Write a Book in Two Hours: Authorship, #1

Introduction

When I was in high school, a teacher once asked me how many kindergartners I thought I could take in a fight.

I was 16 years old and full of vinegar. With two years of Tae Kwon Do lessons under my belt, I was pretty sure I could win a fight with a kindergartner.

But then he said, Let's imagine you're on the stage in the auditorium, and ten kindergartners come at you. Do you think you could handle that many if they piled on?

When you watch movies, bad guys always take turns attacking. They believe in a fair fight, and each henchman waits his turn to attack the hero. As a movie aficionado, this was how I first envisioned my great kindergartner battle. I would defeat one of these little rascals before taking on the next one. But I was dead wrong. Kindergartners don’t fight like that. Their parents don't let them watch R-rated movies, so they don't know the rules. They will rush you all at once.

While you might have a chance against ten little monsters, once that number hits fifty or one hundred, your odds of success move closer to absolute zero.

There is a value that comes from quantity, and that's what this book is going to teach you. I want to teach you how you can release a good book every single week. It's essential that you dial into that critical element. Anybody can put out bad books all the time, but that's not what I want.

In this guide, we're going to look at limitations and possibilities and see that many of those limitations no longer exist. The assumption that writing is a slow process and books take six months or years to write is outdated. We're going to stop living in the past and start taking advantage of technology and our better understanding of human physiology and psychology. We're going to achieve some amazing and powerful things.

My books always tend to be too long because I can't stop myself. A year after publishing the first edition, I finally released the abridged version of 20K a Day. People were complaining that the book was far too long, and they were right. That's the last book I wrote before hiring my editor.

Even though writing that book from my dock was one of my greatest experiences and marked my transition to dictation, it was still way too long.

I want that to become your problem – that you generate too much content, not too little.

If you decide to read that book, make sure you pick the second edition: the shorter, leaner, edited-by-Alice edition. Believe me; you'll appreciate the new version.

In this book, I want to show you that you can dictate a book from scratch in just two hours because that's exactly what I'm going to do right now. This book is based on a podcast episode where I first taught this initial concept. I want to demonstrate yet again that I can do what I'm talking about while I'm doing what I'm talking about.

I want to take a moment and share with you where I am right now.

I just finished a book for a ghostwriting client. Five minutes ago, I uploaded the last file for my editor to process before we send it to the client.

I'm up in my office. It's twelve square meters on the third floor of a hostel that my wife and I bought this summer. It's open-air, and all I can see in front of me is rooftops and palm trees. It's a little bit rainy, but the view is majestic up here.

I only like to spend a couple of hours a day up here, so we often rent the space to guests at night. Up here is my slice of paradise, as I stand to face the world. In my giant view towards the ocean, I feel like I'm the captain of an airship.

I haven't done it yet, but I'm thinking about buying a boat wheel, so I can feel like a pirate driving my airship as I look at the world. That might be one step too much. I haven't decided yet, but that's how I feel up here. So far in my research, I have only been able to find miniature wheels, but I need something full sized for the desired effect. If I do manage to get one put up in here, I’ll make sure to take a picture and share it on my social media channels.

This little office is as close to the heavens as I can get. I can look down on everything that's happening. I can see my kids playing, the dog running around, and guests coming and going.

As I finished my client project, I thought to myself, I have the notes ready for this book. I feel like writing a new book. Why don't I crank one out before I go downstairs and have lunch?

That's the power I want to give you. I want you to be able to generate a book every time you're in the mood. There is no longer a momentous struggle, but instead, something that's so easy to do on a whim.

The average human speaks 125 to 150 words per minute. Very few people can type that fast, and usually, they are transcribing or taking notes – not creating. It's very rare to find