20 Powerful Resources To Improve Your Writing

It seems everyone has a blog. This can be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. I choose to view blogging as an unlimited opportunity to grow and improve as a writer. Like almost everything else in life, improving your writing requires doing it a lot. The best thing you can do to improve as a writer is to write. Force yourself to sit down each day and put words on the page. Few outlets serve to create a space and opportunity to acquire necessary repetitions to accomplish the goal, like having a blog. 

From time to time, people mention that they enjoy writing and are thinking about starting a blog. That's always exciting. I love to see people jumping into the blogging space and starting to write more! The world needs more voices not fewer. 

There are few things more terrifying than sitting, and starring a white blank page, however. The cursor just blinks at you, as if taunting you. You can hear it laughing in the back of your mind, it's daring you to write something. Fear wells up inside, you start sweating and your mind goes blank. Everyone's been there. 

I know that feeling all too well, and want to help you conquer it. The goal isn't just to turn out pithy sentences and paragraphs, but to impact other people with the words you pen. I've compiled several resources to make your task easier, and more enjoyable. It is my hope that what follows helps you become the very best writer you can. 

Blogs to Help You Create Awesome Content:

1. Michael Hyatt

2. ProBlogger

3. Jerry Jenkins

4. Steven Pressfield

5. Jon Acuff

Despite all advances in technology, ours remains a world of the written word. Here are a few books that'll aide you in honing your skills and becoming the very best writer you can.

Books for Honing Your Skills:

1. On Writing Well by William Zinsser

2. Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. & E.B White

3. On Writing by Stephen King

4. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield 

Good Writing Worth Reading:

1. Walden by Henry David Thoreau

2. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

3. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

4. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

5. Secrets In The Dark by Frederick Buechner 

Writers may read and readers write, but what if your schedule doesn't allow tons of time for reading? Thanks to the proliferation of the iPhone and a million apps you've still got a shot to fill your mind with what it needs to produce great work. Here are audio options to get your brain jump started and churning out content like a pro.

Audio for While You're On The Go:

1. Home Row: A Podcast with Writers on Writing

2. ProBlogger Podcast: Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging

3. Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

4. A Way With Words

5. Audible - (great way to consume audio books)

Now that you're in the mood to make a move and kick start your blogging life, here is an extremely helpful blogging challenge to get you started. In this seven day challenge you'll find ideas for not just what to write about but the immensity of directions and approaches to the job.

7 Days to Getting Back Your Blogging Groove

5 Ways to Make More Happen in 2017

'Get stuff done.' That's the mantra of the daily grind that is America 2017. You drag yourself out of bed earlier than anyone else. You stay late at the office three or more nights a week. You bust your butt and stockpile vacation days like they're going out of style. You do all this and more under the guise of getting stuff done. It's as if you believe he who gets the most stuff done wins.

You do this ever year, yet reach December with unfinished projects and unreached goals. Amidst all the grinding discipline on display in your daily routine, things fell through the cracks and the goals that meant the most to you were neglected for more urgent things. We recently discussed setting goals and I'm sure you have tons of them for 2017. Today, I'd like to share with you five things that help me keep my priorities in line and give me more time to work on my goals. 

1. Write Things Down. 

You have a ton to keep up with. Most of the time you can remember it all without trying or thinking anything of it. When it comes to important things however, you write them down. Your wife doesn't send you to the store without a grocery list. You have a to do list and hopefully a don't do list at work. You use lists to run the important areas of your life. What could be more important than achieving your annual goals?

Write down your goals. Find a nice quiet spot, free from distractions, and spend some time writing out all you're committed to achieving this year. This one simple act makes you 42% more likely to reach your goals. Write them down and put them somewhere you'll see them every day. I have a friend who puts his in his closet. Every morning as he gets dressed for the day, he looks at his goals and every night before bed he does the same. It helps him ensure that he is taking concrete steps towards them each and every day. Do something similar. 

2. Rig The Game

People who want to get to Disney World don't simply get in the car and start driving, hoping the road will somehow get them there. Instead, they look at a map and chart their course. They do this in advance, rather than waiting until they arrive at the wrong destination or discover they've spent three days driving the wrong direction. If you want to get somewhere, guesswork is a poor strategy. Just like you planned a route for your last road trip, you need to decide how you are going to reach your goals.

Regardless of how strong your will power or how committed you are, there are going to be days where you don't feel like working on your goal. Imagine your goal is to run a marathon in 2017. Reaching that goal will require you to go run everyday. If each morning you have to convince yourself you really want to do this, you're in trouble. It's a huge obstacle to overcome. Over time, it will wear you down, and could derail your goals. The solution is to remove that daily decision by rigging the game in your favor.

"You will never change your life," John Maxwell said, "until you change something you do daily. The secret of success is found in your daily routine." Get over the hump and assure yourself success, by finding a way to make your goal a habit. It can be as simple as, "When I get up each morning, I sit down to write for thirty minutes." Building small daily habits like this, makes it as close to impossible to fail as you can get. It forces you to be consistent and consistent action over a period of time is the surest route I know to achieving them. 

3. Focus On The Right Things

"What is important," Dwight Eisenhower said, "is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important." Many of the tasks you spend time on each day don't get you any closer to reaching your goals. They come to you with sirens and horns blaring demanding your attention, but offer little in return. These urgent deadlines, and problems have to be dealt with but pull you away from other important things. Likewise interruptions and time wasting activities draw your attention away from productive endeavors. With emergencies, interruptions and problems coming at you left and right, how do you continue to move forward on your goals? The answer is found in a helpful decision matrix popularized by Steven Covey in his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.     

When tasks cross your path, run it through the matrix above. If it lands in quadrant four (not urgent, not important), do it later. If it belongs in quadrant three (not important, but urgent), delegate it to someone else. Obviously, the urgent and important tasks need to be attended to immediately, but don't forget to make time for quadrant 2 (important, but not urgent). The more time you can focus on this quadrant, the better off you'll be. It will allow you to deal with important things before they become urgent. 

4. Get Up Early

If you want to get a lot done while avoiding the time wasters, interruptions and all the things that keep you from working on your goals, get up earlier. This isn't a popular suggestion. Most people scoff at the thought, and that's exactly why you shouldn't. You don't want to settle for average, you want above average. Average people sleep in as late as possible, while the above average person gets up early and gets to work on their most important projects.

As you read about focusing on those tasks that belong in quadrant 2, you wondered where the time to do that is going to come from. The early morning hours are the perfect solution to that quandary. If you made the decision to rise one hour earlier, you could gain five extra hours of productive time per week. That's roughly six plus weeks over the course of a year, while still taking two weeks off for vacation. This is how you get your goals done.

5. Don't Throw In The Towel

No one ever achieved more by quitting. Your greatest weakness is listening to that voice in your head telling you to give up when things get hard. When you find yourself on the verge of giving up I want you to give it one more try. There is so much value in staying in the fight.   

3 Things Goals Should Have

You've read and heard a thousand different things about goal setting. You know how important it is, yet the majority of you don't have written goals. Far too many of you are playing around when it comes to your goals. You have a few nice ideas about where we want to go and what you want to do in life, but you haven't committed to them enough to write them down. The upside is you aren't discouraged when things don't pan out. We never put ourselves out there and as a result we think we're safe from the pain of failure. 

The down side is, that its an illusion. Not committing to something, is a type of failure all its own. "Its hard to fail," Roosevelt said, "but it is worse to have never tried to succeed." Its' a failure in courage and it leaves you even more defeated than they guy who dared to take on the mountain and failed. Your neither hero nor villain. Instead, you're irrelevant. No one will remember or pay attention to the things you never dare to try. Should you live your life begging for the attention and appreciation of others? No, but we weren't put here to stay on the sidelines either.

Daring to do great things is about more than deciding to give it a shot and see what happens. Achieving great things is all about setting the right type of goals and pursuing them with everything you've got. As you sit down and hammer out what you want out of 2017 ensure your goals include at least three aspects.  

1. Energizing

Whatever it is you want to get done in 2017, make sure you're focusing on things that fill you with energy. You want them to cause you to leap out of bed each day, ready to get after it. Many of the goals you fiddle around with each year don't inspire this type of want to and energy. No wonder 92% of Americans fail to achieve their new years resolution. That's a an utter shame. If you're going to have any shot at reaching your goals in 2017, you can't afford to waste your time on things that don't get you out of bed before the sun, or keep you up long after its set. If they don't make you want to get after it, you need to set some bigger goals. The first step to making big moves in 2017, is to set your sights on mega goals.  

2. Measurable

How do you know who wins the Super Bowl each February? That's not a trick question, you look at the scoreboard. The team with the most points, walks away with the Lombardi Trophy. If you're going to make big changes in 2017, you have to define exactly what a win is going to look like. Be as specific as you can. You've got to find a way to turn that energizing goal into something tangible, something that can be measured. It's hard to hit a target you can't see. The second step to a great 2017, is making your goals something you can measure. 

3. Time Bound

You don't have forever to get things done. Life doesn't work that way. It might make you feel good to set goals without a definite time table, but it doesn't help you achieve much. How many of your friends have goals to "some day" do this, or that? Ask yourself how likely it is they'll ever get them done. If your not introducing time to the discussion, your not serious about the goal. Give your goals deadlines that make you uncomfortable. This will motivate you to work harder and get it done. Step three is to ground your goals in time, while remembering that if you don't get there you can always reevaluate and set a new time table. 

What The Best Men I Know Say About Telling People Hard Things

Part of loving people well involves telling them the truth, especially when the truth hurts and is something they don't want to hear.

Want to know who your real friends are? Ask yourself who has confronted you on your stuff, asked you hard questions and told you what you don't want to hear. In fact, this one quality more than any other shows you who truly cares for and loves you.

Given that part of loving people well involves telling them the truth, especially when it hurts and is something they don't want to hear, each of us should strive to improve in doing so.

One of the best ways to improve at something is to talk with people who do it really well. And that's exactly what I've done. I sought the wisdom and advice of a few of the best men I know. Men who strike the right balance of sharing the truth in love.

In this process several things popped up over and over again, and that is what I want to share with you today. When something comes up over and over, perk up and listen, it just might change your life. 

Of all the advice and insight I received as I reached out and spoke with others, humility came up more than any other. In fact, it was the first thing mentioned each and every time.

And that is telling.   

We hear this word all the time, but how often do we contemplate how a humble attitude would impact our lives? If I'm honest with you, I fail the humility test WAY too often. I routinely want things to go my way and get caught up in my own thoughts, opinions and desires. That's why I've found the advice of others to be so helpful.

So what does it look like to walk into a conversation with a humble heart. 

A humble heart is self aware

It takes stock of how it feels, what its thinking and its attitude and posture. It recognizes that anger, frustration and a critical spirit do not produce the righteousness of God and takes steps to deal with its own junk before addressing anyone else's. What's going on inside your heart matters more than the truth you're trying to share. As Scott Kedersha says, "We don't want to be people who say the right thing or do the right thing without our heart guiding us. It's like the Pharisees being white-washed tombs; clean on the outside, messy on the inside." 

A humble heart is kind

It doesn't speak harshly or rudely, but with softness and gentleness of tone. It is calm and collected, not bouncing off the walls. You've heard it said, but it is worth repeating that, it's not what you say but how you say it. Tone matters. It can either be your friend or your greatest hurdle. Jon Flaming captures the difficulties tone can present as he shares, "I could speak God's truth to someone all day long, but if it is not done with humility and kindness that person will never hear it." A humble heart recognizes that sharp and cutting words and actions are counter productive and make it near impossible for the other person to hear the truth in their words. Instead a humble heart seeks to do everything it can to be kind.   

A humble heart is motivated by love

It is genuinely concerned about the other person's well being and good. A humble heart is not looking to score points, win an argument or point out where others are wrong just for sport. No, it hangs in there and has the hard conversation because they are motivated by love. It's cliche, but people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.  

How To Overcome The Dark Side Of Lists From John Piper

How do you approach your day? 

Do you live and die by your "to do" list, or do you take your day as it comes?  

Boy do I sometimes wish I could take life as it comes. I am just so not that type of person. I am more characterized my the former of the options above, list obsessed. I am so committed to the idea that I take lists and the like to the extreme at times.

While I believe strongly in the power of habits and that accomplishments are by and large a result of the habits we cultivate, there can be a dark side to it all.

What is the dark side of list keeping?

Allowing the list to be the priority and believing that just by keeping the list all your dreams will come true can be an easy trap to fall in. One I've fallen in many times myself.  

Lists are great tools and can help us achieve many good and right things, but shouldn't be our end all. They are incredibly limited in their power and can crush you if you're not careful. 

Thankfully John Piper offers some truly helpful and insightful help to us in this 10 minutes of audio. It is perhaps the single most important 10 minutes of preaching I've ever heard. It is an excerpt from a 2004 sermon entitled, What Is The Will of God and How Do We Know it?, in which he discusses among many things the only way we can live the Christian life. 

Here is one of my absolute favorite paragraphs found near the end of this talk. Tell me this doesn't encourage and challenge you at the same time. 

"I don’t buy and large live my life by lists. You try to live your life by lists, either the lists will be ridiculous in its shortness compared to the 10,000 things you do each day or it will be so long you would die. There is only one way to live the Christian life. Don’t be conformed, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. It is our only hope. Life is too spontaneous. You just can’t live it by lists. You can’t live it even by the 10 Commandments, because 95 percent of the time you are doing stuff without reflecting on whether it breaks any commandment. You are just doing stuff. My biggest challenge is: Piper, be new. Be new. Just get at the core of my being. If there is any stuff, junk, pride, left down there that is just causing the stuff to come out unbidden and unplanned, get at me down here, Lord. That is the only hope, isn’t it? So concluding exhortation. Immerse yourself in God’s Word. Saturate your mind with it. I don’t know another way."

This short clip of audio has had a far greater impact on my life than any other, and I pray that it is just as impactful for you today. We can't afford to live our lives clinging too closely to our lists. We must have transformed minds, it is our only hope.