5 Lessons From Making My First $100 on Medium.
#2 Your only job is to create
I’ve just made my first $100 on Medium last month
Screenshot From Author
And I am incredibly proud of myself.
But I know what you’re thinking: Making $100 in one month is nothing. It barely comes to $3.50 a day. Less than my daily cup of coffee in Melbourne. You can’t pay rent or live off that money.
I get it. I don’t plan to retire or quit my full-time job to start writing full-time. Not yet anyway. I’ve still got a long way to practice my craft before I look to make a living out of this.
But money signifies progress. Progress that I am improving. Progress that my work is contributing value to real people in the world. Validation that my words are having an impact.
Around this time last year, I only made $1.02 from a whole month of writing.
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That’s almost a 100x improvement over the course of one year.
Still nothing groundbreaking or exciting. But that’s the point of my story:
Working to achieve something meaningful is not glamorous nor exciting. Writing is not always sexy. The process is messy, ambiguous and hard.
It requires sacrifice, delaying gratification and riding the emotional rollercoaster of starting anything new. But the ability to create something of value from nothing is a superpower.
You’ve got to learn to love the boring and make do with incremental progress. You’ve got to love the setbacks, the feeling of being a beginner. The feeling of sucking at something hard.
Uncertainty is often the biggest barrier. There is no guarantee that you’ll succeed. There is no roadmap to follow or manual to guide you. You’re trying to build the plane while you’ve already jumped off the cliff.
I won’t lie. I’ve thought of stopping so many times. A lack of progress would make my inner critic would come roaring out. I would doubt my ability and faith that I would actually improve.
The ability of your mind to make you feel worthless is incredible. Give those thoughts an inch and they will try to take a yard.
I would compare myself constantly to writers already successful on Medium. I would read their articles and think: “Wow. That was so great. I will never get to their level.”
I never stopped to think how many years it must have taken them. Most great writers are made, not born. They put in the 10,000 hours of deliberate practice or more to be where they are today.
But still, the resistance to stop writing sometimes became overwhelming.
There were many days when I wanted to quit. Weeks where I would sit down and write garbage. Months where I felt like I was regressing and my articles were not being read by anyone. And years before I found my voice and rhythm as a writer.
1. Change Your Identity
One of the biggest barriers to writing is that I never identified as a writer.
Sounds silly right?
I always found the ‘writer’ identity uncomfortable. Whenever I would entertain the idea of being a writer, I felt like an imposter. I didn’t have a qualification or degree in writing. I barely passed English when I was in high school.
After reading James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, I learned to change my identity to change my mindset. “To change your behavior for good, you need to start believing new things about yourself. You need to build identity-based habits” writes James Clear.
Your behaviors and attitudes follow your identity. Once I started to adopt the mindset of a writer, I had great clarity of what a writer does: write. Sometimes you think you lack time when what you really lack is direction.
It sounds too simple. But try it yourself. The biggest impediment to creating a new habit or changing a bad one is that you don’t change your identity.
You don’t want to simply quit smoking. You want to become a non-smoker. You don’t want to be someone who exercises, you want to embody the identity of an athlete.
It might feel uncomfortable at first, but long-term change requires a long-term identity. You can’t change what you don’t believe in.
2. Your Only Job Is To Create
“We cannot predict the value our work will provide to the world. That’s fine. It is not our job to judge our own work. It is our job to create it, to pour ourselves into it, and to master our craft as best we can.” — James Clear
I wish I told myself this earlier: don’t chase metrics.
Your audience, recognition and money will come with time. Don’t make them the focus of your creativity. Attachment to extrinsic measures can divorce you from your intrinsic motivations.
Metrics can corrupt the purpose of creativity. You can never find your voice if you are constantly worried about what people might think. You can never create anything of value if you’re scared of embarrassing yourself.
Your only job as a creative is to create. That’s all you can control. Everything else is beyond your control.
3. Focus on quantity rather than quality (for now)
You are going to suck at first. And that’s okay. We’ve all been there. You need to go through the rough to get to the green. When you first begin, place more emphasis on producing more rather than the quality of articles.
Multi-grammy award winner Ed Sheeran calls his songwriting technique like ‘turning on the dirty tap in an old house’. When you first turn on the tap, only dirty water comes out. But after a few minutes, clean water starts to come through.
You need to consistently create to push through the dirty water to get to the clean. The more you produce, the more you’ll be able to find the quality. Once you have the water flowing the quality will naturally increase.
The creation of a genius is simply through more repetitions. The more you create, the better you get at creating. You start to find your voice. You want 10,000 iterations rather than 10,000 hours.
I made a deal with myself that I was not able to quit writing on Medium until I had published 100 articles. However long that might take. I am on 55 articles so far. If I keep progressing the way I am, I don’t think I’ll be quitting even after reaching 100 articles.
4. Improvement compounds
Improvement compounds. And in my case, sometimes exponentially. James Clear writes about how improving 1% every day over the course of a year, will result in you improving 37x by the end of the year.
Anything great once started off useless, boring, and unoriginal.
5. Consistency beats talent
“Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” — Tim Notke
Cliche quote? Yes. But it doesn’t make it any less relevant.
I am sure there are many more talented writers than me on the Medium platform. But I plan to write daily forever. I don’t plan to ever stop, no matter what barriers get in my way.
I’ve seen many of my more talented friends come and go. Some hear that I’ve been writing articles and making money and join the platform too. Most have left once they realized the commitment needed to consistently produce content.
My only skill is that once I commit to something, I commit to it.
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill” — Will Smith
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