7 Courageous Details You Have To Focus on Regardless of the Stats
If You Wrote 20 to 50 Articles on Medium, You Haven’t Been Born Yet.
Let me be 100% honest with you. If you just have 100 followers, it doesn’t mean I’m better than you, just because I have 800. The number of followers only translates to the time and dedication you give to this job.
Yet, we are in a competition for reading time, don’t think otherwise.
700,000 monthly readers are the ones who pay us at the end of each month with their time.
So, if we want our message to reach as many readers as possible, we have to understand very well all the corners of this platform. Otherwise, we will be run by other, more astute, consistent, and resourceful writers.
These are the seven details you have to focus on, regardless of the stats.
1. Consistency is what transforms average into excellency.
I write in a full-time mode since December 2020. In the last three months, I earned around $450 monthly, and some of my articles are starting to give actual money. I’ve reached the magic number of 150 pieces recently.
Sinem Günel says 150 is one of the most important milestones for your articles to start to produce the compounding effect.
Writing 150 articles makes you a consistent writer. Most beginners don’t stay so long. They think this platform is a quick ride to the gold medal, but it isn’t. It’s an ultra marathon.
The most consistent writers are the ones who win.
Consistency gives you time to improve. Consistency gives you opportunities to know your weaknesses. Consistency makes you better with words, grammar, and structure. Consistency elevates your tone and voice. Consistency gives you an authority in this platform.
To thrive as a writer, you have to write every day, simple as that.
2. Be patient. Some things take time.
Medium has a high level of dropouts. People start with high enthusiasm and high hopes, but they can’t wait.
I frequently see writers sharing their frustrations on Facebook. I don’t know what kind of mindset they have. But the time they spend selecting words to share their frustrations, I have another new idea to explore and start yet another article with the potential to add something new to the most curious readers.
New writers burn too much time on things that don’t matter and less time to make the difference.
If young writers want to succeed on Medium, they should already know that 20% of hard work makes 80% of good results. Yet, if most of them waste their time on things that don’t matter, it’s hard to go forward on this kind of journey.
Everything in life takes time. If you don’t have patience, you should practice it every day. Patience was what made Warren Buffett the wealthier person on the planet. Patience was what made Elon Musk succeed with Tesla. Patience was what made Jeff Bezos build his empire.
Things take time.
3. Vulnerability is the only bridge to build a connection.
Vulnerability is gold if you know how to use it right.
Sharing our fears can be painful, but it indeed is empowering. The more you write about sad things that happened in your life, the more you feel free. The more you write about painful things that happened in your life, the more you deeply understand what really changed in your mind and heart.
Sharing your vulnerabilities is like talking into your own mirror. Simultaneously, as we, writers, write about our weaknesses, the more we can solve problems that still wander in our back door.
The beauty of all this is that readers love deep honesty. They know what you’re writing about because they were there too. Each one the same way, but both writer and reader passed through difficult times.
The good news is that writers usually find the answer to their frailties by writing. The word is one influential weapon writers have to understand themselves. And in that unique journey, readers so often find the positive energy to surpass their own weaknesses too.
Don’t mistake pity for honesty. Sharing our vulnerabilities is showing an honest way to face the challenge of writing. If you don’t have anything to add when you’re feeling sorry for yourself, keep it inside. Sharing your pains on Medium without giving the readers something positive, it’s sharing an article full of empty content.
Exploring our vulnerabilities is very enriching, both for you and your readers.
4. Be stubborn about your goals and flexible about your methods.
Stubbornness used positively can compete with consistency.
Experienced writers know very well how to potentialize their human attributes. Being stubborn about a project means we don’t quit, we don’t procrastinate, and we don’t make easy excuses for our own errors.
Stubborn writers use errors to create new paths. Persistent writers don’t procrastinate because they will finish the job at all costs.
Experienced writers know human attributes and how to use them in their favor. For example, I’m very relaxed in my agenda. I always was a very calm person, and sometimes it made me procrastinate and didn’t finish many things I committed to myself ending. It was a weakness I had.
As I started my full-time writing project, I immediately bought a whiteboard to write every daily task I have to do. First thing in the morning, without overthinking, I sit down and finish all my daily tasks before I do anything else. It’s my way to fight procrastination. If I fail in that routine, I already know I’m not going to finish what I propose myself to do that day.
Knowing our weaknesses and being stubborn to create weapons to fight our own flaws is a good way for success.
5. Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing.
Developing digital thinking like a human attribute is crucial in an era of disrupting innovation.
Digital thinking is the kingdom of zeros and ones.
Artificial intelligence is all around us. Even writers like you and I use it without noticing. For example, to edit this article, I use Grammarly and Free Text to Speech, two applications that use artificial intelligence. Grammarly analyzes and fixes minor typos and structure. My last step before publishing an article is playing it in Free Text to Speech, where I hear a female voice reading my piece.
If you don’t understand what is happening, you are not developing your digital thinking.
Be aware of everything around you. Read techy articles, even if it’s something you don’t appreciate that much. It’s crucial because Medium is a digital platform. It’s important because you are writing on a digital device, and your readers are reading your content on a digital device too.
Creating a digital thinking mode is being ahead of your competition. Innovation and technology exist to save you time. Saving you time means saving you money.
Improving your digital thinking means having technology working for you.
6. It takes drive to move from potential to reality.
Nowadays, most people are routine; people don’t offer themselves new challenges.
Daniel H. Pink explains it very well in his book Drive, where he characterized as Motivation 2.0 the classic incentive structure for career advancement. This post-industrial revolution philosophy begins to be questioned with the technological innovation and new studies on motivation at work.
The reality is that the extrinsic motivational systems implemented like monetary incentives and surveillance by third parties in Motivation 2.0 are unnecessary as they don’t improve employees’ drive to productivity.
External incentives have a huge problem; they block creativity. In a recent article, Tom Kuegler made an extensive analysis of Medium changes in its money incentives by constantly changing the algorithm. Tom explained that writers have to start writing clickbait articles again, and that’s not good for the platform:
When writers start to climb to the top of the chain, they’ll start innovating in terms of creativity again instead of just innovating to get more attention.
They’ll make more money. They’ll feel less pressure to do ONLY what worked in the past. They’ll start investing in more creative writing since they now have the breathing room to do so.
They will truly become better writers.- Tom Kuegler
The drive is what pushes you forward, but today things are changing. Companies struggle to find incentive systems that make employees motivated.
That’s why so many people feel free to quit their jobs and start one of their own.
Understanding what genuine drive is makes us understand the intrinsic motivation. You don’t need a boss who gives you an extra $500 if you reach a specific goal when you know that you can earn $5,000 with the same amount of effort by working on your own.
Depending only on yourself, it’s a risky leap, but I assure you that you don’t die of boredom, you’re constantly being tested, and you get to the end of each month with more tools to succeed.
At a job from 9 to 5, you have another comfort, but your mind is constantly in pain due to all the pressures you suffer, the amount of days your boss is in a bad mood, and if the business is stagnant, your salary is also static for decades.
There is no perfect solution, but if you have the courage and understand the power that drives your motivation, you will become a happier person, with freedom, and preferably richer.
7. For things to change, you’ve got to change.
I hope things will change, someone used to say.
Unfortunately, things don’t change if you don’t change. And let me tell you another thing. Things will be in the next 10 years exactly the same as they were in the last 10 years. See, things don’t change; people do change.
At least, some people change; others don’t. But please, don’t be on the wrong side. It’s all about perspective.
If you genuinely think that things have to change for you to succeed, you are on the wrong side of the road.
After summer comes autumn. After winter comes spring. You can’t change that, do you? The tide comes in, but then it recedes again. It turns to light, and then it turns dark. These things don’t change.
For the last six thousand years, things didn’t change so much.
The only thing that can change is you.
Remember, you can’t change the seasons or the tides, but you can change yourself.
Final Thought
What an incredible journey it is to live your life on purpose.
You must constantly challenge yourself to improve, test your limits, and change your behavior for things to get better.
Writing is one more journey, and like seasons, it has its moments. You’ll have harsh winters but also gorgeous springs.
Use your intelligence and your curiosity to constantly learn new things, new tools, new beginnings. Use your stubbornness and your restlessness to find new paths.
Be patient because simple things, practice every day, always produce outstanding performances. Use the law of sowing and reaping. If you sow good, you reap good. If you sow bad, you reap bad. You don’t reap only what you sow. You always reap much more than what you sow.
These simple principles of life will help you focus on simple details that will make the difference.
Statistics will leave you behind; they will delay your personal growth, damaging your motivation.
Use your emotional intelligence to seek more knowledge. This same knowledge will catapult you to another level as a writer; it’s not a set of numbers on a spreadsheet that conveys your work’s reality.
Simplify the complicated.
Write every day and be humble in the new things you learn.
Success is a much simpler phenomenon than it seems.
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