The Discipline of Writing Your Life Story

I can’t wait to write my life story. I’ll start tomorrow. The discipline of writing – here I am telling you how to fix it while I’m dragging my feet in doing so. I write for 15 minutes and then find something else to do. But I make it work. More on that 15 minutes thing later.

There are hundreds of books on motivation. They tell us the same message. No one can motivate you. It’s an inside job. Tell that to any number of people – bosses, parents, spouses; all have motivated me to raise the bar on a number of occasions. But here’s the point. That kind of motivation is external and it only works short-term. You do it to please someone else. But what works for you? What’s the internal motivator secret? Remember, it’s an internal job. So forget all those books on motivation. There’s something that must come first. Self-discipline.

I won’t go over the necessary steps to master self-discipline. It really comes down to one thing.

A man named Elbert Hubbard researched over 1,000 success principles and the most important was this. “Self-discipline is the ability to do what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.” If you practice self-discipline, everything else falls into place. And you practice self-discipline by applying it daily, starting right away. Not tomorrow. Now.

If there was just one book I could recommend that might help you find the power to write your life story, it wouldn’t be our own Writing Your Legacy. In fact it wouldn’t even be a book about writing. New York Times Best-Selling Author Brian Tracy wrote NO Excuses – The Power of Self-Discipline and every new writer should read it carefully. Best of all, it’s available at Barnes & Noble for just $7.98. That’s a bargain-basement price for the best information you might ever discover.
A Great Idea!

At a writing your life story seminar in Saint Louis, I learned a valuable technique from Jason W. Womack (Check him out at http://womackcompany.com/). He travels the world telling folks how to be more productive with their lives. He suggests the 15 Minute Rule. ‘Focus intently on what you are doing now, but only for 15 minutes. Then stop, do something else and go back to another 15 minutes of deep focus.’ He claims that you will get far more accomplished in just a couple hours of deep focus in a workday than you can otherwise. It certainly works for me. It’s the one way I can banish all distractions from my writing.