Whatever your measure of success on Medium, income, followers, or views, you have to do the actual work: write.
Consistent writing is a powerful way to improve your chances of success. You can persuade almost anyone, with anything, if you persistently share your body of work, and do it repeatedly. If you stay prolific, your efforts will pay off. Repetition is persuasion.
When you create content that informs, educates, or offers advice, solutions, and guidance, you are building a reputation as a source of valuable, useful, or practical information. Think of your writing on the same timescale as any other career, approach it with all seriousness it deserves and you will achieve your goal.
The bitter truth is there are no shortcuts, you may not make it in six months or even a year but you will get there if you keep sharing your best work week, every month and every year.
I’ve been writing on Medium for over five years. In the first two years, I was not consistent. I achieved the real growth I wanted when I decided to make writing on Medium a “full-time” career three years ago.
Since I started writing consistently on Medium, my work has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, CNBC, Inc. Magazine, Pocket Hits, Thought Catalog, and other media publications. I have also written a book, published by a reputable publisher in London.
The single most important advice I can give you to succeed on Medium is to make quality time to write consistently. It doesn’t have to be every day or even every week. Establish a ritual that works for you and stick to it.
Seth Godin has published every day for over ten years. He has never missed a single day. That’s insane. His writing style and routine may not work for you though. Do what works for you, otherwise, you’ll give up. Do more of what brings out the best in you in your own time, rhythm, and structure.
Once you know what makes you come alive, you will share generously and you will reap abundantly. Success will meet you because keep writing, measuring, and adapting.
The key to unlocking your most prolific self lies in the consistency of action. If you want to be noticed for all the right reasons by not just your spouse or friends, focus on sharing your best work with the world consistently. Your goal should be progress and improvement, not perfection.
Jump in with both feet. Establish a daily writing routine and keep delivering your best work. Plus, creating every day has so many benefits, it’s the absolute core of leading a creatively rewarding life. It’s almost magical.
Just show up and share your work. You can’t be truly prolific when you hesitate. You might not know enough but teach anyway. You might not see clearly enough but make a move anyway. You might not be good enough but show your work anyway.
Life is too short to hesitate. Writing consistently will improve your craft, and it will definitely push you towards traction and attraction. Cal Newport says “Until you become good, you don’t have leverage.”
That’s the most important thing to remember when you start showing up and begin to share your authentic work. Don’t expect a sudden breakthrough. A good career mission is similar to a scientific breakthrough. It takes a lot of consistent experiments to get to that all-important discovery.
The world’s best writers, creatives and innovators, are hugely prolific and productive people. They’re not afraid to get their work in front of people and they’re willing to adapt and change. Prolific artists make messy sketches. Don’t wait for inspiration.
If you wait until you get inspired, you will never get anything done. You don’t have to be perfect to start anything. It doesn’t really matter how good you are when you start. What matters is whether or not you’re consistent and improving your craft.
Focus on cumulative output. Indecision is the enemy of great work. Stop thinking so much and just do it.
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The Making of a Writer
I’m a huge fan of deliberate practice. It’s the only way to move from good to great. Don’t look at your life’s work as a must, an obligation, or as pressure.
Just do it and enjoy the process. If you do this, it will grow and stretch and challenge you as a creator or an artist. True geniuses are always honing their crafts, looking to learn more, improve new releases, or give a better performance.
When you work towards continuous improvement, you set yourself up for greatness. I hope you attempt to be more prolific with your work. It has a tremendous pay-off. Leave behind everyone else’s definitions and expectations and focus on what you want to do and share. Ignore conventional wisdom and deliver your gut.
Picasso made 50,000 works of art in his life. Mozart composed over 600 pieces in his lifetime. Charles Schulz made 17,897 Charlie Brown strips before he died. Many great writers and artists create their masterworks and then are done. Others are more prolific throughout their productive years.
Being prolific brings out the best in you but it’s not a requirement to be an artist. Through practice and vulnerability, you will become good at what you do. Hone your craft through unrelenting practice.
Prof. Dean Simonton, a psychologist who’s spent many years studying creative productivity, discovered two things about highly creative people:
- They’re woefully bad at knowing when their own work is going to be a hit or a miss.
- Their capacity for productivity that makes them original, not their innate talent.
Simonton writes: “On average, creative geniuses aren’t qualitatively better in their fields than their peers, they simply produce a greater volume of work which gives them more variation and a higher chance of originality.”
Prolific people are good at creating thought bridges, subconscious connections, and unexpected integrations between seemingly unrelated ideas. The daily practice makes it easy for them to automatically notice natural relationships and structures in their work. Hence, their creative efforts are more productively deployed every day.
Robert Greene, author of Mastery once said, “If we follow the mastery process long enough, inspired by a profound interest and curiosity we cannot fail to achieve something exceptional.”
It’s insanely easy to start writing, but the hard part is finding your voice, figuring out topics that are interesting for other people to read, and making it a viable career.
You can go from “wanting to be a writer” to “being one” by scheduling time for it. I write every morning. If I don’t write before midday, I probably won’t write at all. So I choose to write before noon and spend the rest of the day working on other projects.
If you want to embrace daily writing as a habit, try writing every day for at least 30 days right here on Medium. Don’t aim for 1,000 words if you can’t sustain it. And don’t worry about building an immediate audience. Your initial topics and format should be whatever you can do easily and maintain some sort of frequency. Commit to being relentlessly valuable, no matter how small.
When the 30 days are up, go back and review what you’ve learned, the progress you’ve made, what went well, topics you enjoy writing about, what didn’t resonate with readers, and do more of what works.
Your job is to show up every day, week, or year, and become a reliable source. Great work, like a healthy financial portfolio, takes time to mature. Your best work will emerge with patient attention, time, and strategic action.
Building a writing career takes time and patience. Keep improving and strengthening your voice and soon, you will be so good they can’t ignore you.
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This post was previously published on Better Marketing and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: Sameh Yoakim