“I just spent the past year researching book publishing, and I can sum up my findings in one sentence: No one reads books.” wrote Elle Griffin in her Substack newsletter.

Like me, she wanted to write fiction. She even wrote a Gothic novel and published it on Substack. She tried to focus on her job and writing on the side – nothing else. Then she was chosen by Substack for a fellowship program. She was one of the ten writers selected for the fellowship, and it would have been silly to let the opportunity pass by her.

So rather than spending a year writing her next Utopian novel, she hunkered down on Substack, and according to her, it paid off.

After only one year of starting her newsletter, Novelist, she attracted 4,000 free subscribers and made $10,000 in revenue.

But then she dropped a bombshell. She wrote the article; No one reads books.No one will read your bookAfter I completed my first novel, I had dreams of a beautiful black book, its ivory pages sewn into the binding, the…ellegriffin.substack.com

Her article caused quite a furor. People wrote so many comments. In the Substack writers’ discussion group, people gave their views about her article.

“I think when every word you write is tied to the possible money you need to earn to keep writing works (whether fiction or non-fiction) it can influence choices positively and negatively.” wrote Erica Drayton, The Storyteller.

Most writers indeed want to get compensated for the amount of time and energy they devote to writing. When that doesn’t happen, frustration is inevitable, especially when other ventures are far more lucrative and rewarding.

But that is not the reason we write books. We write books because there is something in us so compelling and urgent that we have to share with the world, whether it is an idea or a story.

“For over half a century, books were considered the ultimate form of writing, wrote Mark Starlin in the discussion forum, “When they were simply a means of communication. The story or information is the important part. The book is just a (much loved) container. Perhaps we need to shift our mindset for current time and technology.”

Now writers have other mediums — blogs, social media, podcasts, videos. Even ebooks and audiobooks have become competitors to physical books.

“The medium doesn’t matter as much as the story, “wrote Mark Starlin, and he is right. In the end, we all are after stories, and we are ready to consume them in any form that is handy. If we are mobile, then through the digital medium, if we are doing chores, driving, or exercising, then through voice, if we are relaxing, then through a physical book.

It is true that we haven’t read 40% of the books we own.

The percentage might be more for some people, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that those who love books can’t resist buying them, thinking they will read them one day.

Our reading habits might have changed too. I like to binge-read books rather than read them cover to cover. It could be because of being time-poor or due to a low-attention span. But I don’t see myself stop buying books anytime soon.

Instead, I now buy books in the middle of the night, at the spur of the moment.

Most writers don’t write books to make money.

We don’t need to do everything to make money. Writing a book is one of them.

Writers write books for themselves.

Ask any writer who wrote their first book why they wrote it, and none of them would say that to make millions. Or even to make a living. Instead, they wrote it because they wanted to tell the story. Or share the idea.

They wanted to see whether they could write a book. It is as if writing a book is like climbing Everest, and you do it not for any reason other than you want to see whether you can do it or not.

I like Mark Starlin’s (another Substack writer) comments in Substack’s discussion group:

“Do we need to be massively popular and earn a lot of money at everything we do? Is that the only gauge of success? I hope not? If you want to write a novel, write one. If ten people love it, then ten people loved something you wrote! That is a good thing.

Sure we would all over to have millions of readers. But if you told a story in a pub to seven people and they all loved it, wouldn’t you feel good about it?

So my thinking is to be a storyteller. The medium doesn’t matter as much as the story. A novel (or a non-fiction book) isn’t the only option. Be creative! And if you can make money writing non-fiction at the same time (and enjoy it) then you have the best of both worlds.” — Mark Starlin

In David Weinberger’s book Too Big To Know, he talks about how knowledge used to be shaped like a book; now it is shaped like the Web.

There is truth in this. Who uses a set of encyclopedias anymore. For most people, information is online.

We have a better medium now than before, that shouldn’t mean we stop writing books.

But poetry, songs, and drama have all survived multiple changes of medium. So can novels and books. They might eventually diminish like any technology and invention. But the hunger for stories will never diminish.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

Three years ago, I quit my six-figure job to become a full-time writer.

My youngest daughter had just married, and I had fulfilled all my responsibilities. I could live my life my way.

I created a website (www.neeramahajan.com) and started writing blog posts.
But there were two big problems:
1) Nobody was reading what I wrote.
2) I didn’t know how to write.

It was taking me 7–8 hours to write a 750-words post. I was investing countless hours for no returns. My dream to become a published author was going to remain a dream. I was on the brink of giving up when I decided to join an article writing course.

It was a highly demanding, overpriced, three-month-long course with daily homework. It was my last chance to save my dream.

Three weeks into the course, and I couldn’t believe it — the course wasn’t even hard, and I was not a bad writer. In fact, I emerged as a star student. Suddenly, I was writing the same 750 words article in under 1–2 hours.

I learned the problem was not with my writing but with my thinking.

I had no self-confidence.

I needed external validation.

Lack of self-confidence was keeping me from realizing my dream.

After finishing the course, I made a 100 Day Article Sprint. I wrote 100 articles in 100 days on Medium.

On Day 24 of the Sprint, I was selected to receive a $500 check as one of the top 1000 writers on Medium.

On Day 65, I started writing a book. I wrote and self-published it in one week, writing a daily update of the progress on Medium.

In the past five months, I have written five books. I have already published three of them. The other two are in the publishing queue.

I have overcome the most significant hurdle any aspiring writer could face — lack of self-confidence.

If you want to succeed as a writer (or any other endeavor), conquer your self-doubt first.

Don’t let doubt ruin your passion.

Have faith in yourself and your abilities.

All writers struggle with self-doubt, even the established ones. But they all learn to manage it.

Follow the five rules to overcome your self-doubt.

1. Retire the inner critic.
2. Done is better than good.
3. Don’t compare yourself with other writers.
4. Concentrate on the verb not the noun of writing.
5. Show the same compassion to yourself as you would to other writers.

Read my journey from a scared chicken to an author of three books in Dare To Create It is available for 99 cents for a short time. You can get it here.

Three years ago, I was trapped in a bullshit job.

David Graeber, a London-based anthropologist, came up with the term bullshit job in his book, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, where he described a phenomenon impacting a number of people all over the globe.

A bullshit job is a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.

My work was pointless and had stopped satisfying me. But it was not easy to quit. One reason was I was getting paid a handsome salary to show my face, and two, I had no idea what else to do.

All my life, I was conditioned to work.

The Call For Creativity

It is one thing to quit your job but completely another to figure out what you really want to do with it.

So many of us had a career at the center of our lives for decades — probably since we left college. When we reach midlife we are faced with the question, ‘What do I do now?’

I looked at friends around me and was disheartened to find they were spending their time minding their grandchildren or tending to their gardens. I didn’t want to confine myself to do just that.

I firmly believed that our life is not just work, home, and social commitments. It is a whole lot more than accumulating money and things.

I wanted my retirement years to be my best.

I believed there was a lot more in me waiting to be expressed. I knew my best was yet to come.

At this time I came across the work of David Corbett, a thought leader on life transition, who revealed that retirement which once was relegated to winding down, now holds the promise of our most significant and passionate years. A time when we can be ourselves and contribute.

We are not only living longer and healthier lives but also tackling a life stage that did not exist twenty-five years ago. A new arena that could last three or four decades after our initial careers have ended.

In his book, The Portfolio Life he shows a new way of thinking and living in extended middle age.

This new stage of life is made more meaningful when people crate a balance of work, learning, leisure and family time, giving back, and whatever else has been simmering on the back burner of their hearts and soul during their careers. The balance can be tailored to one’s personality and situation. I call this a life portfolio because it holds an intentional combination of passions and pursuits. Those who do best at it step back early on, question whatever they may have learned about “retirement,” envision new possibilities and plan ahead.

The term ‘Portfolio Life’ resonated well with me. I am a multi-passion person and a life as a portfolio of activating offers a compelling alternative to traditional retirement.

When I was in primary school, I loved to draw. My favorite class was drawing, where we used to draw and color. Each year, when school would start, I would buy a new set of colored pencils. I loved them more than anything else. All through primary school, I drew, I colored, and I had fun. Then I went to high school and they took away my colored pencils and gave me algebra books.

Now a tiny voice inside me is saying, “I want to draw again. I want to play with colors. I want to have fun again.”

What if I am not good at it. What if I got ridiculed for my attempts. But the tiny voice inside me was saying, if not now then when? In a few years’ time, your eyesight would fade, your hands would tremble and you wouldn’t be able to draw or paint. The thought terrified me.

I also want to write. Writing is not my strong suit but I chose it as my hobby to get better at it. I had tried my hands at writing life stories to document them for my future generations.

I wanted to blog as well. I started a blog a couple of times but gave up because I couldn’t post regularly.

The concept of ‘portfolio life’ gave me a new way of exploring my long-lost passions. I made a list of what my portfolio would include:

• Blogging
• Writing
• Sketching
• Cartooning
• Traveling
• Photography
• Rock painting
• Traveling
• Teaching
• Public speaking
• Organizing retreats

According to Corbett, ‘portfolio life’ is about who you are and so-called ‘retirement years’ are the best time to create a life explicitly for yourself.

All of the above-listed activities make me who I am and without any one of them, I’m not complete.

Thinking of my life as a portfolio of activities helps me embrace change and explore the possibilities that will come with an additional 20 to 30 productive years. I will be able to live my life by design and on my own terms.

Out of nowhere, I have this itch to explore the creative side of me.

It took a lot of courage and mental shift to move from a competitive life to a creative life.

Today I am living the life I envisioned for myself.

When I started dreaming it, I didn’t think it was possible to get to where I am today. I wanted to write books, blog, and teach others how to write. In less than three years, I achieved all that.

I wrote about my journey in my new book Dare To Create. It is part “my story” and part a “motivational” book for those who too want to ditch the competitive life to lead a creative life.

Yesterday, when I was giving it the last read before hitting the publish button, I thought how far I had come in a short period, and it was all due to the books, articles, blog posts I read along the way and the courage they gave me to make the transition.

No success is an individual effort; it is a cumulative effect of all the people who went the path before us and cared to share it with us.

Dare To Create is available for 99 cents for a short time. You can get it here.

Subscribe to my newsletter at A Whimsical Writer for more tips and motivation.

The Oracle had declared — whoever would undo the knot that tied the chariot of the founder of the city of Gordium (in present-day Turkey) to the pole would be the future conqueror of Asia.

But the knot was so intricate that many had tried and failed.

When 20-year-old Alexander came to Gordium on his way to conquer Asia, he too tried his hand at it. But like others, he couldn’t untie it. When Alexander saw his Generals losing faith in him, he drew his sword and cut the knot in half.

What did it matter how the knot was undone?

Alexander the Great conquered Asia and subsequently the whole world because of his this stellar attitude. Even when the task seemed impossible, his immense confidence in himself made him the winner he was.

The phrase “cutting the Gordian knot” denotes a bold solution to a complicated problem.

Your ‘Gordian Knot’ might be a lack of self-confidence that is not letting you succeed as a writer.

Mine was.

I was trying to find the ends to my Gordian Knot for years, thinking I had to learn more and more about the craft of writing before I could ‘conquer’ the world of writing.

The truth was I lacked confidence.

I am not the only one who feels like this. So many of us lack confidence in ourselves.

Meryl Streep is one of the finest actors the world has seen. She has been nominated for a record 21 Oscars and has won three! And yet, she feels like she is a fraud. Self-doubt plagues her: “Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie? I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?”

What can you do when you lack confidence in yourself?

Various research suggests that there are ways to boost self-confidence.

Fake It Till You Make It

Social psychologist Amy Cuddy and her colleagues conducted an experiment in 2010. They divided 42 participants into two groups:

1. the high power posing group and
2. the low power posing group.

They asked the first group to sit tilted back in a chair with hands behind their head and their legs propped up on the table for a few minutes.

The second group was asked to sit with their arms close to their body and their hands in their laps.

All of them were then given $2. The participants could either pocket this $2, or they could bet it on a game with a 50/50 chance to either double it or lose it all. The participants were also asked how powerful they felt on a scale of 1 to 4.

12 of the 21 folks in the low power posing group bet their $2. And their average rating of feeling powerful was 1.83.

In contrast, 18 of the 21 people in the high power posing group bet their $2. Their average rating of feeling powerful was 2.57.

Cuddy and her colleagues also took saliva tests of all the participants before the experiment began and then once again 17 minutes after their pose on the chairs.

Participants in the high power posing group showed higher levels of testosterone and lower cortisol levels. Conversely, participants in the low power posing group showed the inverse: low testosterone and high cortisol levels. (Higher testosterone leads to more confidence and lower cortisol leads to less stress and anxiety!)

Sitting in a powerful pose changed people’s emotions and hormones, making them take more financial risks.

“Fake it till you make it” works because your act changes how you feel. If you act confident, you’ll feel confident too.

Build rituals

Anxiety is the usual reaction when doing things out of our comfort zone. A great way to beat anxiety is to build rituals.

That’s right.

Rituals help us feel in control. Anything that reduces our anxiety enhances our confidence. Athletes who follow rituals before their game feel more confident about their abilities than those who don’t. Cristiano Ronaldo of Portugal’s soccer team makes sure his right foot touches the grass first before stepping onto the field for a game.

Rafael Nadal has to have all of his water bottles lined up with the labels facing the baseline where he is playing from.

Tiger Woods wears a redshirt for the final round of every tournament he plays. In every game, Michael Jordan wore his North Carolina University shorts underneath his Chicago Bulls shorts.

Writers follow rituals too. Isabel Allende starts writing her new book on the 8th of January each year. Hemingway wrote in his bedroom every morning just after dawn and would go for a daily half-mile swim immediately after. Charles Dickens was committed to a three-hour walk through the streets of London or along the countryside. Maya Angelou wrote in a hotel room surrounded by a dictionary, a deck of cards, a bottle of sherry, and a Bible.

Barbara Stoberock and her colleagues from the University of Cologne show that even a simple ritual like crossing your fingers for luck makes people feel more confident.

Build small rituals, and you’ll feel in command and full of confidence.

But what to do if you want to feel confidence deeper — in your bones?

Use Pygmalion Effect To Label Yourself

The Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomenon in which high expectations improve performance in a given area. The effect is named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.

Psychologist Robert Rosenthal conducted a famous experiment in 1968. He gave the young students in an elementary school in California an IQ test. He then told the teachers which of their students had the potential to bloom intellectually and were in the top 20% of the class.

But he lied to them. Rosenthal randomly names the students without looking at the results of their tests.

After a year, all the students were given another IQ test. The students who were listed as being in the top 20% improved their IQ scores by 10–15 points when compared to their peers.

Expectations changed performance. The children who were labeled as smart ended up increasing their smarts the most.

You’ve got to label yourself as confident.

How to do that?

Here is another experiment to help you figure out.

Researcher Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis and his colleagues did a research experiment with the help of 60 swimming class students at the University of Thessaly in Greece. The students were tested on how accurately they threw the ball and how far they threw it.

Then half the students were given instructions to talk to themselves every time they threw the ball. These students dramatically improved their performance and became better at throwing the ball than the others.

Motivational self-talk sounds woo-woo mumbo jumbo, but it works. Just repeatedly telling yourself that you’re a confident person makes the label stick.

Research done by Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan shows that self-talk in the second or third person works better than first-person. Saying “you can do this” instead of “I can do this” to yourself works better because it makes you think objectively.

Takeaways

• Self-confidence is the key to being a successful writer.
• Act confident, and you will feel confident. How you act changes how you feel.
• Reduce self anxiety to boost your confidence. Rituals help reduce anxiety.
• Work on your emotions to feel more confident. Power posture, rituals, and self-talk all help to build confidence.
• Surround yourself with people who think highly of you. Their expectation will affect your confidence and change your performance.