CWC 21: CC Chapman, Storyteller
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This episode of the Chats with Chip podcast features CC Chapman, an expert storyteller, passionate explorer, and committed humanitarian. CC currently serves as a Visiting Instructor of Business and Management at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
He is a prolific writer and frequent keynote speaker who authored Amazing Things Will Happen and co-authored Content Rules.
CC discussed his role at Wheaton, different types of entrepreneurship, and a new book that he plans to start writing next month.
Automated Transcript
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Hello and welcome to another episode of chats with chip podcast. I’m Chip Griffin and my guest today is CCChapman. Welcome to the show cc. Hey man. How’s it going? It’s going great. It’s a having a lot of fun these days, but uh, the show is about you, not me, so. Okay. So, so what are you up to? What’s, what’s, what’s going on in CCS world these days? Oh, well, my big thing is I’m currently a visiting instructor in the business and management department at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. And so I’m teaching currently I’m teaching business fundamentals and a marketing to a variety of students at a, you know, a traditional New England liberal arts college that has added the business major five years ago and it’s going gangbusters. So that’s, I mean that’s my main, my main thing and then trying to cope with having a senior in high school and a sophomore in college now and just, you know, trying to write when I find time trying to find, take photos when I had the time.
But my main thing is teaching right now. Wow. Time really flies that your kids have gotten that old stuff. Tell me about it. Yeah, yeah. I guess, you know, it’s better than the alternative. Right? Uh, so, uh, so you’re now corrupting the minds of the youth of America, the future leaders of America. You know, what are you seeing as you’re, as you’re teaching? Well, first of all, tell us a little bit more about what you’re teaching, but you know, that’s sort of how you’re finding those students to be and what that means for our own futures. Well, it’s really interesting because before I was, I was teaching at Bentley and I don’t want to, you know, pit school against school. I mean I’m a proud Bentley alumni myself, but you know, where that was a traditional business school, it’s a business school and now I’m teaching students who, especially my fundamentals of business, which is sort of the, it’s the one on one course for any student thinking about either majoring or minoring in business.
So it’s a lot of first years and sophomores who are like, ah, I was the, what is this business thing? So I get biology major majors and fine art majors and chemistry and creative writing and all this. And it’s a lot of fun because I’m kind of teaching all the basics. So like, you know, we spend a week talking about finance and a week about hr week about operations managers, a little bit of everything. And I always tell them, listen, if you go down this road, a business, you’re going to learn more stuff. Uh, you’re gonna, you’re gonna spend a whole semester taking finance and accounting and those sorts of things in marketing. But it’s a lot of fun. And because the final project, they have to actually make a business plan for a viable business. And one of the key things that Wheaton is social innovation.
So it has to have a social innovative, whether you wanna call it social good social entrepreneur ship, they’re kind of scared of social entrepreneurship sometimes because yeah, that freaks people out. They think, oh, it has to be a startup. Like, no, it doesn’t have to be a startup as you’re thinking about it. Um, so it’s fun to watch these kids come in who, you know, they’re just like, oh, I never really thought about business, I want to figure it out. But then on the flip side, you have these students, like last semester I had a biology major who his goal is to open his own dental practice down the road and he’s like, I want to have enough business knowledge, I want a minor so that I can do my own books or at least understand if I’m being ripped off by the person doing my books. And I’m like, that’s really, really smart. And so that’s, that’s what a lot of fun. And this is my first semester advising students too. So now I’m like talking to them about careers and talking about where they can go and what to do for next semester. So it’s, it’s, it’s the coolest thing ever. I love working with these students and they come from such diverse backgrounds and it’s a lot of. Yeah,
fun. Why? I think it’s fantastic that you’re, you’re dealing with folks who are likely going into sort of non business fields but need the business background. That dentist example is a fantastic one. It’s, you know, there are so many accidental business owners in this country, you know, folks who maybe are specialists in, in medicine or an architecture or whatever and they end up building their own business, but they may not have come with a background. So you’re now helping to provide that background, which I think is a, it’s really essential. I mean it’s, it’s one of the things that I do with one of my businesses is working with PR and marketing agency owners along those lines, but I was talking with someone just yesterday about how there are so many other folks in other fields who ended up running a business and just, you know, don’t really understand what a p and L is. They don’t know, you know, how to figure out how to deal with hr and operations and all these things that just necessarily come along anytime you have any business of, uh, of any size at all.
Yeah. And it’s, it’s fun because, you know, while while I’m new and I can’t speak on behalf of Wheaton, I know, you know, I sensed that there was some sort of, you know, being a liberal arts school, it’s been around for ever, you know, there’s a deep seated thing of, there’s some hesitation sometimes towards, well what’s business doing coming in here. But then I talked to the other day, one of the students, she’s a dance major and she was like, yeah, but I don’t understand how business is going to fit into my world. I’m like, it might not, but you might also decide you want to start, you know, teaching dance lessons and who’s going to do your books or how are you going to do the marketing or in. And we started talking about often she’s actually thinking of going down like the nonprofit route of using dance therapy or perhaps teaching in inner city. And I was just like, you’re going to need to know how you’re going to make money because being a starving artist is not a fun way to make a living. So I, I enjoy it. It’s fun.
What in today’s economy, so many people have, you know, what is it popular? Say now a side Hustler.
I hate that. I get it. I know I do. I’m all for, you know, you know, I think Chase Jarvis, she’s a photographer and he called it the hyphen life where one time where he’s talking about, you know, it’s no longer I am, I work at the desk, but ibm now it’s, I do this and I do that and do this and. But yeah, the side hustle thing. But yeah, there’s nothing wrong with having that going too. It doesn’t have to make a ton of money either. Sometimes as many as you would just for the love of it. But when you can make money doing it, it’s even better. Absolutely. And, and so I think more and more people are, are at least experimenting with some of these things. And so understanding the principles of business certainly help you there. And you know, frankly it helps you in your personal life as well.
If you, if you start thinking about how you manage a business, you know, it can help you manage your household better. Uh, as well obviously, you know, hopefully with a little bit less complexity than, than most businesses have, but nevertheless the same principles apply. Yeah. This summer it was funny. So I ran this, uh, I managed a program where we took seven students and I basically made a consulting team out of them. It’s a partnership between wheat and in mass challenge, which is a, a big incubator startup incubator here in Boston. And you know, I took seven students who were, you know, there was a creative writing major. There was computer science major, there was a math major, um, and basically it took like three, four weeks, taught them how to be a creative consulting agency and then dump them into mass challenge. And we went down there and they were working with real startup clients and it was fun to watch these students go, oh crap, this isn’t the classroom anymore.
And it was fun to watch them learn how to work together as a team. Are you talking about, you know, personal life, watching these students who had probably seen each other on campus bore but didn’t really know each other and watching them deal when you put them in a team environment and watching them get upset because somebody didn’t deliver, you know, a group project where you’re getting a grade is one thing, but when it’s a startup and they’re not getting their deliverable on time, that’s a whole. It was just the dynamics of watching the team and watching who like stepped up and who didn’t and me thinking long term, I was like, that person is going to be a great manager someday. That person, not so much. Watching the work ethic of dean of students is really fascinating. Why? You know, I think getting that hands on experience when you’re in school is just, it’s so valuable that it helps you explore your own interests and likes and dislikes that may help steer you better when you’re choosing a career.
But you know, it’s also helpful for future employers to see that and frankly it helps you when you first get up. For a long time. I’ve had a bias against hiring people right out of college, a big up. Mostly I run smaller businesses and my feeling is that I prefer to have a larger business with a little bit more of a cushion, a little bit more infrastructure to handle as I, as I like to humorously call it the potty training of new employees. Yeah, it’s tough, right? You don’t want to. If he can’t do that and it’s nothing against him, it’s not one school or the other students come out if they haven’t had real work experience. You’ve got to. You’re going to spend so much time. Just like you said, potty training is perfect. Right? Well, because I mean you have to be broken into the bad habits that you had in school.
You know, we, we all had them, you know, you know that, you know, you always want to try to procrastinate, you know, skip classes. You frankly write differently. Right. When you’re writing in school, and this is one of my beefs actually with academia, is that, you know, professors are having you write in an academic fashion and I would prefer that they take a little bit more of a business writing approach to, to turn papers. But you know, I suppose we probably could have a whole conversation about that. We’re working on that. We’re trying, we’re trying and that’s. And that was one of the things that was fun when I was at Bentley, you, one of the classes I taught was called managerial communications and at first I laughed. I’m like, students really need this. And then I had more. I thought about it. I’m like they do because everybody I talked to you like you would say, well students come out of school and they haven’t been taught the simple act of what is, what a BCC is in an email or how to communicate up the food chain.
You know, you can’t just walk into the CEO and talk to them like your best friend day one. And I, I remember teaching it and laughing and thinking do they need this? And then the more and more people I talked to, they were like, yes, yes, they do need it. Yeah. A few years ago I was, I was working with a recent college graduate on a blog post and he, he tried to put a footnote in it and I’m like, um, no, no, we’re not, we’re not, we’re not doing footnotes. We’re not doing any notes. No, no, no. It’s all, it’s all in line and we don’t need to properly cited either. We can just reference it. Well that’s like, there’s this interesting thing where there’s a senior seminar component of most of the majors at Wheaton and in the business there’s a senior seminar where it’s your senior capstone project, but it was up until this semester it was very much academia.
It was a, you know, 60 to 80 page research paper. And this semester they’re experimenting. I’m not part of this directly, but you know, experimenting, it’s a group project. It’s not necessarily a research, it’s, you know, it’s finding a trend or a business angle and it’s much more, you know. And it’s funny, it’s funny to watch old time academia with the changing times and the, I mean that’s a whole other discussion where, you know, but it’s, it’s really interesting because, you know, we’re also trying open oer, open educational resources, so free textbooks, open source textbooks basically, and that’s freaking out publishers. And so it’s, it’s, it’s fun. I love that we’re shaking stuff up because you know, me, I love doing. I’m not afraid to break something and see how it works. Absolutely. And, and you have tried a lot of different things over the course of your career.
You’ve done agency, now you’re doing academia. Um, we don’t, I think there’s been some other things in there. How would you compare academia to, you know, some of those, those other environments that you’ve been in? Well, maybe that’s a loaded question and Oh God, well, here’s what I, I’ll make sure not to send this to the dean so that, uh, you know, you’ve got to completely to the president of the school. I can already tell. I mean, he’s a good guy, but I just say here, here’s what I would say. I seem to pick, I hadn’t thought about this until you just asked it. I seem to pick industries where there is a very established way of doing things, whether we’re talking about podcasting and music or book publishing and old publishers, you know, where, you know, for a long time, you know, thinking about, you know, the old way of thinking was, well, we can’t change this because it’s way it’s always been done.
You know, all the music execs, what we can’t, mp3s, evil, evil, whoops. Um, you know, book publishers. Oh my God, the kindle then who’s going to want to do that? Oops. And now in academia, and this isn’t I, I mean I love wheat and it’s not just a weekend thing. This is everywhere where, you know, there’s conversations about, you know, well, what, what qualifies you to teach as a professor? Is it having a degree or is it having, you know, 20 years of experience in the field doing the work? Um, you know, the concept of tenure, the concept of. So it’s, it’s very similar where there’s a very set a way things have been done, beliefs and everything. And where there’s certain people who are thinking differently, but they’re so ingrained in the system that it’s hard to get out. Um, and I hadn’t really thought about that, but it’s very rare, you know, marketing, you know, the whole, the whole agency model.
I grew to hate it because, you know, the way that I was like, no, I want to help clients do better. Eventually want them to not need us anymore. Then that, you know, you don’t say that in a marketing agency that’s, you know, here’s the milk and for every dollar you can get. So I seem to pick things without meaning to pick them. Um, I just don’t always follow my heart and what opportunities come up. But I do seem to pick projects where the establishment is a, doesn’t realize that they need to change to survive. So what I mean other than, uh, other than sort of that instinct, you know, what, what drew you to education particularly? You know, what I love, I love teaching. I love, I’ve always, I just love helping is. Well, I guess that’s the way I’ve been thinking a lot about this.
I love to help other people. It’s why, you know, like the early days of podcasting or blogging or whatever, when people would ask questions, I would love to answer them and I love, I mean I love to be on a stage. It’s my favorite thing in the world to do, to speak. And the first thing I did online courses for awhile. I’ve done keynotes all over the world and stuff, but in the first semester he stepped in an actual classroom to like guest lecture for a friend. I was like, I really liked this. I liked the interaction back and forth and I truly love working with that age range. I’ve learned like I could never be a high school teacher. I would go nuts I think. But that college, like under I teach specifically Undergrad, I’ve never taught a master’s level, but Undergrad I really liked that age because kids are just.
And I still call them kids and I get in trouble all the time. Students, um, you know, they’re at an interesting age where they’re trying to figure things out and some of them are really lost and some of them are starting to figure out things, but no one’s told them, you know, you don’t. So many of these kids at this age, I’ve been told this is what you have to do. Step one, two, three, four. And I love the fact that people like you and I know that, that the old traditional corporate ladder of what you’re going to do in and out is, doesn’t exist anymore. And so I love ’em back and forth. You know, yesterday I had a student who was lost. We’re using these marketing simulations and she was really confused about one. So we just sat down for like a half hour and hashed it out.
It was funny because I realized I went, I did the simulation over the summer and I’m like, God, I haven’t looked at this in a little while. And it was funny. I was working through it and when she got the breakthrough at the end where it clicked for, that is priceless. The moment they’re like, Oh wow, I get it now. Thank you. Just very few things are that rewarding to me. And that’s what I love about it. First of all, I think any, anyone who is half your age, it’s okay to call them a kid. I look at it. So like if you, if you’re 80 anyone under 40 as a kid. So, so from my perspective, I think it’s fine to call for us to call college. Okay, that’s good.
Yeah, that’s my official ruling, uh, that I’m sure will
what are the same age as my kids is what I always warned, telling him like celery Bell, you’re the same age as my kids. So your kids to me, there you go.
Now you got into education, you know, at the college level. I forget. Do you have a graduate degree? Nope. So, so how was that? I mean, I, you know, I’ve talked to a lot of folks who are interested in, you know, the, the college teaching environment, but there are a lot of programs that require terminal degrees in a field or you know, at least, uh, you know, having a masters, you know, what, what has your experience been with that?
Yeah. So the only reason, and I’ve been told this from multiple places, the only reason I am not a full time full fledge professors because I don’t have a master’s degree. And I, I, I think that’s utter. I got to be careful. I gotta be, that’s utter bs. I’m trying to keep it pg for you. Um, you know, the fact that if I literally, literally so, and it’s one of those weird things where that’s one of those old fashioned ways of thinking was that you had to have a degree and I get it. I completely understand the importance of degrees. I am a for. I get that. But at the same time, you know, I look at people around me, you know, and it depends in a. yes, a big part of the reasons is accreditation. Some schools can’t get, depending on what your school accreditation is, you can’t get accredited.
Plus you’d like to say, you know, from a marketing perspective, you’d like to say 99, 100 percent of our professors are 99 percent of our professors held and advanced degree. That’s good for marketing. But at the same time when I go into a classroom and talk to students and they teach students and they say, wow, I love the fact that you bring real world experience into the classroom that I’m glad I haven’t had that before. That makes me stop and go, well, why is that the rule? Um, and it’s true everywhere and it’s one of those things were. But, and here’s the thing, almost every college out there, not all of them, but most of them will hire an adjunct to teach that may not have an advanced degree even though they always want it. And that’s the thing. I mean, I was told point blank, listen, you know, we will hire you and I’m teaching the same class.
The kids are spending the same amount of money to take my classes. They are the fulltime professor, um, but you can’t be a full time professor and that just, it’s it truly drive where I’m sitting here at this point where I want to teach so bad. I’m actually considering going to get my master’s degree just so I can teach full time, but that almost the, the, the New Hampshire kid in me, you know, just wants to throw a big middle finger at the system and be like, wait, I want to teach your kids. You want me to teach your kids, but I have to go spend money time and effort just to get this piece of paper in order to do the same thing I’m doing now. Really irks me. Yeah. I mean tell us what you really thinks. She’s a, she’s one of those things for years.
It is. So I would literally take a full time teaching job in a heartbeat and I’m doing it. I’m a full time quote unquote fulltime visiting instructor at the moment and I love it. And I’m teaching a full course load. I’m actually teaching more than some professors, but I’m being paid half the amount and the payment’s not the thing. It’s more of that stability for me at this point, like I can totally see the rest of my career, honestly. Great. Who knows. My career seems to change every five minutes, but I could, I could see myself in a classroom teaching for the rest of my career, my days and be very, very happy doing it. And that’s what I really, really. And everybody talks to me. He’s like, cc, you found your calling. Everybody I know is like, this is what you were meant to do and yet I can’t do it because of the old system at the moment. Right.
And academia always changes. It’s more slowly than, than many other features. We’ve certainly seen it in other places where, you know, your degree, your, uh, you know, sort of your certifications are not nearly as important as what your experiences and what your abilities are. And so, so other, other places in the private sector have been changing much more strictly. Hopefully it will come along to, to academia at, at, at some point, you know, I’m, I’m glad obviously that, you know, there are opportunities for folks like you who don’t have that graduate degree because, you know, I, I would echo what others have said, you know, this is, this is you were made for this. This is, thank you. In the years that I have known you, this is exactly who you are and what you’ve always seemed to enjoy doing. Whether it’s at a conference right now in the classroom.
So, you know, I, I think that, that, those are the kinds of things that students benefit from. So hopefully academia will come along. Obviously it is a challenge because as you, as you note the academic certification bodies, the rankings and all these things are, are biased towards the traditional professor path, uh, to the point where, you know, the number of adjuncts often penalizes people in some of these, these, uh, rankings. And I’ll tell you when you, when I went to school, some of my favorite professors, in fact most of my favorite professors were adjuncts because they were able to bring the real world into the classroom. And so, you know, it’s great to have a textbook. It’s, it’s great to sort of learn how it’s supposed to be. But then it’s, it’s fantastic to marry that up with, okay kids, this is how it really works.
I mean, I remember a class I had on a congress in college and the instructor worked full time for the congressional research service and so, so he would come in and he would, you know, we would go through sort of how a bill becomes a law. I mean obviously more sophisticated that it was college, not, not elementary school, but you know, how a bill becomes a law. And he said, okay, so this is what it says. Let me tell you a couple of examples of how it really works on some of these major pieces of legislation and, and so. So getting that was invaluable because it’s, it’s something that, you know, if you haven’t been part of the system or have haven’t had a full time quote unquote real world job, you just can’t translate in the same way.
Right. And I don’t want to end. It’s one of those things too where I don’t Papou the people, you know, getting your phd and being a scholar is an amazing thing to. And we need that too. I just without a doubt. But yeah, like you said, I mean we do needs to be some sort of balance, especially when you’re talking about I don’t want a separate degrees. We’re talking like a business degree or a government degree, you know, you want those people who’ve been in the trenches, you know, if you’ve, how do you teach writing if you’ve never written a book, you know, you know, same, same thing applies to marketing. If you’ve never run a marketing campaign, how are you going to teach that? So it’s fun. It’s fun. I’m just gonna I’m gonna. Keep fighting the system as long as I can.
So, you know, what are the things that you talked about, uh, earlier in this podcast was a, you know, how some, uh, some people are afraid of the concept of entrepreneurship because I think it means a startup and one of the things that I’ve been involved with over the years is an entrepreneurship program at the University of New Hampshire and one of the things they really try to preach there is that you can be an entrepreneur and so many different ways. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you can be an entrepreneur, not just with a startup but with an established business or just from within. You don’t even need to be at the top level, so you can be entrepreneurial with it. I mean, frankly you can be inside government.
Yeah. No, I think it’s the way, the way I explained it, when I teach entrepreneurship in my classes, it’s a mindset more than anything. It’s not, you know, it’s, it’s, it is a mindset. It’s how you approach things. The fact that you enjoy looking at a problem and going, Huh, let me figure out a solution for that. That’s what entrepreneurship means to me. And I, and I jokingly, when you were talking, I said entrepreneur, I always hated that term. You know, someone who’s inside a company who’s entrepreneurial thinking. Um, I know wheaton likes using the word changemakers. They like that word too, but it just one of those things where, yeah, I think if you enjoy problems, if you’re more comfortable with risk, I mean, I think entrepreneurs, not necessarily risk. They’re not riskier people, but they’re a little. They can deal with risk better than other people.
Um, yes you can start a business, you can start a company, but I think it’s more about how you approach problems, how you approach those situations where it’s like, oh my God, there’s nothing we can do. Of course there is the entrepreneur thinks course there’s something we can do and then can lead it. I also think successful entrepreneur entrepreneurs have a certain level of management or leadership built into them to do the fact that they can lead teams, find the right people, pull together the resources, whether it’s money or time, talent or treasure to pull them together. That’s how I. that’s what I see entrepreneurship really about and some of them go start companies and start startups and make millions of dollars, but you don’t have. That’s one. That’s one thing entrepreneurs can do
and you can even be an entrepreneur with a side hustle.
Amen to that. Yeah, we all, I think most people have side hustles these days
and we’re playing buzzword Bingo today. Boys and girls innovate innovative side hustle. There you go. Exactly. So, but so risk. I want to zero in on that for just a moment. And so I, you know, I think that, you know, when people hear risk, they do tend to think of it as almost risky behavior when in fact risk is simply willing to do something where you don’t know what the outcome right precisely will be. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to blow up and be horrendous, it just means that may not be successful and there’s, there’s a big difference. And if you think of risk in those terms, then I think more people would be willing to say, yes, I’m, I’m a risk taker.
Yeah. Because everyday. I mean, you know, as long as you like, I’m a big fan of being prepared for any situation. Whatever it is, you know, I know walking out the front door, it could be considered risky some days. It doesn’t mean I’m walking out the door, you know, and yes, it’s riskier if I was walking out the front door in Syria versus, you know, Massachusetts some days, uh, but it’s one of those things that, you know, I realize, yes, I’m going to start this, I’m going to do this. It might fall down. I mean, I’ve done that with many projects. You’re starting like November first I’m going to start writing a new book. Am I going to succeed at it? I don’t know. What’s the risk? Not a whole lot. I’m taking a lot of time away from other things. I might be doing, but the lower risk, it’s kind of light, but other times, you know, if I’m going out hiking or going camping or something, is there a risk I might get lost? Sure. Just I think risk gets, and I’m not a big fan of the whole fail fast often thing either. You know, don’t be risks. You don’t take stupid risks. Take calculated risks or at least risk that you look at and go, all right, here’s the worst thing that could happen. Here is the best thing that could happen. It’s going to fall somewhere in between. Hopefully that’s what risk means to me.
Yeah, I mean, I, when it comes to the fail fast, I tend to agree with you, but I, the one thing I would say is that if you haven’t failed at all, then you haven’t tried hard enough. And then uh, and so, you know, and I always tell people, particularly when I speak with these entrepreneurship classes and, and business groups, you know, you learn far more from failure than you do from success. Success is often an accident, right place, right time. Failure is sometimes that, but usually there’s at least some lesson you can pull out of that failure and apply to your future activities.
Right, and the one thing that I always stress to students, especially because I don’t think they have been told this enough, is a look at the way they consider successful, whatever that means to them and they look at them and they assume it happened overnight and the students have not been taught patience and hard work hard enough yet because you and I both know every overnight success has failures behind them and years of times they weren’t successful and even the most successful people have those nights where they’re like, oh, I’m not doing enough, or man, I’m not, am I worthy of doing this? And I don’t think that’s been told to enough students and most people cover up their failures either intentionally or just by accident. Right? And so social media world, right? It’s only the good stuff.
Right? Well, you know, most of us don’t realize, you know, how many of our friends and coworkers may have, you know, particular personal challenges or medical challenges, whatever, and then then they hear, okay, well, you know, you’ve experienced it, so then all of a sudden they come out of the woodwork and you know, it’s, uh, it’s a. and I think it’s the same thing from a business failure standpoint or just as a career farrier standpoint. It’s as people start talking about others will chime in and I think that’s incredibly valuable because we can’t just paper over failure because you do learn a lot from it. It, it turns us into the people that we are today. Sure does. I agree. So, so I guess as the, uh, we’re coming to the end of our time here and we could certainly go on probably for hours. You and I, but we’ve done it before, but, um, you know, you mentioned a book. Can you tease out the, uh, the subject of that book at all, are you.
No, no, not too much. So next month is national novel writing month, Nanowrimo. And I did it last year and I did it with a fiction book and it was funny. I did what’s called by the seat of your pants. I didn’t have a plot in three quarters the way through. I found my plot, but oh, I got to go back to. So this time when I’m actually trying to do is, it’s kind of a sequel to amazing things will happen. But what I’m trying to write is I’m trying to write it from a literary fiction standpoint, literary nonfiction standpoint. So basically using a story. You know, I, I, the, the, the one book everybody knows, it’s like the alchemist, which I am not reading the alchemist. I’m not bad. I could, I would, that’d be amazing. But you know, that’s where it’s trying to tell you something, but it’s, it’s fiction and that’s what I’m going to attempt to do.
I’m kind of my kind of taking all my advice that I’ve given students over the years and my kids and youth where I keep seeing to answering the same questions over and over and over, and I’m going to be. I’m trying to put it all into a story, so I’ve got it outlined and I’m not starting writing till November first. I’m going to play by the National Ronald rules. Uh, but that’s gonna be my goal is when I teach three days a week and then I’m going to hope to. I’m going to commit to write at least one full day a week, hopefully, maybe two days. We’ll see if that happens. Um, and hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have 50, 60,000 words, but we shall see what happens.
Well, it’ll be interesting to watch that and, and you know, maybe we’ll have you back on and we can talk about how the process went because I’ve sure I’ve never actually done this myself. I’ve always been intrigued to. I’m, I, you know, I’ve had on my bucket list to, to get around actually writing a book, but I, I tend to be scattered in so many different directions that I, I lose focus. Uh, and uh, so I, I read a lot of small pieces instead of one big one and uh, I need to get over that at some point in my career.
Yeah, you should definitely try. It was funny, it was a podcast last year at this time. I interviewed the creator of Nanowrimo and he was like, shut up, stop making excuses, just do it, do it. I’m like, ah. And I found it to be a really rewarding process actually to say, you know what? I’m going to spend this month focused on this and actually felt really good to be like, I’ve only got a month so I’m going to focus on and that, you know, that would stress some people, but for me it was like, all right, I like this focus and it actually worked even though I didn’t succeed in the end, but I was like, I will finish that someday because that’s my goal. I would love to write a novel someday.
All right, well for those people who are wanting to keep track of you and learn when, when your next book comes out or just learn more about you, where can they find you?
The easiest places. Cc Dash Chapman.com. And I’m, I’m pretty much every social network at CC underscore chapman. That’s fantastic. So cc, thanks for being my guest today. It’s been a fascinating conversation. Sorry we don’t have more time because we could go on forever and ever. But uh, I think it’s been a, a really, uh, a really productive conversation and hopefully the listeners think so as well. Oh, so too, man. Take care.