The 7 Differences Between Professionals and Amateurs

 

For most of my twenties, I jumped from one dream to the next. But through it all, I secretly wanted to be a writer. I watched friends bridge the gap between amateur and professional, and I wished I could be them.

Because I was envious of my friends’ writing success, I would try whatever it was they were doing that I thought made them successful. But the problem was I didn’t know what I was doing.

One writer I knew had a satire blog, so I tried writing satire. It didn’t work out; I just came off sounding mean. Another wrote about popular events from a faith-based perspective, so I tried that. That also failed. In fact, I made just about every possible rookie mistake.

What was I missing?

Turns out, I was still acting the amateur, thinking success as a writer was about finding the right idea or a big break. But the truth is that success in any field is more about commitment to a process than it is about finding one magic trick that will make it all come together.

Sure, there are ways to expedite the process, but it is still a process. And for me, I didn’t start to succeed as a writer until I began shifting my attention away from the results. When I began to mimic the process of professionals instead of just chasing their success, that’s when I started to see real results.

If you want to be a pro in your field, you’re going to have to break this terrible amateur habit of looking at what people have without paying attention to what they did to get it. Chasing the results without understanding the process will lead to short-lived success, if not outright failure.

A friend of mine, a hugely successful musician on his own terms, advises anyone who aspires to his success, “Don’t do what I do. Think like I think.”

How do you do this, exactly? Well, there are seven things I’ve discovered that professionals do that amateurs don’t.

1. Amateurs wait for clarity. Pros take action.

You have to know what you are before you can figure out what you want to do.

Self-awareness is an important part of life, and it’s especially important for creatives. Because so much of what you create is tied to who you are, you have to get clear on your identity. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about this.

In my case, I spent too long waiting for someone to call me a writer before I was willing to act like one. Now I’ve learned that clarity comes with action.We must perform our way into professionalism. We must first call ourselves what we want to become, and then get to the work of mastery.

Your confidence comes from know what you are, and your commitment to acting on that knowledge.

2. Amateurs want to arrive. Pros want to get better.

You have to become a student long before you get to be a master.

“We are all apprentices in a craft no one masters,” Hemingway once said. In words, you have to submit yourself to the teaching of those who have gone before you. You have to study their work and emulate their techniques until you begin to find a style of your own.

For the longest time, I just wanted to be recognized for my genius. It wasn’t until I started putting myself around teachers and around the teaching of true masters that I realized how little I knew and how much I still had to grow as a writer.

Hemingway did this, too — it wasn’t until he spent a few years at the feet of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson in Paris that he grew from a good writer into a masterful one.

If you don’t do this, you delude yourself into thinking you’re better than you really are, which is the fastest route to failure and anonymity.

3. Amateurs practice as much as they have to. Pros never stop.

You have to practice even, maybe especially, when it hurts.

It’s not enough to show up and work every day. You have to keep challenging yourself, keep pushing yourself beyond your limits. This is how we grow.

I used to write a few hours on a random Saturday every third week of the month. I never got better, and I couldn’t understand why. Then I started writing 500 words a day for as little as twenty to thirty minutes per day.Within a year, I had found my voice.

Frequency trumps quantity. It’s better to work a little toward mastering your craft every day than a lot once in a while. John Grisham knew this, too: he wrote his first novel in small pieces, during the only free hour he had before work every morning. By the time he was done, three years later, he’d created a new genre: the legal thriller.

What if he’d decided it was too painful to get up to write at 5:00am every day?What if he’d given into the overwhelming feeling of writing a novel on top of 70-hour work weeks? What if you decide the same?

4. Amateurs leap for their dreams. Pros build a bridge.

You have to build a bridge, not take a leap.

It’s not about the giant leaps of faith or big breaks that will make your career.It’s the daily practice.

I recently spoke with a best-selling author who has sold tens of millions of books. Do you know when his career started to really take off? It was when he wrote his 125th book at age 45.

You have to put the time in, but it’s more of a marathon than a sprint. I took a leap every time I started a new blog. I did this eight times, every time I had a new idea. But none of those blogs stuck until I decided to stick with one,which is the blog I write on today.

What’s the thing that really needs to “stick”? It’s not the idea. It’s the person.

5. Amateurs fear failure. Pros crave it.

You have to fail your way to success.

What professionals know that the rest of us don’t appreciate is that failure can teach you more than success ever will. Failure is feedback, and truly successful people use it to move forward in their careers.

I used to think my failures prohibited me from success, that every time I failed I had to go back to square one. Now I know that failure is the only way you get to success and that each my failures has taught me something I wouldn’t have been able to move forward without.

Thomas Edison, in his efforts to invent a working light bulb, once said, “I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” How many times are you willing to get it wrong?

6. Amateurs build a skill. Pros build a portfolio.

You must master more than one skill.

This doesn’t mean you have to be a jack of all trades, but you must become a master of some. For example, all the professional writers I know are good at more than one thing. One is a great publicist. Another is really smart at leadership. Another is a fantastic speaker.

For creative professionals, this doesn’t mean you have to work at your craft uninterrupted for eight hours a day — at least not for most professionals. It means you will spend your time getting your work out there through a variety of channels and mediums, or that you’ll work for part of the day and master something else with the rest of your time.

Either way, you must develop your own portfolio.

For me, my portfolio consists of writing, marketing, and business. But for a long time I just waited for people to think I was a good enough writer, expecting the money to follow that one skill. It doesn’t always work like that.

I recently spoke with a creative professional in New York who makes a living as both a fine artist and a photographer. He knows, as all professionals do, that all our skills complement each other and, frankly, relieve us from putting too much pressure on ourselves to be the world’s best at any one thing.

7. Amateurs want to be noticed. Pros want to be remembered.

You have to care about legacy more than ego.

The professionals I know whose work reaches a lot of people and truly matters, aren’t just thinking about the quick win — the big book deal, the next speaking gig, the new product launch. They’re thinking about the long game, about what they want to work on that might endure for the next 100 years.

The amateur is concerned with the big break, whereas the pro is more focused on delaying immediate gratification in exchange for long-term success.

When I began writing, all I cared about was my byline, whether or not people recognized me as successful, famous, or important. Now, I understand that on the other end of the computer screen or book, there is a person’s whose life I want to influence.

When people started asking me how I became a professional writer, how I chased a dream and got the rare opportunity to do it for a living, at first I didn’t know how to answer them. So I rattled off some cliches — “I just got a vision and went after it” — but over time, I realized that wasn’t true. Looking back, I realize it was this process, these seven habits, that really made my career.

And these are things that I continue to practice today. They’re disciplines that you keep doing that allow you to keep succeeding. And if you don’t do them, you’re really just rolling the dice.

So if you want to be a professional at any craft, especially writing, I’d highly encourage you to start applying these habits today.

Why There is No Such Thing as Time Management

 

How to produce 100x results 10x faster than anyone

“Most people have no clue what they are doing with their time but still complain that they don’t have enough.” -Grant Cardone

Most people feel they don’t have enough time.

They want to spend more time with their family.

They want to relax more.

They want to make more money.

They want to write a book.

They want to travel the world.

They want to open a side-business.

But ask them why they haven’t made any meaningful progress in years…

“I don’t have enough time,” they’ll lament, convincing themselves as much as you.

Then, they trudge back to their routines, never really feeling like they can live the life they’ve always wanted.

For most people, having a “work-life” balance is the ideal goal. To live a balanced life would finally enable them to enjoy both work and play.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

“When the goal is merely to ‘get through’ the day as quickly as possible, life will pass full of regrets. Time becomes the great taskmaster when it should be the liberator. Time is endured rather than enjoyed.” -Benjamin Hardy

Most People Don’t Understand How Time Works

Time is an intricately complex concept. Most people have extremely little understanding of how time actually works.

In efforts to make sense of it, society has taught simplified, primitive ideas about time that have become truth for the masses. Trite little sayings like “time flies” and “there are only 24 hours in a day” are used by everyone to justify mediocre results.

Most people don’t realize time is relative; an hour can feel like a week, and one person can do 1000x more in a day as someone else could do in a month.

In the words of author Grant Cardone:

“Most people complain about how little time they have without even understanding how time works.”

You have all the time in the world, if you know how to utilize the time you’re given.

The average person believes there are limits to how much you can accomplish in a workday or in a week.

It’s not surprising; many 9–5 job environments constantly reinforce this. Tasks and projects are given deadlines with the average worker’s pace in mind. The average worker subconsciously plans the project timeline so they’ll finish right on time. They call this “productivity.”

99% of people don’t realize your projects and tasks can be completed as fast as you want them to. And I’m not just talking about working more hours — I’m talking about upgrading your mindset so that one hour becomes an eternity to you.

There are no limits to time. You can complete as much work as you want — if you have the right mindset and environment.

“If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us.” -Marshall Goldsmith

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

How Highly Effective and Incredibly Successful People View Time

“How can you achieve your 10 year plan in the next 6 months?” -Peter Thiel, Billionaire

World-class performers don’t strive for “balance.” They strive for greatness, all the time, in every area.

“Balance” implies partial amounts of energy given to everything: 33% to family, 33% to work, 33% to relaxing, and the like.

But think about it. Are you really satisfied with giving your family only 33% of your energy? Or your work? Or your relaxation time?

This is not the path to becoming an extraordinary, world-class version of yourself.

The world’s most successful people give 100% of their time to whatever it is they are doing.

They are hyper-focused and relentlessly present with what’s directly in front of them: their work duties, their current set at the gym, their family across the table, or their daughter begging to go outside and play.

The most successful people in the world became so successful because they learned how to master time. They understand “balance” isn’t the goal — greatness is. They can do as much as they want.

They learned the most important truth about time there is: the rules are made up. They don’t apply to you. You can accomplish any goal imaginable in an extremely short length of time.

You just have to know how to use the time you’re given.

“Don’t seek time balance. Seek time abundance.” -Grant Cardone

How to Accomplish 3 Years of Work in 30 Days

“Wherever it is you want to go, there is a long and conventional path; and there are shorter, less conventional approaches.” -Benjamin Hardy

Once you cut out all the fluff, distractions, and procrastination, you can accomplish in one week what it would take others years to finish.

4-year colleges are a great example of this.

If you’re like me, you have a 4-year degree. But you probably only ever took less than a dozen classes in your desired field. The rest was fluff, like pre-requisites and “general education” that had nothing to do with your goal.

If you had 3 hours a week in class, for four 16-week semesters, that total comes to 192 hours of learning.

That’s 8 days.

To receive half of a “4-year” degree.

Obviously, there’s more to it than just class; homework, essays, and studying all take time. But for most students, 95% of school is fluff. Remove the forced summer/winter breaks, screwing around, and partying, and you could complete the requirements for a “4-year” degree in a few weeks.

Most people carry this misunderstood “4-year” principle for the rest of their lives.

They hear “15-year mortgage” and assume takes 15 years to pay for a house. They hear retirement is at 65, so they can’t fathom retiring any earlier. They get 2 weeks of vacation a year, so they think it take 5 years to earn that trip to Europe.

Most people don’t see the trap they’re in. They don’t realize they could complete 1000x the results, 100x faster than before.

NaNoWriMo is one of my favorite examples. If you’ve never heard of it, National Novel Writing Month is a challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. Every year, thousands of writers finish enormous books in 4 short weeks. Many of these writers have created six and seven-figure incomes from their NaNoWriMo projects.

I can use myself as an example about saving an incredible amount of time. When my wife and I moved to Korea, I knew absolutely no Korean (except “Annyeong”; thanks, Arrested Development).

But while my coworkers signed up for a 16-week Korean language class, I found a video where I learned to read the Korean alphabet in literally 5 minutes through a pneumonic memory strategy. Months into their Korean class, my coworkers could still hardly read the alphabet. I was reading menus at restaurants and navigating bus terminals for us.

If you remove all the breaks, fluff, preparation, and procrastination, you can accomplish your biggest goals in a few months — or even weeks.

Photo by Joe Gardner on Unsplash

Busyness and Stress Are the Enemy

“People are unhappy in large part because they are confused about what is valuable.” -William Irvine

Most people prize “being busy.” They proclaim it with pride, as if it’s a badge of honor.

But for most people, this “busyness” is nothing more than distraction and procrastination from what really matters. They just like feeling busy.

Said author Benjamin Hardy, “Most people lack the confidence to go big. They prefer the dopamine boost of getting lots done, even if they aren’t making any progress.”

For world-class performers, busyness and stress are the enemy. They’re a sign you’re off-track. It means you’ve been lazy and undisciplined, and have let too many unimportant tasks take you away from what really matters.

“Being busy is a form of mental laziness.” -Tim Ferriss

Bestselling author Jeff Goins once wrote, “The most successful people I know are not busy. They’re focused.” Extremely successful people don’t tolerate busywork or distraction. They have crystal clear vision on their goals, and do what they need to do to get there, every single day.

In his landmark book Deep Work, Cal Newport recounts some choice insights on how to develop insanely productive results through removing all distraction and entering flow states:

“Busyness and exhaustion should be your enemy. If you’re chronically stressed and up late working, you’re doing something wrong. Do less. But do what you do with complete, hard focus. Then when you’re done be done, and go enjoy the rest of your day.”

Deep work means absolutely not tolerating distractions and producing monumental quality and quantity in a very short time. This is how you can complete far more with focused efforts than unfocused efforts with far more time.

Do you want incredible productivity?

Then cultivate extreme focus with whatever you do.

If you don’t manage your time, it will manage you.

“When you have less time available for work, you have to make better choices about what to work on (and what not to).” -Tim Metz

In Conclusion

“If success is a main concern for you, then spend most of your time doing things that will create success.” -Grant Cardone

Most people will continue to live with self-imposed limits on their time.

Their beliefs are flawed. They will stay on the long, conventional path, wasting precious years when they could arrive at their destination in a few months of hyper-focused time.

There’s no such thing as “time balance.” Stop thinking in “either/or” and realize there is an abundance of time.

Be 100% focused on whatever you’re doing. Set distinct, definitive priorities — then never sway from them.

The best way to increase how much time you have is to get more done in the time you’re given. An “imbalance” will always happen when you don’t do enough with the time you’re given.

Striving for a “balanced” life means you’re still operating on a low level. Understand you can have everything you want, if you develop your ability to capitalize on every moment you’re given.

9 Questions to Ask When Everything Goes Wrong

Photo by Nihat from Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/beach-bench-dawn-lake-340705/

I guess it all started when the toddler took a blue marker to the chair.

His actions triggered a cascade of panic in my brain. It wasn’t just the chair that was a problem. Dishes cluttered the counter. Unpaid bills were splattered across the table. Unfolded clothes lay in a pile on THAT chair (you know the one).

As I bounced from thing to thing, my family gathered in the living room. They’d forgotten Colin’s chair coloring and were instead spending the time… you know… enjoying each other’s company or whatever.

My wife walked out of the room and grabbed my arm.

“Babe, what are you doing?”

“Kate, I can’t hang out now. There’s too much to be done.”

And then she said this:

“Name a single thing which can’t wait for tomorrow.”

A bomb detonated in the back of my mind.

The answer was nothing, of course. Nothing was urgent. Nothing was life or death. Nothing was falling apart.

Well, except me.

---

Here is an inconvenient side effect to being human: You are a slave to your biology.

Now, the good news: The actions resulting from your biological slavery are entirely up to you.

Stress creates tunnel vision. When we have tunnel vision, we revert to animal mode and react. I don’t like being an animal. So when the stress hits and the world crumbles, I try to slow down and ask these things.

---

What can I learn from this?

I was feeling pretty good about this question to begin with, but then I learned Oprah asks it whenever she fails, and so does mega motivational speaker Lisa Nichols.

So yeah, asking this question puts you in decent company. Here are Oprah’s own words:

“Here’s the key: Learn from every mistake, because every experience, particularly your mistakes, are there to teach you and force you into being more who you are.”

Mindsets like this are probably the reason you know who I’m talking about by first name only.

Who has it worse than me?

Barnes and Noble makes an evil wager with their customers around the holidays.

They wager that if you sign up for free magazines, you will be too overwhelmed, lazy, or indifferent of the $4 per month to cancel the subscription.

When they threw me in the roulette wheel. I lost. Now, a stack of Entertainment Weekly and Sports Illustrated sit unread on my dining room table.

On a whim, I picked up the other “free” gift: TIME Magazine. After flipping through a few pages randomly, a story sprung from the pages about a country I’d never heard of called Myanmar.

TIME painted a picture of Myanmar refugees fleeing to Bangledesh after watching “soldiers slaughtering civilians, raping women, torturing the elderly, and burning children to death. They arrived in a different country, barefoot, bruised, and barely alive.

And I sometimes get upset that more people didn’t sign up for my email list.

So yeah.

Can I fix this?

If yes, fix it.

Is this becoming a habit?

Performing an action over and over forms a layer of something called myelin in your brain.

Myelin is the coating which covers certain nerve fibers in your mind, making it easier for your mind and body to remember and repeat tasks you have done before.

Here’s the problem. Myelin doesn’t care what kind of actions you are taking. Its only job is ensuring the displacement of rarely used behaviors with efficient access to commonly used ones.

This is part of the reason smoking is so hard to quit, spending recklessly is tough to stop, and indulging past comfort is so much easier after Thanksgiving.

It’s also the reason you might have made the same mistake hundreds of time, with the same results.

Maybe it’s time to break the cycle.

Will I get another opportunity?

For this, I would like to refer to Sir Richard Branson, a sort of famous businessman.

“Business opportunities are like busses. There is always another one coming.”

What does this make possible?

Let me tell you something wonderful about the culture in America right now.

Failure is sexy.

We can’t wait to line up and tell you about the struggles from our hustle, the lost money, the bad decisions. I just Googled “lessons from failure” and came up with 323,000,000 results.*

Permission to fail has never been more prevalent. So long as you can move past the devastating effects of shame and doubt, losing almost always opens the door to at least one other opportunity.

Oh, and every hero you know, fiction or non, goes through a Black Moment in their story.

• Seth Godin struggled along in business for years before he became king of the Internet.
• Harry Potter lost his parents, godfather, and mentor, then defeated an evil wizard.
• Jim Rohn lost millions of dollars more than once, and became a tremendous speaker and motivator.

Failure is not fun in the moment. It hurts. But it makes more possible than waiting for success to find you somehow.

*I also just Googled “how to build my own lawnmower” and came up with 1,670,000 results, so we can take those big search numbers with at least one grain of salt.

Do I need to grieve?

Now, the consequences of making failure glamourous.

We have instilled in our people the sort of ram-your-head-into-a-wall-and-get-what-you-want-even-if-it-hurts-keep-pushing attitude. Men, I believe, are especially prone to this.

The only way to get over pain is more action, right?

Wrong.

Too often, when we cannot transform our pain into something positive, we transfer it to someone else. My old pastor said that. I think he’s onto something.

If nobody else gives you permission, I will: It is okay to be sad. It is okay to do nothing. You are allowed to wallow for a while. Cry and spit and curse and do whatever it takes.

Don’t gloss over grief when the situation demands it.

How important is this, actually?

Believe it or not, you can reach the same sort of perspective in your work without looking at the devastation in Myanmar or other atrocities in the world.

In the broad scheme of your impact, how big is the mistake you just made?

If you are in business and one mistake dominates your entire life, you need balance. You can find it immediately. When in doubt, serve. Serve your family, your friends, or a stranger.

“Okay, thanks for the sweet talk Todd, but my mistake actually IS huge.”

First, you’re probably wrong, but let’s pretend for a moment.

Maybe you did something which got you fired or shunned or jailed. When I think a mistake is end-all, be-all I remind myself of a framework laid out by business writer Suzy Welch. The 10/10/10 Rule.

• Is this going to matter in 10 minutes?
• Is this going to matter in 10 months?
• Is this going to matter in 10 years?

Answering any of those questions with “No,” and you’re good to go.

Get a yes on all three? Refer to the other questions here.

How would (insert role model here) handle this?

I heard a secret the other day about Stephen King.

He is a human being.

This means he is bound by every biological restraint I am, yet he marches on.

In the face of turmoil, I make believe I am someone else. How would Tony Robbins handle this argument with a business partner? How would my friend Ash Ali negotiate? How would Eric Thomas bounce back?

You can be anyone you want.

Starting now.

It’s So Easy To Find The Negative in Everything. But What’s The Point?

Tim DenningFollow

---

Last week, I posted a photo on LinkedIn that showed Keanu Reeves and his generosity.

The post went semi-viral, and people really loved it.

Well almost everyone. There were the 1% of haters.

The highlight of the post is that Keanu takes the train to a lot of places with normal people like you and I, and is not into fancy things. He’s donated most of his money to good causes including leukemia.

The haters wanted to tear Keanu down because how dare he own a house in LA (allegedly).

---

Being right is not the answer.

Whether Keanu does or doesn’t still own a house in LA doesn’t matter. Trying to always be right can force you to be negative. You end up adopting the mindset that everybody is wrong, and you’re smart — and the world is just one big lie.

This mindset can slowly create a self-destructive nature to the way you do life.

---

How do you know you’re 100% right?

There are no absolutes in life. Not everything is as black and white as you think. Maybe Keanu had a house and sold it. Maybe the house doesn’t belong to him. Maybe he shares the house with three Air Bnb travelers and so technically the mortgage is shared.

You just don’t know everything.

Google and Wikipedia are often wrong.

Focus on positivity instead of always being right.

Keanu Reeves on the train.

This negative way of thinking serves no one. Least of all you.

Negatively tearing people down all the time is affecting your own mindset which equals your success in the long term. It may seem like an innocent comment that you’ve written on someone’s post, but it shapes the way you think. You can’t help not be affected by trash talking good people like Keanu.

When you stand up and want to work on your goal, you end up being drained of energy from all the negativity you’ve put out.

“If you want to get mad, get mad at your goals and why you haven’t achieved them!”

---

Use your time better.

Don’t you have something else to do other than commenting on social media?Instead of fact-checking the entire world, you’re better off switching off social media and chipping away at your dream. If you love cars, spend your time there. If you love art, create some.

Focus on creating and not consuming.

---

Your network suffers too.

Your habit of being negative and wasting your time worrying about Keanu’s financial stats is repelling good people out of your life. People are watching you shoot your mouth off and are subconsciously thinking “Maybe I’ll leave this person alone. This doesn’t feel good.”

As humans, we want to feel good. Being positive feels good and you attract the right people. Slamming people on social media to make yourself feel good makes everyone else feel like garbage. If you wonder why you have no friends or your current friends suck, this is part of the reason.

The good news is you can change it. Focus on the positive.

---

Remember your EGO.

Finding the negative often occurs when your ego is out of control. Your need to be right is linked to the idea that maybe you think you’re really smart.

Your ego being too big contributes to your need tocorrect people and be negative.

“Your inflated ego and your negative mindset are in love with each other.Break them up — for good!”

---

***Final Thought***

This is not a post about social media and trolling. If you thought that then I’m sorry.

My aim here is to get you to remember why you do what you do. I want you to focus your time on being positive and fighting the raging tsunami that is negativity which we’re all having a daily sword fight with.

Positivity is power. Positivity is success. Publish positivity.