HOW TO WRITE A 10 000 WORD EBOOK IN 10 DAYS
Introduction To The Paperback Version
After I had published the eBook to Amazon using the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) platform, I realised that I needed to write more words. KDP would not accept 23 pages. They wanted a minimum of 30 pages. So I decided to add more content to the paperback version and write an introduction to this version. The importance of getting started is that you get to learn along the way. I would not have known this if I had not tried. I want to thank my friend Kuziva who said he preferred to buy the paperback version. It is because of him that I tried to upload the paperback version only to realise that KDP was rejecting the 23 pages.
Although technology is moving on and some people are now exclusively consuming digital content, there are some who still prefer to read the physical paper copy. There's something about the touch and feel of a book that they like. To demonstrate the need to listen to the market, I am increasing the number of pages by adding this paperback introduction and some extra chapters at the end. I will not change anything in the eBook, but just add sections at the end. I will talk about the day of the digital publishing and the social media engagement.
Introduction To The eBook
This eBook is the culmination of writing ten blog posts of about 1000 words each for ten days. I have always wanted to write books, but I also wanted to blog and vlog at the same time. So I came up with a plan to kill all birds with one stone. I decided to blog at least 1000 words per day on related topics, which would allow me to compile a 30 000 page book at the end of the month. I would compile a 480 000 page book after 12 months. So that is the plan. Since I started writing these blogs ten days before the end of July, this month its only 10 000 words. I Could have waited until the beginning of Agust, but that would have constituted procrastination, and new ideas would have interfered with a future start date. Today I am editing this book and adding a few ideas here and there. I don't think there's anything to remove.
Blog Post 1: How Can You Repackage Your Passion?
Many people have a passion for something. Their passion becomes a job because they have to go to a job. A job they may not like, but they continue to go because it pays the bills. It also rewards them with a weekend or off days, and an end of the month. Then there are religious holidays and public holidays. People used to work at one job for decades and get rewards for long service to the company. Now, most people will change jobs twice or more in their working lives. It is becoming the norm to get many qualifications and work for various companies. So how about the passion? For a lot of people, the desire becomes the hobby. They do it after a hard days work despite their fatigue. It shows that they are committed. If only they could turn the passion into their full-time occupation. It would be ideal to do the job that you love if you could make some money.
The good news is that now you can. In this book, I try to show how a change of mindset can help one to make a living from doing what you love. Whatever you love to do, blog about it, share pictures, talk about it and make videos too. When you do that, and you’re consistent, you can grow a community. Your followers are your capital. Big brands are looking for communities to sell their products and services. If you can build a community, then you can get the attention of advertisers, and you can charge them for access to the community.
The time to start building your community is now. Stop treating your passion as a hobby and document your daily experiences in line with your privacy preferences. If you’re a fisherman, talk about fishing through blogs and vlogs, and post pictures on Instagram. Social media is the platform for attention. It is through attention that you get the opportunity to sell your products and services. You get the attention by providing value for time. Time is the new currency because people now live hurried lives. They have no time to waste on things that bring no value to their lives. You have to appreciate that your content is competing against lots of other content. To stand out, you have to produce a huge amount of content and fast. Speed and volume will give consumers the chance to vote for your best content. Great singers are often known for their hit songs, but they would have produced a tonne more music which is usually released post-mortem. So you need to create at scale and let the market decide the best content. You focus on content creation and let the consumers debate which is your best.
Blog Post 2: Text, Images, Audio, and Video
We live at a time when it is now possible to tell our stories in the form of text, images, audio, and video. It is great because we have a choice to tell our stories using one or two, or all of these forms of communication. An excellent blog tries to incorporate all four. In my case, I’m comfortable using all four. Many people have a passion for writing, photography, radio and television broadcasting. They have faced obstacles regarding the equipment. The internet and smartphone applications have changed all that.
So the first thing I do every morning is to write a minimum 1000 words of a blog post. It provides me with the content that I will then talk about for the rest of the day. My podcasts and YouTube videos will reflect this blog post. It gives me the chance to say something about my website. My website has an Adsense account associated with it, so it’s an important income stream for me.
Text
The written word is critical to us as a human species. We learn to read from an early age so that we can consume the vast amount of reading which we have been producing for centuries. We have used text based communication for as long as we can remember. Even our religious books have been text based. We have huge libraries full of text based materials, from books to magazines and newspapers. Even as we have gone digital, we have remained text based. Despite digitalisation, the amount of paperwork continues to pile up.
Remember how we used to write letters? A few people still do, and it’s amazing when you receive a written letter. Why? We have developed high tech but remained high touch. We crave the feel of paper.
The accidental discovery of text messaging is one of the best innovation of the mobile phone. Now we have emojis, little pictures that help us to convey our emotions. The text is everywhere. Our road signages, election manifestos, even subtitles for movies. Some applications can now read road signs and translate them into the language you prefer and understand.
Audio
Audio is our most natural way of communication. We learn to speak before we even get to write. We learn by listening to those around us who can talk. Babies imitate the sounds of those around them. It is not surprising to note that children of the same family speak like their parents. We have developed thousands of different languages across the globe. I speak five languages as do some people. Some speak more and some less than 5. Some are okay with just one language. I speak English, Shona, Ndebele, Spanish, and French. I have a bit more work to do in French as I stopped using it after high school. Maybe I can start a podcast in which I talk about the journey of relearning the French language. That's an idea for a podcast. I also understand Sesotho. It is a language spoken in the Gwanda area of Zimbabwe. I worked there for a couple of years and was slowly learning the language.
There’s nothing as beautiful as learning a local language. You form new relationships with the community, and they are impressed by your efforts to learn. You build stronger relationships with the locals. It's fun when they laugh at your 'broken' way of speaking.
The radio has been a great invention to help us communicate in our natural languages. I remember the old supersonic radio that my father bought. I used to sit by the speakers and listen to music. I also used to enjoy some programs like ‘chakafukidza dzimba matenga’. In the rural areas, the radio was the primary form of entertainment. People would dance to music into the night. When I think about the countryside, I always picture young men carrying their shiny radios on their shoulders blasting beats. The children would follow them for a while to dance to the music. I was one of those kids once when I lived with my grandmother in our rural home.
The vinyl records, cassette tapes, the compact disc (CD), and now services like iTunes, Spotify, and associated music streaming services have made music portable and almost limitless. We have also turned text based books into audiobooks.
And now radio has become personal and democratised with the innovation of the podcast. Platforms like Anchor.fm have made it possible for individuals to run a private radio station and broadcast to the whole world. I have a station on Anchor.fm, and I try to air at least once a day. The broadcast is then automatically converted into a podcast and published on the iTunes podcast app. It’s only 5 minutes long, for now.
Anchor.fm takes away the hustle of the technical set up. In other words, they take away your excuses not to produce anything. The excuses punch the biggest holes in our pockets. Poverty has fast become a choice rather than a reality you’re born with to die. The choices far outweigh the excuses.
Everyone is an entrepreneur; they just don’t know how to package themselves into an income generator. How do you package a personal brand into a sellable product or service? Believe it or not, just becoming an Instagram influencer brings in serious cash. It’s a numbers game. If you attract enough attention, companies pay you to post about their products and services. It’s that simple. But you need to know how to grow your numbers around your brand.
Video
They say a picture says a thousand words but a video says a million. Communication is biased towards visual cues. We can communicate our fears and emotions through body language. We can even produce chemicals like adrenaline during fight or flight situations. When we speak to someone in the physical form, it’s the best representation of communicating with them. Video captures much of that communication but is still missing information from the chemical world. But we are working on it. Haptic touch is slowly making it to market. When your smartphone vibrates, it’s calling for your attention in a place where it is prudent to keep it in silent mode. Developments in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) will bring a richer video experience to the masses. We are in for exciting times as the big three, Google, Apple, and Facebook are all developing AR and VR.
Text, images, audio, and video are all forms of communication. Every application on the smartphone is trying to improve our communication. You need to pick on your strengths from the four and start telling stories. If robots take over all the robotic tasks we have been carrying out, we will be free to tell stories. Fitness and entertainment are the future of employment. Applications like WordPress, Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Anchor.fm, and YouTube are training grounds for better applications in AR and VR. We can write, share pictures, talk, and act on these platforms at zero cost. So get started now!
Blog Post 3: How Are Our children Getting Bored?
Our kids are growing up surrounded by entertainment abundance. There’s no shortage of entertainment from countless television programs, entertainment platforms such as Apple TV, Netflix, and Hulu, YouTube and video game consoles. The games have become more realistic, and I wonder what it will be like when augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) become development platforms for games. Imagine the game FIFA in AR and VR? Version 1.0 of AR games are already available such as Pokemon Go. The future is more real and more entertaining.
Many parents I have met have told me that their children complain about being bored. As soon as the children have no access to their gadgets, they complain. They’re not spending time with face to face interactions. Some even find it difficult to communicate with parents and peers correctly. We need to teach our children essential social skills. It starts in the home.
Is there anything wrong with video games? If we don’t limit our children’s access to video games, we are not allocating them time to learn other life skills such as communication and respect for things and other people. Because our children have lots of gadgets, they do not see the need to look after them. They always get new video games consoles.
When I grew up, we had to be very innovative and build our toys. Our parents prioritised basic food, shelter, and education. Academic qualifications were better than anything else they could imagine. War compromised the school years of our parents. They believed in the magic of teaching. That school would end all our problems. They tried to send us to the best schools. They bought us books and school uniforms. But they did not want to hear of sport or the arts. Acting and ‘guitars’ were for those who were planning a life of hardship. They were right as only a few can breakthrough in sport or music. But should they have discouraged us? Perhaps not. Societal attitudes were also to blame. Parents feared what other parents would say.
So today we are confronted with the same questions. Our children don’t want to be doctors and teachers. They want to be YouTubers. They want to be gamers. What should we do? School dropouts are making millions of pounds a year entertaining our children. The fight for our children’s attention is intense. How do you convince them that a University degree is the way to go when we have college dropouts like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg who have changed the world?
We should remind our children that the likes of the college dropouts who have changed the world are not in the majority. They are the exception to the rule. They found their purpose and went all out to achieve their dreams. They were self-driven, and they implemented their plans. Not everyone can drop out and make it. We will never know how many dropouts did not make it to the top of the success mountain. We have forgotten them. We are aware the few who made it because they have the products and services to show for it. The rest of us still need to get that education.
Should we discourage them to try though? I don’t think so. I believe that we should help them to find time to implement some of their ideas but not at the expense of a good education. The time that they spend playing game after game could be better spent implementing some of the ideas they have. Teach them to use a daily to do list, even for their homework and extra study. Those are lifelong skills. Implementing is the biggest lesson our children can inherit from us. Our parents left us with education as an inheritance. How we are using that education is a different conversation. They could not accumulate enough inherited capital in their limited working lives after independence. They still managed to buy properties, and some even started businesses.
Social media platforms are the newest threat to how our children are spending their time. We are competing for attention from social media influencers. When we grew up our biggest influence was mom, or dad, or uncle or aunt. Grandma and grandpa were the best. Some community leaders and teachers were also a significant influence. And the community religious leaders of course. Not anymore. YouTube creators and gamers, Snapchat and Instagram influencers have become the new role models. There are a lot of things our children don’t think we know.
So what can we do? I believe that we need to step up our social media skills. We need to understand that social media is just people. They’re storytelling platforms and opportunities for influence. Parents should be on those platforms spreading parental influence. Grandma should be on Snapchat telling fairy tales. Auntie should be on Instagram advising the youth. If we don’t get involved otherwise, someone else will.
Pastors preach the word on social media platforms. Go live on Facebook or periscope. Start a YouTube channel. Understand that the setting up of a media company is down to you. Individuals, organisations, and corporations can now create media companies at next to zero extra cost. The same smartphone you’re using to read this article can be used to create your story.
Back to our bored children. What can we do to keep them entertained? I think we should teach them to communicate on and off the grid. Let’s help them find their passion and set aside some time to implement the ideas. Let’s teach them to break down their dreams into tasks which can be put onto a daily to do list. Encourage them to be patient and to enjoy the daily implementation of baby steps which will lead to long term gratification. Gamification has the addictive element which uses an immediate reward system so that players continue playing. Real life is more about long term satisfaction than short term.
Blog Post 4: How To Package Your Passion Into A Product
We have endless possibilities due to advances in smartphone innovations. The smartphone has democratised wealth creation, but many of us still treat it as an entertainment and educational tool. We have a voracious appetite for consumption. Some are binge watchers of television series, or we can spend the whole day watching YouTube videos. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not judging anyone for their indulgences. We have all done it. I’ve binge watched many Netflix series, YouTube channels, and podcasts. I’ve read many books and listened to many audiobooks. We consume more than we produce. The ratio of producers to consumers is biased towards consumption. That’s right for the producers because they have a bigger marketplace.
I figured I could either continue consuming great content or start producing content until I became a great content creator. Somebody has to produce. The challenge is how do you balance consumption and production? Do you do it 50-50? That’s a good starting point, and extremists have no time to consume. They produce 24-7. So I have settled for at least 10% consumption. You can always learn something new. Always.
Now the question is how do you continue to produce content? What if you run out of ideas? What if people don’t like the content? Some people try to blog every day but suffer from writer's block. Their mind just goes blank. But there’s a new way of finding unlimited content. A new way of producing content nonstop. In fact, there’s not enough time to create all this content. It’s called documenting. Recording only means you and your experiences. It doesn’t mean putting your personal life onto the public domain. It just means talking about passion and packaging it in a way that people will find interesting.
As an individual, you have a unique story. Many people will find your article interesting. You also have a passion, or you have been doing something for some time. Or you want to be an entrepreneur or a future comedian. Instead of telling us the complete success story, you can document the process. You can tell us what you are doing to accomplish your goal. At first, it doesn’t make sense, but when you think reality TV, then it begins to make sense. Why do we watch reality TV? Media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram are reality TV. You snap or go live on Instagram in different places all day long. You’re documenting by posting on social media. You’re also recording when you go live on Facebook. We have already got these skills. We just don’t realise it.
Let’s break it down further. New media platforms have put storytelling into your hands. The smartphone is your newspaper, art gallery, radio and television station. You can publish using WordPress, post pictures on Instagram, run a broadcast radio station using Anchor.fm, and broadcast television using YouTube live. There are much more platforms to write, produce audio, pictures, and video all day long. And you can have multiple channels and publish and broadcast all day. That’s why documenting is perfect because you don’t have to invent anything new. You do you. You’re the storyteller.
It may take some time to understand. It took me a bit of time of continuous professional development and implementation. Let’s look at how you can package your brand into text, pictures, audio, and video. This blog post you’re reading is an example of how I have used text to document. I will then use Anchor.fm to produce an audio version of this. Anchor.fm then converts it into a podcast to be posted on various podcasting platforms. The audio doesn’t have to be exactly like this blog post. It should be able to convey the same ideas. When you have an idea or philosophy of life, it is natural to be consistent. A Pastor can preach at any time and place. That’s what he does for a living. The problem is that other people don’t talk about what they do unless some media company needs their story one day. What if we could share our knowledge and experiences outside of work as long as it was appropriate? Some professions have strict confidentiality laws unless you’re planning to get fired. I’m not encouraging people to go public on issues that compromise their jobs. There’s a lot we can document with confidentiality in mind. I will also take pictures of the process, and make a YouTube video with this content.
All this can be done using just a few apps on my smartphone. But there are many more applications for documenting and telling stories. So which ones should you use? At this point, you need to understand the concept of numbers and attention arbitrage, the new currency. You get a financial reward for the attention you can attract. We have become inundated with requests for our attention, and the smartphone has become the focus of our attention. The people who draw the most attention get the highest rewards. Here’s an example. If you attract a lot of attention on Instagram because of your documentary, your storytelling or just your relevant posts, you become an Instagram influencer, and therefore corporate brands want to pay you if you post about their products and services. You have the numbers and potential customers for those goods and services.
So how do you become influential? You do this by producing ridiculous amounts of content. You suffocate the market. You focus on as many platforms as possible. As long as there are people on any platform, you go there and grow your brand. Your brand is your number one priority. That is your capital. If you have a broken brand, you need to fix it. Avoid talking about things you don’t know. People will stop reading, listening or watching. Document through writing, pictures, audio, and video or on all four ways of communicating.
The future of employment is fitness, entertainment and personalised education. Remember that. Start producing content now.
Blog Post 5: Produce As Much Content As You Can
If you are a musician, then you should be producing music nonstop. There’s no other way to be a musician if you’re not creating music. It’s that simple.
Bear in mind that you’re not the only musician. You’re not the only one who is practising the same craft as you. Innovations in technology have democratised content creation. That means anyone with a smartphone and an internet connection anywhere in The World can produce content. They can do exactly the thing that you’re doing. The possibilities have reached abundance status but so has the competition. There’s a race to abundant content creation. The winners are those who create more content. They will produce a lot of content which will go unnoticed except for the gems, and the gems are what the world will appreciate and remember. The world does not remember the many times you fell; they remember the few times you got straight up and kept on moving.
People become experts in particular disciplines because they repeat the same things every day. The more you repeat something, the better you become at it. People don’t care about the things you don’t know or can’t do. They’re happy to have you as an expert in that one field. You wouldn’t want a medical doctor fixing your car before a long trip or a car mechanic performing heart surgery on you. It took the doctor seven years of training and repetition even to be allowed to start practice. It takes some time for the worker to achieve mastery. Their skills need upgrading all the time. Technology continues to evolve. Cars are now more sophisticated than 20 years ago.
As a content creator, the same principles apply. You have to produce a ridiculous amount of content. You have to put in the work. That is how you become better and more comfortable with it. If you’re a YouTuber, you want to look natural on camera. You want to look like part of the furniture. You can only achieve that through shooting videos every day many times a day. The cost of doing is almost zero. You don’t need to break an arm and a leg to get started. If you already have a smartphone and an internet connection, then you’re ready to go. So how do you get started shooting video? You start shooting video right now or right today. The only way to get started is to start. There’s no other magic besides that. Once you have made your first video, make your second and third, and just keep going. Not only do most people have a smartphone and an internet connection, but we now also have a lot of app stores and free apps for video editing and for uploading videos to web platforms where people can consume the content.
Making raw video footage then editing and distribution is one way, we now have new media platforms that allow us to produce native video content within the app. As a video producer one now has access to apps such as Facebook for Facebook live, Snapchat and Instagram for short video and one can even go live on Instagram. There are apps like and Live Air Solo, Wirecast Go, and Livestream that allow one to go live on YouTube from anywhere with an internet connection. Twitter now allows you to go live with the integrated Periscope app. These are the prominent ones, but there are plenty more. The YouTube app itself allows you to go live. There’s just no room for excuses. Technology is suffocating those who like to make excuses as a strategy for procrastination. There’s just no place for the lazy industry. The 'reasons why it can not be done' industry is the biggest driver of poverty in this day and age. In my culture, there’s a saying that one cannot suffer from thirst when they are knee deep in water.
If your strengths are with the spoken word, if your passion is radio, then today you can start a radio station. Podcasting is the new radio. A good place to start is Anchor.fm. You can record up to 5 minutes of audio, you can add some background music to it, and once you publish it, you can share your story on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. A cool thing that Anchor.fm do is to allow you to post the audio as a podcast episode on the iTunes podcast app and Pocket Casts for now. They have promised to deploy integration with other podcasting platforms in future updates of the app. But you also have apps like SoundCloud and WhatsApp which allow you to post audio. There’s very little room for excuses.
You might say that speaking is not your thing. Video freaks you out but you’re very cool with writing. No problem. There are just more platforms for that than audio and video. In fact, many platforms start off allowing text only then gradually integrate audio and videos. Those that start with voice and video recognise the importance of written words in comments. It is the comments which help to keep the conversation going after consuming the audio or video content.
There are many applications that we can use for writing. As a writer, you can start a blog. Starting a blog is simple. What we call Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn in are nothing but blogging platforms. So by publishing on these and other social media platforms you’re blogging. If you’re publishing on Medium, you’re a blogger. If you’re using WordPress, then you’re becoming a more serious blogger. But it’s blogging all the same.
Realise that we now have platforms that allow us to publish text, voice, and video as training grounds for starting media companies. When we take charge of our own media strategy, we begin to own our own stories. Those who tell their own stories control the memories we create for future generations. Our grandchildren will make their judgements about our legacy, but at least we will speak through the content we leave behind. It is this content, these works which will define our legacy.
Blog Post 6: Spend Zero Time On The Things You Can’t Change
Time is the currency, not paper money or gold coins. You get money and gold in exchange for your hours. You charge for your day, and you get paid for it. The more time a garage spends fixing your car, the more you’re charged. The hourly rate reflects the value that you’re putting into a product or service. We have time scarcity, not abundance. For that reason, it does not make sense to waste time. Once our time is gone, we can never recover it.
There are things we can change, but there are others we cannot. It makes sense to focus our energy and time on the things we can change. Before you carry out a project, decide whether it can be done or not so that you do not waste your time. If you think you can do it, then go for it. However, what I am referring to is more than just selecting a feasible task, I m talking about the idea of spending time on issues we cannot change.
Social media branding is still a misunderstood phenomenon. It is, however, the greatest opportunity for individuals to reinvent themselves and build new empires. Winston Churchill once said that the empires of the future are the empires of the mind. He could not have been more right. We live during a period when we have all the tools in our toolbox to grow individual and corporate brands. The dilemma is that most of us do not realise that we are living during an era of unprecedented abundance and this is only the beginning of the democratisation of wealth creation.
To understand social media we need to know a little bit about numbers and the economies of scale. I know that some of my friends become disillusioned with having so many friends on social media that from time to time, they offload the excess baggage. I respect that decision. What I have noticed though is that some people are digital introverts and are not comfortable sharing their views with total strangers that they befriended on a social media platform. When you meet them in person, it is an entirely different experience. Even some of those who are tough talking on Facebook, when you meet them in person, you wonder if it is the same person.
Back to numbers. Numbers bring about economies of scale. When you unfriend individuals, those numbers go down. The reason you even post something on social media is to share what you think may be of interest to your friends. You could be sharing content that you have come across elsewhere, in which case you’re playing the role of a curator, or you could be producing original content like what I am doing with this article. People will engage when they find it in their best interests to do so. Individual posts will always attract the same characters to the comments. When a post gets a lot of observations, it encourages the author to write more of the same.
So what have numbers got to do with economics? Well, this is where social media comes in. Social media has democratised wealth creation. It is now possible to repackage the same activities we are doing a product or a service which we can sell. Remember you are spending time on social media. What if you could spend time and get paid for it? The challenge is in how to package your social media engagements. A great example is Instagram. You can become an Instagram influencer. When you become an influencer, big corporate brands are willing to pay you if you post about their business. An analogy to this is sporting influencers. An individual like Usain Bolt gets paid by brands like Virgin Media because of the number of people he attracts to a personal brand. There are much more examples of this arrangement. Michael Jordan, the Chicago Bulls basketball legend, had a sponsorship deal with Nike and had the Nike Air coined after his court exploits. Athletes have numbers because of the value they bring to the entertainment industry.
Now I am not saying everyone is an entertainer on social media, but you can see moments of brilliance in some individuals who demonstrate mastery in particular fields. They post consistently on certain topics and can be considered to be influential in their right. In the old world of radio and television, such people would have been your regular talk show, hosts. What does Oprah Winfrey do? She tells stories and asks people their stories. No more than what most people spend the entire day doing on social media. The only difference is that Oprah has figured a way of getting paid for her time. We haven’t. People like Oprah had it very hard. It was not easy to break through the way that she did. If she had the same tools that we have today, Oprah would have been even more phenomenal.
To understand the impact of social media influencers, you only have to ask small children what their plans are for the future. They want to be YouTubers or video gamers. These are now million dollars per annum occupations. Some still want to be doctors and engineers, but it is interesting to note the emergence of Vlogging and Gaming. There are more ways to be influential on a global scale than the old Schoolmaster and the Vicar.
Numbers are important. Suppose you are a budding musician. There are now many ways to grow your brand. You have Snapchat. You can sing 10-second songs to showcase your talent. You can do the same on Instagram and Facebook. You can also use YouTube. You can produce content and distribute it on a daily basis. What you need to get started is a smartphone, some apps, and an internet connection. The cost of getting started is next to nothing because you already have a smartphone and apps and an internet connection, but you’re not taking advantage of the opportunities this presents. The challenge is to learn how to package your daily activities into sellable products and services.
You can now decide whether you want to publish a blog, run an art gallery or radio station, or a television station. You can even do just two or run all four. I am going to repurpose this blog post into a podcast and a YouTube video. That is how easy it is to blog, podcast, and vlog at the same time. Your smartphone can do all three. You can also post pictures of the process on Instagram. You can compile a book with some of your blog posts. Some people are already doing all four, but they have not figured out how to monetize their time. I have helped a few individuals to start. I said you would be doing what you’re already doing. You just need to put a price on your time! Time is the only currency.
Blog Post 7: Talk About What You Know And How You Do It
Documenting
I have spoken about the importance of documenting so that you do not struggle to produce content or suffer from writer's block, today; I talk about the need to record your experiences. I think the reason people develop writer's block is that they’re not documenting what they do. If they record what they do writing stories, then they should write the story of writing a book. Write an article on writer's block. I think if you write books then you should also be a blogger. Blogging is something you can do as a writer. Short stories are good practice for the book stories.
The central message in this blog post is that you should talk about things you know. It is effortless for readers or listeners to figure whether or not you know what you’re saying. It is also straightforward for some people to understand whether or not you’re an authentic person, hence the need for full transparency in communicating our stories on various platforms. It is now tough to hide unless you’re completely off the grid. Privacy has become a nice to have, but it’s not practical. We give away a lot of private information to all the platforms we interact with our friends and acquaintances. We renounce our privacy for the opportunity to use social media platforms.
Data
Traditionally it was the government who had data on all of us. Then in addition to the state, it was the phone and utility companies. Now it is the social media and gaming companies. Every big company needs to build a broad user base. Large numbers are important to grow the economies of scale. Big organisations try to create a database of their customers to sell to them. Social media companies a particular product to sell so they keep a database of users to attract large corporations to advertise and sell to them. They need your information to sell it to advertisers.
Social media companies can build a profile of their account holders to allow targeted marketing by dealers. If you're using a service and not paying for it, then you’re the product. The trick is to realise that you can use social media platforms to grow your numbers. Social media platforms are now places where you can market your goods and services without charge. You can decide to pay for advertising, but you can also grow organically. If you’re selling something, then you need customers. Your job is to give customers a reason to buy from you.
Branding
Social media platforms have become personal branding opportunities. There are four different ways in which we communicate as human beings. We use text, pictures, voice, and video. The various social media platforms allow users to tell stories using one or more of these four ways of communicating. Advances in telecommunications technologies have democratised the media industry. We’re no longer at the mercy of media companies to tell our stories. We can now run a blog, a picture library, a podcast and a vlog. In other words, we can now run a tabloid, an art gallery, a radio station, and television. These applications are available for use within social media. Facebook allows us to blog and to run a television network with Facebook live.
The challenge is no longer technical; it is consistency and nonstop production of content. Authenticity is now the new currency. If you approach the content creation as a process of documenting, then you can not run out of things to say. You can not run out of being yourself! Documenting means recording what you do and how you do it. The problem is that some professions are hostile to social media and employees have to use fake accounts, and they still are not allowed social media use during working hours. So they’re living a double life.
In the world, as we know it today, it is becoming more and more difficult to live a double life. Disguising your digital footprint is hard. It is everywhere. In that case, it is important to take ownership of your brand. If you don’t tell your own story, then others will do so on your behalf. Their version of your story may not be what you want the world to know. So take ownership of your stories as individuals and communities. They say if you control the past, you control the future.
Technology
Technology has evolved to a level that suffocates any excuses you might have for not creating content or telling stories. It has also become effortless to get involved in what is happening all over the place. A lot of people have become consumers of too much content. The biggest casualty to this is time. We are wasting time chasing too many shadows instead of focusing on ourselves and talking about what we know. We need to become experts at something. When we do that, people see value in us and are willing to spend their time consuming our content.
If you want to know what value you bring to those around you, take note of what help people need from you. What do people ask you? How do they want you to help them? That is a clear indication of the capital you have built. It is your brand. If you’re happy with that name, then well and good. If not, then it’s time to rebrand. Authenticity is the unbeatable brand. The truth always wins. Your personal story is unique.
We now have multiple options to tell our stories. Social media platforms have enabled storytelling to take advantage of our strengths. We can now use words, pictures, voice, and video. We can use one or more or all of the four ways of communicating our stories. The trouble is that most people are focusing on written words yet we have limitations regarding consuming text. We have become busier as a human species, and competition for our attention is increasing. It is more practical to listen to something while doing household chores and driving to work than it is to read. That is why I think podcasting is winning. Audiobooks are more a more practical format to consume than hard copies of the same book. I have listened to more audiobooks than I have read the equivalent paper in recent months. Some people are still romantic about book reading and are attracted by holding a paper and smelling the pages. Technology is changing all that, and we have to adapt to save time.
Blog Post 8: Time Is The New Currency
Time is the greatest asset that we have. Everything we do has to be done in space and in time. We can change our area, we can go anywhere on this planet and later in the universe, but we can not recover time. Once it is gone, that’s it. We can not get it back. We can avoid wasting time by pondering on time lost.
Now is an excellent opportunity to talk about time because we have become rushed as a human species. We have so much to do, and we just don't seem to get enough time in the 24 hours we have. Some people have to sleep fewer hours just to catch up. So how do you manage to get ahead of time or are you always playing catch up?
Wasting Time
Lets us consider some of the ways through which we are wasting our time. Social media is a big consumer of time especially WhatsApp from my experience. The biggest time wasters on WhatsApp are groups. There is a wealth of useful information from the discussions there, but the problem is that we consume information at the expense of creating content. It's a catch 22 situation where the information is valuable but so is the time. Once we have wasted our time on social media, we can never get it back. Time is our greatest currency, and we need to stop wasting it. Reading this post, you will find that you are aware of most of the things here but never really got to think about them and to limit the amount of time you spend consuming content.
I have been reading many books and listening to many podcasts; watching many videos, participating in many discussions on social media, including Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp, then realised that most of the information I was reading was just repetition. One day I decided to suspend consumption and embark on serious content creation. It was tough, but I decided to serve the suspension until 31st December 2017. I want to see how much content I can create in these six months. Are you using a todo list because that certainly helps? I do use a todo list, and it has made my life a lot better. The list is a good reminder of what we need to get done. When you have a list, some things take priority over others. If you want to reduce content consumption, you have to replace it with creation. Having idle time in our lives is tough. When we have nothing to do, we look for entertainment.
Entertainment
Entertainment is probably the biggest contributor to time wasting. Besides education and learning, we find the content we consume entertaining. Every content creator is looking to either entertain or educate, or both. Most people would rather find entertainment than education. If the training helps them to access or enjoy the show, then they will gladly go for it. That is just the reality. So with a background in physics education, I am more inclined to educate than to entertain. But I must educate on things that I know, and do. If I can also treat in the process of education, then I would have hit the jackpot. Most comedians have an educational message behind the jokes. Pastors educate and entertain. Some do more of teaching than entertainment, and vice-versa.
You need time to get things done. If you're consuming content, you need time. To create content, you also need time. Now, you spend time and probably money, to consume content, and you spend time and sometimes some money, but you do get paid for the content if you know how. It's hard to get paid for consuming content. If it happens, then there is a catch. There is no free lunch!
Avoid Wasting Time
How do you stop spending time-consuming content so that you can use it to create content? Well, it is possible to create content out of the things that we consume. The easiest example is this; video gamers are recording themselves playing video games, then putting the videos on YouTube, and monetizing those videos. They are getting over one million dollars a year doing that. They enjoy playing video games, but they are getting paid for doing something they love doing. That is the definition of the perfect occupation. Most people crave entertainment after their boring jobs. That is just sad, to live for the weekend, to wait for that holiday. How many people dread Mondays, and enjoy Fridays? The majority I would say. Ask these people how they spend their time? They spend time chasing entertainment.
The Good News
The good news is that you do not need to stop doing the things you are already doing. You can find ways of monetising the things you consider entertainment. Let's consider someone who likes to watch football. Remember the guy who knew all the football players when we were young? The person who remembered every world cup goal? Today that person is called a blogger. They are called football pundits. They are a YouTube sensation. Some of those job descriptions did not exist before the web. They do now, thanks to the innovation of a few individuals.
The internet has democratised wealth creation. That's a good thing, but the problem is that most people are not taking advantage of the opportunities presented by the web. There’s the mistaken belief that social media platforms are a waste of time. It is true if you’re not using them to save time. A lot of businesses sell you products that save you time. As mass communications tools, social media platforms are saving us time to communicate with our families and friends, and customers. Communication is still the key word for all these platforms. 20 Years ago we would have been waiting days to receive a reply through a letter. We would also need to wait for major media organisations to wait for news of what is happening around the world. Now an ordinary person with a smartphone and an internet connection can go live on Facebook with breaking news.
And The Challenge
The challenge is to repackage what you already do into sellable goods and services. Entrepreneurs create a product or service that saves people time; that's where the money is. That’s what Uber and Amazon and other successful corporations sell. Entrepreneurship is about reverse engineering the saving of TIME. Physics has not yet figured out possible time travel, so until that day, save it!
Blog Post 9: Watch What I Do Not What I Say
Don’t Tell Me Show Me
I have been talking to various people and advising on a range of issues. Although they agreed with me, there was always the question: have you done it yourself. There are two ways of looking at this. Either that I’m a thought leader or I should stop talking only, but also start doing. It is for the second reason that I’m writing a minimum one thousand words a day. I remain a thought leader, but I also develop a different kind of authenticity from those who pay attention to my ideas. I privately advise some people at no cost, and I emphasise on implementation. The natural thing for me to do is to go practical on the things that I discuss. It makes me more credible to practice what I preach. Credibility is one of the new currencies.
Doable Writing Goal
I’ve been a freelance writer for a while. I consider myself writer because I can just decide to write and produce quite a lot in a short time. For the past ten days, I’ve been writing a thousand words a day. Not that a thousand is a lot, but that I set a daily goal which I find very comfortable to implement. On one of the days, I wrote two thousand words because I was behind. I had been rushed the previous day and was just too tired at the end of it. I was able to recover and stay on course. That's an important fact. The advantage of such a small commitment is that you quickly get a book done.
My Message Is Consistent
My theme and my message are consistent in all my writings. I talk about implementing whatever you want to focus on, that which makes you happy. Writing and speaking make me happy. I can do it all day. Some people think I should go into media. I think everyone is already a Media Company. They’re just not working hard at it. No one will tell your stories better than you. Whoever tells your story controls your past and your future. Yesterday I watched a video where Akon was talking about the need to tell positive stories about Africa. That’s part of the reason that I think writing and recording audio and video is an excellent way to contribute to the rebranding of Africa.
Watch What I Do
I have just made my to do list much longer to accommodate my beliefs. There’s nothing that I preach that I do not or can not do. It is all doable. The reason I’m doing this is to give serious people the practical evidence that they need to get started. Since I’m writing, I can communicate about writing on social media platforms. And that’s what I’m doing. Social media is people. People love stories. The human mind is a story processing organ. We cannot compare the function of the human brain to that of a computer. A computer is just a calculator. The human mind is an extrapolation organ. We extrapolate into the future and decide to implement or to abandon a plan because the extrapolation informs us that we are going to fail. Extrapolating breeds procrastination. We need to hack the natural inclination of the mind to extrapolate and procrastinate or abandon plans. The antidote to procrastination is a todo list with simple daily tasks. When repeated, these tasks become second nature and not chores.
Question What I Say
What we say is usually contextual. Breaking news enthusiasts then take those words and manipulate the context to suit their agenda. That’s why you need to question what I say to put it in the correct context. I think our reliance on a foreign language has become an obstacle in understanding one another. Some of the discussions we have become arguments and eventually quarrels because we begin to question the understanding of key concepts and definition of words. People become annoyed with each other over petty issues due in part to the use of a foreign language.
The challenge these days is that the internet has opened up the possibilities of content creation to anybody with a smartphone and a web connection. Anybody can record anything anywhere. So we are overwhelmed with an abundance of content. There are some mediocre content producers and some excellent ones. The best content always wins. The problem is that there is too much brilliant content. We could spend our whole lives just consuming it but what would be the point of that? It would steal all our time needed to create our purpose in life. Our aim in life is to build relevance. Remember that. You create your own goals and your future. The future belongs to those who create it, and the past belongs to those who tell their own stories. If you control the past, you also control the future. The present is where implementation is the name of the game.
Stop listening too much and just watch what people do. Their deeds are more telling than their words. We can all build mansions in the sky and live happily ever after but it is the doer who wins. The implementers have created the goods and services that we all use. While the talkers talked the walk; the implementors walked the talk. We remember the wins and the winners and not the failures. Watch the implementors more than the talkers. Remember the speaker can even monetize their talking, but you're just the consumer. You are paying for entertainment. Even when you believe you're consuming for free, you're paying with your time. Time is the new currency. The internet just made time more expensive because it has become more scarce. Time is subject to the same rules of scarcity, supply and demand. Start producing content today!
Blog Post 10: What To Do Now
Implementation is the only variable we can control. There are so many variables which contribute to the completion of our goals, some are beyond our control, but we can fully control some of them. The only thing we can control is the implementation. The only implementation we can control is what we are doing right now. Not tomorrow or next week because we can never know what might happen, we may have to change our plans. But we can control today. That is why the todo list is crucial. The list reminds us of what we need to do right now. I know that the first thing I do every morning is to write at least 1000 words. If I write more than a thousand words, that's a bonus. I am confident that after 365 days, I will have a 365 000 word book. With additions, I can take that up to 500 000. Taking the word count up to 1500 a day easily surpasses the 500 00 words target. I think from the first of August. I will try to write 1500 words. It's only 500 words more.
ThisThe decision to increase the length of my daily writings is a perfect example of documenting. I am making decisions on the go. Once I have published this book today, I can plan for August. I will blog and vlog daily. Social media will help me to spread my content.
Documenting is the natural form of implementation. Recording what we are doing is easy because we don't need to do a ridiculous amount of research. Of course, research, especially statistics, helps us to appear more credible. We can't just throw random figures around on things we have no clue about unless it's a comedy of course.
Credibility is the most important attribute you can have as a content creator. People will listen to someone they trust. If you want to be credible, you need to go all in on the truth. People know when are putting up a front. The lies and cover-ups become the story, and people will stop giving you the attention. A good example of a bad strategy is to practice click bait negatively. Click baiting is enticing someone to click on a link with the promise of one thing only to get another. Click baiters do this to increase the hits on their websites and make through Google Adsense. Impatience and sometimes the eagerness to break the news before everybody else is the motivation behind those who practice click baiting, but it also means that they fail to reverse engineer the psychology of the consumers. If you waste their time, they are not coming back to you again. Your brand becomes associated with insincerity.
Word of mouth is still alive and well despite all the innovations in social media. Instead of alienating us, social media has brought us closer. Social media platforms have given everyone the same opportunities to sell products and services to anyone across the globe. We have the global market in the palms of our hands because of the smartphone and mobile applications. We can publish blogs, post pictures, and broadcast radio and television using the same smartphone device. We choose what to do with our smartphones because you might binge consume content all day long. The 10% of the population who decide to produce content in particular, and implement in general, are the winners of the advances in mobile applications. The skills that you develop today with the current applications will prepare you for the world of augmented reality and virtual reality. The future of employment is in fitness and entertainment.
Start documenting today. Choose from blogging, photography, and broadcast radio or television. Grow communities around your passion and focus on creating as much content as you can at speed. Reduce the amount of content you consume because you do not have all the time in the world. If you become addicted to consumption, you will never get a chance to produce anything.
Thank you for reading my book. Some of the blog posts from which I have taken the bulk of this material are still on my website which is available in the next paragraph. My next book starts tomorrow with 1500 words blog posts.
After The Kindle Direct Publishing
On Monday the 31st of July 2017, I was determined to put the final touches on this book and publish it that very day. For the past ten days, I had been writing about 1000 words for my blog. I wanted to compile the blogs into a book and publish it. That way, I would surely be able to write a book every month. If I could write ten thousand words in ten days, then I could write thirty thousand words in thirty days. That extrapolates to a book which is at least 365 000 words after 12 months.
What if I develop writer's block you might ask? Well, when you document what you do on a daily basis, you can not run out of things to write. I am not trying to imagine something which is not there. In fact, if I believed it, I could write a fiction thriller. However, with a background in science, real science is stranger than science fiction. Documenting means recording the process of entrepreneurship or anything you do. The internet has opened up possibilities to record our hobbies and create communities around it.
After I had published my book through the KDP, I felt a sense of relief and accomplishment. I had walked the talk. Instead of telling people that it is possible to write a book if they put their minds to it, I decided to lead by example. I wrote the book in ten days and published it. I published my first book about two years ago. If I had continued to write, I would have published perhaps fifty books by now. Perhaps work got in the way. Work does get in the way of many of the things we love to do. After work, we are too tired to do the things we enjoy doing. We are too exhausted to exercise and to give attention to our families. After all, we spend more time at work than at home.
After publishing, I had to tell people about the book. There are various social media platforms that one can use. I broadcast a simultaneous live show on YouTube and my Facebook page. I was also using GarageBand to record the audio which I would later upload to SoundCloud. SoundCloud is also the platform that I use to upload my podcasts ready to be forwarded to the iTunes podasct platform.
You can read this, and other blog posts on my website: www.derecktafuma.com
My social media accounts are on my website.