No One Will Read Your Writing If You Don’t Believe in Yourself

How to dig a well in the desert

I love reading articles about how people make millions of dollars by writing on Medium. (Hint: they don’t.) It encourages me to think differently and write more.

Whether writers have thousands of followers and make thousands every month or budding artists without a single penny in their bank account, they have something to teach us.

You don’t need AI technology or a cereal-box decoder ring to see the recurring secret of success on Medium. You can triumph here, or anywhere, following two “secrets”:

1. Believe in yourself
2. Write daily

You don’t write every day because you don’t believe in yourself

There’s a reason my two-step list above is numbered and not bulleted. You need to follow those steps in order. If you are not writing every day, it is because you don’t believe in yourself.

Notice what I didn’t say. I didn’t say publish every day. I didn’t say to write 1,000 words every day. If you are doing these things, great! These actions mean that you believe in yourself, and you will see success.

If you believe that you have something to offer and that you have a way to express yourself in your written voice, then you are golden. If you don’t, then you are settling for mediocrity. Get used to living life the way you have been living, because it won’t change.

To change your life and to become successful, you have to believe in yourself.

How to dig a well in the middle of the desert

Your job is to dig a hole, no matter how deep, to get to the water in the desert. When you start, there is no one around you for miles. All you see is barren, dry wasteland. There are cracks in the ground from lack of rain.

You have to believe there is water, even when your hole is 10-feet deep. If you need inspiration, Google Napoleon Hill quotes. Here, I’ve done that part for you:

Your first shovel full will be all dirt. Your next shovel will be all dirt, too. You have to believe there is water. You have to taste it, see it, hear it, feel it, and smell it. Your next several shovels will all be dirt: dry, dry, dry dirt. But you keep going because you KNOW there is water.

It will be lonely and demoralizing

Are you tired of digging? Then why do you keep digging? Because you know there’s water.

In case you already forgot the secrets of success, here they are again:

1. Believe in yourself
2. Write daily

When you first start writing, you can picture yourself surrounded by throngs of fans, begging for your autograph, throwing vast sums of money at your feet. It’s like you are a literary stripper, dancing around word poles, raking up mountains of cash.

Then you publish your first article.

Then you publish another article.

You get no reads, no claps, and no followers. It sucks.

You have two choices. First, you can begin to believe in your external environment. You can stare at the zeros in your stats and associate your identity with those numbers. Spoiler alert: you’ll stop writing.

Your other choice (you guessed it) is to keep believing that there is water.

There’s an ocean in this desert

Writing on Medium can feel like Californian gold-rushers, panning for flakes of gold. You look around, and it seems like everyone is digging up dirt in the desert. That’s not true.

There is an ocean underneath. I promise you. There’s enough for everyone that keeps digging. There’s an abundance, waiting for people who can visualize and that have persistence.

But the first step is to believe in yourself. I believe that you are worthy. I believe that you have something to offer me. I think you have a unique way of sharing your worldview and that your worldview comes from experiences that only you have experienced.

The question is: do you believe enough in yourself to keep digging?

Ryan DeJonghe is the owner of YourEnergyHealers.Org, an online collaborative of energy and Reiki healers offering services over video. Ryan is also the author of Energy Healing 101, releasing January 2021.