Over the years many have asked your humble daily email horror host about ways to motivate themselves to do the writing they want to do for emails, sales copy, courses, books, even things like fiction.
The obvious answer to them is to just sac up and do the work.
But, one tip I can trace a whole lot more content written, created, sold in my business to is simply reading lots and lots and lots biographies from people who accomplished a lot of work and projects in their lives.
I started doing focusing mostly on reading bios back in 2019.
And since then, I don’t think the sheer output of writing dwarfing everything I did the 17 years before that up in this copywriting and marketing business is a coincidence.
The reason for bios ain’t so much instructional though.
Very little “how to” info in bios.
No, it’s just practical:
i.e., You realize real quick how little time you have in this world.
If you’re a young turk full of piss & vinegar, fresh off the chair with the barber cape removed after getting your latest broccoli haircut this won’t be as easy to grasp than if you’re an old fart in his 40’s, 50’s, and beyond. But when you read lots of biographies of people who got a lot of things accomplished in their lives, and see them from birth (or before birth — most bios start with their parents’ lives) all the way to the moment they wheezed out their last breath, it can’t help but give you a better sense of your own mortality.
It’s no different than when you hear about someone dying.
Funerals and death remind the living that we’re all mortal and gonna die.
My pal and the guy who has the privilege and honor of publishing my deranged Enoch Wars and Villains books titles on Amazon Greg Perry likes to talk about how old school preachers used to get people’s heads on straight. And they did it by simply pointing out the window at the graveyard, and reminding them they’re all gonna end up there sooner rather than later, with no other lecturing to stop sinning and get right with God needed.
The grave has always been the “great equalizer.”
Once you’re there, that’s it. And while this may or may not apply to anyone else — I can say after reading quite a few good bios over the past several years, it definitely has given me more of a sense not just or urgency…
But emergency.
I don’t have to coax or force myself to get up and write.
If anything — and Stefania can attest — I’m up an hour or two earlier than I have to, in my office, banging away at whatever project with reckless abandon. I have way too much work to do to do anything else but either write or think about writing whenever I’m not writing, in order to better prep for the next time I sit down to do some more writing.
The money is obviously one motivation.
As is legacy.
(Which having a son has certainly gotten my head out of my arse about.)
But so is this impending specter of doom constantly hovering over my shoulder and whispering in my ear, letting me know I better hurry up because I only got so much time left… thanks to reading all these bios of people that ultimately died, and some of them frustrated with lots of unfinished work.
Another thing about bios:
If you read ones about people who died young it’s even more motivating.
It is a powerful reminder that you got things you want to get done, and if you’re like me where the more you get done the more ideas you’ll get for other things you want to do… reading bios of long dead people (I rarely read bios of people still living), seeing their entire lives from tugging on the teet to being put in the ground can be a tremendous motivation for doing a lot of writing, creating a lot of content, growing your business a lot bigger and faster than you would have otherwise.
A caveat about all the above:
This all could admittedly be just a morbid quirk of my personality though.
As I’m the kinda guy who watches a Hitchcock movie, for example, and constantly pauses it throughout just to Google how the actors in the movie ultimately died. I also thought the first Faces of Death (not the sequels) movie was extremely fascinating, too, in its own gruesome way for much the same reason.
So I really have no idea how many people will find this bios tip useful much less will do it.
But it’s not something I’ve seen anyone talk about.
So that’s that.
I talk about purely writing stuff like this on in the paid Email Players newsletter at times.
More about that here:
Ben Settle
