Not more writing advice

When I signed up for Medium, I made this mistake of reading through writing advice. And, unfortunately, the way the algorithm works, it starts to show you article that they think you may be interested in.

So the journey began.

I began to fall down a rabbit hole of writing advice. One article after another and the whole thing became so addictive.

I had a penchant for writing and so, these articles fueled my desire to write again. This was by no means a bad thing but the problem was that it didn’t stop there. I never stopped reading the writing advice articles.

As with anything on the internet, you start out thinking everything is what it seems. Until, it isn’t.

It took me a while to understand who was telling the truth about how much they earned from their writing and who was actually writing anything worthwhile.

But, I suppose the biggest mistake I made was trying to emulate other people or follow their advice.

Let me be clear, not all the writing advice is garbage. In fact, I learned some awesome tips about formatting and how to attract and audience. I learned about discipline and what it takes to break the fear of publishing.

Unfortunately, it took me a while to realize that not everything is suited for everyone. Trying to write like a steam engine completely burned me out. The idea was quantity over quality because quantity will eventually beget quality. I don’t disagree. The more you write, the better you will get. But, not to the point where you’ve squeezed the lemon so much that it’s bitter.

The other problem was with writing about certain topics or niches. Apparently, every writer is seen as a one-trick pony. You have to have a niche or genre. While that’s probably fine for books, I don’t see how that can be true for short articles. People often have a wide variety of interests. And people often know a lot about a great many things. The whole idea with writing should be to write about what you enjoy, what you’re passionate about.

I made the mistake of trying to write about just one thing and it burned me out as well.

Clearly, you can see there was a lot of burning going on there. Ha ha. But the point I’m trying to make is that none of the advice should be taken as gospel truth. The idea of advice articles should be just that, ideas. You can perhaps learn a few tips and then make them your own.

I found my own style of writing and my own niches that suited me. It’s been little over a year that I started my finance newsletter and it’s taken off brilliantly. I’ve even managed to monetize it now. That newsletter even led me to appearance on US National TV.

It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t me but, then again it was. I wasn’t wrong to in my approach to begin with. I was wrong to take too much of the advice to heart. I should’ve known that I needed to find my own way.