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How To Unlock That Best-Selling Book Or Project That's Inside You: A Conversation With Joe Vitale

by Josh Hinds & Andy O'Bryan

The following is an excerpt from the exclusive AudioMotivation interview with Dr. Joe Vitale. He is the author of a number of books, including the #1 best-selling book "Spiritual Marketing," the best-selling e-book "Hypnotic Writing," and the best-selling Nightingale-Conant audioprogram, "The Power of Outrageous Marketing".

AudioMotivation: Now, so many of us kind of go through life with the dream of writing that novel or just getting started on any kind of writing. If you had to sum up a few quick tips for somebody like that who wants to write a book or start their writing career whether it's syndicated or whatever, what are some ideas to put those dreams into play for them?

Joe Vitale: Yeah, that's a great question. I'll tell you the easiest thing to do and it might seem so simplistic, but it's so powerful, is to just get started. I have found that the big stumbling block with people in any walk of life that's trying to do anything is they're listening to their voice of doubt. They're listening to their inner critic.

When it comes to writing, when people tell me they're in a writer's block or they're having difficulty writing, when I explore it a little bit, I find out that they're listening to the editorial voice within themselves.

They're listening to that voice that says, "Who are you to do this or you don't have the time to do this or this probably won't pay off or what if you do it and it fails or what if you do it and it works and it succeeds?"

All of those questions, all of those doubts, all of that criticism stops people from doing the fundamental thing that needs to be done and that is take action.

So I would say there's at least 2 tips here for this short question and answer. Be aware of that voice inside of you that's talking you out of doing what you want to do and treat this like a meditation.

You'll listen to the voice, but you don't necessarily pay attention to it. You just kind of say oh, okay, you're there again. Thanks and we'll talk to you later and basically let it go its way. And it loses that power over you in time as you practice that.

And the second is, just start doing it. For example, if you want to write a book, the easiest thing to do is to sit down and start typing. You have to keep in mind that all you have to do is write your first draft. You don't have to write the book flawlessly. You don't have to write the book perfectly to anybody's expectations. All you have to do is get the words on the paper or on the keyboard. Then, when you're done with your first draft, you can go back and edit it, refine it, retune it, delete things, add new pieces.

Then you can have select people review it or an editor review it, but you can take it one step at a time and it doesn't have to be done perfectly. It doesn't have to ever be done perfectly. I think that's another thing that stumps people is the idea that it has to be perfect and perfect is a relative term. There is no such thing as perfection. None of us agree on that.

AudioMotivation: Well, I'm sorry, I read something where during that first draft process, you shouldn't edit at all, like you shouldn't stop yourself to edit and people I think are tempted to do that quite a bit. Is that what you have found?

Joe Vitale: Yeah, that's a great secret to flawless, easy writing. The great secret is, do not edit when you are writing your first draft. I've written about this in Hypnotic Writing. In fact, I've created a whole software helping people to write books and articles. It's called Hypnotic Writing Wizard and the Hypnotic Writing Wizard, you can have this cool little device on it where you can, it will shut down your monitor for a scheduled period of time.

While you write, it will retain everything that you're writing and the whole purpose for this is if you can't see what you're writing, it disconnects that editorial part of you. You can't edit it because you can't see it. So this is just one of the tools in Hypnotic Writing Wizard to help you do what you just explained that if you're editing, you're not going to write or you're not going to enjoy your writing. You're not going to be very creative at it. Turn off the editorial voice.

Josh Hinds & Andy O'Bryan co-founded AudioMotivation, which includes success sessions with famous motivational speakers, trainers, business experts & best-selling authors.

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