Member-only story
Don’t Be Fooled By Good Ideas
A few weeks ago, I wrote two pieces that got featured by Medium within days of one another, and the experience almost ruined my productivity. I had zero blogging experience before I started writing here in January of this year, so I didn’t really know what to expect. Actually, I didn’t expect much of anything. That’s not to say I expected to fail; I just wanted to write and somehow stumbled upon this platform. So I started writing — that’s all, no real goals or expectations.
I wrote about whatever I wanted to on any given day. Sometimes more whimsical or opinionated stuff, sometimes fiction, sometimes investigative historical stories. No genre target, no topic niche target — I just wrote about whatever intrigued me at the time. Then, after a few weeks of blogging, I began to realize that many people out there earn a respectable income in the blogosphere. I started to think, hmm, it’d be pretty cool if I could make a living writing for myself like that.
Just as I was getting curious about whether I could earn any real money blogging, two of my stories got featured by Medium and were well received by the community. I got a good deal of positive feedback in the comments, and the editors at even sent me a $100 bonus for one of the pieces.
This nearly ruined my prospects of future blogging success, and I almost didn’t realize it.
