HealthyGamerGG - 40 Year-Old Gifted Kid: Why Can’t I Start Writing My Novel?

Episode Date: December 20, 2022

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And so paradoxically, the more we invest into something, the more we view ourselves as an author, the more that we strive for success in writing, the harder it becomes to write. There are many people who will offer solutions for life. Do this and you will be happy, do that and be happy. It is my opinion that you must understand yourself first. That is why we made Dr. K guide. Check it out, nah? A writer who never writes. I identify a lot with what Dr. K says about gifted,

kids, except I'm 40. My failed college censor long behind me. I've achieved a lot in life, truly, but good financial success is not among my achievements. 13 years ago, I dedicated my life to writing fiction. I've written a lot, outlined even more, but shared little. I fear failure, comparison, and how those failures would sink my chances of keeping a future reader. This fear is so all-encompassing that I would rather not write and just play video games, or write Pathfinder modules. Anything but tell the stories that I could sell professionally to make money for my family. Does anyone have any insight into how I might overcome this limitation? Storytelling has been my passion since I was nine, and I would love to do it as a profession.

I know writing very well. This is not a skill issue. It's 100% a psychological issue. What a beautiful, beautiful post. So we've talked a lot about gifted kids, but those gifted kids sometimes grow into adults. And the hard thing about being an adult and not being successful is that while you're a kid, you've got potential. You've got time. Like even if you screw up a little bit when you're 18, 19, 20, you got time to sort of get back on track and sort to do what you're supposed to do. But then you kind of grow into an adult. And then you're on the downhill, right? You're 40 years old. Maybe you're 35. Maybe you're 45. And sure, Dr. Chaos has all this advice about how you can put your life together when you're in your 20s. But some of us are

kind of over the hump. And then we're kind of struggling because this is a something that we really want to do, right? And you can sort of look at your life and you can say, I've accomplished a lot. I've grown a lot, but there's just this one thing. And then the real weird paradox here is that it's not even a skill issue. You know you're good at it, right? You've been dedicating your life to it. It's been your passion your entire life. Or maybe you discovered it a little bit later. And you're putting in the hours and you're putting in the work and you know you're confident that you can do it. You feel stuck. And despite the more that you practice, The more that you train, you're never ready to actually take the plunge.

You practice and you practice and you practice and you're not ready and you're not ready and you're not ready. So how do you overcome this? Because at some point you begin to realize practicing, I don't know if I can ever like write the perfect novel. At some point you've got to take the plunge, but you can't. And that feels kind of weird, right? So what's going on here? So I want you all to put yourselves in the mind of a 40-year-old whose passion has been writing their entire life, who spent 13 years training their craft.

So this person hasn't been financially successful. They've figured out all the other parts of their life. This is their white whale. This is their raid boss. This is the final challenge. So you're a 40-year-old. You've got to make something of your life, right? There's a lot of pressure.

You've got to make something of your life. And now you've invested all of your energy into this. And so what if you fail? Right? So this sort of becomes, okay, I'm afraid of failure. The person even knows that. I compare myself to others. We even know that.

But why can't we overcome this? And it turns out that all the things that we think we have done to set ourselves up for success, actually are the things that paralyze us, right? Because if this was my passion since I was nine, and if I take the plunge and if I fail, then what am I? I've been writing for 13 years. I'm so good at it. It's 100% not a skill issue. I'm supremely confident. Why can't you write? It's because of the ego. Because what you want to be as an author, right? And as the years of your life fly by and doors and opportunities close behind you, you've got one door left. You're all in on this one thing.

You want to be a successful author. And what excuse do you have? You've got the skill. You've got the passion. You're one of these success stories, right? Oh, yeah, this person started writing at the age of nine. Oh, my God. And they devoted their entire life to it.

And then they published their first novel. And what a great success it was. And this is what you strive for. As you've made sacrifices, as you've made investments, you've got one door left to be a successful author. That's what you really want to be. And so you learn about how to become a successful author. You practice.

You do this. You do this. All to tee yourself up for success. And paradoxically, the more effort you put into trying to be successful, the more paralyzed you become. Because think about it. If you go all in on this thing and you lose, you lose everything. And now we can also see why this person has moved forward in other parts of their life.

How have they been successful in so many ways? Well, because that wasn't as important to them. Does that make sense? Because you could afford failure over. This isn't who you are. This isn't who you strive to be. This isn't what you were put on this earth for. And so all of those things you can take a chance.

But I want y'all to think for a second about how crushing it would be. To be 40 years old, be passionate about writing since the age of nine, spend 13 years on your craft and get rejected. Then who are you? That final door closes. The reason that you were put on your earth, all of your passion, all of your effort, all of it goes down the drain. And no wonder we can't write, right? Because it's a fucking coin flip. And if the coin flips the wrong way, it's over. It's G.G. You're not a successful author. What are you then? A failure. You are a failure. And you just can't handle that, right? You can't handle being a failure.

And so now we understand, okay, of course. Like, who would, who wants to go all in on a coin flip? Can you do that, especially when you're 40? When it's too late to learn something else? when it's too late to pivot into something else, oh my goodness. And so paradoxically, the more we invest into something, the more we view ourselves as an author, the more that we strive for success in writing, the harder it becomes to write. And so then what we do, we go optimizing all the things that we can. We're going to learn this. I'm going to do this podcast.

I'm going to take this course. I'm going to join this writing group. I'm going to do all of the things around the periphery, except take the plunge. So what do we do about this situation? This is where, once again, it's going to be kind of simple. also very difficult. And remember that the more complex the answer is, the easier it is for the mind. The mind loves complexity, right? That's how you're able to do all of the periphery, because the mind tells you, oh, look, being successful involves 15 variables. And then the mind is,

it's thrilled, because now I can do A, I can do B, I can do C, I can do D, I can do E. I can do, I can make all of this progress while staying perfectly still. I can be paralyzed and progress at the same time, right? I can take another class. I can do another podcast. I can listen to this. I can do all these things that will tee me up for success without ever having to take the plunge. And the answer is quite simple. And that is to recognize that you can't be a successful author. The whole idea is false. It's an idea of the ego of the Ahamgar. And now we see why there's so much comparison. So you all have been paying attention. You know about a humkhar. You know that a humgar is a consequence of the comparison. I mean, a comparison is a consequence of a hum-god, because I want to be a

successful author. Well, what does that even mean? What does it mean to be a successful author? What does it mean to be a failure as an author? Is getting a book rejected mean that you're a successful author? Does getting a book accepted mean that you're a successful author? Because ultimately, being an author is not about being. It's not about something you are. It is about what you do. So this is where I think everyone who strives to be a successful author, I don't know about everyone, but many people who strive to be successful authors never become successful authors. So how do you become a successful author? You write.

And then you do the next thing. You write something. You're worried about sharing it with people, sharing it with your family and whatnot. And what if they think you're good enough or what if they think you're bad enough? You're so concerned about the sharing. And instead, what you should be concerned about is the writing. Because the idea of being a successful author is an amalgamation of lots of different things. And the problem is you can't do all of those things at once. You can even say that

part of being a successful author is dealing with rejection. But the problem is that you can't deal with rejection because in your mind, like, that one rejection means so much for your future. So you are tying the actions of today to a destiny of tomorrow. And if you are tying the actions today to destiny of tomorrow, you can never act today. Because how could you? Just imagine for a moment. If you made one choice today that would determine the rest of your life. And furthermore, if that choice was whether you become a successful author or not, imagine how paralyzed you would be. If you're unlucky, you don't even have to imagine it.

You know you can't afford to make the choice. That's what it comes down to. And that's where you have to realize it's all false. All of it is false. All you can do is write. All you can do is submit what you've written. All you can do is go to a conference and find an agent. All you can do is what you can do.

It's not your place to be successful or not successful. This is a concept that I think is best explained in the Bhagwad Gita, which is a religious text from the Hindu tradition. But there's this concept of karmafar. Garmah means action and phara means fruit. As a human being, you are entitled only to your actions, never to the fruit of your actions. I can ask someone out, but I'm not entitled to them saying yes.

I can write a book, but I'm not entitled to publishing it. And so now we understand why a whole generation of people is paralyzed, because we get so caught up on controlling the one thing that is out of our control. When I plant a seed in the ground and I try to grow a fruit tree, does it grow or not grow? I don't know. That's not for me to decide. All I can control is what I do. So what can you do?

This is the answer. Forget about who you are. Forget about what you want to be. You want to be a successful author. Well, I have no fucking idea if you can do that. Neither do you. Because who said you could see the future? You can't see the future.

And yet you live your life as if you can. You live your life looking for the formula that will guarantee you success. And now we understand why you're paralyzed. Because what actions can you take that will guarantee success? What do you have to do to be able to predict the future? Because if you can figure that out, then you'll act. And you stay paralyzed because you can't see in the future and you're looking for a guarantee and you fear failure.

So focus on the action. Don't write for anyone else. Don't write to become successful. Acknowledge that whether you are successful in this life or not is not yours to. determine. All you can do is give everything that you've got. That's all you can do. Give it your all. And what if it's not enough? Then it's not enough. This is the wild thing. If you want to be free of that, there is a beautiful piece in giving everything what we've got in it not being enough. We start with that being the ultimate fear. Because what if I give it everything I've got and it's

not enough? That means that I'm not good enough because I gave it everything. And if you really look at why we self-sabotage, part of the reasons that we self-sabotage is to protect our ego because what we want is we want to reserve something, right? So if we're not top of the class, we can say to ourselves, oh, well, I half-assed it. That's my excuse. So we are terrified of the idea of giving it all and not being enough. But there's something beautiful that we don't realize is when you give it your all and it's not enough, it's liberating. It's not crushing. It's liberating. You may say, well, how the hell does that happen? Well, because I gave it my all. And I know there's not a damn thing I could have done. So it isn't my fault. I did everything that I was supposed to do.

And medicine teaches you this. When you try to save a life and you can't, doesn't matter that you trained at Harvard or not. Doesn't matter, you can do whatever you want to. You can call consults. You can call the chief of psychiatry at the number one hospital in the United States and you can ask for their help and it's still not enough.

You can do everything that you want to do and then you begin to realize how humble you truly are. It humbles you. Because you can't control life. All of this training, all of this power, all of this medical technology. And I do not have the power over life or death. obviously, and it's liberating because then what I'm going to give it at everything that I've got.

If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. So don't try to live a life of success. Try to live a life without regrets. Give it everything you've got. And if it's not enough, that ain't on you, right? If you're just too damn stupid to write successfully or the market doesn't want what you want, that's actually totally okay because you gave it everything you've got. You controlled everything on your side of the equation. So focus on the action. If you want to write, Right. Don't worry about whether people will like it or not like it. That's not what writing is about. Write the story that's in here. Write the story that you want to tell. And you're going to write that story and you're going to look at it and you're going to say, this is trash. So be it. You're going to

stick it in a desk drawer. You're going to walk away from a month. You're going to come back. You're going to pull it out. You're going to read it. And it's absolute trash. And you're going to make it a little bit better. You're going to take that chicken shit. And one step at a time, you're going to turn it in a chicken salad. You make your first edit, we're going to toss in a little bit of mayo. Second edit, toss in a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper. It's edible now, but it's nowhere near where you know it can be. Then we're going to add some pickles, add a little bit of celery, add some cayenne. Now it's looking pretty good. And the Greeks understood this really well, because they talked about genius, which is not that the skill of the writer exists within you. You are not a genius.

Genius is something that happens to you. It's an occurrence. It's an orange. and the beautiful thing about that perspective is that it removes ego from the equation. It assumes that you are not responsible for the success or the failure. And so recognize that all you can do is what you can do. And if it's not good enough, it's not good enough. You can't predict the future. How on earth do you know if it's good enough or not good enough? You're afraid it won't be good enough.

Set that fear aside, acknowledge it, set it aside, and start to write.