Stephen King has published 75 books and 200 short stories. He’s sold over 400 million copies.
The author of Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, has written 48 books and short stories in roughly the same time period as King. He’s sold over 90 million copies, less than a quarter of King’s output.
Martin takes around 6 years between books. He once asked Stephen King, “How the f— do you write so many books so fast?”
King explained that he writes for three or four hours each day and tries to produce six “fairly clean” pages in that time. That’s a 360 page book in approximately two months.
Stephen King is prolific because he treats writing as a job. He writes every day – whether he feels like it or not.
In coaching terms, that’s what Steve Chandler calls the blue collar work of coaching.
You do what you need to do, no matter how you feel. You do what you need to do, no matter the fear, the doubt, the naysayers, the critics.
George RR Martin pushed Stephen King deeper still: “You don’t ever have a day when you sit down there and it’s like constipation? You write a sentence and you hate the sentence, and you check your email and you wonder if you had any talent after all and maybe you should have been a plumber? Don’t you have days like that?”
But Stephen King doesn’t think that way. He takes a blue collar approach to writing. In his book On Writing, says: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
The same principle applies in coaching.
If you want to be a successful coach there’s no shortcut. You must do two things above all others: serve people powerfully and create a lot.
Another great writer also takes a service approach to his craft. Stephen Pressfield, author of The War of Art, says,
“When you understand that nobody wants to read your shit, your mind becomes powerfully concentrated.
You begin to understand that writing/reading is, above all, a transaction.
The reader donates their time and attention, which are supremely valuable commodities.
In return, you, the writer, must give them something worthy of their gift to you.”
If you want to create valuable clients, create value for them before they ever become a client.
Every day, I wake up, and I ask myself two questions: Who can I serve? What can I create?
Today, I served. I coached the 30 members of my 4PC community.
Today, I created. I wrote this article for the 25,000+ people who read my newsletter. That means I wrote this for YOU…
And that’s it. I’m done for the day!
Who did you serve today? And what did you create?
Love. Rich