Yesterday, I announced on Instagram that my newest book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors The Brave, is available for preorder. It will be my 12th book in 10 years, and so there were a bunch of comments from people who wondered how I was able to get another one done so quickly. 

How do you write books faster than I read them? 

What’s your secret to writing so many books? 

The answer is that I have a system, a process that helps me be productive. It’s not my system exactly, as I’ve taken many strategies from the greatest writers to ever do it. Although I talk about the creative process at length in my book Perennial Seller (which for some reason is currently $1.99 everywhere you get your ebooks), I thought I would detail some of my rules that I follow as a writer. I think they can help anyone be more productive. 

[1] Read. Read. Read. 

A book is made of books. “The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book,” Samuel Johnson said. As I was putting together the bibliography for Courage, I counted something like 300 books I was directly sourcing from. 

[2] Always be researching

The bulk of the work is researching—collecting stories, anecdotes, and data to marshal your argument. The writing is stringing those pieces together. I’ve found stuff I’ve used in in-flight magazines, discovered snippets on social media, even heard things mentioned on TV. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: “I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.”

[3] Put good advice where you work

Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). When I was working on Ego is the Enemy, I had this quote from Machiavelli on the wall to inspire its style and ethos: “I have not adorned this work with fine phrases, with swelling, pompous words, or with any of those blandishments or external ornaments with which many set forth and decorate their matter. For I have chosen either that nothing at all should bring it honor or that the variety of its material and the gravity of its subject matter alone should make it welcome.” I have another quote that I put up for this book from Martha Graham: “Never be afraid of the material. The material knows when you’re frightened and will not help.”

[4] Make commitments

I turn in a book proposal for my next book before my latest one comes out. When I have a commitment that I know I have to meet, Resistance doesn’t have the time or space to creep in. Right now I am on a book year path for the next four years. It keeps me honest and keeps me working. Meet deadline, or death. 

[5] Work with great people

Success requires greater investment in the creative process. Pay for professional help. There’s that saying: if you think pros are expensive, try hiring an amateur. 

[6] Have something to say

“To have something to say,” Schopenhauer said, “by itself is virtually a sufficient condition for good style.”

[7] Have a model in mind

Thucydides had Herodotus. Gibbon had Thucydides. Shelby Foote had Gibbon. Every playwright since Shakespeare has had Shakespeare. Everyone has a master to learn from. For me, it’s been Robert Greene

[8] Know where you’re going

You don’t “find the book as you write.” You have to do the hard work of solving the problem first. You have to figure out the best route, too. One of the best pieces of writing advice I ever got was to–before I started the process–articulate the idea in one sentence, one paragraph and one page. This crystallizes the idea for you and guides you—Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a “derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim” he opened with. 

[9] Focus on What You Control

As Epictetus says, there’s some stuff that’s up to us, some stuff that’s not. The work is up to you. Everything else is not. If you’re in this for external rewards, god help you. A Confederacy of Dunces was rejected by publishers. After the author’s suicide, it won the Pulitzer. People don’t know shit. YOU know. So love it while you’re doing it. Success can only be extra.

[10] Embrace draw-down periods

You need what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the “draw-down period.” Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to let things settle. I started Courage is Calling on my birthday, but not before I took an extended period of just thinking. 

[11] Listen to the same song on repeat

I’ve found that picking one song—usually something I am not proud to say I am listening to—and listening to it on repeat, over and over and over again is the best way to get into a rhythm and flow. It not only shuts out outside noise but also parts of my conscious mind I don’t need to hear from while I’m writing. 

[12] Make little progress each day

One of the best rules I’ve heard as a writer is that the way to write a book is by producing “two crappy pages a day.” It’s by carving out a small win each and every day—getting words on the page—that a book is created. Hemingway once said that “the first draft of anything is shit,” and he’s right (I actually have that on my wall as a reminder). 

[13] Don’t let the tools distract you 

Great artists work. Mediocre artists talk a lot about tools. Software does not make you a better writer. If classics were created with quill and ink, you’ll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Don’t let technology distract you. Helen Simpson has “Faire et se taire” from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as “Shut up and get on with it.”

[14] Get some strenuous exercise every day

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought of a great line or solved an intractable writing problem while running or swimming. Exercise is also an easy win every day. Writing can go poorly, but going on a run always goes well. 

[15] Write about the things you’re afraid to talk about.

James Altucher has a great rule that I have stolen: write what you’re afraid to say. If your stuff isn’t scaring you, you’re not pushing yourself enough. 

[16] Journal every morning

Each morning, I journal in three small notebooks. The whole ritual takes 15 minutes and by the time I am finished, I am centered, I am calm and most importantly, I am primed to do my actual writing.

[17] Don’t talk about the book (as much as you can help it)

Don’t talk about projects until you’re finished. Save that carrot for the end. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. 

[18] Stop on the “wet edge”

Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe “to break off work when you ‘are going good.’—Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume.” Brian Koppelman has referred to this as stopping on “wet edge.” It staves off the despair the next day.

[19] Make something that does a job

My editor Niki Papadopoulos once told me, “It’s not what a book is. It’s what a book does.” This is why musicians follow the “car test” (how does the song sound in a car driving down the highway). It’s just about whether you like it…but about what it does for the people buying it. 

[20] Cut out the jargon

This was Ogilvy’s rule: “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.” The other one I like is: “Never use two words where one will do.”  

[21] Talk it out

When you get stuck, talk the ideas through with someone you trust. As Seth Godin observed, “no one ever gets talker’s block.”

[22] It’s OK that it’s hard

Thomas Mann described a writer as “someone to whom writing does not come easy,” he was putting it lightly. Walker Percy said “that writing is like suffering from a terrible disease for a certain period of time. Then when you finish you get well again.” That’s why there is the old saying: Painters like painting. Writers like having written.

[23] Remember … it’s all material

As Vivian Gornick explains, “What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.”

If all you do after reading this is start asking more often, “How can I use this to my advantage?”—your creative output will not only get better, your life will too.

I hope some of these help you become more productive, and if you want to really take your creative process to the next level, I do recommend my book Perennial Seller. As I said up top, the ebook is currently $1.99—I don’t know if it will ever be cheaper than that. 

And if you have gotten anything out of my writing over the years, I’d love for you to consider picking up my new book, Courage is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave. I’m confident it’s one of my best and I think the blurbs and early reviews already hint that it is. Academy Award Winning Actor Matthew McConaghey called the book an “urgent call to arms for each and all of us.” General Jim Mattis called it “a superb handbook for crafting a purposeful life.” And Classics Professor Shadi Bartsch wrote that it’s “a heartfelt and passionate book.”

To make it worth your while, we’ve put together a bunch of cool preorder bonuses—among them is something I’ve never given away: a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at dailystoic.com/preorder

I was honored to have been asked to write a piece for the By Invitation series in The Economist, they couldn’t run all of it, so I thought I’d send the longer version here. Enjoy!

The Statue of liberty was a gift from France to America, commemorating the two nations’ friendship and shared love of freedom. Completed in 1886, it marked one of the world’s first, successful crowdfunding projects. The famous poem “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, mounted in bronze inside the pedestal (“Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”), was written for the campaign. Over $100,000 was raised from more than 120,000 donors, including schoolchildren who collected pennies.

The end result has towered not just over New York Harbour and the millions of immigrants who passed by, but also over Americans’ view of themselves. It is a symbolic representation of the country’s foremost ideal, individual liberty. That value of freedom undergirds every newspaper article, church sermon and street demonstration—and is invoked whenever someone refuses to wear a face mask during a pandemic or accept a vaccine.

And yet what most people don’t know is that around 75 years after the statue was inaugurated, another statue was proposed, its “twin” so to speak, to be erected on the other side of the country in San Francisco Bay. Called the Statue of Responsibility, it was meant to symbolise the flipside of America’s prized virtue, the inherent obligations that come with a free society.

The idea was the brainchild of Viktor Frankl. In 1942 at the age of 37, Frankl, a psychologist, was deported from Vienna to the first of four concentration camps, where his father died of pneumonia, his mother and brother were gassed and his wife died of typhus. He ended up in Auschwitz. Within months of his liberation, over a nine-day period, he wrote the book that became Man’s Search for Meaning. In it, he tried to make sense of the evil he experienced and articulated the importance of having a goal to live for.

In 1962, when he revised the book for an American edition and, with the passage of time, had reflected more on the experience, he wrote:

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.

Since then, his vision has been taken up by two nonprofit groups, The Responsibility Foundation and the Statue Of Responsibility Foundation, both with the blessing of his second wife, Elly Frankl. Among the latter group’s backers was the late Stephen Covey, a business professor and author of “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. Covey commissioned a sculptor, Gary Lee Price, who designed a 300-foot statue of two arms clasping each other by the wrist—a bond among individuals unshakably gripped together.

Several locations have been suggested. One is on Alcatraz Island (which as a former maximum-security prison probably provides the wrong symbolism). A more inspiring choice is Angel Island, which sits around four miles off of San Francisco and served as an immigration-processing centre for more than half a million new residents between 1910 and 1940. So far, both projects have stalled.

Mrs Frankl, at 95 and living in Vienna, notes that her husband’s idea for a statue was meant as a thought experiment. “He was surprised and flattered when he heard of the project. I don’t think he ever expected to be taken literally,” she said in an interview, conducted through Alex Vesely, their grandson and a board director of the Viktor Frankl Institute. “Many people talk for hours and say very little, but he had this gift of speaking the truth with a few simple words. He coined this phrase to make a point,” she said.

What makes Viktor Frankl’s idea so appropriate is that, as he understood, liberty begets responsibility; that with freedom comes the need for self-control and an obligation to think of others, not just oneself. That is what Frankl alluded to when he wrote that freedom is “only part of the story and half of the truth”.

The pandemic—with its ludicrous protests against face masks and vaccines in the name of freedom—has been a painful illustration of the costs to society when people fail to understand liberty’s flipside. Research has found, for instance, that private birthday parties were large drivers of COVID-19 infections and that the irresponsibility was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. People thought that because it happened behind closed doors…it didn’t count.

We don’t have a freedom problem: we have a responsibility problem.

What does it mean to be responsible? Perhaps no better explanation of this duty has been given than by Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, who came to America through Ellis Island as an immigrant in 1906. “Responsibility is a unique concept,” the admiral said in testimony to Congress after decades of tireless service, “it may only reside and inhere in a single individual. You may share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. You may disclaim it, but you cannot divest yourself of it. Even if you do not recognize it or admit its presence, you cannot escape it. If responsibility is rightfully yours, no evasion, ignorance, or passing the blame can shift the burden to someone else. Unless you can point your finger at the man who is responsible when something goes wrong, then you have never had anyone really responsible.”

Responsibility means understanding yourself as belonging to something larger than yourself: accepting a duty to do right regardless of the cost. To the Stoics, the branch of classical Greek and Roman philosophy that I study, our responsibility was to our character and to the common good—a dual loyalty, much in the way Frankl wanted two statues to commemorate two concomitant values.

Statues are totems to our values. We erect them not just to honour the past but to remind the present. The great Athenian orator Demosthenes once reminded an audience that previous generations did not put up monuments to recognise their own achievements but to spur people to greater deeds in the future. Yet sometimes the past and present collide.

Around the world, people have begun to look uneasily at the statues in their cities, parks and campuses. In Belgium, some monuments to Leo pold II, the coloniser king, have been removed. In Britain a heavy, bronze statue of Edward Colston—merchant, philanthropist, slave trader—was pulled down and pushed into Bristol Harbour. I was in New Orleans when enormous cranes removed the statue of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee, which stood near the entrance to the French Quarter. And I spent considerable time and money to remove a loathsome, century-old Confederate monument (celebrating “our noble white souled Southland”) from the lawn of a county courthouse in the small Texas town where I live.

Although many of us can agree that statues of colonisers, murderers and traitors should go, it has long struck me as peculiar that we have little sense of what should be there instead. America in particular has struggled to put up statues of late. It took more than 20 years to plan and erect the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, a set of bronzes in Washington, DC. The Martin Luther King Jr Memorial, in a park next to the National Mall, is not even ten years old—yet plans for it began shortly after his assassination in 1968.

Likewise, when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility, somehow no one is willing to be responsible. It is preposterous: there are more than enough tech entrepreneurs on a single block in downtown San Francisco capable of funding such a project. What is needed is a sense of urgency and the sense of responsibility to do this for future generations—and for this one as well. As the French writer André Malraux is said to have remarked: you can judge a society by the monuments it puts up. What does it say if a society is unable to build anything at all, let alone agree on what should be built? That Frankl’s lovely proposal has stood in the planning phase for seven decades, and one of the richest cities in the world stands impotent to erect anything that represents its aspirations or values? San Francisco apparently has the time and resources to rename schools named after Abraham Lincoln, and a mob can be whipped up to tear down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but when it comes to a Statue of Responsibility? Somehow, no one is willing to be responsible for that.

Reading to my four-year-old the wonderful children’s book about the Statue of Liberty, Her Right Foot by Dave Eggers, I was struck by his insight that Lady Liberty is depicted in motion, taking a step forward. Like him, I had seen the statue hundreds of times, but never noticed that her feet are not stationary but striding. Liberty is on the move—she uses her freedom. There’s no time for standing still, she’s got work to do.

So too the Statue of Responsibility should be active, symbolising what we ought do, individually and collectively, to act cooperatively on the major challenges of our time. “We are humans, given a heart and a brain. This makes us responsible,” says Mrs Frankl. “There are tasks waiting for us.”

Amid covid-19, some people ran away from their responsibilities while others ran toward them—selflessly, courageously. Millions did their duty quietly and without complaint and never ended up in the news. We should celebrate and immortalise the values that create a responsible society. We should bind it to our cultural consciousness as we did liberty. Those who proclaim their freedom but ignore their responsibility aren’t being heroic but self-centred and irresponsible. They are misusing the gift they have been given.

That is what lies behind Viktor Frankl’s observation that “freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness.” Imagine how different the response to the pandemic might have been if the value that Americans looked up to wasn’t just liberty for themselves but responsibility for each other.

“If I don’t believe in myself, who will?”

It’s a good question.

A seductive one. An empowering but innocuous phrase has been inscribed on a million inspirational quote images, been the subject of countless self-help books and TED Talks. 

Believe in yourself! Fake it until you make it!

The problem is that it’s bullshit.

Great people don’t have to believe in themselves. They don’t have to fake anything. They have evidence.

A few years ago, an interviewer asked Jay Z about his incredible self-assuredness. It’s a good question. He does seem like a person with unending faith in himself. How else could he rap the things that he raps? How else could he have gone from the Marcy Projects to Madison Square? (Great book on this by the way, Empire State of Mind by Zack O’Malley Greenburg) 

I’d argue it wasn’t belief. As Jay Z explained,

People don’t realize I’ve put a lot of my life into what I’m doing right now. I didn’t just have a hit record and get lucky. I put a lot of my life into it so the things that come out of it is not due to bravado and arrogance. I have confidence because of the work that I’ve put in, and I’ve put in so much work.

On a regular basis, I get emails from people who are trying to do big things. They are convinced they have some multi-billion dollar idea, a genius pitch, some brilliant artistic concept. They also have complete certainty that it will be a success (“I just need you for the marketing”). It’s always fascinating to see what this certainty is based on, because it almost always turns out to be, well, nothing. Mostly just wishful thinking, that idea that they can manifest this into being. 

They haven’t put in the work. They haven’t even started the work!

They think their success is written in cursive, when really, success and confidence are carved from effort and results. In gradual relief as the evidence comes in, reassessed at every turn. And while it’s perfectly possible that believers may turn out to be right, it’s the latter type, the evidence-based community, as the saying goes, who will enjoy their success more and find it considerably less precarious and fleeting.

This plays out well on the basketball court. Based on what they’ve done in practice, based on their stats, players have a sense of the probabilities of given shots. When Damian Lillard took that 37-foot shot in Paul George’s face to knock the Thunder out of the playoffs in 2019, it wasn’t about belief. He knew he shot 43% from that spot on the floor. Steph Curry knows he’s in range just about anywhere inside of half court. It’s not arrogant when he takes those shots, it’s based on the numbers…but it took years of play and deliberate practice for those numbers to exist. Like Jay Z, they put in the work. 

The great military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart compared two different types of generals. The first was the Napoleon types—those who believe they are destined for greatness, who have an unswerving faith in their own specialness and importance. The second, someone like William Tecumseh Sherman, he says, is defined by a “slow growth dependent on actual achievement.” Which is happier? Which is better? I won’t make a joke about how the Napoleons and the Pattons of the world inevitably overreach and are often the source of their own disasters. Hart’s analysis makes a better argument:

To the men of the last type their own success is a constant surprise, and its fruits the more delicious, yet to be tested cautiously with a haunting sense of doubt whether it is not all a dream. In that doubt lies true modesty, not the sham of insincere self-depreciation but the modesty of “moderation,” in the Greek sense. It is poise, not pose.

When I left what was a very good job to write my first book, I didn’t believe I could do it. That would have been absurd. What would that belief have been based on? I had never done it before. What I did have was evidence of the traits necessary for success. I had put in the training as a research assistant on other books. I had written on a regular basis for many years (every day for six years in fact). I knew I wasn’t a quitter. I knew I had mentors I could go to for advice when I felt in over my head. 

Same goes for when I opened my bookstore. Plenty of people told me it was a bad idea, but, it wasn’t my belief in myself that motivated me to push past this. I listened to them. I listened carefully. I also looked at the numbers, looked at my track record, looked at the traits I knew I was bringing to the table. I had a case—I had evidence that I could do it and I was willing to test that assumption. No more, no less.

Several times now I have tasted that fruit that Hart was talking about—the sweetness of gradual accomplishment. The immense gratification of looking at something you created and thinking, “Where did that come from?” And being able to answer that it came from you. Not because you were born with it, because you are inherently or intrinsically entitled to it, but because you created it from nothing.

This is a feeling that can only be earned. To take it on credit in advance, to steal it, to pretend, is to miss the point. It deprives you of all the pleasure of the actual accomplishment.

The Bible describes faith as “the assurance of what we hope for and the certainty of what we do not see.” Whatever you want to do with your spiritual life is up to you, but that way of thinking is about as dangerous as it gets when it comes to one’s profession. Hope is not a strategy for writing a book or starting a company. It’s not something to bet your career on.

It is a recipe for potentially catastrophic failure. Cheney believed we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq. Trump believed that being president would be easy. What evidence did they have for these assumptions? Very little. Worse than nothing actually, they had plenty of people telling them how hard it would be, how it would actually go. But they couldn’t listen. They had too much faith, too much belief in themselves, too much certainty in what could not be seen. Instead of tasting the sweet fruit of gradual accomplishment, they drank the bitter brew of abject failure. 

You cannot will evidence into existence. If you think you can fake it until you make it, well…that’s just another way to describe fraud. 

For the Shermans of the world, their rise was more gradual but it was based on what was real. His famous March to the Sea was military genius but hardly some flash of inspiration. It was the slow accumulation of his deep study of the country, of the failures and difficulties he faced in battle, of his insight into the Southern mind, his collaborations with Grant, and then his willingness to test the theory, city by city, town by town across rebel territory, even as the newspapers called him a madman, an idiot, and predicted his failure. It wasn’t faith in himself, it wasn’t belief that he was chosen by God, it was rational, operational, iterative. And it worked and it saved America.

It also saved himself—he knew when to stop the war, he knew how to end it peacefully, and he knew when it was time for him to walk away. (“I have all the rank I want,” he would say). That’s the other part of it. Somebody believes they can jump off a cliff and live—and if they do survive, that doesn’t mean it was a good idea. It just means they’ll keep doing it until, eventually, they don’t.

Is that what you want? Who do you want to listen to? The gamblers? Or the workers? The hustlers who sell hope as a product? Or the doers who don’t traffic in any of that?

As crazy as it sounds, you don’t need to believe in yourself. That’s not what’s holding you back. Whether you think you can do something is so much less important than whether you actually can or can’t do that thing. You need to assemble a case that proves you can. You need to do the work that stands as evidence for what you’re capable of.

So you can walk by sight, not by faith.

That’s how you actually end up achieving the things that other people are too busy believing they can do.

In my book, Ego is the Enemy, I further explore how a delusional belief in oneself poses a threat to one’s goals—whether you’ve achieved some success or hit rock bottom. If you want to be an achiever instead of a believer, I encourage you to check it out. And you can now get copies of Ego over in the Daily Stoic store, where you can also get them signed and personalized!