Here is a list of things I say all the time. See if they sound familiar…
- Don’t imagine a career that will look like someone else’s; grow one that will look like yours.
- Learn to cultivate your best ideas.
- Match your ideas with appropriate markets.
- Know who your best audiences are.
- Overcome editor-phobia.
- Build up increasingly stronger clips as you write.
- Spend more time writing than you spend fantasizing about writing.
- Expect good things but don’t complain when things don’t go your way.
- When nothing else seems to be working, get up earlier or go to bed later.
- Balance your introverted and extroverted sides.
- Find a community of writers with similar goals as you.
- Don’t expect your community to do your work.
- Always be learning from the careers of writers you admire.
- Lift-off happens when you start seeing you name in print.
- Keep doing whatever you did before that was successful.
- Keep submitting to or querying wider-reaching publications.
- Don’t let go of regular assignments until you’ve replaced them with better, regular assignments.
- Get faster and more efficient as you go along.
- Recognize what works in your career and turn those mechanics into habits.
- Start keeping a portfolio of your work and revisit it at least quarterly.
- Pick a time of year that is best for you to do your planning.
- Don’t piggy back your ambitions on other people’s hard-won resources.
- Continually increase the size of your goals.
- Find supporters who will help you stay accountable to your goals.
- When something good happens, pause and appreciate your efforts.
- Become determined to learn when supposedly bad things that happen.
- Become the most resilient person you know.
- Remember that success is not about talent; it’s about having a positive attitude, giving your best effort, and feeling satisfied with yourself and your results.
- And you should still always be getting better at what you write and everything you do.
- Memorize this: you can’t control what happens. But if you are committed, you will likely see your career prosper.