25 Months of Writing, 25 Lessons
I know that’s a lot but it’s all worth it
The interesting thing about any journey is that it teaches you lessons that you wouldn’t learn otherwise. I started my online writing journey in March 2022, and this journey has taught me a boatload of 25 lessons. Let’s roll.
1. The Paradox of Selecting Topics
A year ago, I found audience building a fascinating topic, and then I found writing about writing a fascinating topic. But now both of these topics don’t energize me. I no longer find these topics interesting.
Things become irrelevant over time.
So why do we lose interest in a topic at a certain point?
I don’t have any specific answer to this. Maybe it’s just that we get to learn enough about the subject and there is nothing interesting left, or maybe it’s just that now we don’t care much about the topic, or maybe something else.
The reason can be hundreds.
See, it’s not always the case though. Elon Musk was interested in AI and Aliens when he was probably in his 20s or 30s — and still, to date, he has the same interest in these two.
So there are consequences though, but it’s rare. The big theme is: Most of us lose interest in one topic or another at a certain point or level.
For instance, when the AI boom came in the last quarter of 2022, many people showed interest in AI. But how many of those people to date still show the same interest in AI? Only A few? That’s the point.
The lesson is that if something is fascinating to you right now, it doesn’t mean it’ll be forever. Your taste changes a lot with time. And that’s why things become irrelevant over time.
2. Choose a Fascinating Topic
Your goal as a writer is to choose the topic that is fascinating to you or the topic that you’re deeply passionate about — you have a burning interest in writing about the topic — that’s the only way I find useful to build a writing business around.
If you choose a topic that doesn’t energize you or you have no interest in it, but you choose the topic regardless of that — just because you want to make money off it, then you won’t be able to build a sustainable business in the long haul.
So find the topic that you can at least talk about for the next 5–10 years and have an interest in it so you can stick around to the topic in the long run.
3. You Don’t Need to be an Expert
Most people think that to talk about a topic, they must be an expert in it, which is completely wrong by the way. You certainly don’t need to be an expert on the topic you want to talk about.
Instead, you just need to know enough about the topic so that you can teach other people who are behind you or one step below you. That’s what I did when I started talking about Medium Growth Writing.
So forget the idea of having expertise about the topic.
Everyone starts as a beginner at the work they do, they become an expert over time.
Don’t let perfection hold you back from doing the thing you must get done.
4. Optimize for Lifestyle, Not Money
Money is overrated, lifestyle is underrated.
James Clear said this well:
I think we should avoid chasing “Big money” and focus more on what lifestyle we want to have. Of course, you need money — but not as much as you think you need. And that’s why you don’t need to build a unicorn to have enough money. Thus you must know what type of work or business you want to build that allows you to have the lifestyle you want.
Let me give you an example.
Say you want to live a digital nomad type of lifestyle. You want to work from anywhere in the world. Have no meetings or calls. And doing amazing things offline — in the real world.
To have a lifestyle like this, you can’t work for any location-based company or for a company/agency where you have to go to the office every day, do meetings, and be punctual for the work you do. It’s good, but it will never allow you to have the lifestyle you want.
But works like: Writing online, building your audience on social media, or starting a YouTube channel, on the other hand, can give you the lifestyle you want. Because you’re independent (you’re the boss) when you do them.
And you can pretty much do these works anywhere in the world, you just need a laptop and an internet connection to get the work done. You’re not location-dependent.
You get the point.
5. Writing Isn’t the One-Way Street
There are a million ways to make money writing online.
So if anyone says “No, no, it’s the only way to make money writing online — run!!” Six months ago, I thought ghostwriting was the best way to make “Big money.” And of course, it is, but not the ONLY way. Fun fact, when I did ghostwriting, it wasn’t good at all for me.
I hated it.
Then I found that there are thousands of other ways that are more lucrative than ghostwriting, which can make you more money than ghostwriting — while doing zero meetings, client approach, etc.
For example, starting a paid newsletter, I know it’s hard to ask people to pay you for the things you create. But if you can do it? No more lucrative than a paid newsletter. You just need 500 people paying you $10 per month to make $5,000 MRR. And it’s way, WAY better than ghostwriting.
Lesson: Choose which street you want to walk through to reach your goal.
6. Audience Building 101
Over the last two years, I’ve got to know that there is no specific way to build an audience online. And I want to teach that lesson to you today.
You can build an audience by writing or talking about a broad topic. You can also build an audience ONLY by talking about the topics that are fascinating to you or the topics you care about the most. And you can also ABSOLUTELY build an audience by writing about a MICRO niche.
I’ve seen all of them. They all work.
It’s just people's preference on what they want to go for to build an audience online. Matt D’Avella is one example of talking about the topic he cares about or the things he does daily. And guess what? He has close to 4M subscribers on YouTube doing it. Write With AI is a paid newsletter run by Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush, it’s a niche business. And guess what? They have got thousands of paid subscribers in it. And there is Elon Musk who tweets whatever he wants and has 180M+ followers on Twitter.
People follow you because of you or your work. It’s not necessary for people to like you to like YOUR work. If this were the case, anonymous and pseudo-anonymous accounts wouldn’t succeed, but don’t they?
So forget the idea of “Doing the thing ONLY way” First identify what goal you want to have, and what type of audience you want to build. Then create content around that. People will either love you, love your content, or do both.
You just got a broader perspective on audience building!
7. Walking Down the Street
One of the all-time greatest copywriters — Gary Halbert.
When Gary Halbert was in the jail cell he wrote a bunch of letters to his son. Do you know what was the first advice he gave to his son? He said, “To become a great copywriter, son, you must build a habit of walking daily.”
The biggest unlock for any writer is to build a walking habit.
If you’re a writer doing some sort of creative work, don’t take walking for granted. You must have a habit of walking. The reason is simple: When you go for a walk, it not only makes you energetic and productive but also gives you a lot of untapped ideas that you wouldn’t get otherwise.
Don’t believe me? Wake up, and just walk down the street.
8. Go Against People’s Opinion
People will tell you: “Don’t do this, don’t do that, no, that’s not gonna work.”
Don’t listen.
If anyone drains you or tries to hold you back, you shouldn’t second guess them. They’re your biggest enemy. Whenever you want to take some bold risk, there are always people who tell you “Do this, do that.”
First, ask “Has this person achieved the thing that I’m trying to do (achieve)?” If the answer is no, their opinion doesn’t matter. If the answer is yes, you might better off listening to them.
Trust me, when I understood it — it changed everything for me.
You can apply this principle to all aspects of your life: Business, relationships, health, money, finance, etc.
9. If You Don’t Try, You’ll Never Know
To gain wisdom, you must do the work.
You’ll never know about the thing, if you don’t try it. So for instance, let’s say you want to build a paid newsletter on Substack. Many people will tell you: It’s a bad idea. It’s hard. Not sure if you’ll succeed. Better not to try, etc.
But should you listen to them or just try doing it? Of course, you should try it. Because if you don’t try, how the hell you will know whether it’s hard or not or whether you’re going to succeed in it or not?
The only way to know is to try the work. Forget about the people’s experience and knowledge. If you really want to know about the subject or work, just do it.
No other way around.
10. Forget the Ocean, Create Your Own Pond
You don’t need to be BIG.
We often visualize that to make money, we need MASS. Massive audience, massive reach, massive people. But that’s not true. You don’t always need a “Big” to succeed at the thing you want to succeed.
Thus forget about the competition, and focus on building your own pond. In the sense of audience building it means, creating your own cult, building your fans, and having your own world of people.
For instance, when you want to build a newsletter, you first visualize some big names like Morning Brew, The Hustle, or The TLDR newsletters — not to mention they’ve got massive audiences — so you think you also need a massive audience to make money or to have an impact on people’s lives.
But that’s not true. You don’t need to be that BIG to make money or to make an impact on people’s lives. You can create your own little pond. Always.
11. You Want to be a Millionaire, Not a Billionaire
The mental bandwidth to become a billionaire is so much higher. It’s not easy. You have to grind probably 10x times more than a millionaire. So I don’t think it’s worth it to pursue a billionaire path, at least it’s not for me.
Money comes with responsibilities.
You can’t have $10B and expect to chill on a beach every day. $10B, that’s a hell lot of money, and now you’ve to manage it, sustain it, and take care of it. If you don’t? You’ll run out of it soon.
To become a billionaire you must build a unicorn or massive startup. Otherwise, invest like Warren Buffet and get rich slowly over time.
To become a millionaire, you can have a one-person business or startup doing $1–$10M ARR. That’s a pretty sweet spot to be in. And to live a peaceful and comfortable life I think that $1-$10M is more than enough unless you want to buy a Private Jet or something.
Do you want to become a billionaire?
12. To Get Lucky, Take Bold Risk
I recently learned this.
I decided to rent an apartment when I only had $150 in my bank account, and that money was from my Medium earnings. The plan was to just rent a room to work on my business as long I had that money, and if I ran out of money, I’d go back to my home, that was the plan.
But guess what?
When I took the risk, luck got involved and I made more money — and more money — and more money, and ever since I’ve been renting rooms.
So the point is, if I hadn’t taken the risk to rent that first apartment I wouldn’t be able to make the money I’ve been making since 2022. And it’s just one example, there are countless times this has happened to me.
So now I believe that: You get lucky when you take risks. But of course, you’ve to be conscious about the risk you’re taking.
But don’t be afraid to take risks.
13. Awareness is a Superpower, Truly
Imagine if you knew what is online writing or Medium writing five years ago, wouldn’t have you built the business or made the money you now want to make? I think you did.
That’s why awareness is so, so important.
There are massive amounts of people having paid newsletters and making tens of thousands of dollars per month, but if you don’t know what a paid newsletter is, you’d never make money off it.
Am I right? So always learn. Question almost everything. And be always aware of the things around you and your business. The biggest life hack.
14. Authenticity is the Biggest Unfair Advantage
One way or another you might have found yourself copying someone else’s style, voice, tone, or structure at some point. If yes, that’s the wrong approach to writing online.
Anytime you’re copying someone from something, you lose authenticity, which is the most important part of your writing. And to be clear, your audience will never want you to copy someone's tone, style, or something. If they’re your audience, they’ll accept you as you are.
No one can compete with you on being you.
And that’s why authenticity is your biggest unfair advantage. Be authentic to yourself. Show your personality. Tell the truth. Write in your style. Write like you talk. Write the way you want to express yourself. That is YOU.
15. Quality + Consistency = Growth
If you keep the quality bar really high of your work and keep doing it on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, you have the success you want to achieve.
The reason most people don’t see any growth in writing online is because of two reasons:
- First, they write quality content, but not too often.
- Second, they write content too often, but not quality content.
Both have problems. And that’s why you need quality and quantity. The reason I got 1,000 or 5,000 followers so quickly is because I wrote too many stories too quickly while maintaining the quality bar really, really high.
Pair these two elements and you’ll be unstoppable.
16. Blame Yourself, Not Others
Blaming others won’t lead you anywhere.
The opposite can be beneficial though. When you ONLY blame yourself, you try to improve the mistake you have made. And when you blame yourself, you become accountable for not repeating the same mistake again.
Even if it’s someone else mistake or they did the work wrong, try to incorporate it on your shoulder (if you’re under or above it) and think about what you can do to fix it.
For instance, blaming your parents for not having enough money growing up or not having money for your better education is a bad trade to make. Instead, think about what you can now do to have a better life. This way, you’ll take care of your parents and have a great life ahead.
Don’t you think it’s a mental unlock?
17. You Get to Learn From Almost Everything
There is no such thing as “I can’t learn anything from this.”
There is always something you can learn from anyone. For example, water, what can you learn from water? Well, it teaches us to be adaptable according to circumstances and situations. What do trees teach us? Well, it teaches us that we should give to others to get something back. Trees teach you that your foundation (route) should be strong enough to survive — this applies not only in life but also in health, business, and relationships.
You can almost always learn something from anyone. No matter how bad, fool, or ugly that person is, they will always have something you do not, so if you notice carefully or ask them something, you’ll definitely learn something new or helpful.
Be conscious and use your time consciously to keep learning new things.
18. To become a Great Writer, be a Good Reader
Every great writer you see online: Paul Graham, Mark Manson, Morgan Housel, Kevin Kelly, and other writers — all are great readers. If you talk about Hemingway, Bukowski, or other writers — they all were great readers.
This means you must read books if you want to become a great writer. Because reading helps you understand all the nitty-gritty stuff about writing and the way ideas are being said.
David Perell says:
Read to collect the dots, write to connect them.
The better the content you read, the better you get at writing. Because it’s all the correlation between writing and reading. You can’t just have one.
Read the books you love until you love to read — Naval.
19. Quit Your Job, Especially if You Don’t Like it
Ever since the “Work from home” culture has been started, more people are quitting their jobs than ever. The one simple reason is that now people get free time to explore their interests on the internet and build things that they’re passionate about.
And I think it’s a good thing. Quit your job, especially if you hate it. Because at some point or another, you’re going to start your own, so why not today?
Of course, you need to save up and have enough money for the runway. But take the risk and build the thing you really want to build. Understand: The internet has massively unlocked the opportunities for people like you who have a burning desire to create and build something meaningful.
Point to be noted: Quitting a job isn’t for everyone.
20. Making Money is the Exchange of Value
You’ll make no amount of money if you’re not providing value to people’s lives. The form of value can be: Solving a problem for a group of people, educating people on certain subjects, or making them laugh by telling stories or creating videos.
There has to be some form of value in order for you to make money.
So if you’re wondering and asking “Why the hell am I not making any money?” The answer would be straight “You’re either not proving any value to people’s lives or not solving their problems.” Period.
The amount of money you make is directly proportional to the amount of value you provide to people’s lives. The more the value, the more money you’re going to make. It’s as simple as that.
21. Surround Yourself in the Right Environment
Easier said than done though.
Well, it’s hard to surround yourself with the right environment in the real world. Sometimes we pursue a thing that most people don’t — in our circle.
So what’s the solution? Online.
If you don’t have the right environment offline, create it online. Find relevant communities, forums, and groups — join and engage there. Follow people online on social media who have done or doing the work that you want to do — and try to network with them.
This not only allows you to build the right mindset but also makes your journey fun — so much fun.
22. If You Don’t Want to Fail, Just Stick Around
You only fail, when when stop trying.
So if you want to win the game, keep playing it. I know it’s easier said than done but trust me this is what I’ve been doing. I may not have a successful writing business yet but I do now know all the different business models and how things work online. And I think I feel better knowing it.
The reason I got to know and keep trying is because I don’t want to lose. I know, the moment I stop writing online — I’m done. And that’s not what I want, to be honest.
This is one of the main reasons most people fail to write online.
23. Nothing Happens, Then Everything Happens
I want you to have one great mindset: The mindset of having enough patience to see any results or progress.
See, when you start something new, there is a major chance that you won’t make any progress in the beginning. You may not see any significant progress in one year or two. But if you keep doing the work, all of suddenly one day, something clicks, and boom! Everything changes that day.
I’ve seen such things happening with other people over and over again. So my advice would be to just keep going and wait till that day comes.
Remember the ice cube has to be a meltdown at some degree if we keep increasing the temperature. Makes sense?
24. Destination Doesn’t Matter, Journey Does
Often time we get caught so much thinking about the destination (goal) that we literally forget about enjoying the journey, which is the completely wrong approach to do things.
We set the goal of achieving something, and we get so obsessed over it that we forget enjoy the journey.
A better example of this would be: Let’s say you want to get to $5,000 per month ghostwriting on Twitter. So you start cold D’ming your ideal clients, you stay at night working, grinding, but you know deep down that it’s not cool to ghostwrite for other people but still, you want to do it because it’s the only way you see that can get you to $5,000 a month.
So you do it, you achieve the goal only to realize that it’s not fascinating. You hate it because it’s now not something that you were expecting in the first place. And now maybe you’ll quit doing it — if you’re smart enough.
You see, there is no point choosing a mindless goal just because you want to look cool or just to make money, I think if you’re not enjoying the process of doing the work, nothing is worth it.
So ask: Am I really enjoying the journey? If not, quit. If yes, keep going.
25. No Matter What, Always be Grateful
No argument on this.
There will always be people who will have more than you. They have more money than you, they have more followers than you, and they have more opportunities than you.
Comparison is the enemy.
And that’s the reason always be grateful for whatever you have. Doesn’t matter how little you make, or how small your following is, appreciate it.
And with that said, I want to show my gratitude to you as you’ve completed and read this story till the end. Most people won’t, but since you did, I really appreciate you, and thank you so much for reading it.
Dear Medium writer, keep crushing it on Medium.
PS: I teach aspiring Medium writer how to grow, build their brand, and make money on Medium in 2024. In case, you’re interested in it, you can check out this next story, and take action accordingly:
Thanks for reading, I appreciate it.
