My First Posts on Medium are Horrible — Here’s Why I Decided Not to Delete Them

We only see the tip of the Iceberg

In the past three months, I was hardworking and lucky.

I averagely published one story per day on Medium.

That’s not particularly exceptional. Anyone can do it, but, of course, it requires a good amount of discipline.

However, besides my hard work, I was lucky to get a bunch of support from Medium. The majority of my stories were curated, and I experienced crazy growth.

While I was busy celebrating my first $500 with one single story, I hit the $1,000 mark only a few days later.

I struggle with the term “full-time income”. I believe it means something different for everyone. However, I am honored to share that I made a few thousand bucks by writing on Medium from mid of December until now.

On the one side, I am incredibly grateful, and I believe I was lucky in hitting these numbers so quickly. On the other side, I worked my ass off.

I published my very first story on the 20th of July 2018.

For the rest of 2018, I gave my best to write as much as I could, yet, it was hard as I was studying and doing a full-time internship. However, I published more than 80 pieces in five months.

In 2019, I was worried if Medium makes sense for me at all, and I only published around 50 stories throughout the whole year.

I was not worried about the potential of Medium itself, yet, I was running a coaching and training business in German, so I was struggling to combine my efforts on Medium with my German business.

At the end of 2019, I was really frustrated. I wasn’t happy with my business results, and I didn’t feel joy in what I was doing. So I practiced a lot of self-reflection. I asked myself which projects I enjoyed most in the last couple of years.

Luckily, I came up with a clear answer: Medium.

Even though I didn’t make much money or reach many people, I truly enjoyed writing on Medium.

Thus, I decided to come back and write regularly. And by now, I can say it was the best decision I made in the past three years.

My numbers are going crazy, and I enjoy every minute I spend here.

However, lately, I was wondering about my very first stories, so I scrolled all the way back to 2018 to open one of them.

Admittedly, at first, I was shocked.

Just to name a few of the mistakes: The headline was terrible, the cover picture was poor, and the formatting of the story was horrible.

Additionally, the story itself was full of mistakes as well. Obviously, I didn’t know about Grammarly at that time.

I knew my writing, editing, and formatting skills improved over the past two years. At least, I expected so as I am reading lots of stories from top writers on Medium, but admittedly, I didn’t expect my first stories to be that bad.

When I scrolled through these first posts, I had one thing in mind: delete them!

Honestly, I found them so bad I was even embarrassed. If someone told me he read those stories, I would’ve been ashamed.

But right before hitting the delete button on more than 100 stories, I stopped for a minute.

On Medium, profiles are arranged chronologically, meaning people who visit your profile see the latest stories first. And if you write a lot, your first stories will soon disappear in a sense that they will not immediately pop up when a new reader visits your profile.

Only if a user scrolls all the way down through +200 stories, he ends up seeing my worst pieces.

This realization led me to a question:

Is it really that bad to start at the bottom?

My worst stories reveal a lot about me and my journey on Medium.

They show how much effort I put into becoming better. They show how much time I invested in writing before getting rewarded. They show that we all start somewhere.

Too often, we only see the tip of the Iceberg. We stalk the best and most successful people of a specific field and end up feeling sorry for ourselves for not being there yet.

But here’s a little secret:

Everyone starts at the bottom.

If we take Medium as an example, each successful Medium writer started with zero followers and claps. There is no other way than starting from scratch.

You either start from zero or not at all.

There is no chance of being well prepared before diving into something. It’s just not possible

You’ll always learn your most valuable lessons through making mistakes.

I can tell you what worked for me, and you can keep reading stories called “How to succeed on Medium”, yet, nothing will change without hitting the publish button for a few dozen times.

Easy as that.

I am not proud of my first stories, but I am incredibly proud of all the progress I made in those two years.

I am proud of having improved my writing, my formatting, and my editing. And I am glad I found out about Grammarly.

Too often, we see the success stories of others and compare our beginnings to their highlights. It’s just dumb. They all started somewhere.

I am an optimist and a true believer in the power of our minds.

If you believe in yourself, work hard and learn lots, you can achieve anything.

On Medium and way beyond.

I decided not to delete my first stories on Medium because they are a critical part of my journey. Without writing the bad ones, I could never write the great ones as I’d lack the experience.

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