Life is an ongoing process of choosing between safety (out of fear and need for defence) and risk (for the sake of progress and growth). Make the growth choice a dozen times a day.

Abraham Maslow, American psychologist, 1908–1970

You’ve now seen how to start a project that will take you one step closer to getting paid to play. Hopefully you’ve also taken a few minutes to actually begin it. Now let’s make this really clear: there is always a way to get the experience you really want in your work. If you’re flexible about how you get it, and you’re willing to start working on it without knowing exactly where you’re heading, you are guaranteed to get it if you simply don’t stop.

Welcome to the roller-coaster

Fasten your seatbelt because you’re going on a roller-coaster ride. Once you set off on this journey it is far from smooth running. When you finally dare to admit what you really want and go after it, you will be giving up the constant flat line of mild discontent so many people spend their lives in. You will be living, not just existing. You will have fantastic highs as you achieve something you didn’t even think possible. And you’ll also have real lows when you get a big setback, someone important rejects your idea or says something very critical.

If you’re used to living by the adage, ‘Don’t get your hopes up’, I invite you to do the opposite. Do get your hopes up; dare to dream that you can have what you want. And, yes, if you hit a big setback, it will hurt. This is normal. Take a moment to lick your wounds, commiserate with friends, then keep on marching. There’s always another way to get the experience you really want. In fact, these setbacks are your friends. Most people give up at the first obstacle and that means less competition for you. The only thing you can do wrong is to stop.

Having positive expectations has been shown in most situations to bring better results than expecting the worst. It’s no coincidence that most successful entrepreneurs are optimists. And it’s also suggested that appreciating what’s already working in your life has greater benefits than obsessing about what’s not working. This idea has received a lot of airplay recently from believers in the law of attraction but is this really a law of physics or just wishful thinking?

The law of attraction, as made famous in the book and film The Secret, is a principle that states that what you think about the most tends to be attracted into your life. Think about good things – money, possessions, good relationships – and you attract those good things. Think about bad things – debt, illness, conflict – and you attract those bad things. Is it true? Is there really some mystical force or universal law of physics that gives you more of what you focus on?

The fact is that some of what’s described as the law of attraction definitely operates but you don’t need to believe in anything mystical to understand it. There are a number of very practical reasons our thoughts become self-fulfilling prophecies. One of the reasons for this is that, as you may know, the majority of what we communicate to the outside world is actually done so through non-verbal communication (such as body language and tone of voice) rather than words. If you go to a networking meeting in a good state of mind, with a genuine smile on your face and relaxed, open body language, it’s likely you’ll connect more easily with people than if you turn up miserable, pessimistic, and expecting people to ignore you. And if you spend too much time complaining, you tend to attract other people who complain and turn off others. (This doesn’t mean, however, that you should become one of those people that pretend they never have a moment of disappointment or despondency!)

Another reason for the powerful effects of a positive outlook is that your brain is continually filtering the mass of information that comes into your senses according to what your focus is. If you are on the lookout for a way to get into TV presenting, your ears prick up when you overhear someone talking about working in TV, or your eyes are drawn by a newspaper article on a famous TV presenter’s career and how they started. If you have convinced yourself, however, that TV is too tough to get into, you’re more likely to notice stories about how cutthroat TV is. Whatever your belief is about the world, you tend to notice the supporting evidence for that belief.

So whether or not you choose to believe that the power of quantum physics, the universe, or God is helping you out, there is no doubt that getting clear on what you do want and focusing on that will bring you better results than focusing on what you don’t want. The question then is how do you create a more optimistic outlook?

Introducing your nemesis

You cannot successfully survive the roller-coaster to transform your life from worker to player unless you master the inner game of play: those unhelpful doubts, beliefs and habits that hold you back. To do that, you will need to tackle your nemesis.

If you can’t work out what you want to do with your life, if others’ criticism cuts you to the bone, if you’re haunted by negative visions of the future, if you’re creatively blocked, if you’re a perfectionist or procrastinator, or if your mood takes a dive at the smallest trigger, there’s one culprit behind it all.

It’s the number one block to playing and it’s the enemy of your creativity, happiness and even your wealth. And the enemy is inside of you. It’s a sub-personality referred to in Gestalt psychology as the top dog.

The top dog is the part of you that says the most damning things:

‘You can’t write to save your life.’

‘So now you want to be a starving artist?’

‘You’ve always been useless with money.’

‘You’re mad to change career in a recession.’

‘If you quit your job, you’ll lose your house and end up living in a cardboard box on the street.’

And if it doesn’t come out as words, you might see images in your mind or feel sensations in the body which represent the same message. When you believe and obey these messages, you limit your playfulness, your creativity, your happiness and your life. Every creativity exercise ever invented was designed to get past your top dog.

Others call top dog the internal critic but I find it more helpful to name it as a separate sub-personality. And ‘critic’ suggests it might give some constructive criticism. The top dog’s messages are not constructive.

The top dog grew inside you as a child with repeated messages from your parents and other significant authority figures. The same people who taught you important things like ‘Don’t run into the road’ and ‘Keep away from the fire’ also taught you less useful ideas like ‘All artists are broke’, ‘You have to sacrifice your happiness to be successful’ and ‘No one enjoys their job’. Now these messages are a deeply ingrained habit within your own mind; they are the language of your top dog.

The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your internal dialogue.

Pete Cohen, executive coach, trainer and TV presenter

Origins of the top dog

Babies know what they want and express it freely. Hungry? Just scream. They don’t have creative blocks. Of course, this isn’t a great way for adults to behave so we raise our children to act in a more sociably acceptable way. But sometimes teaching good behaviour isn’t done cleanly. It strays into criticism, shame and humiliation: snapping at the boy that cries, laughing at the girl that gets angry, the silent flick of the eyebrows that disapproves of a child ‘showing off’. It’s these incidences that create your top dog.

In reality these messages were fuelled by the fear and anxiety of the person giving them. And that fear and anxiety was learned in their childhood. So your top dog is driven by fear – fear of failing, of ‘making a fool of yourself’, of getting hurt, of being humiliated.

There’s not much logic to it either. It often gives conflicting messages – ‘you should stand up for yourself’/‘don’t make yourself unpopular’. After all, this is a very young part of you. Have you ever seen two young children walking down the street and the elder sibling is admonishing the younger using their parents’ language: ‘Oh, I don’t know what we are going to do with you!’ That’s all your top dog is doing – aping the messages from your parents.

In a strange way, your top dog is actually trying to protect you – like the person who is self-conscious about their weight and feels compelled to make a joke about it before anyone else does. But the message only serves to make you feel worse.

Top dog messages are culturally influenced. Classic British ones are ‘Don’t get your hopes up’, ‘Don’t get ideas above your station’, ‘Don’t show off’ and even the shockingly unhealthy ‘“I want” never gets’.

We hypnotise ourselves through these kinds of habitual thoughts into mistaking unhelpful beliefs for facts of life. We become convinced that ‘you can only get rich by doing something you don’t enjoy’ or that you’re ‘just not one of those lucky people born with talent’. I meet a lot of people with very different beliefs but the one thing they all have in common is that they see their beliefs as the way the world really is. And this is despite the fact that each client believes such different things. Clients tell me ‘it’s impossible to change career after 30’ or ‘. . . after 40’ or ‘. . . after 50’. And all I can think is ‘Well, one of you is wrong!’

Taming your top dog

The greatest mistake we all make is to take the top dog as the voice of reason. It is not. So your first step to managing your top dog for greater creativity and happiness is to identify it. Start today to notice your internal dialogue and if you spot something that might be your top dog, simply label it, ‘Ah, that sounds like top dog’.

This is particularly important when you hit a setback. Know your pattern. What are the kinds of things you find most difficult to deal with? When things didn’t go your way in the past, what happened? If you gave up, what was the top dog message at the time that discouraged you? If you managed to get back on the horse, what helped you do it? Did you read a motivating book, speak to a friend or just stop thinking about it for a while? Make a note and remember to use it the next time you hit the down cycle. If you have a friend who always cheers you up, put their number on speed dial now!

Sometimes it’s not even a setback that’s the trigger. Have you ever suddenly lost motivation on something without knowing why? You start off on some project really excited and a little while later feel completely deflated. Or you find you’ve simply moved on to something else without even thinking about it. Notice what happened to throw you off track; was there something you told yourself without even registering it? This is a top dog message.

The next step is to challenge top dog’s messages. When you catch a negative message, think of the more supportive alternative. When top dog says, ‘What’s the point in starting? You never finish anything’, note it and find the counter argument ‘Sure I will. I finished a big project last month that looked impossible and I’ll finish this one too’. This might sound a little crazy to talk back to yourself, but you’re already having an inner dialogue; you might as well make it a more positive one. If you’re struggling to find a positive response, imagine you were advising a friend. What would you say to them in this situation?

If you’re not sure if a message you’ve caught is one you should change – perhaps because it appears to be stating the truth – ask yourself, ‘Would I say this in exactly this form to a friend?’ If not, you shouldn’t be saying it to yourself. It’s remarkable how we tell ourselves things we would never say to others.

The key is habit. Every time you catch a critical thought and remember to replace it with a supportive one, you build the habit and make it easier to do it again. Not only that, but you will also affect your own brain chemistry. Every time you have a negative thought, chemicals are released in the brain and the rest of the body that make you feel worse. Every time you have a positive thought, chemicals are released that make you feel good.

This is not something you can change overnight but if you could spend just one whole day interrupting every negative thought and introducing its more supportive opposite, you would find that you were strangely happier that day than at any other recent time – without any special ‘reason’ to be so. And when you make it a habit, you build structures and connections in the brain that make it easier to do again.

One of the best ways to reinforce your positive internal dialogue is to hang out with supportive people.

Build your support team

Isolation is the dreamkiller.

Barbara Sher, American careers expert and author of five books

What company do you keep? If you want to turn yourself from a worker into a player and escape conventional jobs, you will never do this if the only people you ever spend time with are other people stuck in jobs they don’t enjoy. If you’re self-employed and struggling to make a living, you will probably never make a good income if all the people you hang out with are struggling too. Why? Because we can’t help but take on the opinions, beliefs and habits of the people we spend the most time with. If we’re out of step with those around us, what we want will seem abnormal or unusual. Human beings are built to adjust to the people around them. Just remember that you can choose the community you want to fit in with.

When I survey people wanting to do something more creative with their lives, one of their biggest reported challenges is lack of confidence. Whatever it might look like, even the most successful people have to manage their own confidence at times. Here are two important questions I ask clients who are lacking confidence: ‘What is your top dog telling you?’ and ‘Who do you spend time with?’ If your top dog often tells you things that shake your confidence, you can counter this by spending time with positive people who will support you in your projects.

You must create your own support team. Find a small group of four or five people to meet with regularly. Use the group to encourage each other, comfort you when you have a setback, and hold you accountable to do what you say you’re going to do.

Do you want to know the secret of getting things done when you’re totally undisciplined and a chronic procrastinator? Set a release date as we saw in Secret three and ensure that other people hold you to it. Here’s how my friend James did it. He wanted to try creating instrumental music for television but knew he was likely to procrastinate on doing it. So he agreed with his creativity group that he would bring a new finished piece of music to their meeting every fortnight and play it to them. If he didn’t, he would pay them a forfeit of £50. It’s amazing what a little external pressure – even self-created – can accomplish. James met all his deadlines, paid no forfeits and ended up creating more music in that period than at any time before.

Stop imagining you’re going to wake up one day with great self-discipline. Instead, start building your own support team now. You can start by just finding one other person who you know will be supportive and will take action. Agree to meet them every two to four weeks. Put the appointment in your diary and agree what each of you will have done by then. Show your results when you meet. You’ll be amazed how much work you get done the night before your meeting!

A quick word of warning before we move on: be careful who you share your dreams with. Pick supportive people, not the cynical people critical of everything (cynicism is just a way for very fearful people to manage anxiety). Our instincts are usually pretty good on this if we’ll only listen to them.

When someone is damning of your new direction, just reflect for a moment on their lives. How is their career going? What’s their life like? Do they enjoy it? Or are they miserable and moaning about it all the time? Even if they enjoy their life, would you want it? If you don’t want their results, think twice before taking their advice.

Feeling scared yet?

Decide that you want it more than you are afraid of it.

Bill Cosby

If you’re not scared at least some of the time, you’re not doing it right. Fear is an inevitable companion when you take the risk to create a different kind of life for yourself. Your ability to manage it is a fundamental factor in how far you can go.

When you start to experience worry, anxiety, or naked terror, this is a great time to call on your support team. Get some calming input from someone reliable and ask for some practical steps you can take.

Check what your top dog is saying that’s adding to the fear. Fear is something you do, not something that happens. Don’t believe me? Think of a jumbo jet full of passengers about to take off. Some of them will feel very afraid, some will feel excited, some will feel bored, some will be asleep. Yet they are all on the same plane. What’s the difference? The thoughts and images each individual passenger is creating. The fearful passenger is creating visions of the plane crashing, interpreting each sound as a sign of something wrong and telling themselves that planes crash all the time and that ‘I’m not the lucky type’.

Dealing with your fear is one of the most important things you can do. Successful people typically hold an optimistic view of the world and know how to manage what fear they do experience. They also deliberately do the things that still scare them in order to continually slay the demons that hold them back – whether it’s giving a public talk, quitting a safe line of work, or even making a radical change of hairstyle.

When you’re doing OK as you are, it’s easy to focus on all the possible risks of doing something new. Just remember when you’re afraid of taking a risk that there is a risk to not doing something. The risk of not changing your career is that you wake up ten years later and find you’re still in a job you dislike. The risk of not taking on an exciting new project is that you are giving up all the wonderful things that would have happened in your life had you dared to do it. You need to be willing to give up the good enough to go for the great.

It is when we all play safe that we create a world of utmost insecurity. It is when we all play safe that fatality will lead us to our doom. It is in the ‘dark shade of courage’ alone that the spell can be broken.

Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary General of the United Nations, 1962

How to be indestructible

Chris Guillebeau has created a remarkable life for himself; he travels the world and lives off the blog he writes about his experiences. When I asked him the one behaviour someone most needs if they want to achieve the same kind of success, his answer was just two words, ‘Don’t stop’.

It’s pretty much inevitable you will get what you really want if you just don’t stop. Just remember that if you’re flexible, there will be more than one way to have the experience you want even if your original vision doesn’t pan out.

The key is that with each play project, you keep fine-tuning your trajectory to move closer and closer to getting paid to play. Use the feedback you’re getting, both internal and external, to guide you. External feedback includes your results and the critique of others. Internal feedback is what the experience is like for you – is it enjoyable or does it look like it will be when you’ve got the hang of it? Does it feel like you’re in flow?

If you launch a play project and find that you’re not enjoying it as much as you hoped, that it doesn’t feel like the right direction, or you’re not getting the results you expected, don’t just quit. Think about how you can change the project to make it work better for you. Something attracted you to this in the first place – don’t just throw it out. If you set out to become a public speaker but find that conventional after-dinner speaking isn’t working for you, think again what part of the experience originally excited you. How can you get that a different way? If it was the thought of inspiring others, you could try teaching or running small workshops for your next play project. If the experience you wanted was to share your humour, try a stand-up comedy course.

Once you’ve finished each play project, you’ll be in a different place to where you started and your next project can build on this base. By doing this, you can set off without knowing exactly where you’re heading and play your way to something that works for you. This is a very different experience from that of people who repeatedly take a few tentative steps in one direction then retreat before shuffling off in a different direction only to return once more to the place where they started.

Life as a player takes plenty of time and effort and it’s not going to be 100 per cent fun every day. The whole point is to keep moving on and expanding what you thought you were capable of. This means times of challenge, risk, fear and setbacks.

If you wake up one day and don’t feel like doing what you promised someone, you still do it because keeping your promises is an essential part of getting paid to play. If you find you frequently don’t feel like doing something, it’s time for a change. The good news is that even previously quite boring tasks become more enjoyable when you’re doing them for yourself. There’s a big difference between having to sweep the floor in some dead-end job and sweeping the floor of the shop you just rented, ready to open it to the public. As Derek Sivers puts it, ‘If you’re changing somebody else’s baby’s diapers that feels like work. But if it’s your own kid, that doesn’t feel like work.’

A fundamental part of the shift from worker to player is to take total responsibility for your own working life. It takes time to stop thinking like a worker and blaming others (or the economy) for your situation. Turn the focus back on yourself and ask again and again ‘What can I do to improve this situation?’ This is a big shift and can sometimes feel like turning an oil tanker around!

Be willing to have uncomfortable conversations. One of the greatest skills you can learn is to be willing to ask people for what you need. Ask someone to mentor you; ask someone to buy your product or service; ask an employee to redo a piece of work. Sometimes these are not comfortable things to discuss. Most people avoid having uncomfortable conversations; they don’t go up to someone famous and ask to talk to them, interview them or work for them. Most people don’t cold call a radio station and ask to be interviewed about their project. But then most people don’t end up with the life they want. If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get what everyone else gets.

Dare to have uncomfortable conversations and you’ll soon see how your results differ to others. And if it all goes horribly wrong and you slink away cringing at what just happened, just remember that you dared to do something that most don’t. You’ll laugh about it later. Probably.

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.

Albert Einstein

Stop asking for permission

Are you stuck in the permission trap? Are you waiting for someone to tell you that what you want is possible? Are you spending a lot of time asking and exploring whether you can do what you want to do? Are you researching options and eliminating them one by one? Are you asking ‘Is it possible to have a career in X?’, ‘Is it crazy to start a business in Y?’ ‘Could I ever write a book?’

Stop asking if you can have what you want, ask ‘How can I have what I want?’ When you pose yourself a question, your mind gets to work on answering it even when you’re busy doing something else. Ask whether you can do something and your mind produces a list of pros and cons. Ask how you can do something and your mind comes up with all the ways to do it. Which is going to move you forward? (If after a few days of pondering, the how question is still drawing a blank, you can often get unstuck with a who question: ‘Who would know how to do this?’; ‘Who could put me in touch with the right person to move me forward?’)

Stop asking for permission from others to do what you want to do, whatever it may be. Decide that you will make it happen and you will do whatever it takes to do so. Then you’re thinking like a player.

Take some tips from the world’s best expert on your success

When you’re facing a challenging project, consult the best expert in the world on your success – you. Look back at how you achieved all your life’s significant achievements to date: finding your home, making the move, finding your partner, making your relationship work, how you’ve got a new job or got over a difficult illness. What did you do that made these achievements possible? What worked? How can you use the same strategies now?

When I look back, I realise that pretty much everything I have ever achieved has been due to two factors. Firstly, I started on the project simply because I was interested in it, and then I finished it because I had an external deadline to share the results that could not be moved. The deadline was the only way to get over my natural perfectionism and procrastination. I made the final decision on my first home and bought it in the two weeks before I quit my job so that I could honestly say I was employed when I signed the mortgage. If I didn’t it might have been very difficult to get a mortgage at all. For every achievement, there was usually a gun to my head, figuratively speaking. I’d love to say this wasn’t so but knowing that it is, I can use it to my advantage. Now I know to always agree a release date with other people: a date that I simply have to meet.

Tim Smit, creator of the Eden Project, has achieved an enormous amount and yet describes himself as ‘fundamentally lazy’ and ‘one of the least focused people you could ever meet’. I asked him what drives him to take on these projects rather than just taking it easy. His answer? ‘The fear of death and a rash desire to make unlikely promises. Which I then have to fulfil or lose face as a consequence.’

What works for you? It might be making it fun, or getting loads of support, or getting expert advice. Whatever it is, use it now.

How to cheat

If you want to accelerate your journey to getting paid to play, try cheating. If someone else has ever successfully done what you’re trying to do, chances are you can too. How did they do it? Steal their strategies. Don’t steal the content of what they did, steal how they did it. How did that relatively new band get known so quickly? How did that person get into advertising with so little prior experience? How did that software start-up get going without venture capital? Find out, then copy it.

Take the Millionaire Test to stay on track

As you play out your journey to doing what you really want to do for a living, check in every day on how it’s going and adjust your course accordingly. How do you do this? By using the Millionaire Test.

At the beginning of the day when you first wake up, ask yourself these two questions:

1. If I was already a millionaire, would I choose to do what I am about to do today?

Write down your response.

2. If I had a blank diary today and all the money I could want, what would I choose to do with this day?

Write down your response.

If the response is that you would actually the take day off and sit on a beach, then ask how you can achieve some of that experience. Can you actually take the day off? If not, can you find some space to do nothing? If you’re nowhere near a beach, can you go swimming after work and then sit by the pool reading a book? Or should you make time to book your next holiday today?

If the Millionaire Test keeps showing that you wouldn’t choose to do your work today, it’s time to change your work.

You can also use the Millionaire Test throughout the day for the smaller decisions you make. I went to a networking event recently with lots of ‘important’ people from big companies. I found myself thinking, ‘I should go speak to that guy from the multinational corporation, he could be an important contact’. The problem was I ended up having conversations I wasn’t really interested in; I realised I was bored. I was choosing people I thought I should talk to, not the ones I really wanted to – a habit ingrained from my years of consultancy work in big corporations.

Then I remembered my mantra,

If I were already a millionaire, would I do this thing I am considering right now?

I realised that if I was already a millionaire I would just talk to whoever looked interesting to me or who I knew was involved in a project I genuinely wanted to know about. I started to do this that night and met a couple of great people and had fascinating conversations – ones that spurred new ideas and new connections for my business, connections I would love to make. One of the people I spoke to went on to speak at my Scanners Night event.

Imagine what would happen if we always worked on this basis. We would make natural connections with people we enjoy spending time with. Our projects or businesses would continue to grow with less strain and a lot more fun.

Moment by moment, this simple, rather materialistic-sounding question will guide you towards getting paid to play. On the way it’s still important, obviously, to do the things you promised even when you’re not in the mood for it. And you might take some projects that are not exactly what you would choose to do but are a good stepping stone to get you to your ultimate ideal.

Of course, you could just ask the question ‘Do I really feel like doing this?’ but it’s amazing how many of my clients cannot answer questions like that effectively – thanks to the influence of the top dog.

If you want to make a habit of using the Millionaire Test, carry around a reminder of it. You may need to change the wording to work for you. ‘Millionaire’ can mean many things but to my mind implies a level of established wealth that, while not allowing you to retire for good, would give you a great quality of living without working for several years. This is a good position from which to make choices about your work – the heat is off but you may still need to work further down the line.

How to make progress when you’ve got no time and no energy

Are you struggling to find the time for your project? Are you creating a new career while still busy working in your old one? There is a way you can still keep making progress: by doing little and often. Carve out micro-blocks of super-focused time to do what is most important to move you forward. Could you spare ten minutes of time at some point in the next 24 hours? You’ll be surprised at what you can do in just ten minutes when you’re prepared and you focus completely on the task in hand. If you come home exhausted at the end of a day at your current work, you might not feel like doing anything. The fact is that motivation often comes after you start something, not before.

Here’s how to keep going even when you have very little time to invest. This also works brilliantly if you have a task you’ve been putting off because you have some kind of resistance to it.

1. Think of the next task you need to do to move your play project forward. What single thing will have the biggest impact for the least amount of time spent? Write it down.
2. Decide how long your micro-block will be: 10 minutes? 20? 30?
3. Write down what you can do in this micro-block. Don’t go writing things like ‘Learn French’ or ‘Plan business’. Write ‘Do exercise 10 in French book’, ‘Search online for three good articles on making money from a blog and print them to read later’, ‘Read the three articles printed yesterday’.
4. Get out your diary and write it in as a real appointment:e.g. 7:00 to 7:15 Do French Exercise 10.
5. Turn up for your appointment. Make this as real a commitment as if you had a doctor’s appointment. If something absolutely critical comes up you might move it, but otherwise you stick to it. You never just skip it.
6. Switch off your phone, your email and anything else you don’t need that might distract you. Tell others who might interrupt that you are busy.
7. Use this brilliant tip from time management guru Mark Forster: get a kitchen timer that counts down and set it to ten minutes or whatever time you’ve allocated. Place the timer right in front of you and set it counting down. This will help keep you focused.
8. Do exactly what you wrote down that you were going to do.
9. When the timer goes off, you can stop – even if you haven’t finished the task. (But if you’re now feeling motivated to continue, do.)
10. Before you file your notes, or close your document, decide what you will do in your next micro-block. Write it down as your next action so that when you pick-up again tomorrow, you know exactly what you’re doing. Put your project away some place where you can pick it up again quickly.
11. Get out your diary and write in the appointment for your next micro-block and the action you will take in it.
12. Go and relax!

Of course, for any significant project you’re likely to need some big blocks of time to get it done, but until you can free up that time, you will be amazed how much progress you make in your micro-blocks. And the continual progression will keep your spirits up much more than watching days disappear without doing anything. How many weeks go by with you waiting to spend an hour on your project but never finding the time? Now, can you imagine doing ten minutes a day, six days a week? Author Suzy Greaves managed to write her entire book The Big Peace in 15-minute segments between running her successful life-coaching business and being a mum.

You don’t need to know exactly how you’re going to achieve your project. You only need to know the next action and then turn up and do it. Your success is pretty much guaranteed if you do. Just keep moving forward and adjust your course according to your results.

Try doing a micro-block first thing in the morning before you start anything else. It’s a great way to start your day and ensures nothing can get in the way of doing it. If you can grow the block of time to an hour every day, you can make a huge amount of progress on your project. Be sure to use this technique on Play Wednesday too.

Manage your overwhelm, not your time

It’s easy to get overwhelmed these days. We have all too much to do and too much information to manage. Even with the discipline to be ruthless with your tasks and information, the problem will never go away. Your to-do list will not all be ticked off when you die!

Overwhelm is one of your greatest obstacles on the way to getting paid to play. And creative people are particularly prone to it. Why? Because the creative personality does not think in a structured way. We don’t have a strong sense of time. We get absorbed in something and hours fly by. It’s the ability to forget time altogether that allows us to go so deeply into the creative process. We don’t naturally think in a sequential way. We can see everything needed to make a project happen but without any time-frame, so everything looks like it needs to be done right away. The result is overwhelm. Overwhelm feels terrible, so when it happens our response is often to stop altogether; we collapse in a heap or more subtly, we find we’ve started browsing YouTube or watching TV – anything to take our mind off the overwhelm. This is why overwhelm often passes for procrastination or, worse, laziness.

I think of this as an inbuilt tilt switch. To be a great pinball player, you have to shake the machine around a bit. But if you hit it too hard, the tilt switch activates and the whole machine shuts down. Your job is to notice when your tilt switch has activated, realise it’s overwhelm, and do something to address it. The answer is always to break down your task into smaller chunks and focus only on the next chunk you have to do.

Have you found yourself watching TV when you’ve promised yourself you’d plan your whole website today? Break it down. What’s the first thing you have to do? Make it something that lasts no more an hour. How about choosing what five pages you’re going to create? Or writing the three main points you want to make on the homepage.

If you get stuck, call in someone who finds it easy to plan their time. They’ll quickly be able to look at what you have on your plate and tell you the first five things to do and in what order.

Moment by moment you can do simple things to reduce your overwhelm. Have a good diary. Write everything down; don’t carry essential information in your head. Leave it free for thinking. Be realistic; write short lists for each day with the three things that are most important to do.

Also check what your top dog is saying about this task that has overwhelmed you. Is it something pessimistic? If it’s telling you the project is bound to fail, or you should have done this ages ago, you won’t be very motivated to work on it. Is it about perfectionism? Perfectionists are even more prone to overwhelm because their top dog tells them everything they do must be flawless. It’s better to finish something that’s good than to abandon yet another project because you can’t make it perfect.

How to manage your brilliant ideas

Do you have more ideas than you know what to do with? If you pursue everything you think of, you’ll never get anything finished. Create a place to keep all your good ideas. When a new one comes to you, store it where you know you’ll be able to find it so you can get on with what you were doing.

When you start a whole new project, the very first thing you should do is create a repository for all the ideas you’ll have: whether it’s a talk you’ve just been booked to do, a website you’re going to build or product you’ve decided to make. Start a fresh notebook, or do as I do and start a blank text file on your computer. Then whenever you have another idea, open the file and jot it down. You might find the first draft of your talk almost writes itself.

When you have a great idea and you know you want to press ‘Go’ on it, don’t hang around.

What you actually do within 24 hours of having a creative idea will spell the difference between success and failure.

Buckminster Fuller

Ideas have a half-life. Wait too long before you act on them and there’s a chance you’ll look back at your notes and wonder what on earth you were talking about. If it looks like the right project for you now to get paid to play, don’t waste time getting it launched. ‘Money likes speed’, as author Joe Vitale likes to say.

How to be a creative genius

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Pablo Picasso

Learn the tricks to unlock your own creative genius and you’ll produce far grander results for a lot less effort. Don’t believe the myths about creativity. It’s easy to assume great works of art fell out of their creator complete, but in fact they are far more often sculpted. Sculptures start as a shapeless block of marble. The sculptor chips away week by week until a rough form starts to emerge. Eventually, the final form is revealed in all its beauty. Any creative process works in a similar, iterative way but it’s easy to forget this and expect we can create something brilliant in one sitting. Here’s a much better way.

1. Get clear what problem you are trying to solve or what outcome you want to achieve. ‘A problem well defined is half solved’, as psychologist John Dewey once said.
2. Work on your project a little every day, ideally first thing in the morning. In between, your subconscious will work on it. Aid it by doing something simple and physical – walking, gardening, washing up.
3. Record your ideas. Creativity researcher Dr Robert Epstein says that those we consider creative may simply have good ‘capturing skills’: that is, they take all their ideas seriously and record them. So take your playbook and pen everywhere and note anything that comes to you about your project whether it’s in bed, on the train or at work. You can even buy a waterproof notepad to capture those great ideas you have in the shower!
4. Think quantity not quality. ‘The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas’, as chemist and peace activist Linus Pauling once said (and he’s one of the few people in the world to have won two Nobel Prizes). Generate as many ideas as possible, write for a set period of time per day, or take a set number of photos per week. This takes the pressure off you getting it ‘right’ and thereby generates more creative results. Later, go back and choose your best results. Always keep the processes of creating and editing separate as they require different modes of thinking. One is adding to your content, the other is taking it away. Try to do both at the same time and you end up with a brain-freeze.
5. If you get stuck, brainstorm with friends or colleagues and remember that no idea is too wacky in a brainstorm. Or try talking about it to someone for ten minutes while they simply listen. If on your own, try writing continuously on the topic without stopping for ten minutes and see what comes out.

When I tried my hand at stand-up comedy, people would ask me how I came up with my material. And I would tell them it’s not as difficult as you might think. Carry around a notebook and write everything you can think of that might be funny whenever it occurs to you. Then try the material out on people and edit out the weak stuff. You’ll eventually be left with five minutes of good material you can go and perform.

The power of ‘creative idling’

Idleness for me is not a giving up on life but a spirited grabbing hold of it.

Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The Idler and author of How to be idle

Idle time is an essential part of the creative process. There will be times you need to put a huge amount of effort into a project. Taking breaks, doing something completely different, spending some time playing with your children, and bunking off for the afternoon can all help you refresh. It’s also just a kinder way to treat yourself. If you’re going to be your own boss you might as well be a nice one!

Remember to build some time into your schedule for some pure play – the things you love without worrying about turning it into an income. Notice your natural pace and work with it, not against it. Don’t try to make yourself into someone else: someone who can work all night, or can focus for four hours straight, or works normal office hours. Work with who you are. If you want better results, your job is to do something different, not be someone different.

Listen to your body when it’s asking for a break. If you don’t, you’ll find yourself stealing the rest time anyway by losing your attention or getting distracted by something unimportant. You can’t cheat your body for very long so you might as well take a real break. You might even get your big breakthrough when you do. J.K. Rowling was travelling alone on a delayed train from Manchester to London when ‘the idea for Harry Potter simply fell into my head’. Over the next four hours ‘all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn’t know he was a wizard became more and more real to me’.

Physicist Richard Feynman was watching someone messing around throwing a plate in the air in Cornell University’s cafeteria when he decided to describe its wobbling movement in equations ‘for fun’. The spinning plate equations turned out to be critical to his study of quantum electrodynamics, the work that went on to win the Nobel Prize.

It’s necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant.

James D. Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

Get a little closer to your natural way of working every day. How close can you get to the way you envisioned living in your year out?

Go on, take a nap

You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner . . . That’s what I always do. Don’t think you will be doing less work because you sleep during the day. That’s a foolish notion held by people who have no imaginations. You will be able to accomplish more.

Winston Churchill

If you’re going to be idle, why not go all the way and take a nap? Naps have been shown in research trials to lower stress hormones and boost productivity and creativity. The effect of a nap is like rebooting your brain and, as Winston Churchill said, ‘You get two days in one – well, at least one and a half’.

If anyone tries to make you feel guilty about napping in the middle of a workday, just remind them that sleep can also be a very productive time. Paul McCartney dreamed the melody for ‘Yesterday’, and chemist Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the baffling ring shape of the chemical compound benzene after dreaming about a snake biting its own tail. Good napping takes practice. I can now get to sleep in five minutes or less. Use a timer to keep the nap short, around 20 minutes, and you won’t wake up groggy.

When you’ve got the hang of all this, you’re in a good place to start angling your play towards something you can get paid for. Read the next chapter to find out how.