Dear Writer: You Are the Problem
In my day job as the founder of a ghostwriting and book publishing company for entrepreneurs, I work with some of the most successful people in the world.
Many are multi-millionaires, almost all of whom are self made, and a good number have built up their businesses from nothing.
They tend to have expansive mentalities and work with us on their books so that they can build their authority.
But now and then someone slips through our screening process who isn’t a fit, and those are the people that provide me with the best front-row seat I can get about how much a person can be their own worst enemy.
For the past few months, we’ve had a client on our roster that I’ll call Sam Sabotage. He came to us because he released a book a few years ago that didn’t do anything for him. He complained about the company he’d worked with, saying that he believed if he invested with a higher caliber company on a relaunch, the book could actually transform his career and make him into an authority. He asked for a discount and we gave it to him.1
The first real red flag was when, a week after making his first payment, he wrote my right hand Kaitlin and said he wasn’t sure he wanted to proceed.
This was a new one. We’ve definitely had people verbally commit and then change their mind but we’d never had someone pay and then re-think it.
She told him that was fine, we could cancel the contract and refund the payment. But then he said he thought about it and did actually want to move forward.
The second red flag was when the cover design process went on and on and on and on, occupying so much of one of my Project Manager’s time that she began to neglect our biggest client of all. Every letter and color on the cover was discussed and analyzed and re-done until we ended up with something that wasn’t nearly as good as our initial designs.
At every stage after that—from edit to layout to gathering support for his Review Squad—we were met with resistance; we’re talking four or five follow-ups to get him to respond to a simple “Do you approve this layout?” email. Finally, when his delays were having a massive impact on our production schedule, preventing us from moving forward on other projects, his Project Manager reminded him that extensive delays can require a holding fee. His response to that email was to forward it to me and write, “Dear lord lol.”
Dear lord lol? For asking him to approve something?
When he stopped responding to the PM’s emails again and she again reminded him of the holding fee and asked if he wanted to move forward with the relaunch, he wrote, “LOL. Confirming my intent to proceed.”
Every response from him after that contained an LOL or a snarky comment about how he didn’t want to be “in breach” of his contract again.
My Project Manager felt terrible that she seemed to be upsetting him but I reminded her of what I’m telling you: this person is his own worst enemy. He hired us to help him with something that didn’t work out the first time and has acted at every stage like we are annoying the hell out of him.
There’s nothing we can do to change how he approaches life. I can guarantee that he will be unhappy with the results, no matter how great they are, despite the fact that almost all our clients are thrilled. This is a person who can’t help but be disappointed because he sabotages himself at every step.
While in this case my company is caught in the winds of his self-sabotage, most writers who sabotage themselves do it in the privacy of their own personal hell. And in my experience, they don’t do it by putting their books out and flopping (if they put their books out and have the right attitude, they can’t flop).
They do it by working on their book for years, rewriting and reworking until they’ve written themselves into inescapable holes. They do it by asking for advice and then rejecting it or reacting defensively to it. They do it by antagonizing the people trying to help them. They do it, in short, by never actually trying. And they do it by lying to themselves that they are trying, setting themselves up to blame the world (or their publisher) when it doesn’t work out.
I recognize them because I was them. Like recognizes like. The difference is that I was lucky enough to realize I was bringing about the exact results I didn’t want by approaching the world with an “I’ll-punch-you-before-you-can-punch-me” attitude.
Don’t be the old me. Witness your inner saboteur (because we all have one—some of us just recognize that monsters can turn out to be just trees). When you recognize him or her or them or they, ignore them and move on.
