“…your first draft is only for you. No one is ever going to see it, so you don’t have to worry about it. You’re not going to turn it in. You’re not going to show it to friends to evaluate — because it’s only for you.”

“Nobody creates flawless first drafts. And nobody creates better second drafts without the intervention of someone else. Nobody.”

Of all the things that have been helpful to me in personal growth and goal achievement, using my journal daily is at the foundation.

Writing in my journal every single day is the glue that holds everything else together.

Writing intrinsically champions and improves creativity, critical thinking, and clarity.

Sketching is great, but before I start sketching, I start writing. Writing first has lots of advantages, regardless of the project you’re working on. Here are a few examples.

When I read this, I immediately began a ritual that I have practiced for many years–and that others have done for centuries before me–I marked down the passage and later transferred it to my “commonplace book.

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

1. Do not start with the thank you.

2. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.”

3. Then you’re done.

I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.

Before I was a writer, I was simply a reader. Like many readers, I was somewhat in awe of the process. I had no idea how the books I read were made, or how if I was beginning to then aspire to one day write one myself, how on earth I would manage to string so many words together.

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives. [Links checked February/11/2017]

GitBook is a modern publishing toolchain. Making both writing and collaboration easy.