Golden Advice For The Ages
10 Judo Tips For Struggling Writers
The premium Medium edition
“If one hates to be thrown on the ground, one cannot expect to become a master of Judo.” — Jigaro Kano (Founder of Judo)
- Look in the mirror, and say to yourself: ‘I will never be boosted in a thousand years.’ Now, say it again. Repeat it three more times. Good. Now go write your next $1.76 masterpiece with your eyes wide open, knowing full well what to expect. This is master class judo.
- Love the fact you will never be boosted in a thousand years. Fall deeply in love with the idea of being completely ignored, unappreciated, and virtually unpaid for all of the years you spent practicing and cultivating your writing craft while working dead end jobs. When you can’t beat them, love them.
- Love that your college student debt is nearly six figures. Love the fact you did not grow up with a silver spoon in your mouth or a handout from wealthy, loving parents. I have no idea how you will find a way to love this brutal fact, but love it anyway.
- Line up a picture of a smiling Elon Musk next to a picture of Jesus being crucified, and say to yourself, ‘I’d much rather live on the income salary of Jesus.’ Repeat this out loud 10 times. Don’t blink. See no irony, hear no irony. Now close your browser and deal with the irate customer who has been impatiently waiting for you to finish your little prayer.
- Love wealth inequality. Love that the world is wholly arbitrary, irrational, unfair, and infuriatingly unjustifiable. Love the acute injustice of it. Bury your nose in the crushing melancholy of it all and say out loud, ‘This shitty world smells good.’
- Love the fact that Medium much prefers optimistic sales types who sell impossible dreams of financial success to more honest writers who write about reality and failure. You could argue this is just another variation on #1 and #2 and another way of telling you to love the fact you will never be boosted in a thousand years. Fortunately, I’m the judo teacher, and you are my pupil, so you will have to put up with me repeating myself. Now, write it down so I can reveal #7.
- Love the fact that your utility bill is double the monthly earnings of your most productive month on Medium. Do you see a trend here? Good. Love the trend.
- Love the fact that all of your best friends on Medium are satirists complaining about how little money they make while trying to write for a living. Remember #5: ‘This shitty world smells good.’
- Love the fact that you might die one day smack in the middle of writing another one of your $1.76 listicles about the inevitable failures of the life of a writer. You could cark it in the middle of #5, or maybe #8. Head on the keyboard. No one would ever know. All your Medium stories would still be on your wall in eternally forgotten, scorned, and ignored glory. Your stripe payments would still be coming, making a jingling noise of $2.37 passive income monthly. The world would continue to spin.
- Assuming #9 happens, love the fact you will die never knowing whether the Medium CEO was serious or not about his seductive hint that writers would start getting paid for external views. If nothing else, love the mystery and suspense of it all.
© Carlo Zeno 2023
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Well done on swallowing my ten bitter truths. What are your judo tips for writers? Asking Lucy Dan 蛋小姐 (she/her/她), Michael Burg, MD (Satire Sommelier), Captain Obvious, Patrick Eades, Douglas Lim, Ann James, Krystal, Victor Cardenas, and Annie Trevaskis. If you know any other gritty and humorous writers who are suckers for punishment, please tag them for this prompt. Cheers, and Ciao, for now.
Thank you to Toni the Talker and Hollie Petit, Ph.D. and the supportive team at Everything Fun. For more numerically satisfying, bullet-pointed advice, check out these two 👇