 In this video I'm going to share with you how I overcame years of hating writing. I don't know, I call it writer's block, but there's, maybe writer's block is a more technical definition, but basically I did not write and I hated writing for most of my life, really, until the past couple of years. So how did that happen? First of all, I want to ask you for your opinion. What do you think about this angle for my video? Another possibility is this. So, which angle do you like better? I guess this is A or B? I'll stay with B for now because I guess the whole shelf is there and plus you can see this cute little dog. Dog on the skateboard, that's what that is. Some people think, is that a hat? What is that? It's a dog on a skateboard. This is one of the books that really started my spiritual transformation a couple of years ago, The Spirit's Book by Alan Kardec. And this other book, Dial Leadership, I read probably 20 years ago that really planted the seeds for how I see leadership and even marketing today. And my favorite 2020 candidate, kind of a long shot, but Yang 2020, go Andrew Yang. So just to give you some context here, I really started out in life being traumatized by writing. And some more context is, okay, I hated writing, I was traumatized by it and now fast forward to when I'm making this video, you know, April 2019. I'm working on my fifth book, book number five now. So I've self-published four books and written, I think, over a thousand blog posts by this point. And I write almost every day now and it comes obviously much more easily and naturally and it's a joy, it's a great sense of fulfillment. It's a continual exploration of who I really am or what I could become, what my ideas are, my philosophies, all that stuff. And of course it helps a lot of people who read that. So I was traumatized in early years by writing because first of all, my family immigrated from Taiwan to the United States when I was six and a half, six and a half, seven. And so English was my second language starting then. I can still speak Chinese fluently with pretty good accent, but I had to learn English, you know, when I was about seven. And just plunged right into grade school and, you know, a bit bullied at school. Actually, I'll tell you what, the most traumatic bullying that I got at school was not physical. Although a little bit of that happened, but it was the bullying that, the bully said to me, George, why are you so quiet? Why are you so weird? Because I never spoke in class. I never said a word in class. You know, when people came up to me and tried to have conversations, I was very shy and didn't know what to say. And I frequently went home and said, I don't know what to say. I don't know what to say to other kids. I didn't know how to communicate. I didn't have any things to communicate about, which I smile at now because you can't shut me up. You can't shut me up now. It's like, I could talk all day, all night about just about anything. Give me a topic. I'll just, you know, BS my way through it, you know, I could talk about just just about anything. What happened from being bullied for not being able to talk in class at all? And this is through high school, you know, and the talking part got easier to be able to talk, okay, and to be able to have conversations. That got easier. I'm still not great at parties, to be honest. So I go to very few of them. I always decline everything that I'm invited to. So I'm still not a great conversationalist, I don't think. But I can certainly give talks, obviously. I can do videos all day long. But writing was still traumatic all the way until really 2014. So most of my life, you know, 40 years, almost 40 years of my life. And I, you know, second language, English, you know, had a hard time writing in school. And then, because, you know, coming from an Asian family, I only had a couple of paths that were given to me. I could become a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant. Now, an interesting accountant is not usually the part of the part of the usually doctor, lawyer or engineer, right? But accountant is because my dad was a businessman. So he thought having an accountant in the family would be useful too. So I hated science and I thought I would be bored by numbers. So I chose lawyer. And what that meant was that in college, I got an English degree. College was all about writing, which I hated because here's the thing. A lot of you have probably been traumatized by writing also. I mean, a lot of us have been traumatized by school, period. Traumatized by learning. Formal learning has been done terribly for many of us. And writing is like, okay, you are required to produce these papers by the certain deadline. And it's got to be about some topic that you don't really care about. That's how we are usually raised in school. And it's terrible. And my college degree, same thing. Writing about some obscure novel that I didn't really care about, but I had to make something up about the characters doing them. I didn't like school at all, even though I did fine in it. So I was compliant in school, but I didn't love it. So fast forward to starting my business back in 2009. I went into marketing for all fields. It's like marketing. Marketing is all about communication. And communication is online, especially a lot about writing. Every time I had to write my website, hated it. Every time I had to write an email newsletter, hated it. And guess what? I made fun of the blogging industry for years. 2009 through 2013, I mocked bloggers. I said, bloggers, why are they so dumb? I mean, they're writing and writing and creating all this free content out there when they could be monetizing it. Why are they foolish? Foolish, right? That's what I thought. I was partly reacting to my dislike of writing. So I thought that other people doing it must have been foolish and they're giving away the farm just by sharing their knowledge for free. How silly and foolish of them. Now, why did I start writing? I started writing because in 2015, when I started making videos, I really had a transformation about video before I had the transformation about writing. So I started making videos regularly in 2015. And when I made the videos, I thought there are probably some people in my audience who are similar to me who don't like to watch a talking head video. I mean, we're fine watching amazingly edited videos that are really snappy and interesting and entertaining. But talking head video, just some guy or gal talking, that's boring, you know? I thought. And so I said, well, out of a sense of courtesy from my audience, the people who also don't like to watch talking head videos, I am going to basically write out what I said. So those of you who don't want to have me go on for even three minutes felt long to me, five minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes. Here's basically what I said in the video. And so what that meant was that I wasn't trying to write a book. I wasn't trying to draft an essay or a blog article that was going to go viral. There was no pressure. It was simply, hey, real quick, if you don't want to watch this, don't worry about it. Here's basically what I said. I said these five things. That's it. It was almost bullet points in the beginning. It was like, here's what I said if you didn't want to watch. That's it. And the second thing was I wrote it on my phone. I wrote it on my phone real quick. For those who don't want to watch it, here's what I basically said. And when you're writing on your phone, what's interesting is that there's less white space. So there's less intimidation. Whereas if you write on the computer, you're staring at a blank screen and that's intimidating to me anyway. So writing on the phone, tap, tap, tap, all of us have the experience of texting a friend or maybe quickly drafting an email on the phone. So I think the phone for a lot of us is less intimidating than the computer. Maybe that's true for some of us anyway. So for me it was back then. So also when I was writing on my phone, the words went by real fast because it's a small space. So whatever I'm tapping, it looks like I'm writing a lot. And so it bolstered my confidence. So those are all the different factors that got me to... And the other thing about it was that I was making a daily video. So it was Monday through Friday without fail. I was committed to that up until 100 videos. So I basically, Monday through Friday, I was writing. I wasn't planning on overcoming my writer's block because I wasn't even thinking of these as blog posts. I was just thinking, basically here's what I said. If you don't want to read it. So it's a quick summary. I could write a quick summary as if to a friend. Like, ah, basically. So daily writing on a device that was casual for me didn't feel intimidating for me. Okay. And it was no... The end product was not important to me. It was out of quickly just go get it out there. No worries at all. Okay. And by the time it finished my 100 videos and therefore 100 blog posts, I didn't realize they were blog posts, but they basically were early days, very, very basic, simple blog posts. I overcame my writer's block because that's what happens when you practice. And this is the wonderful reality of the human mind is that it is plastic. The human brain, I should say, is changeable. Whatever block you think you have. Oh, I can never do that. No, you absolutely can. If you were put in an environment, you were forced to do something daily for, you know, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days. I don't know how many days it'll take you to overcome the block, but you will overcome the block. Guaranteed whether it's I can never be on video like George or I can never write. I thought I could never write for 30, what, 38 years. I could never write. I would never be a writer, blah, blah, blah. Right? Never, ever, ever. Hate writing. Writing sucks. It's painful, right? Fourth book published. Now I'm writing my fifth book. So whatever block you think you have. Oh, I could never be good at marketing. I could never be good at whatever. If you, if it will benefit you, if it will serve your purpose, if you want to become that kind of person, you can absolutely, absolutely become that. Whatever it is to practice. And the practice, of course, if it's intimidating for you, needs to start with something that is, that feels casual, low pressure, you know, no big deal. Don't care about the results. Just practice, practice, practice, practice, practice. Same thing with, you know, right now I'm, I'm relearning how to play the piano. I played the piano quite well when I was a kid and I haven't played for like 20 years. No, longer than that. And now I'm playing again. I'm like, oh my God, it's, I can't, I can't believe I was able to play so well when I was young. Well practice, practice, practice every day. So it doesn't matter. Sports, music, art, communication skills, the ability to coach, the ability to mentor, heal, whatever it is, you can get, you can become amazing at it through practice. And the question is, how will you start practicing consistently? So back to the topic of writing. How will you practice writing consistently? Because if you do, you will become a much, much better writer. It'll flow out of you and it'll become like, your writing will become an instrument of your soul's expression. That's what it will become. It will flow out of you like a lot, for a lot of us talking is not a block for many of us, right? We can talk to a friend. We can talk to somebody we feel comfortable with about a topic we're passionate about. And by the way, I want to give kudos to Laura Krilligan, who's here. She reminded me of a concept called voice journaling. Actually, it was she, she, she, she, she gave this exercise to Gail Blair and Gail Blair had commented on an earlier version of this blog post, this video that I'm making about a year ago. And so thanks, Laura. And I'm going to put Laura's simple blog post about voice journaling in the notes of this, of this blog post when I, when I post it. And voice journaling is a great way to, to start expressing yourself, expressing your soul. Basically, the idea is you get a recorder, an audio recorder. Every single phone has an audio recorder now. And you simply start the recording and you just speak from the heart. No one has to ever hear it, right? You're just speaking to, to, to, to the recording, telling a story, giving your thoughts about whatever is important to you, your philosophies, your, you know, life lessons, whatever it may be. And by the way, another way of doing it, besides like the phone recorder, is you go to Google Doc. Go to doc.new. That's to instantly start a new Google document and use voice typing. Google Doc has a feature called voice typing on the computer. On the phone, you can do it too, I'm sure. And if you switch on voice typing on Google Doc, just Google it. Google, Google how to do this, okay? Figure it out. Voice typing on Google Doc, you can just speak. And if you're not speaking way too fast, if you're not speaking too fast, it'll transcribe everything for you just about perfectly. Now, not without, without punctuation marks or whatever. But it's brilliant. And you just talk. You know, you don't have to worry about how it turns out. You just kind of talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. And later on, you can go back and edit, edit the writing itself, put in the punctuations, put in the paragraphs, and all the formatting, et cetera. So that's another way to express yourself through writing first with your voice. But I really, really want to encourage you to aim for becoming a great writer. The greatest writer that you can possibly become, which is far greater than you can imagine. You can become a published writer that sells lots and lots of books, that gets lots of people interested in your ideas and your message and your services and your products. Aim to become a writer that can quickly and easily express your authentic soul and your stories, your values, your life experiences. And that happens through practice. And like I said, you got to find a way of practicing. Like me, I started with the phone, typing casually, no big deal, right? However you need to start voice journaling, however you need to start to write, to learn this art of becoming a great writer. Because it will serve your business in more ways than you can imagine. Writing is much more search engine-optimized than videos, because with writing, the search engine can easily see what you're talking about with videos. They have to try to figure it out through voice transcription, which is not perfect yet. So, aim to be a great writer if I can overcome hatred of writing for all these years, for almost four decades, as a second language. You too can become a great writer in whatever language you choose, as long as you do it through practice. Hope that's helpful. I just want to see what some of the comments are coming through here. And just one more question again about the format. Thank you, Shreta, for your vote there and Gudrun. So, this is B, okay? And then A is this. So, which one do you like better? A or B? Okay, so thanks for joining me. Captain Gudrun, Indra, Laura, Shreta, and Tom, and Sharon and Tina. Thank you all for joining, and I hope this is encouraging for you. Go forth and practice your writing. It is one of the most valuable skills you can develop for your career, for your business, for just life fulfillment and satisfaction. So, go for it. Be well.