Who taught you how to be a writer? Who taught you the discipline of tracking your ideas and characters, setting aside time to shape those rough starts into stories, reviewing and revising your drafts into something others might want to read, and then figuring out how to sell them? And where did you learn how to manage your mindset and energy, so that you could persist through rejections

.

As an author and coach, I’ve spent my career studying writing productivity. I’ve examined the practices that help and hinder our ability to write. I’ve read academic articles, how-to books, and more on the science of procrastination and productivity. But I think I’ve learned the most from reading about how other writers have done it.
.

This past year, I had the privilege of researching and writing a book about people whose writing changed the world. Mightier than the Swordprofiles leaders from a variety of disciplines who wrote poems, stories, laws, and protest documents that impacted their communities. I learned about their habits: how they made time to write, mastered their mindset, and more. Here are five lessons I learned from the people in the book: