Can you improve constantly, and still lose every day?

Once upon a time there was a weight lifter who wanted to be the strongest man in the world. He ate correctly, rested well, and went to the gym every day, getting stronger and stronger. But he was defeated in EVERY MEET. And eventually became discouraged, and quit. But as he walked out of the gym that last time, an old man stopped him and said: “would you take a piece of advice from an old guy?”

The weight-lifter had never taken advice from anyone before, but this time, he decided “wtf” and nodded wearily.

“I’ve watched you get stronger and stronger. But every time you come in here, you put more on the bar than you can lift. You are the strongest man in the city, but no one knows it, because you always put a couple more pounds on the bar than you can manage. So the others have all the awards, and fame, and you have broken your heart because you never were realistic about where you were TODAY, meaning that you never had real faith in yourself. Never had permission to win. The secret is to set a series of small, achievable goals, put a little LESS on the bar than your one-rep max, so that you have a series of successes rather than failures.”

The weightlifter went home and thought about it. And finally realized that he had trapped himself between two different sets of voices: one saying “you can’t do it” and the other a pure ego voice saying “you are the best! You can do anything!” that had never allowed him to actually develop, because he constantly measured himself against impossible standards.

And that night, before he went to sleep, he swore he would change. And did. And finally began to win, because he set no more weight than he could actually lift on the bar. And the voice that said “you can’t” never went away…but grew quieter. And the voice that said “you can do ANYTHING!” never went away, but was modified with “as long as you can divide the road into steps, and take just one every day.”

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If you look at the “Lifewriting 6-Step” process, which is designed to get a writer from zero to “published”, it is one of my proudest accomplishments: so far, no one has made it past about 25 stories before getting published, and that is just wonderful. I give thanks to writers like Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Octavia Butler, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury for hard, useful conversations, as well as excellent essays and teachings.

The pattern:

1. Write at least a sentence a day
2. Write 1–4 short stories a month
3. Polish and submit at least 1 story per month
4. Once submitted, don’t rewrite except to editorial request
5. Read 10X what you write
6. Repeat this process 100X

There are hundreds of pages of instruction condensed here, and while it certainly isn’t the ONLY path, it is the one I have total confidence in. If students come and give good reasons why they don’t want to follow it (say, they are film-makers) I try to modify it, but don’t have the same level of confidence. This is tried, tested, and damned near guaranteed.

The most common divergence from this is people who want to go from “zero” to “novel.” While there are people who have done this, its sort of like someone who walks in off the street and jumps into the black belt class, or someone who has never run a lap signing up for a marathon. You kinda have to be against them. They haven’t broken the desired destination into enough intermediate steps to really have confidence they can handle it.

1. They don’t know if they have developed basic, marketable writing skills. The best report card here is a check that clears the bank from a professional editor betting their mortgage on YOU.
2. They often don’t understand the field they are trying to write in. Haven’t done their market research, which is “baked into” the six-step.
3. They invest YEARS in writing that novel, and have so much ego invested in it that if they cannot sell it, their ego crashes and burns. They conclude that they have no “talent” or that the market is stacked against them.
4. Considering that they can work on short stories and SIMULTANEOUSLY work on their novel, if they won’t accept my advice, they really, truly need to find a mentor or system that was, preferably, created by someone who is a successful writer, who has also PRODUCED successful writers. “Empty their cup” and follow directions.

The value of the 1% rule is enormous. If you can create a plausible path to what you want to accomplish, tested and true, then your next step is to clarify your own position on the “map”. This can be TERRIFYING to people with short-term thinking, or those who don’t REALLY believe in themselves. If you don’t really believe you can do something, or don’t have internal permission to succeed, but feel compelled to take action anyway, you can deliberately sabotage yourself by aiming too high too fast.

People do this with exercise and diet — try something more extreme than they can actually sustain.

They do it with love and sex, desiring partners out of their current reach, and growing frustrated and embittered rather than motivated to up their game or love themselves more.

They do this with career, refusing to break their path into bite-sized chunks, and eat that elephant one forkful at a time.

When people come to me and won’t listen about dividing their journey into smaller chunks, I feel sorry: they could have succeeded, but never gave themselves the chance. In some cases because they got bad advice. In others, because they have internal conflicts that keep their brakes on. In yet others because they developed an ego-shell to protect them from the terror of not really believing they can reach their goals.

ANYONE who has known me for years can tell you I had such an ego. I believed in myself, without any external evidence, no mentors, and the entire world saying “no.” You HAVE to have an ego to survive that. But the ego which protects you will also eventually limit you if you grow, and begin to sabotage your efforts if succeeding at your goal would shatter your self-image.

THE WAY TO JUGGLE FIVE CHAIN SAWS IS TO START WITH THREE SCARVES.

You have to have faith in the process. You can find ways of accelerating that process, yes…but be careful. To grow faster than 1% per week will make most heads spin. 1% per day is seriously possible in many arenas, but damned few people can handle that without imploding. Aim at 1%. That would be part of the “Yellow Belt” theory, to design a path that progresses solidly and reliably, allowing you to re-integrate and re-orient along the way.

Please, don’t make this basic, tyro mistake. Don’t deny the world your beauty and power, or the amazing joy of hitting th level where you are rewarded in direct proportion to the amount of service you give. This is actually doable, but requires a level of integration that will elude those who cannot grow in a healthy, steady way.

Escape suffering. Embrace joy. Give service. IN THAT ORDER. At the rate of 1% improvement per week. That’s fast enough to get you anywhere you want to go over the course of a couple of years. But is not so fast you can’t “chew and swallow” and turn concepts into healthy muscle.

Give yourself a chance.

Namaste

Steve