Once I had a literary agent I started researching the book industry. I learned that more than three hundred thousand books are published in the United States every single year. And well over a million a year are published around the world. Suddenly it dawned on me: Getting a book published was not very special. A million people did it every year!
I looked at bestseller lists and they had only ten or twenty books on them. I calculated that only a few hundred books make bestseller lists each year. Less than 0.01%.
So I set a new goal.
I wanted my book to be a bestseller.
I wanted to be one of the 0.01%.
The Globe and Mail published a bestseller list every weekend and I started checking it. What did these books have in common, what made them great, what made them sell?
So for the next year I kept writing my blog every day, writing my book, and working on a book launch plan. My plan was to work with bloggers to prepare interviews and articles about my book while working with my publisher to line up radio, newspaper, and TV interviews—all to come out when the book hit shelves.
Basically, the entire year after winning the awards, I was consumed with The Book of Awesome hitting the bestseller list. It was all I wanted, thought about, talked about. Then the big day of publication finally came!
I woke up early and started interview after interview. I posted a special entry called #526 When dreams come true. My voice turned scratchy, bags under my eyes turned black, and I was sleeping three or four hours a night. And then, finally, the next Saturday morning the newspaper came out and . . .
I hit #2 on the bestseller list!
It was a dream come true. I went to bed happy. I had achieved my goal. My publishers were excited, too! Their joy said to keep pushing.
I woke up the next morning and took a closer look at the bestseller list.
My book was listed with a 1 beside it because it had been on the bestseller list for one week. I noticed other books were on the list for twenty or thirty weeks. Staying power. That was more important than being a one-hit wonder. I didn’t want to go the rest of my life telling people my book was a bestseller for only one week.
I suddenly realized that popping on the bestseller list was nice . . . but it was nowhere near my true goal. I wanted this book to be bigger. The New York Times bestseller list. A #1 beside my name.
Eventually The Book of Awesome hit #1 on the bestseller list and stayed there for five weeks then ten weeks then fifty weeks then one hundred weeks. Foreign publishers translated the book into German, Korean, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The Book of Awesome hit The New York Times bestseller list, too. I was on the Today show, The Early Show, CNN, and the BBC. The producers of The Office optioned TV rights to the book and some big film producers optioned the movie rights, too. I got another book deal, then another, then another . . .
And I had done it!
I had finally reached my goal.
I started smiling. Tried to relax. A few days later, after working so hard for three years straight, lying in bed alone in my tiny apartment, getting three or four hours of sleep, eating takeout for every meal, developing black bags under my eyes, and losing touch with friends . . . I suddenly had a realization.
No matter how many external goals I achieved . . . I just kept setting more.
I started realizing that external goals didn’t help me become a better person.
Only internal goals did.
2
What’s the biggest problem with external goals?
When I was stressing about my blog and watching hit counters, bestseller lists, and award nominations, I was using external motivators. I wasn’t doing it for me. I was doing it for others. I lost my self-confidence because I started outsourcing it to signals outside my brain, which I couldn’t always control. When those signals were positive, I was flying. Lots of emails, piles of comments, and bestseller list rankings lifted me up and kept me going. But when those signs were negative, even relatively negative, I was devastated. Critical comments, a nasty review, and the inevitable slipping off the bestseller list—meant I was a loser.
3
4 simple words that block all criticism
Do
It
For
You
Do it for you.
Don’t do it for others.
It’s hard to compete endlessly because there’s always more to compete with when you get there.
Remember we will always be number two to seven billion at everything in the world. And every level we go up has new peers, new benchmarks, new competitors. A CEO once told me, “You always think the geniuses are at the next level.”
But the next level never ends unless you are literally the best in the entire world. What are the odds of that happening? Well, they are one in seven billion.
You have better chances of getting struck by lightning every single day of your life.
4
Why your dream job could be the worst job you ever have
Teddy Roosevelt famously said, “It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming, but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
It’s not the critic who counts.
But what motivates that man in the arena? Why is he working so hard?
First, remember there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal. You’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external. You’re doing it because you get something for it.
Guess which gets better performance?
Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. Like, we literally lose interest—as in, the interest we have becomes truly lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.
While at Brandeis University, Dr. Teresa Amabile performed experiments on elementary school and college students and asked groups to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work and some were not. What happened? Based on independent judges, who didn’t know who was getting paid, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Dr. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”
Makes sense.
When you’re not doing it for you . . . you’re not doing a good job.
It’s not just that getting rewards hurts quality, either.