The Only Piece of Advice You’ll Ever Need to Make It on Medium

Assume you have 1 million words inside of you, and they’re all rubbish — get them all out

Please, do us both a favor. Make this piece the last one you read on the subject of “how to become successful on Medium.” That way, my other posts (not about Medium) will get more views, and you’ll spend more time doing the only thing that matters: writing.

I’ve been writing on Medium daily since October 2019. Since then, I published more than 200 pieces on this platform. And if I look back on what pieces got the highest exposure, follower growth, and made the most money — 80% of them are about Medium:

I Published 40 Articles on Medium in October

I Made $616.93 in My Second Month on Medium

What I’ve Learned Writing on Medium Every Day for 90 Days

What It Really Takes to Get 1,000 Followers on Medium

Almost every day, I see another writer who wrote something similar, like, “I Made $10230123192839 in one week on Medium” — and I always think to myself, “Good for you. Now what?”

I think that people who spend too much time reading posts like this will probably never become successful on Medium.

Do you know why?

Because reading these posts is a form of procrastination.

It’s preparation. You want to know the “secret” that will make you a better writer and help you turn your writing hobby into a full-time income.

And I get that. I used to look for secrets too. I used to search for a “hack,” and I used to think that people who “made it” (on Medium or elsewhere) know something I don’t.

The truth is, there is no secret.

You achieve success on Medium the same way you achieve success in almost anything in life: by being patient — doing something regularly for a long time and becoming better at it. That’s 80% of success.

The “Success-on-Medium” articles are the other 20% — they talk about tactics, details, little nuances, all of which don’t matter unless you get the 80% right.

When I realized that, I exhaled. Then I got back to work.

Best Piece of Advice on Writing You’ll Ever Receive

Don’t listen to me. I am an aspiring writer myself.

Listen to Neil Gaiman, the famous English writer and author of the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book.

When an aspiring writer asked him how he should go about his writing process, Neil thought for a second and then replied:

“Write, finish things, and then start writing the next thing…Just write. Assume that you have one million words inside of you and they’re all rubbish. You need to get them all out.”

When you’re just starting out on Medium, you have nothing. Nobody knows you; nobody wants you. Like Steven Pressfield says, “nobody wants to read your shit.” And that’s OK. You shouldn’t care.

Your main job should be to set up a writing regimen that would allow you to create consistently, over a long time period. Whether that’s one article per month or one per day — is up to you.

One million words. Get them all out.

What Helps Me Write

I can’t tell you what you ‘should’ do, but I can tell you what helps me create consistently.

Write like you talk

As Seth Godin said, “I write like I talk, and I never saw anybody suffer from a talker’s block.” Another thing that helps me write a blog post is imagining that I am writing an email to a friend after two glasses of wine.

Have a “Groundhog Day”

The more similar your writing days are (whether it’s a daily morning routine or a one writing session per week), the easier it is to start. A writer’s block is nothing but fear, and the way to eliminate fear is to make everything more familiar.

Write on the same days, at the same time, in the same setting, on the same computer, and through the same editor.

I enjoy Medium editor a lot, so I use it instead of Word.

Something is better than nothing

It’s OK if you feel that your posts are crap. They probably are. Personally, I hate to look back at my old writing. And I am rarely satisfied with what I come up with.

That’s the nature of an artist’s life: to make good art despite self-sabotage and fear of rejection.

As Neil Gaiman reminds us, “You cannot fix the perfection of a blank page.” Writing something is better than writing nothing.

Don’t just sit there because you think you’re not good enough. English is my second language, and yet I try to write as much as I can.

You shouldn’t care about the quality of your work. Your (only) job is to ship. Finished a post, a book, an article? Great. Start another one the next day.

You can only control the effort

Stoics have a concept of “dichotomy of control.” There are things you can control in life — effort, intent, preparation, work ethic. And there are things you can’t — rejection, praise, follower growth, your post going viral.

Don’t make it too hard on yourself. Focus only on the things you can control. In 99% of cases, that is: writing the best you can, as often as you can.

Think long-term

I wrote at length about the “6-month-rule”, so I won’t repeat it here. But that rule is a simplification of the general approach: thinking long-term.

So what if nobody reads you? So what if this week you haven’t had a single follower? Writing is a (very) long-term game, and most bloggers on this platform haven’t seen any success until their 9th or 12th months of regular writing.

You don’t want to be the writer who is read by everybody for a short period of time and then forever ignored. You want to be the type of writer who is being read consistently, and you want to build loyalty among your readers.

I understand why authors write pieces on success on Medium.

As long as Medium is a goldrush, everyone will want to get in. And pieces like that will get eyeballs and will continue to make money for writers.

But please, if you want to become a successful writer on this platform, make us both a favor: stop reading pieces that talk about success on Medium. They are all the same, and they have nothing to do with you.

What worked for one writer won’t work for the other. You can’t just take the strategy that made Tim Denning or Tom Kuegler successful and replicate it.

If you do, you aren’t learning from them.

In turn, I’ll do us both a favor as well: this will be the last post I write on this subject. There are so many other things I write about: thoughts that inspire, ideas that matter, things that should be said, and it’s not about Medium.

I doubt that there is anything substantial I forgot to say in the five pieces I wrote about Medium.

If you want to become successful on Medium, you’ll understand the key (the 80%) from this piece or pieces by other writers out there. I talked about the other 20% in my eBook on Medium.

But I think that if you get the big stuff right, you can figure the rest out on your own.