Develop Good Writing Habits with Little More Than an Inner Scorecard

How an unlikely documentary about Warren Buffet made me a better writer

Four days ago I watched an HBO documentary about Warren Buffet. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s REALLY good. If you’re not, no worries, everything you need to know about my experience is written here.

Here we’ve got one of the most-wealthy people on the planet, and regardless of how you feel about him, you can’t dispute his humble beginnings.

Whether it was a paper route, selling soda pop door-to-door, purchasing insurance conglomerates, or testifying before congress, Warren’s only competitor was himself — yesterday.

Warren never cared how other people felt about his decisions. His father taught him the importance of the inner-scorecard. And Warren Buffet, probably more than any person on earth, learned to use that inner-scorecard to grow an empire that now employs over 300,000 people.

When you want to improve something about yourself (in this case, our writing), all we’ve got to do is look inward.

Am I a better writer today than yesterday?

Is the work going in an upward direction?

Are book sales improving or shrinking?

Are my readers responding more-favorably, or less-so?

Is my manuscript closer to done?

Does my quality of work make be happier or less-so?

And don’t get this inner-scorecard confuse with self-loathing or impostor syndrome. As creatives we battle through hundreds of cognitive biases to get our books from letter-one to done.

This is a positive scorecard. A self-reflection, not self-flagellation.

If we are better than yesterday how do we fix that? If our writing sale slump, what can we do to boost it? The scorecard becomes a compass to help guide the direction of your work.

The opposite of the inner-scorecard are the Joneses

The comparisons are forever in our faces. Even amongst writers we’ve got sales numbers, book rankings, publicity, news stories, reviews, and celebrity endorsements.

Keeping up with the Joneses will crush your creativity. Flat.

When we worry so much about the market, or pleasing the masses, we water-down our work to a place where the writing is so bland is unrecognizable. No one wants to read wet toast.

It’s easy to get jealous of those who came before us.

But what’s better is to outdo them, or sell more books, versus working hard to be, at best, a great knock-off. The inner-scorecard helps solve this dilemma. We no longer care about Stephen King’s Florida mansion. We care about writing the next book.

Plus, we forget (or never consider) those who come before us could’ve had it much worse than us. Maybe they didn’t care what others thought of them, which is how they were able to write such great books. And their use of an inner-scorecard is what grew them to such writerly-moguls in the end.

Progress comes when we work to get better than ourselves yesterday, not better than Jerry-two-houses-down-with-the-shiny-leased-car.

Be more Omaha, less Kardashian

Like him or not, there’s much we writers can learn from Warren Buffet’s internal drive. The ‘Oracle of Omaha’ reads 5–8 hours a day. He’s not concerned with what other people think of him. He felt this way long-before he became wealthy.

He’s got integrity standards for his companies, and those who fail to meet his standards feel his wrath. His work is a reflection on himself. If his businesses don’t match his expectations, he works to uptick the inner-scorecard.

As writers, we’ve got no one to beat, but us — yesterday.

We look back. We check the card. How did we do yesterday? We tic the box and we return to the keyboard. How can we get 1% better today? How can we use the compound interest of cumulative effort?

What can grow our writing craft today to make tomorrow even more successful?

What does your inner-scorecard look like?

As writers we’re our worst critics. It’s been argued that writers who don’t self-criticize enough, probably aren’t good writers. But the inner-scorecard is different.

We look at our body of work from yesterday. We use a very small lens.

It’s easy to feel terrible about all the marks we’ve missed over the past month, year, or ten. But yesterday — yesterday we can do.

Tomorrow we’ll reflect on today and tic the box — or not.

Did we improve our writing by 1% Is the graph moving up and to the right? Do we get more positive feedback than negative?

This is not a call to avoid polarizing work — please don’t get me twisted. All great art divides the market. This is about a contest with yourself. No one will see the stats but you (unless you want to share them).

There’s nothing to write. The inner-scorecard is just that — inner.

We need your work to be better tomorrow. We want your second novel to be better than your first. We need your articles to go deeper next week than they did today — and for today’s to kick yesterday’s out the door.

Your scorecard is ready.

We’re waiting for you.