This is not unique to writers. Anyone in a creative field, or anyone trying to build a career for that matter, faces this hurdle. How do you get people to sit up and take notice? How do you draw attention to what you are building?

The comedian Steve Martin famously said, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” The simplicity of this statement is stunning. Those seven words contain the secret of getting noticed, building an audience, and all the other things writers and creatives want.

It’s worth asking ourselves whether we are committed enough to our writing craft to keep going until people notice us. Are we willing to put in the early mornings and late nights? Are we willing to keep rewriting and editing until it’s as good as we can possibly make it? Are we willing to try different things even though there is no guarantee it will work?

The answer to those kinds of questions will determine whether people will ignore us… or they will eventually sit up and take notice. It’s the willingness to do the work and to keep getting better—not necessarily your level in talent—that makes all the difference.

Question: Have you committed to becoming so good they can’t ignore you?

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You’ve heard the saying, “The devil is in the details.” This refers to the fact that when things go wrong, many times it is the little things that can derail a project or even a business or relationship.

Angels are in the details, too. This is especially true when it comes to creating a product like a book. Things like cover design, interior formatting, layout, margins, spelling and grammar, proper citation of sources, and so many other things make a big difference.

Here’s one example from the world of music. Listen to Paul McCartney’s bass lines in virtually any Beatles song. He constantly adds in tiny details that make it so much more than a standard bass line. There is musicianship and artistry, and you can hear it if you listen closely.

The lesson here is to go the extra mile for your readers. Why? Because you care about them. You care about your craft. You want to give it your best. John Updike said, “Creativity is merely a plus name for regular creativity. Any activity becomes creative when the doer cares about doing it right, or better.”

Don’t let the devil get in the details. Let the angels in and they will bring excellence and a quality to your work that makes it shine.

Daily Question: Are you willing to spend the extra time on details to help ensure you are creating something excellent, something you will be proud of?

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What is the difference between an expensive steakhouse and a fast-food burger place?

They both use the same ingredients for their main product: beef. Yet the experience can be vastly different. When you have dinner at a great steakhouse, it’s not just about the food. Although it may be wonderful, it’s also the experience that counts. The decor, table settings, and exceptional service make a huge difference in your dining experience.

On the other hand, the experience is totally different when you go through a cheap fast-food burger place. There is a good chance your burger will be sloppily put together and the person at the drive-through window will be halfway paying attention. And there is a decent chance something about your order will be wrong.

It’s not just about ingredients. It’s about taking the raw ingredients, preparing them the right way, then serving them to people with care and attention so they have a great experience.

The same thing is true for our words. You can write a first draft and then publish it, or you can take care to make sure it is edited. It’s the difference between a fast-food burger and a high-quality steak. Same ingredients, different presentation.

When you edit your writing, you are taking care to make sure your grammar, punctuation, spelling, and overall content are as good as you can make it. It doesn’t necessarily mean you need to hire an editor for everything you write, but it does mean we should take the baseline steps to ensure that whatever we publish is excellent.

I recommend, at the very least, re-reading your material a couple of times and running your writing through Grammarly, as well as doing a spell-check. Those are free and very simple ways to improve your writing.

We’re all in a hurry. We all have things to do. But if you call yourself a writer, you owe it to your readers to give them a great experience by making sure your writing is as excellent as it can be.

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One of the staples of the modern music world is the “Greatest Hits” album. When an artist has been around for a while, and they’ve had at least a few hits, it’s customary for their record company to release a new album that re-packages all those hit songs.

Have you ever thought about the work required to actually create enough songs for a Greatest Hits album? If you look at the albums of any popular artist, you’ll see that they generally only have a couple of truly “hit” songs from each one. Occasionally, you’ll have an artist with four or five massive songs from one album such as Richard Marx’s 1987 album “Repeat Offender,” which had at least four massive hits. Or you’ll have a true superstar like country legend Garth Brooks, who was on such a hot streak in the 1990s that almost every song was a huge hit. And let’s not forget the Beatles, who were so far above everyone else that almost everything they touched turned to gold.

But the exceptions prove the rule. Most of the time, a band or solo artist making traditional albums only have a couple of hit songs for every ten they put on an album. What’s more, they often don’t know which 20% of songs will be a hit as they’re making the record. They’re just doing the work.

The same success rate holds true in other industries. For example, the Major League Baseball batting average for 2019 was .252. That means players are “successful” less than 30% of the time! In fact, if a pro baseball player has a .300 average, they are considered excellent!

Have you ever written something and expected people to immediately love it? Maybe you wrote an article, book, or social media post and felt disappointed that it wasn’t a “hit.” But if you look to other industries such as music and baseball, you will have a “hit” less than three out of ten times.

Does this mean the other seven attempts are failures? Not at all.

Every time you step up to the plate, or go into that recording studio, or sit down to write, you’re putting in the work. You’re developing your craft. You’re getting better all the time.

You can’t control whether someone will love your work. There are so many factors at play that it’s nearly impossible to engineer a hit. But when you do the work on a daily basis, and you do it over the years and decades, you are almost guaranteed to have a collection of hits.

The legendary jazz singer Tony Bennett reiterated this idea in his book Life is a Gift when he talked about focusing on a long-term collection of hits rather than momentary success. He said, “The public might get the impression that singers only want number-one hits, but that has never been my premise. Instead of being number one, I only wanted to be one of the best. I just keep being myself, and I never compromise. I never strived for a hit song, some novelty tune that would hit it big but be forgotten in two weeks: I wanted a hit catalog. If I do something, I want it to be top quality.”

Don’t focus on being a one-hit wonder. Instead, focus on doing the daily creative work that will create not just one hit, but a whole collection of hits over the years and decades.

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