This may seem a tad morbid.
But one tip I can trace a whole lot more profitable content written, created, sold in my business to is simply reading lots and lots and lots (using Audible 2-3x speed on long walks and in the shower, while shaving, driving, whatever it is) biographies from people who accomplished a lot in their lives.
I started doing this in 2019.
And I don’t think the sheer output of writing dwarfing everything I did the 17 years prior to that is a coincidence.
The reason for bios ain’t so much instructional as it is practical:
You realize lickety split how little time you have in this world.
If you’re a young turk full of piss & vinegar this won’t be as easy to grasp than if you’re an old fart in his 40’s, 50’s, and beyond. But when you read lots of biographies of people who got a lot of things accomplished in their lives, and see them from birth (or before birth — most bios start with their parents’ lives) all the way to the moment they wheezed out their last breath… it can’t help but give you a better sense of your own mortality.
It’s no different than when you hear about anyone dying.
Funerals and death remind the living that we’re all mortal and gonna die.
My Enoch Wars and Villains books publisher Greg Perry likes to talk about how old school preachers in churches used to get people’s heads on straight and to stop sinning by simply pointing out the window at the graveyard and reminding them they’re all gonna end up there sooner rather than later.
No other lecturing required.
The grave has always been the “great equalizer” — once you’re there, that’s it. And while this may or may not apply to anyone else, I can say after reading more biographies than I can even count or remember at this point, it definitely has given me more of a sense not just or urgency… but emergency.
I don’t have to coax or force or trick myself to get up and write.
It’s the exact opposite:
If anything — and Stefania can attest, she jokes about how I don’t know how to just coast — I’m up an hour or two earlier than I have to, in my office, banging away at whatever project. I have way too much work to do to do anything else but either write or think about writing whenever I’m not writing, in order to better prep for the next time I sit down to do some more writing.
The money is obviously one motivation.
As is legacy.
Something I never cared much about BW (Before Willis).
But now I think about it all the time.
And all this adds up to a sort of impending specter of doom constantly hovering behind my shoulder, letting me know I better hurry up because I only got so much time left… thanks to reading all these biographies of people that accomplished all kinds of things but ultimately died, and many of them with unfinished work.
Another thing about biographies:
If you read ones about people who died young it’s even more motivating.
Steve Jobs and Napoleon come to mind.
And if you have things you want to get done, and if you’re like me where the more you get done the more ideas you’ll get for other things you want to do… reading bios of long dead people (I rarely read bios of people still living), seeing their entire lives from sperm to grave can be a tremendous motivation for doing a lot of writing, creating a lot of content, growing your business a lot bigger and faster than you would have otherwise.
This all could admittedly be just a morbid quirk of my personality though.
As I’m the kinda guy who watches a Hitchcock movie, and constantly pauses it throughout just to Google how the actors in the movie ultimately died. And I thought the first Faces of Death (not the sequels) movie was especially fascinating, in its own gruesome way.
So I really have no idea how many people will find this useful much less do it.
But it’s not something I’ve seen anyone talk about.
Anyway, I regret to say I don’t have a $497.00 course about this.
But what I do have is the paid Email Players newsletter.
You can read more about it here:
Ben Settle
