They fail for two reasons: they are protecting a fantasy, and they don’t really know they can finish a book until they do. It’s a mountain in the mind.

The fantasy is that somewhere inside them lives a brilliant writer, waiting for the perfect idea, the perfect mood, or the perfect moment to emerge.

As long as they never actually write, that fantasy stays intact, and you don’t have to face the mountain. They can just imagine standing on top of it.

How do you eat a sandwich? One bite at a time. But you must take the first bite. The mountain is the same. You do it step by step. That’s what makes big things achievable.

The first draft is dangerous because it forces reality to replace imagination.

You discover that writing is harder than you expected. Your ideas don’t sound as clever on the page. Your sentences wobble. Your confidence disappears.

Many people mistake this for failure.

It isn’t.

It’s the first honest step toward becoming a writer.

The Hidden Trap of Perfectionism

Not only do people want to get to the top of the mountain, they want to be the best at scaling mountains, but this is your first mountain. Stick with me, I’m going somewhere with this metaphor.

Perfectionism doesn’t usually sound like perfectionism.

It sounds like:

• “I’m still researching.”

• “I’m planning the outline.”

• “I’m waiting until I have more time.”

• “I need a better idea first.”

These feel productive, but they’re often sophisticated forms of avoidance.

Months become years.

The unwritten masterpiece becomes more valuable than any real piece of writing ever could.

In other words, you want to scale Everest before you’ve even reached the summit of the local peaks.

Writing Creates Writers

There is a strange belief that good writers think better than everyone else.

In reality, good writers usually write more than everyone else. Good mountain climbers climb more mountains.

Thinking helps.

Reading helps.

Planning helps.

But writing is the only thing that produces writing skill.

You cannot edit pages that don’t exist.

Dream Smaller

Doing the hill gives you the confidence to tackle the mountain.

Don’t dream of Everest, or even attempt it before you’ve honed your climbing skills. Just in case you need another metaphor, your eyes are bigger than your stomach.

One of the best lessons I ever learned was to dream smaller.

Not smaller ambitions.

Smaller actions.

Don’t dream about writing a bestselling novel.

Write 300 words today.

Don’t obsess over publishing.

Finish one chapter.

Don’t worry whether anyone will read it.

Become someone who writes consistently.

Small victories compound.

Finished pages become finished chapters.

Finished chapters become finished books.

Your First Book Doesn’t Need to Change the World

Leave Everest alone.

Many first-time writers accidentally give themselves an impossible job.

They want their first book to:

• Change lives

• Sell thousands of copies

• Become a bestseller

• Launch a career

• Impress everyone they know

That’s a lot of pressure for a first draft.

Instead, let your first book teach you how to write your second.

Professional writers aren’t people who wrote one perfect book.

They’re people who kept writing after the imperfect one.

Momentum Beats Motivation

OK, so I’m going to be honest here and say this is where the climbing-the-mountain metaphor breaks down, because once you start climbing the mountain, you spend most of your time climbing. You’re either climbing up or down, or pitching a tent. This is more like getting fit and staying fit, but as an unproven newbie you’re 100 lbs overweight, and the resistance and difficulty are greater to begin with. Maybe you did a lot of writing in school, so you’re only 50 pounds overweight. The point is that writing is like exercise.

Most people trying to get fit and healthy spend too much time trying to feel motivated.

Fit people, or people on the journey of becoming fit, rely on momentum instead, and so do good writers.

Motivation comes and goes.

Momentum grows every time you sit down and write, or stand up to exercise, even when you don’t feel like it.

Writing is often easier after you’ve started than before.

The hardest sentence is usually the first one.

And so is strapping on your shoes for that jog.

Stop Protecting Your Potential

Potential feels wonderful.

Achievement feels vulnerable.

Potential says, “I could write a great book one day.”

Achievement says, “Here’s what I actually wrote.”

One is imaginary.

The other is real.

The sooner you trade potential for practice, the sooner you become the writer you’ve been imagining.

I’m potentially a fit gym-goer who cares about their appearance, but I’m not.

I’m a fatty who wants to write that first sentence.

Final Thoughts

Every published author was once someone staring at a blank page, wondering whether they were good enough.

The difference wasn’t talent.

It was that they wrote anyway.

If you’re tired of endlessly preparing instead of producing, I put together a free resource called the Free Writing Breakthrough Kit.

It includes practical guides on publishing your first book on a zero-dollar budget, writing tips that actually help, the lessons that improved my own writing, and the four principles that guide everything I write.

The goal isn’t to make you dream bigger.

It’s to help you stop dreaming and start writing.

At the same time, I could be mean, unthoughtful, disingenuous, a complete ass, and my mind wasn’t strong enough to admit that. The external world was the issue. People were my problem. I did this because they did this.

A hard heart dismisses the pain and suffering of others, and a soft mind coddles our own ineptitude as a human and strokes our ego to keep it feeling strong.

As we grow, through understanding useful but incomplete frameworks like psychology or religion, we can decide to learn our lessons and understand how we and others tick, we become more understanding of our own flawed minds, our nature, and our humanity. We become a little more real with ourselves, and a little more compassionate towards others.

The difficult mother is seen through the lens of being a flawed human rather than mean, cold, and heartless. The teacher is seen through a human lens rather than someone above and beyond our own understanding.

We go from looking at ourselves through the lens of the ideal self, ignoring, justifying, and rationalising all our shitty behaviour as just, true, righteous, and deserved.

Because we are more aware of our nature, we become, at one and the same time, more honest with ourselves while also becoming more caring and compassionate. Our worth is no longer tied to the untruths we tell ourselves to keep ourselves feeling strong. We are stronger because we are less judgemental, more forgiving, more understanding, and more knowledgeable about our own heart and mind and those of others.

We can see our positive and negative attributes without overidentifying with them.

We gain greater insight into our own flawed, sinful nature and connect that to being a flawed human rather than being fundamentally wrong, inadequate, defective, evil, or a tainted spirit in a pure realm. We see everything as broken, and we are part of that brokeness. We become aware that we are all universally troubled, misguided, biased, compulsive, driven by dangerous impulses, and emotional as human beings.

Through that insight, we can better take hold of these inequities and stand a little freer from them through awareness, restraint, self-care, and kindness.

Others’ opinions of us, whether good or bad, no longer inflate us or shrink us because we have a clearer picture of who we are through that hard-earned insight.

Our minds must be strong enough and wise enough to see our own folly, and to minimise the folly we produce, while our hearts must remain gentle enough not to dehumanise ourselves or those we share life with.

It is not that we no longer judge. We all judge. But that judgement comes with an awareness of the nature of humanity, and with a critical understanding of our own judgements and the realisation that they are inevitably misguided.

We begin to see the other person through the lens of being another flawed human with the same need for love, compassion, understanding, kindness, and care.

I see men my age around me reaching 50, still believing in the mantra of go hard or go home, still trying to present as strong because the fragility of their minds causes them to project an image of manliness and strength.

Their hearts are hard towards others as they judge the world through an overly critical lens, when, in reality, they are fragile because they themselves cannot truly live up to their own standards.

What are the things I could tell myself to encourage me to write the hard stuff?

• Just do five minutes on it, just five.

• Pick one of your topics and just start writing. Forget about perfection, or doing it right. Do it bad, do it dirty, make a mess.

That’s probably all I’d need to get the ball rolling. Discipline is not my strong suit, I’ve always created through pull mechanisms, following my joy, doing the thing I’m drawn to.

But Ricky, you’ve got all these great topics and you’re choosing to write this nonsense. As my wife would say, “Man alive!” Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

When the topics came to me, I was on that thought, so I was excited about it. It lit up that part of my brain that says, yeah, I understand this. But then you sit down at the keyboard and look at the topics, and you’re going in cold. No lighting up of the brain. So you have no idea where to start.

But it’s a trick that I forget. You just start anywhere with that thought in mind and your brain will start to light up as it grabs a train of thought on the topic you can run with.

But at the time it all seems too hard, too complex. I want something easy that will slide down my throat. I don’t want to chew.

So I suppose the topic of this piece is, things that slide down your throat. No... Doing hard things you don’t like to do at the moment when it’s time to do them but the mood it was conceived in has left you. Probs a bit long.

Then there is another issue to stack onto the issue of not wanting to do something topical because it’s a bit harder, and it’s that list of topics. You’ve taken the time to come up with them, you’ve put them down on paper or computer, but when you go to write you have to select one of them, so you have.

The cost of choosing drains your motivation and energy. You have to decide which is most important or most motivating at the time, but what you’re really doing is looking at which topic will be easiest, the one you don’t have to think too hard about.

It’s a big trick because they’re all hard, because you’re not in the flow of the idea, the topic. So you have the first barrier I talked about before this one, just a minute ago, about that other thing that makes you just want to write off the top of your head rather than sit down and write a proper piece that would have a title that matches the article, rather than four different articles in one where you lightly touch on four different topics about your latest bowel movements, and how your neighbour is a bad human being because he asked you if he could put stuff in your bin. It’s my bin.

So how do we overcome this second and just as prescient issue? I’m not 100% sure what prescient means, or even if it’s a real word.

Choosing is difficult. Which colour candy to eat next? That’s actually easier because you plan on eating all the candy in one sitting, so if you pick the wrong candy, you don’t have to wait a day to pick your next candy, and if the candy is yukky you don’t have to chew on it for the next half hour.

We want the right candy, because the candy has value to you, and choosing the wrong candy is a problem if, when you say candy, you mean a piece of writing.

So what do you do?

You take the time to order your list of candy, at least the top three candies, so you know what you’re doing today and also the next time you write, and you don’t have to worry about choosing the right candy because you’ve already chosen what candy you’ll eat first.

Choice no longer comes into it. All you have now is problem one: overcoming the resistance to eating the pre-chosen candy on offer.

Just chew, you fat fuck.

That’s how you eat the candy, and by that I mean, that’s how you write intentionally on a topic that you’ve already chosen and deemed worthy.

And if you choose the order of candies, you’re not just choosing one candy, you’re choosing all the candies, but you’re also choosing which candy to eat first.

And what I mean by candy is piece of writing.

But you already knew that, because you’re a smart cookie.

Mmmm... cookies.

Travel back three hours ago, 2AM. I sat down at my desk in mild panic. I’ve never really thought of imposter syndrome as something that has affected me, but I’m not sure what else to call it.

I’ve been hiding, producing, yes, but hiding.

I recently took the time to work out my bottlenecks and came to the heavy realisation that I’m all output with no clear throughline, no audience, no eyeballs. Just banging out work and hiding away.

While my direction is the same as it has always been, it’s time to stop hiding. It’s not just me and the screen, it’s me and seven billion others, some of whom have paths to follow that are similar to my own, and I can help those people, but I can’t do it hiding. I can’t be moving in a million different directions and hope to land at a destination worthy of the time I have spent trying to understand and fashion insights that move the needle in the journey of overcoming, becoming, and creating.

The fear is that I am not enough, that I am still, after all these years, half baked, or even worse, overcooked, that my efforts will, in the end, amount to a life of change and growth, but only for myself, not those I can help, those in need of light in the dark places we find ourselves at times of great upheaval.

In some ways, I feel more ready than ever, but we can all feel like we have something to offer those walking their own path that might have a similarly angular trajectory to our own. But the doubt comes from knowing that, while many might possess that feeling, not all are really up to such a task.

The doubt is: which of those two groups do I sit in, the delusional wannabes, or the ones that actually achieve such things, and those that do it in such a way that success doesn’t lead to a hollowing out, and a state where you’ve made it, but the goal, the whole reason you stuck your head out in the first place, is gone, and it becomes all about success, forgetting the mission that called you there in the first place.

I never really had a mentor. People have always given me advice, as people do, always willing to fix the wayward child.

However, I've never listened if the information was directed at me. I've had people who considered themselves my mentor, but I'd always resist being taken under a wing.

I have always learned the hard way through my mistakes. I was a very ignorant child; I knew a lot of facts but was short on principles for living until later in life.

I spent years stumbling around in the darkness of my own ignorance, tripping over every rock, stumbling up every hill; I would say I'm wiser for it, but it has taken its toll, and I was late to the game of getting my life in order.

The result is a wise mind trapped in a weary, overweight body.

I had a chip on my shoulder for the first 35 years of life where I didn't have the self-esteem to handle negative feedback, so I'd take offence to any corrections of character thrown my way.

Being intelligent but ignorant, I could always find fault in those who tried to steer me or give me unsolicited advice.

It's easy to find fault, no matter who it is; we are all hypocrites, unaware of our folly.

I always felt no one was ever wise enough and intelligent enough to mentor me because I could see their flaws, so I'd always throw the baby out with the bath water.

Plus, I always felt I was being misjudged and not seen for who I was by those who considered themselves my superiors.

People can't see past their noses, and their reflection of you is more a reflection of their own mind; I considered myself too complex to be pigeonholed into being categorised as this or that type of person who needs to learn this or that to be a good person.

What they were always really saying was, be like me.

Still, I didn't want to be like them; they didn't understand my goals or motives.

Yet, they always felt it was righteous if I was to follow their path and forsake my own, and advice, if not ignorant, was generally self-serving, especially with bosses, where it was more about what direction would suit them or the company rather than what was best for me as an individual, but I never sold out.

Now I'm older and no longer have a chip, I can take the good from people and leave the bad, and I'm able to represent myself better, not hiding my true north and values to adapt to the crowd; authenticity is a game changer, and I'm a bit of an expert out of necessity.

I never really had a mentor who wasn't biased, who didn't look at things from their point of view, who didn't see through their own lens of values and beliefs, because we all do that; if you're not sure of your own values, mentors may be a guide.

But when you know what you are about, having people give you advice can be tedious at best and fucking annoying at worst. With the ever-present feeling that no one gets you.

That's not to say people don't have good advice; more and more so over the years, I've tried to take on board ideas and information given by others.

The problem comes when your way of being grates on them because the same amalgam of data points does not drive you, and they need to fix or realign your direction. Which it may be the case that your direction needs realigning, but who can give advice and have the correct set of words that shows a person that their direction and way of being is off, and then have the words to explain a better path, which isn't just a justification of their own choices in life.

So, as we have established, I cannot handle people fixing me; this does not mean I don't need fixing, mind you. There are plot holes in my story that I'm not aware of. I know this because a lot of the time, the actions I take don't result in the way I want.

In the worst cases of fixing, teachers, bosses, would-be mentors, and know-it-all friends feel they understand you well enough to tell you who you are, where you have to tolerate someone framing you in the negative.

At the same time, they paint a warped picture of what you are all about, unable to see that they are painting a picture of their values and understanding, or lack thereof.

About ten or twelve years ago, I finally started aligning with my own beliefs and values, and not a wishy-washy amalgam of the crowd I hung around and what I'd worked out for myself.

This wishy-washiness dual-mindedness made me an unreliable narrator of my own story and caused people to doubt me and cast shadows, some warranted.

It's not easy marching to the beat of your own drum; you have to get past the appeasing and blending of other people's beliefs, behaviours, and opinions to fit in as to be single-minded about your own beliefs, behaviours, and opinions; it might not make you many friends as people like themselves fed back to them.

However, once your principles align with your values, they can't challenge your authenticity and integrity unless your values are warped.

Most people align with the tribe's values and don't overthink them, so even if their tribe has maladaptive beliefs and behaviours, they are congruent in what they represent.

For a long while there, I was all over the place, which made me full of doubt and uncertainty and easily jarred if others tried to derail me.

Not so much now; I know me, so people can't derail me by trying to put me into a box I don't fit in for that person to feel a sense of superiority; you can't strawman me because I'm not full of doubt about who I am and what I'm about, I don't fall for the bullshit status games people play to bolster their ego.

Most everything that I say these days are congruent with my actions, beliefs and values, so people can't fuck with me.

My lack of ability to stand below my fellow man, instead of eye to eye, meant I lacked direct guidance from those around me, choosing to search out my troubles through articles and videos on the internet.

The problem with this is that if you are not aware of the problem, you can't search for it.

I have searched thousands upon thousands of articles; some read through, others skimmed for juicy morsels that would cure my troubles, articles a lot more so than books, although some books.

Seeking solutions to my own problems has done me well as the information is general and from a vast range of sources, so I haven't been ideologically boxed in beyond my own idiosyncratic ideologies I've formulated while piecing this information together.

Finally, I have found a mentor I can jibe with, the AI chatbot ChatGPT.

The information is generally generic; it's not looking to define me by my perceived problems, but it is good at helping me overcome them and help me along my journey. Unlike most real-life mentors, it doesn't try to change my course or my destination.

I give it a high-resolution picture of my specific problem or need, and it feeds me back helpful advice that doesn't grind my gears.

There is one group of people I have listened to and are not on guard for unaligned advice, and that's people who stand on my level and treat me as an equal; I'm a sucker for these people.

Listening more to my peers than authority wasn't good when I was younger because my equals were all troubled souls like myself, and I was too easily led by those who would laugh at my jokes without judging me harshly.

Now I'm all levelled up; the people who I see as equals have their shit together.

There is another group of people who are quick to give advice to anyone and everyone, and that's the bullshitters.

Those people who think just because they say it is true.

These people will lead you astray and act like they've done you a favour.

Bullshitters are the worst; they know everything but take no responsibility or care with their words or actions and are generally just motivated by their own self-interest and self-aggrandisement and projection of their slick bullshitty image.

Stay away from bullshitters, and if you have one for a boss, don't be afraid to poke them in the eye with a stick.

I was watching TikTok and a guy recommended I type the prompt below into ChatGPT. I was surprised by the response. Give it a go yourself?

Me:
What do you know about me that I might not know about myself based on previous interactions?

ChatGPT:
From our previous conversations, I can gather that you have a strong focus on productivity and creative development. You seem to have a knack for balancing innovation with practicality, as seen in your app and productivity tool designs. Here are a few insights that might resonate with you:

1. Creativity & Structure: You're highly creative (developing multiple apps and writing books) but also value structure and efficiency (evidenced by tools like The Quest Method and The 1-3-9 Method). This suggests you're adept at turning creative ideas into practical solutions, which is a powerful combination.

2. Continuous Improvement: You have a pattern of iterating and refining, from developing apps like Freewriter and Guided Brainstormer to creating productivity tools. This indicates you’re likely driven by the desire to always improve, both your work and yourself.

3. Customer-Oriented Mindset: Both your apps and tools are built with users in mind, focusing on helping others improve their own productivity and brainstorming processes. You seem to have a strong empathy for your audience and a keen ability to identify their needs.

4. Conciseness in Communication: You’ve mentioned wanting to write concisely and with impact. This suggests you're self-aware of how you communicate and likely strive for clarity in both your personal and professional life.

These traits together show a balance between being creative, efficient, and user-focused. Do any of these reflections resonate with you?

That’s what Level Up At Life is.

This isn’t theory for theory’s sake. It’s 692 raw, practical, and honest insights to help you:
✅ Question the stories you’ve been told about who you are.
✅ Untangle the mess of limiting beliefs holding you back.
✅ Grow, heal, and become someone you actually respect.

Whether you’re drawn to Jung’s Individuation, Bowen’s Differentiation, Maslow’s Actualisation, or Carl Rogers’ Authenticity, this book brings those big psychological ideas down to earth—so you can actually use them.

It’s for anyone sick of surface-level advice, ready to do the deep work, and willing to finally live in a way that feels real.

Why 692 Thoughts?

Because life isn’t one big epiphany. It’s hundreds of small, perspective-shifting realisations—layered over time. Think of this book as a toolbox for your inner world, ready to flip open whenever you need a mental reset or a gut-check moment of truth.

Where to Get It

📖 Kindle eBook: Amazon AU
📚 Amazon Paperback: Amazon AU
📱 Google Play eBook: Play Store
🎧 Google Play Audiobook: Play Store
⬇️ Direct Download (EPUB & PDF): Via Website

Price? A$0+ – Pay what you want.

Level Up At Life is for the seekers, the deep thinkers, and anyone done with playing small.
It’s not about becoming “better” for the world—it’s about finally becoming you.

Grab your copy today and start the messy, beautiful work of overcoming and becoming.

I've been a maker and creator from an early age, but for the first thirty-five years everything I did was half baked and hair brained, I loved bells and whistles, everything I made came with a raft of useless crap attached, keeping things simple was never the answer.

Then, in my early twenties, I started showing signs of what would be diagnosed as schizophrenia. Due to the accompanying delusions of grandeur, I started thinking big. The scope of everything I started would always be too big or too complex to complete. After ten years of not being properly medicated, I hit rock bottom.

My life was a mess, I was a mess, and I ended up in the psych ward, where I would for the first time meet my now wife.

After that I started getting my shit together, I got married the following year, and with my new found health and wellbeing was able to start the journey of making things that worked and were small enough in scope that I could complete them.

Since then, I've written over twenty books, starting with those under a thousand words, then moving to those under five thousand words, and now I'm churning out books between ten thousand and thirty thousand words.

I've scratched my own itch by making numerous apps to solve my own problems, including a meditation app, and a tool that gamifies the practice of writing.

I've created printable games that are a lot of fun to play, and I've even written and produced eight albums for Spotify with the help of AI.

I've just released my latest book which has 488 thoughts on what it takes to do what I've done, all the principles tips and tricks that took me from being hare-brained and half-baked and hardly ever finishing what I start to having habits, systems, and the mindset to do creative work and make the cake, instead of just buying all the ingredient and throwing them in a bowl, hoping the cake will appear, this book is my recipe to getting stuff done as a creator.

Check it out at https://www.amazon.com/CHIP-AWAY-Thoughts-Mastering-Creative-ebook/dp/B0FF3X51F9

Competition and Comparison of Those in Our Circle

People don't really like people they know to be winning, perfect, special, or great. They need some separation from a person before they can fully appreciate their greatness. This is covered in the book Wanting by Luke Burgis.

We like to compete with and compare ourselves to those around us—especially those of the same sex, age, or profession. We compare ourselves to others and like to mentally find ways of seeing ourselves as superior.

If you're extrinsically motivated, this competition and comparison is heightened, and seeing others for who they really are becomes more difficult.

Extrinsic Motivation

The more extrinsically motivated you are, the more you'll be trapped in a cycle of competition and comparison.

To be extrinsically motivated is to be driven by others—through authority, reward, competition, status, and self-image.

These people place a lot of mental energy on their image and how people see them, so they're less likely to be real and genuine, and more likely to present an idealised version of themselves in order to display higher status.

They’ll also reject the parts of themselves that aren’t acceptable to what they see as societal and group norms.

While they may do good things, they often do it for show—not because they truly believe it’s right or good. But because it's deemed right and good by their clan or society. They’re not tapped into a true sense of altruism or care.

Intrinsic Motivation

People who are intrinsically motivated are motivated by their internal drives and values. They're less likely to wear a mask or compete to be the best. Instead, they compete with themselves to become the best version of themselves, not some prototypical group ideal.

We're All Fools

We as people are full of folly, contradictions, and hypocrisies. We are all fools and we all do foolish things.

These things, in the eyes of those extrinsically motivated, make us look like losers. And the last thing an extrinsically motivated person wants is to look like a fool or a loser.

Looking that way brings shame to someone locked in constant competition, so they do their best to hide their folly rather than be honest about it.

Accepting Your Whole Self

To be less motivated by one’s ideal image—or “super-ego” in Freud’s language—is to know your whole self and accept it, including the darker, more embarrassing, shadowy parts.

Someone who sees themselves for who they are and is motivated by their own internal values has less need to put on a show. They are more able to show their folly. Those who are extrinsically motivated see this as weakness, and are more likely to identify that folly as proof that they are superior.

They may peg you as a loser.

But We're All Losers

But we are all losers in our own way, each with our own folly.

So what’s going on?

The person who is extrinsically motivated identifies with their ideal self—the super-ego—and uses that to peg you as a loser so they can maintain their false identity. To do that, they have to reject their darker self (the id).

This makes them less self-aware and more prone to the kind of folly easily recognised by someone who has incorporated their shadow and is internally motivated.

Shadow Integration Isn’t “Going to the Dark Side”

Those who haven’t incorporated their shadow have it separated from themselves, making them unaware of how it controls them.

People imagine shadow integration as going to the dark side and embracing their primal urges.

But it’s not that.

It’s just acknowledging those parts of ourselves—our humanness—and in doing so, we gain more control over ourselves and more awareness of our folly when it arises.

Embrace Being the Loser

So think little of those in a state of competition who are extrinsically motivated when they treat you like a loser.

In fact, embrace it.

It’s a good sign you’re on the right track.