Why Successful Writers Give Horrible Advice to New Writers

They don’t know why they are successful

I’ve been on for more than half on year on Medium and I’ve seen countless articles about how to write better. There are very few articles that provide actionable good advice, most of them talk about generic, useless things most people already know.

I don’t believe that successful writers give bad advice to others intentionally, they don’t fully grasp what they are doing when they are writing.

There are tons of processes involved when you write something, especially when you have a unique way of doing it which most people that are successful have.

What you’ve chosen as your title and topic, the way you organize your paragraphs, the image you’ve chosen, your tone while writing, and many other things.

All these contribute to being successful, and I am not even including luck which in a lot of cases can play a major role.

So what’s happening here?

Cognitive automation

The main reason people won’t understand their writing process is due to a process called cognitive automation.

Cognitive automation refers to the fact that initially, you are doing something with the conscious effort of being aware of every step, and after a while, your subconscious takes over and you don’t think too much about it.

The best example of how this process occurs would be leaning to drive, initially, you are very stressed trying to pay attention to the road, the wheel, the pedals and after a while, you are able to talk on the phone and still drive successfully. Something I would still not recommend even if you can do it.

The same applies to writing

When you started out writing the first articles you might have struggled with every little thing involved in the process.

Getting your title right, trying to make clear and valid points, tying everything together, but after years of practice, you will do that effortlessly.

Luck and survivorship bias

Besides not talking about the actual steps involved in their success, a lot of people forget to mention luck.

You can do exactly what someone else tells you to do, but you can simply not have the same chance they had.

There are too many hardworking people that have published consistently, followed the right topics, and niched down but they didn’t find anywhere near the success some other writers have.

Survivorship bias is a cognitive shortcut that makes you focus on the “winners” in a particular domain or field, and ignore the “losers” or everything that didn’t make it past some kind of selection process.

They haven’t been as lucky.

Nonetheless, there is some positivity to this, if other writers have been given some opportunity, there is a chance you will also meet the same luck someday if you are persistent enough

The takeaway

A lot of successful people don’t have a clue with regards to what made them successful, and also forget to mention the luck factor.

You might still find some people that have a high degree of awareness and manage to give very useful advice to others.

I believe that you will be able to learn the most by practicing the craft yourself and not wasting time with false promises that people make.

You can also learn a lot by reading other’s people work, you might be able to grasp what they are not able to articulate, and see for yourself what makes their work so great.

Best of luck trying to make it, I know you can.

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