Make Your Pen Mightier Than a Sword

Wield power through your writing

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” ― Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

2020 has been a wild year. The most significant of all the things which have happened so far, at least for me personally, has been an identity shift.

I became a paid author.

That is to say, in June, I made $0.01 off of my Medium stories. Like I said… my self-image can now honestly be that of “paid author”. Before that, I used to make $0.00 chasing reads and likes on Facebook.

I’m done with that now.

It may not seem like much, but there is an infinite distance between 0 and 1. The entire digital civilization we have created is based on the power of the divergence between 0 and 1.

You don’t simply start life off with the ability to discipline yourself and harness your actions. It is a daily struggle.

You don’t begin life able to influence others through some stroke of luck. You have to sharpen your skill constantly.

Writing does this like nothing else.

Truly, nothing has helped me to evolve faster, organize my thoughts and feelings, and keep myself on track more than writing has. I hope that all writers will find value in this article, but it is dedicated to everyone who has been thinking about writing but hasn’t yet put themselves out there on a regular basis and built a habit of it.

Most people settle for being silent 0’s, accepting the narratives they’ve been handed without realizing that we are all co-authoring reality together. No one has complete control, and neither is anyone completely powerless. No matter how beaten down you might feel, we each still have the power to craft our own story right up to the very last page of it. Below are my thoughts about that process.

Most people live an entire life on autopilot without ever learning to express who they are or evolve into who they could be.

Happily, the fact that you’re reading this means there’s good reason to believe you won’t let that be you.

You Change the Coding of Reality by Becoming a “1”.

Writing allows you to tap into your thoughts and deliberately create a positive feedback loop. Through a writing habit, you can change the coding of your life to change your reality itself.

This is not hyperbole. The most powerful forces in the world are now fictitious phenomena such as corporations, money, religions, languages, and nations. These entities don’t exist in the physical world, they are socially constructed ideas that we humans have created. A currency, for instance, has value only insofar as a large network of people believe it does. It seems flimsy at first blush, but that belief can literally move mountains, at least if there’s something valuable inside the mountain worth strip mining.

As an author, you are a part-owner in that process of constructing ideas.

Regardless of the true state of nature regarding things like gravity, or God, or viruses, the stories we tell about these complex things as a way to map reality and make it comprehensible are undeniably fictitious.

Just as a painter can only ever give an impression of the subject, so too are our minds only ever able to make projections of reality. No matter how beautiful, words are never the thing, thoughts are never the object. However accurate the painting of a ballerina might be, the painting is never the ballerina itself.

Similarly, our mind’s comprehension of truth is never truth itself. Perhaps this is why two seemingly mutually exclusive things can sometimes both be true.

But anyway, this inability to know the truth in absolute terms might seem like a limitation but it can actually an incredibly liberating realization. It hints at the power behind Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet’s recognition “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, which is really just a reformulation of Seneca’s observation “reason shows us there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”

A quick but important aside: don’t worry about if what you have to say is original or not.

You’ll notice that I pull in a lot of quotes from a lot of people. That’s no accident.

Concern yourself only with whether what you’re saying is true and useful. Don’t bother worrying about whether what you want to write about has already been said and done. It has. No matter what you want to say, rest assured, it has already been said, probably by someone more talented and influential than yourself.

And that’s completely okay. Just make peace with it.

In the same way that you wouldn’t try to create a new form of martial arts without first learning and practicing some branch of existing martial arts, similarly, you shouldn’t do this with ideas either.

Learn and master some of the ideas that already exist by expressing them and remastering them yourself. It is through merging the useful branches of knowledge, through producing synthesis, that we advance both individually and as a species.

Transform Yourself to Transform the World

Writing is one of the ways you can take control over your own thinking (suffering is another). You can literally rewire what “bad” and “good” mean for your mind, as guys like Jocko Willink and David Goggins often discuss.

Returning to my formulation in the previous section, through writing you can go from being a passive “0” that has “good” or “bad” determined by others, to a self-directing “1".

If you’re new to Medium or still struggling to get yourself to take those initial steps, then we probably think a bit differently from one another by this point because I’ve been writing for months and the doubts and fears are in the rearview now.

But when I wrote this first piece on the topic, I was exactly where you are now. You may find it helpful.

There’s a quick addition to those thoughts which I need to throw in: never worry about critics.

Anyone who takes the time to bash your work is almost by definition doing less to improve themselves than you are. Use constructive advice to the extent you see fit, but discard everything else unless it is coming from one of your role models who has already achieved what you hope to achieve.

Money is Power

I often talk about money in the context of writing not because I see money as an end-all-be-all, but it is a tangible way of measuring your progress.

But let’s face it, for most of us money is also a necessary tool in the game of life. No matter how well your time is being used right now, more money will allow you the freedom to accomplish even more fulfilling pursuits.

Get it out of your mind that “more money = more problems” if that bad programming is still bouncing around in your head.

Money is a form of power. Power is not intrinsically bad, it just reveals your character.

So, learn how to use your craft of writing to both improve yourself and to increase your earnings. And make the world a little better, along the way.

To boost my income much higher than Medium can offer, I recently became a real estate agent.

Rather than giving up on writing, I’m going to lean into it as my superpower. It differentiates me from all the realtors who aren’t writers. I’m going to be showering buyers and sellers with information that’s going to help people feel comfortable with me from the moment they look me up and find me on the internet.

The stories that I have to tell are no longer just about my own experiences and thoughts and feelings anymore. They’re evolving into a celebration of gratitude for the professionals, buyers, and sellers that I meet along the way in my journey.

For that reason, here’s the story that I am probably most proud of thus far. If you take the time to read, I’m confident you’ll see why.