A Thing That Always Works, If You Can Set It Up

Every Tuesday at 6pm I go into my office, shut my (new) blinds which now keep various kids out, fire up Zoom and spend the next two hours with my writing group. I see the same seven people every week but I know basically nothing about them - we rarely talk about work or kids or where we live or what we were doing at 5:58pm or what we’ll do at 8:03pm.

I mean I obviously talk about Rubes but that’s a special case.

The session itself is broken into three prompts - these could be something like “write about something you, or a character, regrets doing,” or “write about a photograph that was never taken,” or “write something that starts with ‘even now, when I close my eyes, I can still see…”

You open up a blank document and write for 15 minutes before a buzzer sounds and then, one by one, you read aloud what we just wrote. Fifteen minutes is incredibly short when you haven’t seen the prompt before, so you’re usually reading stuff for the first time since writing it.

It’s understood that someone might only get 25 words out in 15 minutes or they might get 2,500 out. Sometimes a prompt opens the flood gates.

It’s also understood that the writing might be about a person’s life or a character they’re working on in a novel or just completely made up. Someone might write about being abused or getting in a car accident or winning an Olympic Gold Medal - you comment on the writing and ignore everything else.

Why the heck am I telling you about this?

Because every single Tuesday, without fail, at 5:55pm I think of a reason to skip. I haven’t eaten or I have work to catch up on or I really should see the boys or Ruby needs a walk or I should go for a run.

And sure, I came up with something last week during the writing class when the prompt was about a specific summer night I remember from childhood but that’s gotta be it, right? I must have used up all my stories by now. The creativity bucket has to be empty. Which means I won’t have anything interesting to write and I’ll have to read three boring prompts to this group of people that I like and respect and want to think highly of me.

And I know they do, because I’m very, very good at this. Every Tuesday by 8pm I look back at what I wrote and I’m amazed - I have no idea where it came from. Which means, surely, it can’t happen again.

The other thing that’s amazing is that everyone else does the same thing. Julie comes up with shit every week that blows my mind, and, clearly, hers. She’s an incredible writer and I assumed she had to be a professional, but, against the rules, she once mentioned that she’s an attorney. What?

So, I force myself to go every Tuesday and every Tuesday I’m happy I did. Sometimes the stuff I write is fine and sometimes it’s kinda bad and sometimes it gets me so fired up I can’t go to sleep until 2am.

The point is that it works. If I show up, with other people expecting something of me, for a set amount of time, with a leader who sets the tone, I can really write some good stuff. And I feel incredible after. And I look forward to it all week - until like 5:50, where I do my little dance before forcing myself to get to the desk.

This is the formula for good work: something risky, something hard, with external boundaries and pressure and expectations and, most importantly, immediate feedback.

This is - exactly - what most idea-stage founders with jobs lack. It doesn’t exist, so the type of work you could be doing doesn’t happen.

So… how do you create these conditions? With th

(and yes, I know this is basically just Tacklebox - but for people not in the program…how?)