Toxic Words and Ways of Thinking

You must.

You should.

You have to.

Those can be toxic words that fuel toxic ways of thinking. The road to success is filled with potholes, pitfalls, rejection, and sometimes total failures. Along the way, you’re likely to encounter all sorts of bossy, pushy, judgy messaging about what you need to be doing to achieve your goals. This is true no matter what you’re pursuing in life. In the writer’s world, we’re bombarded by advice about what makes for a successful book. And we can feel at the mercy of all those musts, shoulds, and have to’s—leaving us anxious, ill-confident, and encumbered by the weight of these BS expectations. These will sound familiar:

You must be popular with a strong social media platform and lots of followers.

You should start a podcast or at least go on as many as you can to promote your book.

You have to do x, y, and z prior to your publication date or your book will go bust. 

False.

False.

False.

You’d be surprised by what can propel a book into bestseller status. It’s often not what you anticipated or even planned for. Even in today’s hyper-viral world where the prevailing wisdom says you are required to be an established star on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram to succeed, you can find other ways to benefit from those programs through other people’s large following; I tackled that myth before in a previous post. I’ve worked with authors whose appearances on high-profile, syndicated television shows did little to move the needle on book sales. And I’ve watched books take off totally organically through grassroots campaigns that simply leveraged the author’s strengths, however small. One woman’s first book a few years ago, for example, became a hit when she encouraged her modest Facebook community to post images of the book in their hands once they purchased it, and slowly but surely momentum began to build and word-of-mouth spread. Soon enough, the law of inertia kept the momentum going.

More recently, another first-time author became an Amazon bestseller after he was spotted in a Pennsylvania Barnes & Noble trying to sell signed copies of a self-help business book that he’d published himself. A young mother in the store was moved by watching him sit alone at a tiny desk behind a pile of books. Shoppers swept past him ignoring his presence like he was a peddler on a street curb. Grabbing her smart phone, the woman recorded and posted a 10-second video to her TikTok account with the caption, “This sweet man is sitting at B&N with a stack of books he wrote and my heart is breaking every time someone passes him.” Her darling 4-year-old daughter then walked up to the man, asked about his book while sharing her own aspirations to be an author someday, and became one of his first enthusiastic book buyers. Within 24 hours, that video took off online to everyone’s surprise. The mother’s 8,000 followers surged to tens of thousands as tens of millions of people around the world viewed the video. The media picked up the story, too, it was so good. The best part? The title of Jonathan Stanley’s book:

Purposeful Performance: The Secret Mix of Connecting, Leading, and Succeeding. How fitting.

Nobody saw that coming. If you must, should, have to do something, it’s this: be purposeful in your pursuits, make connections where you can, and lead with faith in your success. Don’t be derailed or led astray by the musts and shoulds. Start wherever you are and use whatever you’ve got. What ultimately works for you will likely surprise, perhaps even stun, you.

Added challenge: I dare you to go a week without saying “you must,” “you should,” or “you have to” to anyone else.

Credit: Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash