Jim Collins has written some of the most popular and influential business books of the last two decades. My personal favorite is Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck–Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, which he wrote with Morten Hansen. Here’s an excerpt from “Jim Collins on the Writing Process” which is on the Amazon page for that book.
“Yet all writers seem to agree on one point: writing well is desperately difficult, and it never gets easier. It’s like running: if you push your limits, you can become a faster runner, but you will always suffer. In nonfiction, writing is thinking; if I can’t make the words work, that means I don’t know yet what I think. Sometimes after toiling in a quagmire for dozens (or hundreds) of hours I throw the whole effort into the wastebasket and start with a blank page. When I sheepishly shared this wastebasket strategy with the great management writer Peter Drucker, he made me feel much better when he exclaimed, ‘Ah, that is immense progress!’”
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If you want even more writing advice from writers, check out Jon Winokur’s blog, “AdvicetoWriters.”