Mindset Hacks Won't Improve Your Writing

Understanding the three parts of the human person to move from mindset to practice

Moving from Mindset to Practice

Last week, I wrote about the number one mistake you hear when it comes to writing advice—or indeed, productivity advice in general. That mistake occurs because most frameworks leave out an important part of what it means to be a human being. So when the experts prescribe various lifestyle changes for self-improvement, these changes only improve part of who we are. Therefore, the quest for self-improvement inevitably fails.

The most important and powerful parts of us as writers are left on the backburner because of an incorrect dichotomy that separates body from mind and excludes our soul and spirit, hampering our ability to attain basic competence as human beings.

Today, we’ll talk about how to cultivate the lifestyle of a writer with the tripartite understanding of humans as body-mind, soul, and spirit. As a framework, I’m using Cal Newport’s “deep life stack,” about which he speaks and writes regularly. I love Cal’s work on this, because he’s one of the only people who thinks deeply and nontraditionally about the problems we’re facing at this particular time in which technology is growing so rapidly.

He writes about how we, as professionals who need this technology in order to bring our work into the world, can still navigate it more intentionally so that we are helped and not hampered by it, becoming better human beings rather than pale imitations of our own technology.

Can Newport makes a wonderful distinction between the two stages of cultivating a deeper life. Stage one, which I briefly introduced last week, is becoming a competent human. Stage two is the stage of transformation and cultivation, where you take what you built in stage one and raise it up higher and higher. For now, let’s focus on stage one in more detail.

But Do We Really Need To Focus on Basic Competence To Be Good Writers?

Many people either dislike or discredit the idea that you need to attain a basic level of competence before you can get to the good stuff. Some people simply lack the desire or motivation to work on the mundane things of life, assuming these things will take care of themselves. These people prefer to immediately jump to the important, transformational things we ultimately hope to achieve.

But it’s simply a fact that if you are not doing the basics, you’re not going to be able to do the lofty things you hope to achieve as a writer, an artist, or any kind of creative professional. Ancient philosophy and theology bear this out, as does simple human experience.

Cal’s framework is not necessarily the best or the only one out there. I’m using it because I like his work and because his framework is one that is easy for me both to critique and to use. I’m going to take his framework and adjust it just a little bit considering the more ancient and accurate tripartite structure of the human person.

The Hidden Flaw in “Mind over Matter”

But first, I want to bring your attention to something: in a lot of self-help literature, there is a pervasive idea that if you have the right mindset, you will be able to bend reality around you so that reality itself will begin to serve what you are focusing on. This idea was made famous by Earl Nightingale in his record “The Strangest Secret,” and all the big self-help gurus talk about it a lot.

Yes, I’m simplifying this, but the central idea is that if you want to achieve something, you need to focus your attention on that thing, and if you think positively enough about it, then eventually, everything around you will begin to accommodate your desire. All you have to do is dedicate your thoughts entirely to the process and end goal.

If you read my last article, you probably know where my critique is going: we have an overweaning attention on the mind as the thing that causes the change. On a certain level, this makes sense: our aptitude for complex reasoning is one of the most obvious ways in which we are different from animals. So it’s understandable that people assume the thing that makes us human is also the thing that brings transformational change.

Believe me, transformation does happen for people when they use these self-help techniques. But if you look closely at the process Earl Nightingale and others use, you’ll realize that it isn’t the mind that’s making it happen. Rather, it’s the absolute, whole-hearted attention given by the entire person—body-mind, soul, and spirit—to the accomplishment of the thing. And yes, we are able to use these techniques to accomplish great things.

But here’s the rub: we’re not actually the ones accomplishing the great things. That’s the other hidden message in self-help literature: though much of the literature out there isn’t explicitly religious, it does use spiritual language in talking about resonance, serendipity, and an answer to our problems from some other force that is outside of us.

None of this should surprise us.

The thing I want to note is that so much of the self-help advice focuses on using your mind. And if you’re only paying attention to what these self-help gurus are saying instead of what they’re doing, you might think self-improvement is just a trick of the mind, and that if you focus solely on training your mind, you will be able to accomplish fantastic things. That simply isn’t true. The people who do use these self-help frameworks successfully focus on the entire human person, not just the mind.

That being the case, let’s look at how Cal Newport’s framework can be useful in bringing us from a focus on mindset only into a focus on lifestyle. This approach encompasses the human person in a way that helps us attend to realities that are meant to make us competent human beings. This means we’re preparing the soil to eventually plant the seeds of our cultivated garden of creativity, which is what we’ll be talking about next time.

How To Become More Competent

Step 1: Discipline

Cal talks about several concrete steps that can and should be accomplished simultaneously. He starts with the one nobody likes to talk about: discipline. Without discipline, none of the other things can happen.

Cal divides discipline into the categories of body, mind, and heart.

1. According to Cal, the body aspect of discipline involves things like fitness, diet, sleep, and balancing work with leisure.

2. Discipline of the mind involves learning. For Cal, this almost always means reading difficult books, not because they’re difficult but because they contain important truths. (“Fluff,” or reading for enjoyment, is certainly a valid and important part of the human experience, but the fullness of what will make us more competent as individuals is found in reading difficult books.)

3. For Cal, discipline of the heart involves interacting with other people. This is a very important step, because it’s true that we creatives tend to become solipsistic, focusing in on ourselves to the detriment of our loved ones and our social life. (It doesn’t help that many of us are introverts!)

I will adjust this framework a bit. A lot of it is good, but it’s missing one of the key components I talked about last time.

1. As I argued, body-mind is a single part of the human person, so disciplining this part of yourself through tending your physical habits and your reading is only addressing one part of who you are.

2. The second part of you is your soul. A lot of people either conflate the soul with the spirit or else miss tending the soul entirely. Disciplining your soul means cultivating your taste. It has to do with filling the creative well with inputs from different artistic disciplines. I’ll talk more about this in a moment.

3. Third, we have what Cal calls heart and what I call spirit. Spirit does not have to do with other people. It has to do with attending to the realities that are beyond us. If you are a religious person, this means actually doing the practices of your religion. For example, my Orthodox readers will know that the daily practices in Lent are very immersive and difficult, but that they also put into proper perspective the directionality and hierarchy of the things we do in order to simply become competent human beings.

That is the discipline piece. I could give many more examples of how to apply discipline in your daily life, but for now, I’m only presenting the framework. Use it as you wish.

Step 2: Controlling Your Own Time

The second step after (or concurrent with) discipline in this first phase of becoming more competent as humans has to do with the control of time. I had planned to write all about the different methods you can use to control time (e.g. blocking your day for each activity and ensuring you’re doing the thing you should be doing in each block), but I decided to be less rigid. Here’s why:

I was recently reminded by a friend and fellow writer that the control of time is only partially something that we can manage. The reality of having a family, being a member of a community, or both means that sometimes—if not often—our time is outside of our control.

We are often told that our control of time is something that is indispensable, so when we fail to control it due to factors outside our control, we tend to blame ourselves. There are ways to manage this, some of which I’ve discussed inside my author community, but we need to acknowledge that there are certain things outside our control that we won’t be able to lay a system on top of.

Start by Cultivating Attention

Once we acknowledge this fact and set aside the unrealistic expectation of ourselves that we can put tremendous amounts of time into our creativity, let us at least determine to be responsible with the sliver of time we can control. This is very important to something I discussed in my last article: we need to do everything we can to eliminate distractions, so that we can be attentive. The word “focus” is very popular in the productivity space, but “attention” is, I think, a better word. There is something about giving your whole self to a task that activates the entirety of your person—body-mind, soul, and spirit.

To cultivate attention, we must do everything in our power to eliminate technology’s incursion into that sliver of time we can control. This means following the principles of Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism. For example:

• During the block of time you’ve decided you’re working, keep your phone in a different room. The world will not end if you do this, believe me. If there’s a real emergency, people will find ways of contacting you that don’t involve this very recent technology that we lived without for hundreds of years.

• The other thing you may want to do is limit the automatic and autonomic access to the internet that will happen the moment you start focusing intensely on anything, especially if that focused task is happening on your computer. Some of the best and most prolific writers I know use the simple hack of having two computers: one computer with internet for admin work, and one computer with no internet for creative work.

• You might also write in a notebook and keep your computer in another room. Or you might have two desks or two entirely separate work areas. A lot of writers do their creative work in cafes, for example. This is something that has helped me a lot.

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It’s fine and dandy to read about these transformational practices for the serious writer, but it’s easier to implement them if you do it with others. Come and join us at the Story Hearth to cultivate a writer’s lifestyle with others who are just as committed to it as you are:

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Step 3: Having an Ethos of Craftsmanship

The final thing I want to say about this particular stage of becoming competent as a human being is that this is where you develop the desire for craftsmanship as an identifying characteristic of your life. It’s important for us to understand that cultivating our taste and developing our objective ability in the craft is not something we can simply wish away. We need to learn how to 1) cultivate our taste and 2) develop our ability. We do this in the basic competency stage.

So start by developing an ethos of craftsmanship that imbues everything you do, including body-mind, soul, and spirit. For example, for me, this meant that it wasn’t enough anymore to simply decide on being more physically active. It wasn’t enough for me even to follow a specific training plan. I tried both. But to make it stick, I had to make my body-mind training an art in and of itself.

I decided to take up something called adventure racing, which I won’t go into here except to say that it involves all aspects of your person, and it never has an endpoint in its potential cultivation. Even though adventure racing has nothing to do with writing, the actions I take to become more competent as an adventure racer do help when I sit down to face the blank page and the absolute terror of not knowing whether I’ll be able to get over the hump of beginning a new thing…

… which happens Every. Single. Time.

Once we manage to at least start the process of becoming more competent as humans, we have to embrace the fact that this is a stage that has no end. It is a helix that constantly moves toward an end but never reaches it

From Competency to Transcendence

But that doesn’t mean we stop here. Because stage one is still only the level of competency, not transcendence.

How do we get to the next level? We’ll talk about that next time.