Book Marketing Breakthrough 02 - Upgrade Your Expectancies
Dorothea Brande found her own secret to success in life. You only have to set high expectations - as if its impossible to fail...
Lesson 2 – Upgrade Your Expectancies
From the works of Dorothea Brande, author of “Becoming A Writer” and “Wake Up and Live!”
TWO YEARS ago I came across a formula for success which has revolutionized my life as a writer and editor. It was so simple, and so obvious once I had seen it, that I could hardly believe it produced the magical results which followed my putting it into practice.
The first thing to confess is that two years ago I was a failure. Oh, nobody knew it except me and those who knew me well enough to see that I was not doing a tenth of my abilities. I held an interesting position, lived not too dull a life – yet there was no doubt in my mind, at least, that I had failed.
What I was doing was a substitute activity for what I had planned to do; and no matter how ingenious and neat the theories were which I presented to myself to account for my lack of success, I knew very well that there was more work that I should do, and better work — and work more demonstrably on my own.
Of course, I was always looking for a way out of my impasse. But when I actually had the good fortune to find it, I hardly believed in my luck. At first I didn’t analyze or explain it. For one thing, the effects of using the formula were so remarkable that I was almost on the verge of being superstitious about the matter. It seemed like magic, and it doesn’t do to inquire too closely into the reasons for a spell or incantation!
More realistic than that, there was then still a trace of wariness about my attitude. I had tried to get out of my difficulties many times before, had often seemed to be about to do so, and then had found them closing in around me again as relentlessly as ever.
But the main reason for my taking so little time to analyze or explain the effects of the formula after I once used it consistently was – I was much too busy and having far too much fun.
It was enough to revel in the ease with which I worked hitherto impossible for me, to see seeming impenetrable barriers melt away, to feel the inertia and timidity which had bound me for years dropping off like unlocked fetters.
*
For I had been years in my deadlock; I had known what I wanted to do, had equipped myself for my profession — and got nowhere. Yet I had chosen my life work of writing, early on — and had started out with high hopes. Most of the work I had finished had met a friendly reception. But then, when I tried to take the next step and go into a more mature phase, it was as though I’d become stone. I felt as if I could not start.
Of course, I was unhappy. Not miserably and painfully unhappy, but just nagged at and depressed by my ineffectiveness. I busied myself at editing, since I seemed doomed to fail at the more creative side of literature, And I never ceased harrying myself, consulting teachers and analysts and psychologists and physicians for advice how to get out of my pit.
I read and inquired and thought and worried; I tried every suggestion for relief. Nothing worked more than temporarily.
Then, between one minute and the next, I found the idea which set me free. This time I was not consciously looking for it; I was engaged in a piece of research into quite another field. But I came across a sentence in the book I was reading. HUMAN PERSONALITY, by F. W. H. Myers, which was so illuminating that I put the book aside to consider all the ideas suggested in that one penetrating hypothesis. When I picked up the book again, I was a different person.
This altered every aspect, attitude, relation of my life. At first, as I say, I did not realize that. I only knew, with increasing certainty from day to day, that at last I had found a talisman for counteracting failure and inertia and discouragement and that it worked. That was quite enough for me!
My hands and my days became so full that there was no time for introspection. I did sometimes drop off to sleep, after doing in a short while what once would have seemed to me a gigantic task.
I was reaping the rewards, beyond doubt: the books I had wanted to write for so long, and had so agonizingly failed to write, each flowed effortlessly now — as fast as the words would go on paper. So far from feeling drained by the activity, I was continually finding new ideas — hidden ones, behind the work that had “backed up” in my mind and made a barrier.
*
Here is the total amount of writing I could do in the twenty years before I found my formula – the little writing which I was painfully, laboriously, protestingly able to do. For safety’s sake, I have over-estimated the items in each classification, so a generous estimate of it comes to this:
Seventeen short stories,
twenty book-reviews,
half a dozen newspaper items,
one attempt at a novel, abandoned less than a third of the way through.
An average of less than two completed pieces of work per year!
For the two years after my moment of illumination, this is the record:
Three books (the first two in just two weeks less than the first year, and both were successful in their different fields),
twenty-four articles,
four short stories,
seventy-two lectures,
scaffolding of three more books; and
innumerable letters of consultation and professional advice sent to all parts of the country.
Nor are those by any means the only results of applying my formula. As soon as I discovered how it worked in the one matter of releasing my energy for writing, I became curious what else it might do for me, and tried acting upon it in other fields where I’d had trouble.
The tentativeness and timidity which had crippled me in almost every aspect of my life dropped away. Interviews, lectures, engagements became pleasurable experiences. A dozen stupid little exploitations of myself ended then and there. I was on good terms with myself at last, no longer punishing and exhorting and ruthlessly driving myself, and so no longer allowing myself to be unnecessarily bored.
From time to time, now that I was no longer living in such a state of siege as made me blind to all outside happenings, I saw indications here and there that another was wasting their life in much the same way that I had wasted mine.
Except for chance, I would never have thought of publicly offering the simple program which had helped me in that way. I might, indeed, never have realized that to a greater or less extent, most adults are living inadequate lives and suffering in consequence.
*
Some months ago, I accepted the opportunity to lecture to a group of booksellers, and the subject which was tentatively given me was “The Difficulties of Becoming a Writer.”
Beginning to prepare the lecture, I could think of nothing further to add to the subject than to say frankly that the most difficult of all tasks for a writer was learning to counteract their own inertia and cowardice. Fearing at first that my talk would have somewhat the sound of “testifying to grace” in an old-fashioned prayer-meeting, I considered the subject and prepare my speech.
The conclusions I came to: that we are victims of a Will to Fail; that unless we see this in time and take action against it, we die without accomplishing our intentions; that there is a way of counteracting that Will which gives results that seem like magic.
I gave my lecture.
What was really startling to me was to see how they received it. Until the notes, the letters, the telephone-calls started coming in, I had thought the report of how one person overcame a dilemma might interest many of the audience mildly and help two or three hearers who found themselves in somewhat the same plight.
But my audience, almost to a man, was in the state I had described, that they all were looking for help to get out of it. I gave the lecture twice more; the results were the same. I became flooded with messages, questions, and requests for interviews.
We all live so far below the possibilities for our lives that when we become free from the things which hamper us — so that we merely approach the potentialities in ourselves, we seem to have been entirely transfigured.
It is in comparison with the halting, tentative, hesitant lives we let ourselves live that the full, normal life that is ours by right seems to partake of the definitely super-normal.
When that becomes apparent, it is easy to discover that all men and women of effective lives, whether statesmen, philosophers, artists or men of business, use, sometimes entirely unconsciously, the same mental attitude in which to do their work that their less fortunate fellows must either find for themselves or die without discovering.
*
In his book, Myers made a theorizing comment which is of immense value to everyone who hopes to free himself of his bondage to failure. He points out that the ordinary shyness and tentativeness that affect us when we approach any new action are entirely removable. And that removal results in one who consequently acts instead with precision and self-confidence.
There is the clue. No sentence was ever more packed with rich implications for those who are in earnest about reorienting their lives towards success.
The problem is in how we learn. It has become a commonplace to say that we learn by “trial and error.” We learn by discovering that one course of action does not bring about the end we had in view; we try again, and perhaps many times, until we find the procedure which accomplishes our intention. We then adopt the last solution we uncovered in this series of acts.
That is the mental picture we make of the “trial-and-error” method of learning.
The hidden trick in this method is that we never forget all our earlier failures. Our Unconscious records the element of pain. While we remember and apply that one success, we do not consider the tremendous importance to our future conduct of those discarded trials which ended in failure. We don’t keep in our memories only the memory of the ultimate success. And that ultimate success doesn’t operate to make the failures and pain unimportant to our Unconscious.
Rather than revive the memory of our early failures, we will unconsciously decide to remain inactive, or we will choose to do something easier.
It is utterly illogical, of course. In order to avoid a trivial discomfort, we miss opportunity after opportunity which may never come again. And so expose ourselves to far greater pain than that we manage to avoid. But at least the memory of that early humiliation can sleep, or only turn restlessly, half-awakened.
The solution is far simpler. All that is necessary to break the spell of inertia and frustration is this:
Act as if it were impossible to fail.
That is the talisman, the formula, the command which turns us from failure towards success.
By an easy imaginative feat, clear out all the distrusts and timidities, all the fears of looking ridiculous which you may hardly suspect of being treacherous trouble-makers in your life. You find that if you can imaginatively capture the state of mind which would be yours if you knew you were going towards a pre-arranged and inevitable success, the first result will be a tremendous surge of vitality, of freshness.
Then the long-dammed-up flow sets in: directly, irresistibly, turned at last in the right direction, the current gathers strength from minute to minute.
At first you may still harbor some fear that the spell which worked so instantaneously may break in the same way. It will not, simply because it is no spell; it is a reminder to yourself of how your work can always be successful.
Those fears, anxieties and apprehensions, you see, were far more than mere negative things. By acting as if they were important, you endowed them with importance, you turned them into realities. They became parasitic growths, existing at the expense of everything that is healthy in you.
So, one doesn’t suddenly get wonderful new powers. When you cease to let fear hold its frustrating sway, we now find existing aptitudes, which we formerly had no energy to explore. We discover that we already possess capacities we had not suspected, and the effect, of course, is as though we had just received them. And the rapidity with which these capacities make themselves known, once the aspects are favorable for them, is truly somewhat startling. It is even more enjoyable.
There is always so much ahead, and it is so clearly seen, that there is no chance for depression to set in.
Once you absolve your Unconscious of the thankless and unnecessary task, and it rewards you by seeming to fly – where before it had only stumbled and groped.
*
Improving our writing craft builds the core abilities any author starts with. And finding mentors who trained writers into professional authors, ones who make their living from writing, is next thing to examine...
How This Can Help You
This course evolved while I was wrapping up the first three books in this series - and became part of the fourth book (see below.)
In that fourth book are three mini-courses — this is just the second lesson of the first course in there. The reason for this last book is to give you actionable material to get you started simply. After the first three were ready to go to press, I found I still had these too-short-for-paperback works were sitting around unpublished — so…
I intend to run a group chat on this course, lesson by lesson, where you can ask me anything about what I cover here.
And you can always buy me a coffee…
Very inspiring Robert! Thanks for sharing