Harry Bullis, former chairman of the board of General Mills, often gave his salespeople the following advice:

“Forget about the sales you hope to make and concentrate on the service you want to render.”

“I tell our salespeople that if they would start each morning with the thought,”I want to help as many people as possible today,’ instead of ‘I want to make as many sales as possible today,’ they would find a more easy and open approach to their buyers and they would make more sales.

“The person who sets out to help people to a happier and easier way of life is exercising the highest type of salesmanship.”

What a great business philosophy! As soon as I read these comments, I began thinking about their connection to writing and how we might fruitfully apply them.

I know, I know! We’re not selling cereal! But we are aiming to convey our ideas and experience, and our own take on life and how it works. In a way, that’s a form of “selling,” isn’t it? We are hoping to inform, persuade, and enliven our readers through our writing. To my mind, writing is also a form of service—we are reaching out and sharing what we’ve learned, what we believe, and what we want our readers to understand about us and the world we all inhabit.

Think about it! Romances are all about modeling relationships, with all their joys and messiness. Fantasy takes us to new worlds, but it’s often grounded in our own and aims to illuminate it. Even science fiction, which seems so alien to the world we know, sheds light on it, doesn’t it?

All of this makes me think that focusing on service might be a helpful and even energizing approach for us as writers. It doesn’t have to be front and center, but just keeping it in the back of our minds, might free us from a host of woes.

Focusing on others—on serving—might free ourselves from getting in our own way as we write. Suddenly, we’re not in the spotlight laboring to be clever and artful and profound; we’re simply telling a story, whether we’re inventing it totally or writing nonfiction and marshaling facts in service of a goal.

When we focus on service to others, the effects on our writing can be transformative. It can make us bolder and freer, more willing to take risks to give our readers something we believe is of value.

So let’s give it a shot! Let’s see if focusing on being of service in one form or another gives our words wings as we all write on!

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