8 brutal truths you need to hear as a writer (to actually make money)

if you actually want to make money as a writer and not just spend your entire life daydreaming about it then you need to hear these eight brutal truths and I know you need this tough love because this is the same kind of tough love I needed at the beginning of my writing career and just to give you a little context 10 years ago I graduated from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in fiction writing and I was completely broke I was living in a rundown studio apartment uh on the north side of Chicago I was

working a minimum wage job as an entry copywriter and today 10 years later I now run a portfolio of writing related businesses that does over $6 million in annual revenue I've published 10 different books I've made millions of dollars from my writing I've grown all different sorts of writing related businesses and I went from that studio apartment to where I am now by really internalizing these eight brutal truths that I'm going to share with you um this is not the surface level stuff I'm not going to tell you uh you just have to work really

hard or you just got to pour your heart and soul into your writing that that's not what we're going to talk about here today these are really hard lessons I had to learn along the way and each one forced me to change the way that I was thinking about becoming a successful writer in the digital age so brutal truth number one if you want to earn a full-time living as a writer you have to work twice as hard as everyone else and what I mean by that is you are competing against people like me today

today so just think about that I now spend 8 to 10 hours per day writing minimum usually 7 days a week I usually do do just as much on the weekends and most people most really successful writers in whatever industry or whatever Niche whether it's non-fiction or fiction they all are writing 30 40 50 hours a week and so as a baseline you sort of have to understand if you're starting from zero that's who you're competing with right and the first step of really building momentum for yourself as a writer is you have to solve

this problem called I only have an hour or two a day to work on my writing which was me in the beginning when I was first starting out you know I was working 8 10 hours a day at this Ad Agency not really doing the sort of writing that I wanted to do a in a lot of cases I wasn't even writing I was getting paid as a copywriter but I was just like editing or doing grammatical uh edits on proposals and random other things like that and so the only time I had to write

was after work I would commute an hour to and from work each day and then I'd go to the gym and then the only time I would have to write is around 8900 p.m. to about midnight and if I didn't get in my writing in those hours I didn't get to write that day and if I didn't do that each day of the week and I only did that on the weekends well then I was only writing you know two five maybe 10 hours a week and again your you're competing against people who are writing

30 40 50 hours a week and so in the beginning the first thing you need to solve for is well how do I get as many hours as possible practicing my writing and sometimes that means late at night sometimes that means early in the morning sometimes that means saying no to some of the other social obligations and getting it done on the weekends but you got to make it happen because if you aren't able to do that then you're never going to get over the hump and start building momentum to where you have more and

more time to invest in your writing and I'll tell you the the step that I always recommend everyone takes here is I really really encourage you if you want if you really want to become successful as a writer the first thing I would encourage you to do is to start ghost writing because ghost writing is essentially this bridge between you working a full-time job and you maybe writing on the side and ghost writing if you can transition a ghost writing side hustle into your ghost writing full-time will now during the day all of that time

spent ghost writing you're basically getting paid to practice so so you can double or triple the amount of hours that you're writing and that you're practicing but you're getting paid to do it you're providing a service and then also with ghost writing is you can increase how much you're earning and as you increase how much you're earning maybe you don't need to work as much and then you have more time to reinvest in your own writing so step one is really how do you get yourself out of a scenario where you're working a job that

you really don't enjoy for 8 10 hours a day how can you reclaim more time so that you're practicing writing and you're getting paid to practice and then as you have more time and you're getting paid to practice and you increase your earnings how do you have more time to reinvest in your own writing and that is when you start to really feel momentum as a writer it's very very difficult to feel that momentum or to get to a place like where I am now when you're only able to write an hour a day you

know so that's really the thing you need to solve for and this might seem like a funny example but uh I was just watching this really great documentary on Netflix with my wife about the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders it's called America sweethearts um I did not think that I was going to enjoy it as much as I did but it's a really great example of the kind of work ethic you need when you want to make your dream come true I didn't actually know that you know the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders for example um I didn't know

that they w paid a full-time salary and they weren't dancing uh for the team all day every day all of them actually have other careers and they are working six eight hours a day doing something else and then in their off hours or at night they go dance with the Dallas Cowboys and or they're training or they're practicing with their team and so you know that's a great example of being world class at your craft that this documentary made me respect them so much cu the amount of work ethic you need to do that is

insane but that's essentially the mentality you need to have and you need to apply that to whatever your Pursuit is in life and writing is a great example of this is if you're currently working a job that you don't enjoy and you really want to make it as a writer or maybe you're working a job you enjoy but you want to make it as a writer you're just not doing that yet you have to work way harder than everyone else in the beginning and you have to make use of all your extra time otherwise you're

never going to get over that first hump then once you get over that first pump and you're able to start getting paid to practice writing or you have more hours per day to reinvest in your writing then it becomes a game of well how high can you turn up the volume on that you know like every single day I'm like wow I got here but if I slow down I'm not going to accomplish my goals so that's why you know the more successful even I become I do not taper down how much I'm practicing I'm

still writing 6 8 10 hours a day on the weekends I'm still putting in shifts because that's how hard you to work so that's the first brutal truth the second one and this is very specific if you want to become a successful non-fiction writer you need to become a worldclass marketer and if you want to become a successful fiction writer you need to become relentlessly prolific so let me explain the differences here if you notice all of the most successful highest paid non-fiction writers are not just writers almost all of them are entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial

okay so James clear the author of atomic habits has other businesses and is an amazing marketer Mark Manson author of The subtle art of not giving a has other businesses makes money in other ways besides just writing books and is an amazing marketer Ryan holiday author of The Obstacle of the way has other businesses monetizes his writing in other ways and is an amazing marketer and I even heard him say in an interview that he makes more money each year selling his little stoicism coins than he does his own books and he's one of the

most successful non-fiction authors of the past decade so something that you really need to internalize is that becoming successful in the world of non-fiction really doesn't have as much to do with the volume of books that you're putting out and it also doesn't have very much to do with even the quality of writing there there are some very very very popular non-fiction books business books self-help books Finance books that are very mediocrely written and that's because the value in non-fiction is not the beauty of the sentences the value in non-fiction is are you answering my

question or are you telling me a story I find interesting okay so if you want to succeed in non-fiction you have to realize that the game is really about marketing and in many ways entrepreneurship you know there's a reason why so many of the books that dominate The New York Times bestseller list from from non-fiction authors are also from people who have very lucrative businesses because then they can throw money at their books Tony Robbins is an amazing example of this every time Tony Robbins comes out with a book number one New York Times bestselling

author but that's because he's not really a writer he's not really an author he's an entrepreneur with an insanely lucrative business that allows him to fund and Market his books okay so that's the non-fiction game the fiction game is actually very different with fiction if you notice all of the most successful and highest paid fiction writers are actually not great marketers many of them don't have huge social audiences they don't have big email lists they don't follow any of the best practices that you know if you're in the marketing World a lot of them are

actually invisible on social media but they do one thing exceedingly well and that is they publish a Relentless amount of fiction and they just don't stop and they keep going over a very long time Horizon and I find that often times when people ask about fiction they think that fiction is is about hitting a a grand slam and it's like you spend 10 years writing this perfect book or this perfect series and then you put it out into the world and then this series just explodes and like that that's it and that's actually not really

the game the game with fiction has a lot more to do with volume over a long time Horizon Colleen Hoover if you if you know who she is is a really great example of this um her books are not you know pullit or prize winning material but she is Relentless about publishing romance stories and the fact that she is so consistent and just keeps going over and over and over again that is really what has made her so successful obviously her stories resonate and there's something that's connecting with readers there but a lot of it

has to do with volume uh Matt denan is actually another good one he's the author of this lit RPG series called Dungeon Crawler Carl and if you look at you know lit RPG writers are a great example of this or writers that start with uh web novels or web serials and then they be they transition into writing books later each book so in in this Dungeon Crawler Carl series each book is 500 plus words it's a it's a huge book 600 700 800 words and there's six books in this series and he's been chipping away

at this for years and another thing that he does is he also publishes these on a site called uh Royal Road and so you're he's constantly getting feedback and so when you look at the output of someone like that that is so far above what the average fiction writer thinks is necessary and I did a quick search there's a a great tool called publisher rocket where you can pull sales data from Amazon and it's not always 100% but it's Direct Ally accurate and this series Dungeon Crawler Carl uh between print books ebooks and audio books

just for this six book series altogether is averaging over $200,000 per month in Revenue okay so that means his book series is doing you know over a million a month basically in in Topline Revenue because each book is doing 200 Grand so 200 grand time 6 1.2 million a month is Top Line and he's taking home 10 maybe 20% of that so he's making 100 Grand a month writing but I would also bet that he has been writing for 30 40 50 hours a week for years and so again you don't always have control over

you very rarely have control over the outcome you know I don't think he even knew that this series was going to be as successful as it became but the thing that he knows he has control over is how many hours he's racking up and how consistent he is and the more that I study genre fiction the more that I see this to be a universal truth is that it really doesn't have to do with some clever marketing uh strategy it doesn't have to do with having some giant social media audience what it really comes down

to is your ability to yes write great stories but write a lot of them and continue to do it over and over and over again over a long time Horizon so those are the two big things you need to understand about becoming a successful non-fiction writer or becoming a successful fiction writer which leads to brutal truth number three making money exclusively as an author or a legacy writer is unnecessarily hard and I'm using the word unnecessarily on purpose I find that a lot of writers really romanticize what it means to be successful and they think

that you're only a real writer if you are earning money exclusively from selling books it's like the same definition of being a successful writer that we had back in the 1920s but today and that just doesn't make any sense and I know how challenging this is because I have struggled with this for years this was my definition of success for a long time and in many ways just to be fully transparent I I still feel that feeling of you know I see some other writer you know when the pulit Sur prise or some other writer

gets all this you know press coverage saying oh this new novel they came out with is just absolutely incredible and they have a publisher behind them and they have all these Legacy Badges and and and all these things that say that's what it means to be a successful writer and I have moments where I go oh I I must not be a real writer you know I don't have any of those things but then I remember how much freedom I have and then I remember that I make 10 times more money than that writer and

so it depends on how you want to define success and I feel very strongly and this is whenever I have those moments I always come back and I reground myself and I'm like oh yeah I wouldn't trade what I have any day of the week you have to really remember that books are far from the most lucrative way to monetize your talents as a writer for two reasons one is that books are price kept readers are not willing to pay more than 20 maybe $30 for a book maybe $50 for a book if it's some

super dingdong hard cover leather back rare Edition right but typically books as a product category are price kept and then second is that they're oneoff when someone buys a book they're done and the only time that there's repeat purchases is if a they lose their book they need another one B they want it in a different format so they're like I have the print book but I want the audio book or C they gift it to someone else but even still right that you have no recurring Revenue like yeah maybe they might buy a second

C but there there's nothing about that there's nothing recurring baked into the business model and so as a business selling books is very very far from the most effective way to monetize your talents as a writer and yet that is the business model everyone Associates with being quote unquote successful and that's why I used the word unnecessary because we don't need to only monetize our talents that way anymore it is unnecessary to think that way you unlock so much more upside for yourself as a writer when you consider the other ways you can monetize your

talents so sure you can monetize through books but you can also monetize through paid newsletters you can also monetize through courses you could also monetize through providing coaching working with other writers one-on-one or working with businesses one-on-one you can monetize with providing a service you can get paid ghost writing whatever you're really good at writing for yourself you can earn a dividend on those talents by providing that as a service to someone else through ghost writing right so there are so many other ways to monetize Ryan holiday writing about stoicism and then sell stoic coins

he makes more money selling the stoic coins than he does the books there are so many other ways to monetize your talents as a writer and I think it is one of the biggest mistakes that writers make today thinking that they aren't a real writer if they aren't living that you know projected dream of if I'm not the modern day Hemingway or Virginia wolf then I'm I'm not a real writer and that just couldn't be farther from the truth all of these different ways that you can monetize you are still writing it's very hard to

have a lucrative paid newsletter if you can do that as a writer you are a real writer okay so it doesn't just have to be a novel you can monetize in all these other ways brutal truth number four you can't measure success over days you have to measure it over decades so it is very hard to unlock massive success as a writer year one often times year two and even year three okay you can start unlocking small wins it's very it's very easy and very doable year one to go from I have zero followers to

I have a couple thousand followers right it's very easy to go from I want to start monetizing my talents I want to get into ghost writing oh now ghost writing is paying me 5 10 grand a month I've seen it happen I've coached hundreds of writers doing it I know that it's possible I've seen it over and over again however it's very rare that in the first year or even two years you start unlocking outcomes like oh all of a sudden I'm making 30 grand a month for my writing or I'm making 60 Grand a

month for my writing or oh I've I've turned myself into this super lucrative service and and I'm killing it I'm making a 100 Grand a month or oh I wrote this best-selling book or this amazing book series and I'm just raking in the cash very very rarely does that happen in the first year two or three okay and so you have to internalize that if you want to make it as a writer you're not playing a year long game you are playing a decade long game or ideally a multi- deade long game that is one

of the reasons why I love writing so much is because unlike Athletics or even in many ways Business Like You Don't See CEOs stay CEO until the day they die but very often you will see prolific writers write until the day they die and I love writing because it is such an infinite game I know that until I die or my brain goes I'm going to write and I can write and there's nothing that's really holding me back from that it's not like being an athlete where past the age of 30 you know or maybe

35 your body just you just can't do it anymore right that's what makes writing very different and so you have to internalize that and go this isn't a game that I'm focused on winning in 365 days this is a game I'm focused on winning over the next 30 or 40 or 50 years and when you elongate the time Horizon like that you remove so much of the pressure off of yourself okay so the other thing that here that a lot of writers misunderstand is that a lot of the rewards that come from writing it's actually

impossible for them to happen in the first year or two so a lot of the rewards are things like compounding word of mouth or compounding trust like I see writers now that join our program ship 30 for 30 or premium ghost Writing Academy that will say I've been following you since 2014 I've been reading your writing since your Kora days and then they didn't they just haven't purchased anything until now 10 years later right or someone going you know I've I've been on your email list since 2020 and now finally I'm ready to take the

next step well if you don't stick with it and you don't continue building year after year after year you never start unlocking all that compounding and it becomes a very powerful thing you you know from a perception standpoint when someone discovers your work and you know say you write something that goes massively viral doesn't have to be but for the sake of this example let's say you write something that goes massively viral and someone discovers you for the first time well if they see that you've only been at it for 30 days or you've only

been at it for 3 months or 6 months yeah they might follow you or they might pay attention to you but but there's this unconscious bias where they go yeah but you're still new to the game we'll we'll we'll see how long this lasts right and we all do this whereas when someone discovers me the first thing they realize is you've been at this for 10 years and once you see that your likelihood of wanting to listen to that person or wanting to follow them or wanting to pay attention to them is so much higher

than the person that looks like they've just started playing the game and so these are the types of rewards that you don't really unlock in the first year or two which is why I really encourage you to not get so caught up measuring success in the first 365 days it doesn't matter this is a game that you should want to play for a very very long time okay and it's hard for everyone like everyone starts at zero the first year is grueling my my first three years of trying to quote unquote make it as a

writer were so hard I was working that full-time job I was commuting an hour back and forth to work I didn't have air conditioning I didn't have any furniture I just had a desk and a bed and and I would just try and get in my two hours of writing each night before before I went to sleep you know it was really tough and and that whole first year I just really didn't know if it was going to go anywhere and even year two I like started to see some success and started unlocking some little

wins but I was like maybe this is shortlived I I don't know where this is going to go okay so it's hard for everyone and and it doesn't help you to look around at other people and go oh well it was easy for them they they had the fast track like it's it's just too hard for me no it's hard for everyone you just have to have the grit and the determination to get through those first couple years and then when things start picking up momentum you're going to think the complete opposite and you're going

to be like wow this is amazing everyone needs to do this okay so do you just internalize that the beginning is is tough and that's just part of the process and all of the real rewards get unlocked as you get through that phase brutal truth number five writing is a lottery so optimize for volume and this is one that took me a really long time to learn and I think it's true for pretty much every creative industry which is you never know what's going to resonate I promise you the things that you sit there and

obsess over and spend a 100 hours refining and thinking oh this is my masterpiece and I'm going to put this out into the world those are the ones that flop and then the things that you write really quickly and you you're not even sure if you like it and you barely bothered editing it and and you're like I don't even know if I really want to share this but whatever and you hit publish those are the things that catch fire and I have lived this so hundreds of times the things that I spent so much

time on and obsessed over weren't the things that ended up working weren't the things that ended up really resonating and then the things that I just almost threw off the cuff and just went through quickly or acted on an idea in a very short amount of time they ended up Catching Fire and I am always surprised even to this day I am surprised at how much I don't know what the market wants and I don't know what's going to work and what doesn't and so you have to sort of internalize that and just trust that

you are not the smartest person in the room you don't know what's going to resonate and so it doesn't help you to sit there and obsess over your writing instead it's much better to optimize over shots on goal volume how can you get as many ideas as possible out into the world and then just let the market take care of it let the chips fall where they fall that's the only thing that you have control over you don't have control over the outcome a lot of writers think well if I obsess over this I'm going

to control the outcome I'm going to make sure that this performs well and a lot of times that's not how it goes and so you you have a lot more to gain by almost forgoing that and just saying I'm going to get out as many of my ideas as possible into the world brutal truth number six I always love this one reading does not make you a better writer writing makes you a better writer and I will tell you the moment that this really clicked for me this was probably back in 2014 2015 like right

after I had graduated from college and again I was in that first year it was a slog I was trying to figure out how to make it as a writer I really didn't know where the path was going to go I didn't know what I was doing there was I was just trying and I remember I was watching the little Wayne documentary if you if you've ever seen it uh when he was making his most famous album of all time which is the Carter 3 and this documentary is the year that the album comes out

and they're on the tour bus with them and there's this part in the documentary documentary where the interviewer goes who do you listen to for inspiration and L goes myself and the interviewer is confused and clarifies and goes no no but who else do you listen to what other artists do you listen listen to for inspiration you know who who do you admire and L way just with the most dead stare goes myself I I record I listen to myself I listen for what needs to be improved I record again and that's what I do

and I remember watching that and going I am spending too much time reading and not enough time writing and there was something about seeing it with someone else you know versus just reflecting on it in myself that made me realize how much the more that you consume and the more that you read you aren't really getting better at creating you're getting better at consuming reading makes you a better reader you have to create in order to get better at creating writing is what makes you a better writer and obviously obviously I understand the value of

reading I read I enjoy reading I enjoy studying other writers I do it often but there isn't a single day when the amount of hours or the amount of time I spend reading exceeds the amount of hours or time I spend writing it never happens ever because I know if I'm forced if I only have a free hour if I have a really busy day and I'm like wow I just had a ton going on I only have an hour I only have two hours the hierarchy of decision is if I want to keep getting

better and better at as at a WR at being a writer I need to spend those two hours writing okay and if I spend those two hours reading and that day my time spent reading and studying exceeded my time spent creating and pushing output then I am not advancing myself toward my goal and whenever I explain this to beginner writers it's so hard for them to to wrap their heads around and I find the vast majority of writers really over rotate here and they think that reading is how you become a better writer and so

what happens is they start to use reading as a way to productively procrastinate because writing is hard and so instead of writing and doing the hard thing they read and they read and they read and the whole time they tell themselves I'm getting better at writing I'm studying my craft but the reality is you're not you're getting better at reading and reading is only beneficial when your time spent creating is already locked in Reading is a supplement it is not a replacement okay you could say the same metaphor about going to the gym it's like

everyone wants to know what the supplements are and if you're not going to the gym regularly and you're not eating consistently it doesn't matter what supplements you take the supplements are not what get you there okay they help but they are not the core and reading is the exact same way brutal truth number seven there is no such thing as good or bad writing only effective or ineffective writing so the terms good and bad are entirely subject I promise the writer you love probably isn't the writer that I love and the wrer that I love

probably isn't the writer that you love okay we have subjective tastes and so I think that it is very challenging when a writer says my goal is to become a great writer because that is that is an unclear aspiration great is completely subjective okay and you might aim yourself in One Direction and then find someone else who has a different taste than you and all of a sudden you go oh I guess I'm not that good of a writer no they just have a different subjective opinion of what they like which is why I much

prefer and a much clearer aspiration is to think in terms of is my writing effective or ineffective and what I mean by that is am I able to speak to my target reader do they see themselves in my writing am I effective at reaching them helping them solve a problem or entertaining them because if my writing is effective at achieving those goals then it's great writing and if my writing is not effective in achieving those goals it's not very great it's not very good writing right it is ineffective and so I would really encourage you

do not do not fall into the Trap of thinking I need to be a great writer or I'm a good batter I'm a good writer I'm a bad writer do you think I'm good do you think I'm bad I notice all the time like people that go through our writing programs ship 30 for 30 is a great example people want to know you know is my writing good and I always tell them it it doesn't matter if I think it's good or not because I might not be your ideal reader good and bad are subjective

your goal is for your writing to be effective in helping or entertaining a specific type of person and if you're able to do that then you're accomplishing your goal I think the romance category is an amazing example of this a lot of times admittedly myself included but a lot of times writers will look at the romance category and go uh that writing is so bad but the reality is those Romance Writers are raking it in and their readers love their work and their readers will read the out of whatever they publish so it really doesn't

matter if I think the writing is good or bad the writing is very very effective and that's the only measure for success and lastly brutal truth number eight if you aren't achieving your goals as a writer it is your fault and I say that as an empower ing statement and not a demoralizing one there is always a reason why something is working or not working and your job if something isn't working is to figure out what that thing is okay and I will tell you a 100% guaranteed path to making sure that you do not

succeed is for you to defer and not do this self-reflection and blame external forces and I see writers do this constantly they go that platform's broken that platform's too saturated my Niche is too saturated there's too much competition I don't think uh readers care about this thing anymore um the reader wrong I'm I am so smart and talented the reader just doesn't have good taste that is a 100% guaranteed path to failure because all you're doing is forgoing responsibility and you don't have control over those variables okay you gain Nothing by by deferring and blaming

other things or other people the thing that you have control over is instead of pointing the finger you pull the thumb and you ask yourself there's something that I'm not getting there's something I need to change okay so some questions I would encourage you to ask yourself what don't I know how to do what do I think is true that isn't actually true what am I not doing enough of so volume of some sort what am I doing enough of but need to do better so you might be doing it but you're just not doing

it well enough and or what am I doing enough of to the best of my ability but might not actually be the thing that moves the needle so you might not need to keep doing the same thing that you've been doing or do it better you might need to do something different and these are the self-reflective questions that you have to ask yourself because I promise you wherever you are stuck whatever bottleneck you are faced with whatever obstacles is in front of you is your fault and the only reason that you haven't gotten a gotten

over it yet is because you haven't figured out what that thing is because if you knew what the thing was then you wouldn't have that problem anymore right and I and I find you know creative people are so just notorious at this creative people do a miraculous job at blaming everyone else and the ones that are truly successful are the ones who ask themselves these self-reflective questions and really just continuing Hammer hammering home what don't I know how to do what new skill do I need to develop what am I not doing enough of what

am I doing but I need to figure out how to do it better maybe the all of the things that I'm focused on aren't actually the things that move the needle for me what is the new and different thing I need to do and if you aren't able to do that for yourself you're going to stay stuck wherever you're stuck and speaking from experience I've been writing on the internet for over a decade at this point I can tell you that every single time I was stuck at a certain level I made the same mistake

I went through my little you know internal temper tantrum of it's everyone else's fault but mine I made up every excuse in the book and then eventually I figured out or I realized wait I I just have a skill deficit or wait I was focused on the wrong thing or wait I was I was measuring success incorrectly I'm I'm not doing what I need to do or that's actually not going to lead in the direction that I or originally thought that it would lead and every time I went through these self-reflective questions and every time

I just forced myself to take responsibility and go I have a skill deficit I need to learn how to do something new I need to learn how to do something different I need to figure out how to do what I'm doing better I need to figure out how to do what I'm doing more more often that is when I saw the next leap and the next leap and the next leap and so this is the you know the meta skill that you need to build as a writer is you need to stop blaming everyone else

and stop blaming the platform and stop blaming the industry and stop blaming the niche and stop blaming the customer and really pull the thumb and go what do I need to change what do I need to do because there's too many successful writers in the world and there's no reason that you can't be one of them and that has always been my mentality even in moments of frustration if if JK Rowling can make billions of dollars from Harry Potter there's no reason I can't make a 100 million there's just no reason James Patterson can make

$800 million writing Thrillers there's just no reason why I can't make a 100 million there's just no reason and that's the same mentality that you should have there is always a reason why you are stuck and it is your responsibility to figure out what it is and put in the hours and put in the time and put in the effort to acquire the new skill and move on to the next level and that is the only path forward so I hope the brutal truths helped you these were lessons that have taken me a really long

time to learn myself and they're also the things that once they clicked I noticed a tremendous amount of growth through each one you know these aren't just simple oh I hear it once and then I get it you know these are things that really take time to internalize and you have to allow your your thinking to change in order to start moving in a different direction so I hope these helped you and keep writing