The other day I presented a workshop for a chapter of the Academy for Chief Executives on going “Beyond Brainstorming.” This covers advanced creativity techniques and it’s always interesting to see how quickly these methods yield new, practical ideas.
But what struck me this time was an exercise in which the executive said his goal was to come up with a better web site. He revealed that he’d paid a lot of money to a company that promised to get his company to the top of the Google search engine results. They did it—but very few of the many people visiting the site actually contacted the company to find out more or to buy their service. The moral of the story is:
Be very clear on what it is you really want.
In this case, they didn’t really want lots of random visitors to their site—they wanted visitors who would buy. (And we quickly generated several ways for them to attract those kinds of visitors without being number one on Google.)
Sometimes it’s useful to ask that question about our writing, too. What do you want? It could be:
• the creative satisfaction of expressing yourself through your writing;
• the money that comes with having a best-seller;
• to leave a legacy (of wisdom or experience) for your children and grand-children;
• to have a book that will serve as a calling card for other things you do, like consulting or teaching.
Each of these would lead in a different direction, but I see lots of writers who are not matching their writing practice to their real goal. For example, if you want to leave your story behind for your children and grand-children, self-publishing is a terrific solution; if you want to have a best-seller, it’s (usually) not.
What do you want to get from your writing? Are you following the best path toward that destination?
