Obligatory writing photo with coffee nearby by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

5 Reasons to Write on Medium Every Day — Besides Money and Fame

There’s lots of articles on Medium that describe how you can make $weet, $weet ca$h with your writing. But what about writers like me who aren’t making the big bucks (or any bucks at all, for that matter)?

Success leaves clues?

I enjoy and appreciate the articles from many of Medium’s most prominent writers where they describe how they made it to the top of the Medium publishing world. Most of them say very similar things, which suggests they’re on to something. Here’s a summary:

Publish often — daily is best
Write in your authentic voice about things you know
Write good headlines
Be persistent
Write good

The last one is tricky, because what is “good writing?” A theme that comes through in many of these articles is this: the more you write, the better you get. Then, after practicing your craft, you’ll learn how to “write good.”

This all makes sense. Again, because so many successful Medium writers are saying the same thing, it seems to indicate that there are some common elements to their success.

But you only hear about the ones who made it

Some of my favorite Medium writers even acknowledge that they wrote for a long, long time before they started to develop an audience. There are many examples of people who can tell you how to gain thousands of followers in a month, or whatever they accomplished.

It’s rarer, but more valuable, to hear about the people who wrote and wrote and wrote, with little or no positive feedback, but persisted and eventually built a following and even an income.

I’ve yet to find an article on Medium that says “I wrote every day for years and still have no followers. Here’s how to suck as much as I do.”

There’s another common element to these types of “How to Succeed as a Medium Writer” articles: the survivorship bias.

I’ve yet to find an article on Medium that says “I wrote every day for years and still have no followers. Here’s how to suck as much as I do.” Even if such an article exists, it probably isn’t going to get curated or clapped.

More likely, this poor, imagined writer will probably give up the effort after several years of frustration, so they won’t be around to write the article about how they wrote every day on Medium and didn’t get any reads, or claps, or income.

We read the stories about the people who succeeded, in part, because they succeeded.

There’s no easy recipe for success

How do we know this is true? Because if there were an easy, step-by-step process to become wildly successful, everyone would have done it by now.

It’s possible to follow all of the guidance in these “How to succeed” articles and still not make a dime.

Perhaps there’s another factor, which is invisible to the successful writers, but is the key to their success. Often, the things that we do easily, but are hard for others, are invisible to us, precisely because they’re so easy for us to do.

If there were an easy, step-by-step process to become wildly successful, everyone would have done it by now.

Maybe they were lucky — they picked a topic that lots of people are interested in.

Or maybe the topic picked them. Who knew the horrible things that happened to you years ago would lead to you becoming a compassionate, articulate, and authentic writer?

There’s no guarantee of success. But you can’t hit the shots you don’t take. You’ll never become a successful writer if you don’t write.

That’s why so many of the articles I truly appreciate focus on the process, not the outcome.

Free advice: you get what you pay for

You can’t control the outcome of your writing. Will it lead to a big publishing deal, or a big audience, or a whole lot of nothing? You don’t know until you try.

That’s easy advice to give, especially because I’m not a top Medium writer. I’m starting at square one here. Here’s what I have going for me right now:

I already write every day — I just don’t publish very often.
I like to write.
I want to be a better writer.

So, I’ve got the start of a good writing habit. Writing is easy for me. It’s the editing, and ultimately, pressing the “publish” button — those essential tasks are much harder for me to do.

But, I think I can become a better editor, and publish more frequently, the same way I got to be a better writer: do it every day. Practice, and focus on the process, not the results.

Why should I, an anonymous noob, publish every day on Medium?

Now I know what I want to do, how am I going to sustain this effort? I realized there are a lot of reasons to publish frequently on Medium, besides becoming a top writer and making a tidy fortune.

Here they are:

Become a better writer: The only way to become a better writer is to write — and also edit and publish. I’ve discovered that the process of editing and preparing an article for publishing improves my writing dramatically. I need to do all three steps to improve, not just churn out the words.
Learn something well: The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else. Writing an article about something you already know is actually a good way to discover weaknesses in your knowledge. Or, if you’re curious about a topic, you can research it and then write something about it. As you probably know, if you only read something in a book, you’ll most likely forget it. But if you instead write about what you read, and describe what you’ve learned in your own words, you’ll retain it much better and for much longer.
Expose myself to other people’s ideas: This is the advantage of publishing, instead of just writing for myself. People who read my work can clap, or give comments. That’s not going to happen if I keep my writing to myself. Also, getting feedback from other people increases the chance that I’ll 1) become a better writer, and 2) learn something (see the first two items for more on these benefits).
Expose myself to positive “Black Swans:” I’ve been reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan in this time of the coronavirus. The popular understanding of a Black Swan is a bad thing that happens that a) no one predicted, and b) has significant bad consequences. The Covid-19 pandemic is a classic negative Black Swan. Although some people knew a pandemic like this was bound to happen, no one knew exactly when it would occur. More importantly, most people (especially people who had an opportunity to prevent or mitigate such a disaster) acted like they thought that it wouldn’t happen at all, or at least when they would have to deal with it. Positive Black Swans, on the other hand, are unexpected good things that have unexpectedly good consequences. Now that I’m quarantined like everyone else, publishing my writing on the daily is a way to expose myself to a possible positive Black Swan — maybe one of my posts goes viral (maybe that’s not the best metaphor, but you know what I mean).
Create a body of published work: I’ve literally written millions of words over the last few years, but only published a tiny handful of them. That’s maybe a good thing. I like to think I’ve published the best words out of all the words I’ve written. But, without a doubt, I’m most proud of the articles I’ve published, especially compared to the piles of incomplete drafts that are still waiting for that dreaded edit.

That’s what’s motivating me to write and publish every day.