucky individuals – after all, none of us were born able to write! And, in the 21^st century, many stifling grammatical “rules” no longer apply. You’re free to write in your own voice and your own style … and you can enjoy it. Here’s how:

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Before I began to write, I didn’t fully understand the effects of the past on the present.  Instead, for years, the past appeared in my mind’s eye like faded black-and-white photographs, in which no one, especially me, seemed to be fully alive.

Growing up, I lived a double life.  On the face of it, we seemed like a normal, happy family:  My father had an important career.  We lived in nice houses and wore pretty clothes.  But all this seeming perfection was a veneer, masking the reality that my father sexually molested me, a reality never spoken aloud.

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Image courtesy of Hacksomia

Ahh, motivation hacks!

If you’re anything like me, you have tried dozens of motivation hacks in your life, with varying degrees of success. (Ever tried the one of spinning a dead cat around your head thirteen times in a graveyard at midnight during full moon? No? Weird, I thought everybody knew that one…)

Thankfully, your search is now over! You have reached Vlad’s Ultimate Motivation Hack Formula! (I was going to throw in a few other fancy words, like “passion” and “synergy”, but if I ever decided to trademark it, the paperwork would kill me.)

I’m not just going to throw a simple technique at you. Oh no. We’re going to dig deeper into the STRATEGY of motivation. And from there, I will help you build the ultimate Motivation Hack that works for YOU personally!

Okay, ready?

Why do you need a motivation hack anyway?

Let’s face it. If you’re looking for a motivation hack, that means there’s something you feel you HAVE TO do, or SHOULD DO, but you don’t feel like doing it.

Pause for a moment and think about it. It’s so obvious you probably never even considered it. And yet it holds the key to motivation.

When I was a kid I used to jump out of bed at 6 am on the weekend, all excited. Why? Because the morning cartoons were on! And yet during weekdays, I would be hard pressed to drag myself out of bed by 7:30.

Notice something? During the week, I HAD TO get up. On the weekend, I WANTED TO get up!

So if you’re looking for a motivation hack, that means you don’t really WANT TO do something. You logically know you SHOULD be doing it, but your emotions tell you otherwise. You associate pain with doing it.

In a moment, I will share the Ultimate Motivation Hack with you. But first, there’s one more thing you need to understand. It might even shatter your model of reality. I’m going to show you why bribing yourself is directly COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE as far as motivation goes!

Why bribing yourself doesn’t work:

Let’s say you have some writing that you want to get finished. But you don’t feel like doing it. So what would most people immediately do? Bribe themselves! They decide to stick it out, and then reward themselves with a cold beer or a chocolate bar or any other kind of reward.

Nooooo! That absolutely KILLS motivation in the long term!

“But it works!” I hear you say.

Well, yes and no. Bribing yourself might get the task done this time. But it also associates even more pain to doing the task, because you now see it as this annoying painful thing you need to get through to get your reward. The next time you want to do the same task, it will be even harder to get motivated.

Through bribing, you don’t get yourself to the point where you WANT to do something. You only reinforce the notion that it’s something you HAVE TO suffer through to get a reward.

Remember when I told you it’s all about what you WANT TO do vs. what you HAVE TO do? It’s a deep principle. Remember it every time you struggle with motivation.

Okay, now let’s move on to the grand finale! How to build your own motivation hack for every situation!

The Ultimate Motivation Hack

Hold this in mind – you want to get to the point where you WANT TO do the task.

The best way I found was… to make the task itself FUN!

Like this one time, I had to sweep the living room floor. I spent hours procrastinating and thinking up excuses for not doing it. Then I stopped myself! I realized I was procrastinating because sweeping the floor was bloody boring! (i.e. painful). So I thought about how to make it fun for myself, and I came up with a solution! I decided to make it more challenging!

I stood on one leg, lifted the other one up while bending my body forward (forming a T-shape) and swept the floor like that, hopping around on one leg! (I also started talking in weird voices and eventually fell over from laughing at myself.)

Don’t take yourself too seriously . In fact, making a fool of yourself is a great way to start enjoying the task again.

A couple of months back, I started really strugging with writing. It became a painful chore, and I even thought of quitting blogging. But when I stopped myself and thought deeply about the problem, I realized I simply started taking myself too seriously! I had built up a readership, and I started caring about what they thought. (As in, “What would they think of me if I wrote this silly stuff?”)

Then I realized it doesn’t matter. If somebody doesn’t like my writing style, they’re free to stop reading. Being myself is more important than impressing strangers. And once I realized that, and stop censoring myself, the floodgates opened! Writing became easy again, because I was having FUN while doing it! (Plus, I got a lot more positive responses from readers!)

So if you want to build a motivation hack for yourself, just remember: It’s about making the task FUN.

You can make it more challenging, or more silly, or more ridiculous (I had a friend in high school who hated how formal the essays had to be. One day he decided to instead make it AS FORMAL AS POSSIBLE, using incredibly long convoluted sentences and fancy words, to see if the teacher caught on to the irony. She never did…)

I’m not going to give you “the one hack”. Because no one technique works for every person in every situation.

Instead, I will let YOU create hacks that work for YOU in each particular situation! Based on the principles I shared in this post, you can create your own motivation hack for every situation. And THAT is the Ultimate Motivation Hack.

Vlad Dolezal is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain. Check out Vlad’s blog Fun Life Development for more fun and exciting personal development tips. He’s even got a few posts waiting there especially for you!

The other day, having just typed an email to a customer, my mouse cursor hovered over the send button. But something didn’t feel quite right. Re-reading the email, I stopped at the following sentence:

“I should be able to get this to you in the next 24 hours”.

This is a fairly standard sentence, but on this particular occasion the word “should” caught my attention. Was this the best word I could use? Did it even matter?

I knew why I had chosen this particular word; I wanted to convey that I expected to have the work done within 24 hours, but there was a possibility I wouldn’t. So there was a rational reason for my choice, but in that moment I also came to see that using the word “should” could have potentially negative and unintentional consequences.

Ted Rogers, the Canadian Communications mogul who recently passed away, once noted: “It’s funny, the difference between success and failure often is very little.” It seems to me that one of these “little things” is the language we use to communicate. Here’s why:

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We’ve all seen spam emails and hyped-up sales pages that look so sleazy. We see large fonts, boldface, red text, and sometimes even blinking text. Everyone claims to be able to change your life with this one secret you absolutely need. Effortless abundance is there for the taking, but you must ACT NOW because they only have one product left.

But while they’re screaming at you and telling you why they want you to buy it, they’re sending an even stronger message with the words they’re not saying. The fine print may say “results not typical” or “these are paid actors,” but they sure don’t want you to see that, lest it destroy the perfect illusion they’re trying to create.

They’re not trying to help people understand the pros and cons of the product so they can figure out if the product is right for them. Instead, they’re trying to just cram it down everyone’s throats and pressure people into buying.

We’ve all seen this, and we all despise it. Even in one-way media like television, communication is still meant to be a two-way street. The problem is essentially that they’re talking AT people instead of talking WITH them. But is it possible we’re doing similar things without realizing it?

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This is one of my favorite posters. It hangs where I can see it from my desk:

12 and ½ Writing Rules from AllPosters.com.

Everything on there is good advice for any writer, especially those working on pieces of fiction. It also looks great on the wall of your office or den – it’s currently replacing my rather battered poster of Johnny Depp…

So what exactly do these rules mean, and how can you use them to make you a better writer? This is my take on it – I expect everyone who owns this poster has a slightly different opinion!

1. If you write every day, you get better at writing every day.

This is common – and good – advice that lots of published authors offer. Stephen King, for instance, suggests that aspiring writers should write a minimum of 1,000 words a day. Many people, myself included, find that it’s easier to make something a daily habit rather than a “not quite daily” habit: I’ve written about this one in How to Write Every Day (And Why You Should)

2. If it’s boring to you, it’s boring to your reader

When I was doing NaNoWriMo last year, I found myself churning out sentences, paragraphs and scenes just to hit my wordcount for the day – what I was writing didn’t always interest me much. If you find yourself struggling to write because you’re bored, stop! No-one’s going to want to read it.

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I believe if something is important enough to remember, it’s important enough to write down.  This doesn’t just apply to random to-do tasks or events to put on your calendar.  I write down goals, ideas, what I spend money on and useful thinking points from books.  The reason to write isn’t to keep records, but to be more aware.

In the popular productivity bible, Getting Things Done, Dave Allen suggests writing everything down on a notepad so you won’t forget.  The purpose, according to Allen, is to take the burden off your memory.  While I think this is important, it only touches on one of the reasons to write things down.

Writing Keeps You Aware

Writing focuses your thinking.  When you write something down, you aren’t just creating a paper record, you’re changing the way you think about it.  Writing down a goal changes a whim into a conviction.  Writing down your expenses changes excessive spending from a bad habit to a conscious choice.  Writing down your idea turns a vague suggestion into a clear concept.

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Photos by Esther G and Mezone.

“Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler

Perhaps this is a sentiment that all writers can share to some extent. However, writing doesn’t have to be a tortuous experience akin to banging your head against a wall. Frustration rarely helps our writing; good writing is perfectly compatible with efficient and reasonably quick writing. If you would like to become a fast and efficient writer, the following are 10 suggestions that have the potential to dramatically increase your productivity.

Clear Mind

Writing is a creative exercise which benefits from having a clear mind. If your mind is cluttered with distracting thoughts you will struggle to write effectively and fluently. When writing you need to concentrate on nothing else other than the subject of your writing. This requires a combination of one-pointedness and concentration; only if we can absorb ourselves into writing will we be most productive. How can we write anything meaningful if 50% of our thoughts are worrying about miscellaneous events in our lives? To cultivate a clear mind, it is helpful to set aside certain times just for writing – then, during this time, be disciplined about keeping your mind free of distracting thoughts.

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Leo Babauta of the excellent ZenHabits weblog and a personal friend of mine has recently launched a new blog named WriteToDone. Here is the purpose of the site in his words:

I’ve created Write To Done as a way to share some of what I’ve learned as a writer, with new (and experienced) writers looking to improve their craft and their art.

For those of you who’ve enjoyed popular PickTheBrain writing posts like George Orwell’s Rules for Effective Writing and How to Write Something Worth Reading, this site will be right up your alley.

Check it out!

Our brains have an amazing ability to learn and retain material. The trouble is we don’t have 100% control over this ability — we can tell our brain something is important, but our brain may not listen.

Have you ever told yourself that a particular book is important but you find yourself rereading the pages just to understand the material? It’s difficult to pay attention to material written in a formal tone (like most textbooks) even though you may want to understand it. The problem is you’re fighting against your brain – the most sophisticated computer ever created.

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