re410: How Writing Your “Worst Book Ever” Can Boost Creativity

[00:00:00] Hey, hey, little Thursday Thunder, what have you done in the past that has worked? [00:00:07] What have you done that was successful? What are you possibly no longer doing that was successful and you're not doing it anymore? Bradley Scharban, our little Thursday Thunder here, a little repossible podcast. And I am, I am a compulsive, addicted master creator. I have new ideas all the time. It's both a curse and a blessing. It's a curse because I have new ideas all the time, and I then leave, you know, yesterday's idea to die. And then it's fun because I have new ideas all the time, and so new ideas pop up and I can work on new ideas. Yay. Fun. So it is early 2025 as I record this Thursday Thunder. I do a weekly podcast, if you're not familiar, weekly podcast and a weekly video, which is what you're watching and listening to, called Thursday Thunder. Because I believe the ideas come with the lightning, maybe on Monday or Tuesday. And the good stuff, you let it sink in for a bit, and then comes the thunder today. What is that stuff that you've done that worked and maybe you're not doing anymore? And why not? And why aren't you doing it? What could you do? Or should you do it more? [00:01:29] So, as I said, Early 2025, and I've been asked, plus, I just need to do this. I need a more improved. I need to optimize a better speaker page, right? I am a speaker. I speak a lot. And yet I am. I wholeheartedly admit this. I am not very professional in my marketing, offering up what I do. You know, like typical sort of TEDx pitches are, what are your three main talks? Right? What are you. What do you talk about? And I just heard a great quote the other day. It said something like, the organizers don't hire the speaker, they hire the speech. I thought, oh, yeah, I know, I'm awesome guy, that's great. But what is my talk? So I can actually recommend this to everybody to. [00:02:19] Even if you're not speaking or writing or anything. Although I feel that we all should be speaking and writing, even if not publicly or professionally. It's a bit of another topic. But what is that thing that you have done really well that succeeded that you're maybe not really doing? So the reason I bring this up is because I need this speaker page and I need to narrow down my four gazillion ideas to three ideas, ideally, right? [00:02:46] And off the top of my head, it would be every single day, worst book ever. And now what Kind of comes back to books I've written, called the same titles. I don't have the now what book Done. That's the one I'm working on, but the one that is sort of closest to my heart, but also my gut is worst book ever. Worst book ever. [00:03:08] If you're not familiar with it, I ran a program called worst book ever called how to write your worst book ever and why you should. [00:03:19] And I'm just gonna pitch it to you. Here I am at minute three. I'm gonna pitch it to you and I'm gonna shoot for like two minutes and let you know. Let me know what you think. Okay. If you're a conference organizer or you host events or you're looking for some, you know, sort of in very general terms, motivational speaker, talk a lot about confidence, stuff like that. Here we go. Now I haven't rehearsed this with the exception of my audio to myself at 3:30 this morning. Now it is many hours later. [00:03:55] So here we go. Ready? It is for a conference. I have particular, a couple particular conferences I'm thinking about. Although I think this could be a good TED talk. [00:04:06] And where's Pips Pepper? [00:04:12] Do, do professional speakers have to pause to wait for their dog before they start their talk? [00:04:18] Come on, Pip. Hold on. [00:04:22] One thing I don't want him to get into. [00:04:26] Oh, if it's grass, that's okay. Here we go. Sorry for that delay there. [00:04:36] Okay. He's just eating grass. That's one thing he does well. Yeah, great. Nice little cough. Cough up the grass, everybody. Okay, here we go. [00:04:45] How to write your worst book ever and why you should. [00:04:52] Now, I ran a program for a while called how to write your best book ever. And what happened was that people were first of all hesitant to join because they were perfectionists and procrastinators, that is the planet. And what happened was that we, not that I wanted them to, but that most of them strove towards perfection, which meant that we, in a nutshell, never finished the product, the project or the product or the book or whatever. I then turned that around and I got into stuff like how to write your shortest book ever. How to write the easiest book ever, right? And in the end, what I really wanted to write was I wanted to get over yourselves. I wanted to be able to laugh at yourself, to laugh with yourself and at yourself by doing something kind of silly, kind of crazy, getting out of your own comfort zone. And this is going to sound like it's difficult, but being funny. Now, the reason I say it's difficult because a lot of people say, oh, I'm not funny. If you twist what you really want to do and sort of turn it around into what you really shouldn't do, it's probably kind of funny. So here's the program. The program also for the talk is I'm going to talk about the pros and cons, mostly the pros about why you should write this worst book ever. So for number one, because it's the worst. It is the extreme, right? It is the. The ultimate. It's the worst thing you've ever done. So by definition, everything you do afterwards is going to be. Is going to be better. [00:06:23] Also, it helps you get over your perfectionist self. It helps you get over your procrastinator self. Because we're going to do this fun thing, this silly thing that it's not serious. We're not going to publish it on in the public. It's for you or it's for the group. If we're doing this in a group setting. And the idea, the idea is for you to start something and finish something and have fun with it and laugh at yourself and with yourself. Who is this for? This is for people who are stuck. So whether you're stuck on your absolute first book or you're stuck on your 41st book, this will help you get unstuck and it will help you get unstuck by finishing something. I want you to complete something so that you have that sort of success and celebration feeling and you're ready to do more because you've done this one thing. You're like, gee, I could do that. I can do more. If you've written a whole bunch of books or completed a whole bunch of whatevers, then maybe you don't need that. However, this could help you break through somewhere where you have been stuck and it can break through into new ideas. [00:07:37] So I'm going to give you a quick couple of examples that. So that's roughly it. What we're really. If you're looking for one word that I'm. I'm talking about is breakthrough, if you want a second word, it's confidence. [00:07:50] I'm going to give you the confidence to finish this project, thus the confidence to finish future projects, right? That's the sort of businessy end of this. The fun Bradley end of this is we're going to have a laugh, we're going to have some fun. And then here's a bit of a side benefit that you might think is dorky, but it's actually quite true. And Quite powerful is that it's gonna sound really weird, but at writers conferences, almost the first question anybody ever asks is, oh, what are you working on? Right? And let's say you're hesitant. Let's say you're not so proud or not so sure about what you're working on. And you might say, oh, yeah, well, yeah, it's really a draft. And I don't really know. I'm not really sure. Oh, I don't really want to talk about it. What if you said, I'm working on, you know, the history of socks in the dryer, right? Some totally silly thing. And they're like, excuse me, what are you talking about? And then you. And so I love the question. They say, oh, well, is it any good? And you say, no, it's terrible. [00:08:52] And they say, excuse me again. So can you see how this conversation is going? And meanwhile, you're probably giggling or laughing and they're confused and you're going to explain it and you're doing worse ever. And ideally, you could show them somehow what you're working on and you have just broken the ice and you have a conversation starter. I mention this because many authors are introverts and scared of, you know, talking to people and not sure what they talk about. So this would be a funny and fun thing to talk about at a conference. So there you go. Hey, I'm running out of time. I see that. I didn't adhere to my two minutes necessarily. I do. There's a couple elements. Like right now I'm doing a video of this, whereas I'm a writer. That's one of the elements. I want you to work on this worst book ever outside of your normal comfort zones like writing or on a computer. Finally, I. I'm not gonna have time, but I'm gonna. I'll tease you with it. I have a. I have a little tactic called the one star and the three star and the five star review that you're gonna write for your own book. All right, I'm out of time. Ten minutes. That's my pitch for worst book ever. Let me know what you think. Bye for now.