“How on earth did they find the time to do that?”

To learn the skill while they did their full-time job. To juggle the equivalent to two full-time jobs. To write a blog every day. 

I can tell you, having written at this blog for 150 days now, that it looks more like this: you take the smallest steps possible, you write down your ideas, and you plan your week out carefully. I told someone the other day, if you read this blog, you’ll notice a lot of posts are just a few sentences; sometimes I just write it a few minutes before I sleep. 

Other times, it looks more like the opposite: You need to drop other things in order to prioritize a main thing. When I was writing and editing Creative Doing, I wasn’t working a full-time job, and Wonder Shuttle wasn’t taking on any client work. (See “narrative aircover”, by Tom Critchlow which I found via Jakob Greenfield.)

You wouldn’t be able to tell this from the outside looking in, of course, which is the whole point of me telling you now: 

There is no secret. 

You’ll need to focus, to the point where it hurts to give up what you’re doing—in the service of something more important to you. You’ll probably need to build a team, too. Start with folks who are open to part-time work.

The insights will show up as you do more stuff. That’s when the real secret sauce emerges.

The secret sauce is best shared.