Level Up Your Writing — Lessons That Cross Into Business and Recovery

I spent Sunday in the Level Up Your Writing course, and it surprised me how much of the material wasn’t about craft, structure, or technique. It was about psychology. Every one of the four speakers touched the same nerve from a different angle:

writers don’t get stuck because they lack talent — they get stuck because they hit psychological hurdles.

• Flow blockers
• Character fog
• Overwhelm
• Perfectionism

And the big one: disappearing down research rabbit holes and not resurfacing for days.
It struck me how parallel this is to business and recovery.

Success in both requires overcoming similar internal traps:
•     delaying risk
•     underestimating risk
•     procrastination disguised as “preparation”
•     losing sight of the mission
•     drifting into side quests that feel productive but aren’t

The Hollywood Operator: Thomas Dean Donnelly

All the speakers were strong, but the one who landed most with me was Thomas Dean Donnelly — author, screenwriter, and the mind behind the Superdraft process.

Thomas has written on projects that have grossed over a billion dollars worldwide. His credits include Sahara with Matthew McConaughey, Conan the Barbarian, and work across franchises like Voltron and Uncharted. He’s written for video games, taught at Stephens College and USC, and has lived inside the pressure cooker of Hollywood deadlines for decades.

What I liked about Thomas was his delivery.

He speaks like a man who has been in the trenches long enough to stop pretending writing is mystical. He’s part mentor, part operator, part Hollywood insider — and he names the friction honestly. No romance. No mythology. Just the real psychology of getting unstuck.

His Superdraft method is built for exactly that: movement over perfection, momentum over paralysis.

The Shared Psychology of Writing, Business, and Recovery

Across all four speakers, the message was consistent:
the biggest barriers are internal.

Writers stall for the same reasons people stall in business and recovery:

•     fear of getting it wrong
•     fear of being seen
•     fear of committing to a direction
•     fear of losing control
•     fear of not knowing enough

And the behaviours look identical:

•     over‑researching
•     over‑planning
•     over‑thinking
•     waiting for the perfect moment
•     chasing certainty instead of progress

It’s the same psychology, just wearing different clothes.

Where My Doctrine Fits

The good news for me is that the tools I’ve been building — Pursuit of Luck, Pursuit of Grace, Shake the Apple Tree — map cleanly onto the writing process.

They’re designed to:
•     break inertia
•     create movement
•     invite insight
•     avoid stagnation
•     keep the mission in view

And the practical tactics the speakers offered line up perfectly:
•     change your writing location
•     use music to shift state
•     meditate to clear the noise
•     get “bad words” on the page
•     drop a “come back later” placeholder instead of derailing yourself with research

It’s all movement.
It’s all friction reduction.
It’s all staying in the game long enough for clarity to arrive.

The Takeaway

Writing, business, and recovery all share the same truth:
you don’t need more talent — you need fewer psychological barriers.

And once you learn to move through those barriers, the work becomes lighter, faster, and more honest.

This course didn’t just go toward levelling up my writing. It confirmed that the doctrine I’ve been building has a wider application than I realised.

Movement creates clarity.
Clarity creates truth.
Truth creates momentum.
And momentum is everything.

Founder of the Hadspen Foundation, Jason is committed to building frameworks for spiritual recovery that are both repeatable and personal. His writing is guided by discernment, narrative cadence, and the belief that doctrine should support—not overshadow—the human story.