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A Writer’s Success Begins From a Mindset of Abundance
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.” — Charles Dickens
In 1994, a writing teacher named Anne Lamott published a book called Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. It was not the kind of book that typically becomes a classic. It was practical, personal, and at times deliberately unglamorous — a record of all the ways writing is hard, all the self-doubt and false starts and crapy first drafts and sustained uncertainty that the published version of any book successfully conceals.
Lamott held nothing back. She shared her failures alongside her successes. She described the anxiety, the jealousy, the competitiveness, the sense of inadequacy that most writers feel and almost none will admit to publicly. She wrote about craft not as a set of rules handed down from mastery, but as a set of hard-won practices discovered through years of struggle — practices she was now offering to every struggling writer who came after her.
She gave away everything she knew.
Bird by Bird has sold millions of copies. It has been called one of the best books about writing ever written. It is assigned in university creative writing programs, recommended by writers at every stage of their career, and…
