If you want to start a business in 2024, adopt this one high-value habit:
daily free writing.
Free writing is just intentional, self-directed thinking. Thinking is the foundation of business, every entrepreneur’s primary job. If you don’t know what business to start or how to start a business, a daily free writing habit is the key to helping you figure those things out.
In fact, a daily free writing habit is the key to helping you figure pretty much anything out, and that’s the whole point.
Here’s why daily free writing is the one high-value habit you need to start a business in 2024 and how to begin writing today.
Why Daily Free Writing?
Lewis Carrol once said the best way to finish writing a book is to begin at the beginning and then keep on going until you reach the end, then stop.
So, let’s begin at the beginning with a question.
What is a business fundamentally?
A business is a solution machine. It takes a problem, or a set of problems, held in common by its dream customers, develops solutions for those problems, and offers the solutions to its customers. Think about it.
- Mechanics sell solutions to car problems
- dentists sell solutions to oral problems
- doctors sell solutions to health problems
- realtors sell solutions to real estate problems
- attorneys, insurance agents, mortgage brokers…the list goes on
The customer creates revenue in the business by purchasing the solution.
But business-building is a murky, opaque, ambiguous affair from the beginning. Clarity only comes with many years and many mistakes. Daily free writing is kind of like that long pole with a net on the end people use to clean their pool.
Both are tools.
When you use the net, you clean all the muck out of your pool to create an environment for fun in the sun. When you free write, you clean all the muck out of your mind to create an environment for clear thinking and intentional action. The main difference being that you have to use your mind every day whether you clean it or not.
Daily free writing is the only habit I know of that allows anyone to think through all the complexities that inevitably come along with starting a new venture and maturing it into profitability.
What Is Free Writing?
I learned about free writing from Julia Cameron’s incredible book on the creative process called The Artist’s Way.
In that book, she lays out a technique she calls morning pages that is a particular kind of free writing. Its power is in its simplicity. Three continuous pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. No editing, no spell checking, no concern for grammar. Just get the thoughts out of your mind and onto the page exactly how they show up to you.
And it truly is as easy as that.
Free writing is the opposite of structured writing, which is the only writing most people are ever exposed to.
You aren’t writing for other people. There will be no grade. You are writing to improve your own mental health, to articulate problems and brainstorm solutions, to figure out how to build a business (and life) that you love.
That is what free writing is all about.
How to Begin Your Writing Habit Today
The hardest part about developing a writing habit that can drive personal income growth is establishing the habit in the first place.
For this, I have developed the 3S model for daily writing, which is made of these three concepts:
- Sacred-establishing sacred time for your sacred writing activity when all you do is write and nothing else matters
- Setting-preparing your physical environment for writing success
- Sequence-designing, testing, and iterating the sequence of particular actions that lead you to your writing session each day.