Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Here’s how to do a ToN really quickly…
First thing to do is make a list of all the goals you want to accomplish this year. For instance, one of my goals for 2021 was to get a literary agent.
Then ask yourself what would have to happen in order for all this to get done today? However outlandish the needs are, you simply write them down. For me, I determined that in order to get in an agent TODAY I would need to query every single agent in the world TODAY with an undeniably outstanding email.
Then…
See who you need on board to make it happen (if anyone). Who would you need on board to help you get this thing done in 24 hours? For me, I knew I could write the query letter myself, right then and there. I could look up how to format it and give my best explanation on why I think it would be in the agent’s best interest to represent me immediately. That I can do on my own in record time.
But putting together a list of all the agents would take forever. There, I needed help. So what do I do when I need help? I head straight to Upwork (where you hire freelancers). Since I knew exactly who I wanted to hire to help me do this, a chick named Saheli, I asked her how long it would take her to put together a list of ten thousand agents. Then I sent her my login for Writer’s Digest: a website with a directory of agents (among other things).
She said she could start right away and let me know how much time it was taking.
I also told her I needed the agents listed in a Google Sheet in a specific format because the other thing I had to do was email all these agents my query letter all at once in order to accomplish my goal of getting an agent in 24 hours. And in order to do that, I was going to use a mail merge.
I always play a numbers game. If I contact enough of the right kinds of people, I’ll get what I need. You can do the same thing.
New job? Email ten thousand employers.
How do you find them? Hire a VA (virtual assistant) to do that work for you. My VA (Saheli) is so much better at research than I am it’s not comparable.
Anyway, a mail merge is a crucial part of playing the numbers game cause it’s a way to contact a shitload of people all at once without an unsubscribe link at the bottom, making it appear to be a personal email. There are millions of mail merge software you can use. I use one links my Gmail with my Gsheets so that it’ll send one email to every person on that google sheet, provided it’s formatted correctly. Saheli knew the deal, so she got to work building the list and I got to work writing my query letter.
At the end of the day, she had done 100 agents and said it took her about eight hours to do those hundred. So I said okay, do a thousand. That means I would have to pay her for 80 hours of work to get this list of a thousand ready. Ten thousand is clearly out of my budget. I asked how quickly she could do it, and she said in a week. I said I need it faster. She said three days.
Deal.
Okay so now the one-year goal I was to get done in 24 hours got pushed back to 72 hours. That’s okay, better than a year.
Next thing you gotta do is execute. For me, that meant editing the query letter a million times, then queueing up the mail merge to go out to a thousand people.
So this all cost a bit of money, but you’ve traded money for time: the best trade you can make cause it’s more efficient and efficiency is how to do a fuckload of shit in a short period of time. By the way, sometimes you don’t even need anyone.
Like I had another goal (after I did this one) which was to write two books in three years. I started writing every morning and put those two books out in six months. I just decided it didn’t have to be perfect. It’s not my job to write a perfect book. I did that (basically) all on my own without any money, sans hiring the book cover designer and designing the interior for kindle and print.
Anyway, back to my getting an agent example…
Instead of doing it all on one day and paying for the more expensive software subscription (to send out 1,000 emails in a day I had to pay for the more premium subscription), I did it over a period of five days so I could test out different versions of the query on different days with different subject titles and so I could keep on the cheaper version of the mail merge software.
I emailed five versions of query letters to a thousand agents in five days.
I attempted to accomplish my one-year goal in under a week. Not bad. Now the results were out of my hands.
Here’s what happened:
I got about a hundred no’s (they still trickle in till this day), ten maybes, four requests for the full manuscript (one of them was Jordan Peterson’s agent at Creative Artist Agency named… hmm, what the fuck was her name? Molly! Mollie, rather. Mollie Glick. I was pumped about that. She said no after reading the script–at least her assistant did) but in the end they all eventually said no.
Everyone except for Jeff.
Jeff emailed me back and asked if I could get on a call with him. I accepted. We chatted on the phone and he told me he would LOVE to represent me. I couldn’t believe my ears. It was the greatest day of my life. I was finally a writer (a real one).
It didn’t work out.
He pitched my book all over town and nobody took him up on it and eventually he cast me aside and canceled our contract. But the goal had been accomplished in one week. I completed my 1-year goal in seven fuckin days. So, recap:
- Write down your one-year goal
- Mindshift: what would need to happen to accomplish it in ONE day?
- Write down the craziness required
- Just fucking do it. Start now.
- If you need to, hire someone to help you build a massive list of all the people you need to reach out to. Spending money to buy time is the best way to spend money.
And that’s how you do it. You just reframe the question.
But let’s put a happy ending on this story…
I began thinking… well if I can’t get an agent, can I be a writer?
Why do I even want an agent? To get a publisher! Well, why do I want a publisher? To sell more books! Is it possible to sell more books without a publisher, and thus without an agent? YES!
So I came up with a strategy to sell my own books, to run traffic to my Amazon book page and hope for the best, which I did and I can tell you about another time since marketing is complex, but the point is I went even FURTHER than my original one-year goal of getting an agent and went straight to selling thousands of books in one month. But it all started with ONE far-off goal that will take you years to get to, then asking yourself what would have to happen for that goal to come true TODAY.
My latest goal example?
Within five years I want to produce a movie.
What would have to happen in order for me to make a movie TODAY?
I would have to write a screenplay and raise the money. Everything after that is much easier. But… how does that get done today?
Good news is I already wrote the screenplay while Jeff was my agent because he told me not to put out any other books, so I thought, okay… I’ll just write a movie then. So, I got that.
It took me one month.
What’s the next thing that has to happen?
I need to email thousands of potential investors a KILLER investment docket. But before that I need to actually know how much money the movie would cost. So, next step is to hire a line producer to budget the screenplay. I did that last night–at least I put up the job post.
Once that’s done I’ll give good ol’Saheli a shout and ask her to help me compile a list of a thousand potential investors while I put together the investment docket. Maybe I’ll need an attorney for that. Doesn’t matter, I’ll do it all immediately.
I’ll start emailing millions of people!
What about you? What are you doing?
(btw, clearly the title of this post is misleading cause likely you can’t get your goal done in one day, but it gets it done WAY quicker than one year, five years, or shit, maybe it’s something you simply wanted to do before you die that you can do like… RIGHT AWAY! Without dying!)