How To Write A Book In A Weekend: Serve Humanity By Writing A Book | Chandler Bolt | TEDxYoungstown

[Music] it's 2014 and I'm on an awards cruise with friends and co-workers at the company that I work at we just spent the last few days in the Caribbean Sun and every year the company sends their top performers on this cruise and here we are we decided to do something crazy on the last morning on the last morning we decided to climb up to the highest point of the ship so the mast on the ship and we just were up there there's five of us we start talking about our dreams our goals what do we want to accomplish over the next year and about this time as we're talking I hear something now I look to my left and I hear it and what I hear is this sonar unexpectedly starting to spin and I see it spin and then I see it sweep around and it hits my friend Kendall in the chest sweeps him over the railing he fell two stories now about this time you know you look down I think you know maybe this will just it'll be a little fall and he'll just have a small injury broken arm he'll look up and say hey I'm okay but I looked down and he wasn't moving about this time my friend Christian he yells out somebody get some help and that's when I realized this was very serious I scale down the railing I'm the first one to get down there he still isn't moving I get down there I roll him over still isn't moving we call the paramedics they get there as fast as they can seems like what takes forever they get there they rush him down to the medical room below the ship they rush the ship into port they put Kindle in an ambulance and rush him to the hospital Kindle passed away on the way to the hospital a few weeks later I was talking with his dad Bob after his funeral his dad Bob just this incredible guy and he said you know Kendal he was my only son he's the family name I'm old I can't have more kids the only good that can come out of this is if other people's lives are positively impacted by the fact that this happened this just kind of hit me in the chest force me to ask the question what can I do about this few months after or a few months previously the Kindle passing away I found out that he had actually attended one of my random trainings just like this about how to write and publish a book and he had actually written the rough draft of his book so a few months after Kindle passed away we were able to publish his book with the help of friends and family now you know this is the night before he passed away and I'm thinking you know he talked to me about his dreams he talked to me about his goals he'll never be able to accomplish any of those goals now I'm living for two I'm living to accomplish his goals and I'm living to accomplish my goals and that's why every single day since that accident I've worn this bracelet that says make him proud now it was kind of this moment that forced me to take inventory of my life and look at the things that I was doing and I realized there was only a handful of things I was doing that truly mattered and helping people write and publish books was and still is on the top of this list now this forced me to crystallize and just kind of think about it formed this fundamental belief about humanity and that is this the best way that you can serve humanity is to write a book now I know this sounds like a grandiose statement but since then I've dedicated my life to this singular purpose and we've been able to help over 4,500 authors on their journey to writing and publishing their book through my company self-publishing school now after working with authors in over 65 countries and helping sell hundreds of thousands of books we've discovered a methodology for helping aspiring authors get their books done now in this talk I'm gonna share with you the how the what and the why behind that methodology first why does this matter next what keeps most people from getting started and last how to get your rough draft done in as little as a weekend now first in terms of why this matters we've discovered something we call leveraged impact now leveraged impact we believe that books are changing the way that information is passed from one person to another so when you think about how information is passed along or it you know traditions or anything like that you think of one to one so one person teaches another person that thing or maybe it's a classroom setting so you think one-to-many so one person teaches 10 20 or 30 people that thing well the really cool thing about books is that you're able to crystallize all these ideas that you in your head and put those in a singular book and then that books able to impact thousands tens of thousands even hundreds of thousands of people all around the world that is leveraged impact now more specifically leveraged impact is the ability to impact three distinct groups of people group number one of your friends and family these are people who come in contact with you while you're writing this book and their life has changed because you did the impossible you made the impossible possible you wrote this book and then group number two you've got a thousand readers these are a thousand people we'll call it who read your book and are impacted by that book and then group number three is one person this is one person in your life this could be a reader this could be a family member but their life has completely changed by the fact that you wrote this book they going to do something big maybe it's to write a book themselves maybe it's to lose weight maybe it's to make the impossible possible and just take on this big challenge that they previously viewed is impossible now a great example of this is Sean Sumner it's John's a physical therapist and he worked with me to write and publish two books now after Sean published his books his eight-year-old daughter came up to him and said dad this is awesome I want to write a book he said okay Emma why don't you go write 50 words and then come back to me no he thought she's probably not gonna do it this might not you know this is just gonna be an idea that will be fleeting and a few hours later she came back and she had those 50 words written he said okay you're serious about this and then every week after that they go to Panera Bread and work on the book together now a few months later Emma published her book the fairies of waterfall Island and the story doesn't end here so she published this book and made over four thousand dollars in the first three months she donated all of this money to an autism awareness charity called Autism Speaks this is you know raising awareness for autism all around the world and now she's paying for school field trips with the royalties from this book she has an allowance from the royalties from this book and her life has forever been changed because the eight years old she saw her dad write a book that's leveraged impact now these three groups combined to one book impacting 1200 now according to the New York Times we know that 81% of people want to write a book but less than 1% of people actually do it why is that because there's these two pervasive myths that keep people from getting started myth number one is that you need an agent or a publisher to publish a book so in the old days you needed to publish her to get into bookstores and bookstores were the only way that you sold books well now over 70% of all books sold are sold on Amazon and you don't need a publisher to publish a book on Amazon so Amazon has over 310 million users and they've just radically shifted the landscape away from traditional publishing and towards self-publishing so self-publishing has now become the preferred option for authors no longer is it the redheaded stepchild the thing that you only do if you can't get a traditional publishing deal now that leads me to myth number two which is that it takes years to write a book so people think that this takes years and yes when you had a publisher it did take years but even then almost all the progress on your book was made in the last two months before the manuscript was due so by removing the publisher and by the process that we've learned over the past few years we've been able to shorten this timeline from two years down to 90 days and here's how you do it so when you get started on your book yeah I want you to singularly focus on getting your rough draft done there's kind of this crazy thing that happens when you get this rough draft done and you start to see the light at the end of the tunnel okay so you start to believe that this thing is possible so with that in mind we're gonna start with what I call the 24 hour book outline challenge this is really how to write your book in three steps now step number one is to create a mind map a mind map is simply a brain dump of all the ideas that you have on this book so you're gonna take 15 to 45 minutes and you're gonna take a blank sheet of paper write down everything that you can think of on this book okay and then step number two you're going to turn that mind map into an outline so to do this you're going to start to group some of these ideas into groups of ideas or into sections so we'll call this five sections so you're grouping this together and then you're going to order those sections and the order that you want to cover them in the book so now you've got five sections and the order you want to cover them and you're gonna drill down into each section with about three chapters per Section so with that you've got you know these five sections you've got three chapters per Section this forms the 15 chapter outline for your book now once you get this done writing the book actually becomes the easy part which that no probably sounds crazy but here's how you do it stick with me so we're gonna move to step three which is to write the book alright now to do this you're gonna repeat the exact same process that I taught you on a macro level for the book as a whole and you're gonna repeat that per chapter so you'll start with chapter number one and you're gonna spend 10 minutes mind mapping everything that you can think of on that chapter then 10 minutes turning that mind map into an outline and then you're gonna spend 45 minutes to an hour and a half actually writing the chapter and you're gonna repeat that process chapter by chapter by chapter now this is where this gets fun so some of you maybe speak better than you right if you speak better than you write this kind of becomes a choose-your-own-adventure so you're gonna repeat the same process but instead of writing the chapter you're gonna speak the chapter so you're gonna take ten minutes to speak the chapter and then get that transcribed and you'll repeat that process chapter by chapter by chapter so to repeat there's three steps to writing your book step number one create a mindmap step number two turn that mind map into an outline and then step number three write or speak your book one chapter at a time and again you're gonna repeat this process chapter by chapter a chapter now when you do this it is possible to get the rough draft of your book done in as little as a weekend which again I know sounds crazy I'm on a mission to help a hundred thousand people write and publish their book and when we do that through leveraged impact we're gonna be able to impact a hundred and twenty million people around the world this starts with you this starts one mind map when outline when rough draft at a time so I encourage you to take the 24 hour book outline challenge today and commit to getting your book outline done in the next 24 hours I'll leave you with this one of the most common excuses I hear from people who you know they think they've been thinking about writing this book but they haven't done it yet is this Chandler I don't have time or maybe Chandler the timing just isn't right I know I need to do this but just not right now okay so they think they're gonna have this magical time where they're gonna have no kids no job no responsibilities no business they're gonna have a week and a writer's cabin and that is when they'll get their book done well I've got bad news it's not gonna happen you're gonna have to get started before you're ready so pick up your pin pick up your keyboard and get your rough draft done when you do you might just change your life and you might just change 1,200 of them make him proud make us all proud thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 334,919

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Education, Business, Creativity, Education reform, Entrepreneurship, Higher education, Learning

Id: sHfrvpgDsaw

Length: 11min 47sec (707 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 24 2019