#AuthorPost: How I Battle Writer’s Block by Howard Brown Author of Shinning Brightly

Book Genre: Memoir

Book Blurb

In Shining Brightly, Silicon Valley pioneer, cancer survivor and interfaith peacemaker Howard Brown shares keys to resilience for successful entrepreneurs, patient advocates and community leaders. He shows us how to reach out through our families, our communities and around the world to form truly supportive connections and friendships. From Howard’s career as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, to his conquering metastatic stage IV cancer twice, to his compassionate outreach as a peacemaker, to his love of sports—this ultimately is not one man’s story. Shining Brightly is a story shared by countless men and women—and may wind up changing your life as well. With each true story he tells in the pages, Howard invites readers to picture how they might join him in shining more light in our world.

Book Excerpt

When I landed in Silicon Valley in 1997, people told me: “The math is crazy here. Two plus two equals 200.” As a top salesman for more than a decade, I was used to the roller-coaster ride of chasing big deals. I’d had my share of setbacks as well as breathtaking commission checks when great deals finally were signed. But moving into Silicon Valley was climbing to a whole new altitude. At the same time, I also was evolving from strictly sales to becoming a serial entrepreneur, a life whose ups and downs are less like a roller coaster and more like scaling the Himalayas. Silicon Valley in the 1990s was as disorienting as Alice in Wonderland or The Matrix.

With each passing quarter of the year, old assumptions were turned head over heels. I had come of age when aspiring salespeople, executives and entrepreneurs could develop their skills along comfortable on ramps like NCR’s lavish training programs. There was no Sugar Camp with the implicit promise of a successful career. In Silicon Valley, it was learn fast, move fast and earn faster. Everything was new and speculative. There was no safety net. We were scrambling to find toe holds in startups operating out of borrowed garages, cramped cubicles, dusty attics—wherever we could pitch our tents. We were competing for seats at flimsy card tables where people were hunched over their plans to build the future. I was among thousands who were hooked on this adrenaline rush. I sweated toward my first big success in a claustrophobic basement startup that was overwhelmed with the odor of frying onions every day as the vents of the next-door Mexican restaurant turned on for the lunch and dinner rush.

When people first told me about Silicon Valley’s crazy math, I laughed at the exaggeration. When I landed in the scrambler myself, I realized they weren’t kidding. Within just a few years, Lisa and I were able to buy a beautiful, newly built home and increase our charitable giving significantly with our “found money.” I earned big money via large commissions and stock options originally worth pennies working around the clock to build and sell a revolutionary product in the music industry that wound up failing not too long after it went public. We were ahead of our time in that basement, so our concept quickly fizzled. But in Silicon Valley? We still took money home. And, as surprising as it may seem, most of the investors weren’t complaining. For the most part, they were clear-eyed venture capitalists pouring money into startups that sounded promising, hoping to strike gold on just a few of the many bets they were placing.

What about all that money? That’s the first myth about the heyday of Silicon Valley that I need to bust. Many of us weren’t in this for the money. Sure, we all hoped to strike it rich and make a better life for ourselves. Some of us made big money, often for an all-too-brief time. I know that I personally wanted to become a philanthropist and give back. But the money was not what drove us to work insane hours and to nearly abandon our families along the way. No, what drove us through each day was the heady dream of reinventing the way the world works—the way we all connect and move and interrelate—the way we do our work and the way we enjoy ourselves after work. We were the generation that firmly believed we could make the most fantastic tech dreams come true. And, if that sounds like the plot for a sci-fi movie, then so be it.

Author’s Post: Do you battle writer’s block? How do you work through that?

I’m a talented storyteller who, for many years as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, addressed large audiences at technology conferences about the power of online networks to build healthy communities.

I was very good at that. I know how to hold a crowd’s attention and how to interlace true stories with the crucial information I am trying to relay to my audience. The evidence of my success as a speaker is my legacy of several companies that I successfully helped to launch, as described in Shining Brightly.

For me, in-person storytelling is an instinctive gift.

But writing? That’s tough for me! Facing a blank page, I find my storytelling instincts stiffen.

So, over the years, I have developed two strategies for overcoming this “writer’s block.”

The first is physical activity. There’s an entire chapter in my new memoir Shining Brightly about how basketball has been my lifelong “happy place.”

Whether I was a boy trying to fit into the crowd at summer camp or I was an adult struggling to overcome stage IV cancer, my source of renewed energy, hope and creativity always was related to how regularly I could shoot hoops.

Today, basketball also has become a key to another pursuit that is central to my life: interfaith peacemaking. I have intentionally developed informal basketball teams that cross racial, ethnic and religious boundaries. In the process, I have built new bridges across our communities and have made countless friends.

When it comes time to work on writing, basketball clears my mind. If you want to learn more about how that works, just read Shining Brightly.

Then, if basketball is my “happy place,” I also have come to accept that writing will always be one of my “anxious places.” I am not afraid to admit this: I can stress over a writing deadline for days.

I certainly know the true stories I want to tell, but there’s an energy I summon when standing in front of a crowd that’s much like the energy on a basketball court. When I’m active with others, a different set of creative muscles move from my memories to the stories I am telling. With people around me, I can read faces and sense the responses as I’m talking and moving. The same is true on a basketball court.

That’s why my second superpower in overcoming writer’s block is collaboration.

Lots of writers I’ve met prefer to write alone. Many writers publicly describe themselves as introverts who draw more energy from inner reflection than they do from interaction with others.

I am the reverse: an extrovert who picks up energy when others are around me. And that realization led to three years of collaboration in writing my memoir.

I conducted more than 100 in-depth Zoom conversations with people who were involved in the true stories I was trying to capture for my memoir. I had more than 150 in-depth Zoom sessions with my main editor David Crumm.

Together, we talked though the stories I wanted to tell. Because Zoom allows sessions to be recorded, we could pull transcripts and then assemble stories from bits and piece of these interviews. We polished the stories in active cooperation with the people involved. Some people in the book were interviewed across multiple Zoom interviews.

I found that this process exercised those same extroverted instincts that I feel “click in” when I’m on stage or in a live podcast or even on the basketball court. Then, this process also was a wonderful way to double and triple check the details in stories I was retelling from earlier in my life. For example, the passage in my book about the challenges and lessons of summer camp, many years ago, was made far richer by the input from my camp counselors, who I managed to find and who were eager to participate.

So, do I face writer’s block? Sure. It’s one of my anxiety places.

How do I overcome it? I remember that my happy places are shoulder to shoulder with other people and I transfer a form of that energy into the collaborative way I write.

About Author

Howard Brown is an author, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, interfaith peacemaker, two-time stage IV cancer survivor and healthcare advocate. For more than three decades, Howard’s business innovations, leadership principles, mentoring and his resilience in beating cancer against long odds have made him a sought-after speaker and consultant for businesses, nonprofits, congregations, and community groups. In his business career, Howard was a pioneer in helping to launch a series of technology startups before he co-founded two social networks that were the first to connect religious communities around the world. He served his alma matter—Babson College, ranked by US News as the nation’s top college for entrepreneurship—as a trustee and president of Babson’s worldwide alumni network. His hard-earned wisdom about resilience after beating cancer twice has led him to become a nationally known patient advocate and “cancer whisperer” to many families. Visit Howard at ShiningBrightly.com to learn more about his ongoing work and contact him. Through that website, you also will find resources to help you shine brightly in your own corner of the world. Howard, his wife Lisa and daughter Emily currently reside in Michigan.

http://www.shiningbrightly.com

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