Motivational Leadership Speaker, Bestselling Oprah Author

Yesterday, I wrote about my response to the aspiring author who wanted my advice on how to write a book. It was quite simple. Start the book. Finish it.

Have the dream, do the work. This advice applies for anyone who aspires to do anything different, whether the dream is to write books or be an astronaut. What good is a dream if it stays locked in the imagination? That’s just fantasy. Forget your fear and just take the first tiny action step that turns an idea into reality. If you need to get more education, sign up for a class. If you aren’t sure what you want to do, go get career counseling. Just do something to get going.

Life change sometimes seems so huge and unwieldy that we are paralyzed to take the first step. Stop seeing it for all of its enormity and see it as a series of very workable, manageable steps that you can knock off, one at a time, until your dream is complete.

A book is a great example of what I am talking about. There is no book until you start it. So, start! Just write one page. Don’t get caught up on perfection, but write the page. The next day, write another. Do another page every day and, in about a year, you’ve got your book done. You don’t write a book in one sitting. You do it one step at a time — one page at a time, one word at a time.

The manager at the Goodyear where I go happened to see some of my books in my car when I went in for an oil change and he asked if I was an author. He told me he was working on a novel, then described the plot, which I thought was really good. Every time I go in there, I ask how it is going. He always has a huge progress report. He spends all of his lunch hours in the library. He forces himself to write at least three paragraphs on an index card, which he will type into his computer when he goes home at night. He’s got more than 500 pages written! And, he has done it three paragraphs at a time. See? Just take it a little bit at a time.

That’s the formula for making any change in your life. Don’t overwhelm yourself and be your own biggest naysayer. Just analyze what it will take to make your dream come to life, write down the steps and do them one at a time.

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