My Journey of 100 Medium Articles

13 min readDec 15, 2023

Reflections on Writing and Learning

After 100 articles of some 700 minutes of reading time and countless hours of reading, thinking, researching, drafting, and editing, I think it is a good time to pause and reflect. What has been my experience so far? What have I learned? Where do I go from here?

What started as an experiment over two years ago has gradually become an integral part of my life. Writing is now part of my quest to learn and grow, helping me digest information and improve myself, and perhaps have a contribution, however insignificant, to make things better around me.

One question I get sometimes, is how did you do it? How did I get to 100 articles? The answer is shockingly simple. One at a time. Just get on it, finish one, then move to the other. Find my rhythm, my process, and keep going. Get feedback, adjust, and keep going. I wish I had some earth-shattering revelation on how to make it happen, but frankly, there is none.

I have tested this when learning languages, playing piano, lifting weights, studying chess, practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and a bunch of other activities. You have to show up and put in the work. That is always going to be the main thing. Whatever research, training, or preparation you do, DOING what you want to improve is key. Many thinkers — from Roman philosopher Musonius Rufus (see his lecture on theory vs practice) to the modern author Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s views in Anti-Fragile (on how artisans, craftsmen, and tinkerers are the ones who get things done and move forward, whereas theorists rarely deliver) say the same thing. You have to DO. Skill development without practice, trial, and error is not possible.

Of course, I am not saying you should not do your research. I am not saying you should not read about how to do the activity, and how to learn the skill. Of course not. Find good books about writing. Watch YouTube videos and listen to advise from good writers. But theory alone won’t get you there. Practice without theory will always beat theory without practice. Practice plus theory is a superpower.

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article about why I wrote (you can find it here). At the time, my primary motivation was just to get better at writing. That simple. I had some thoughts about what I wanted to write about, some things I wanted to share, and others I wanted to explore. And off I went. One article at a time.

So what has been my experience so far?

Here are 5 changes that I felt in myself:

My writing became better (or so I think). This is perhaps the most obvious change. Still, a long way to go of course, but I realize that as I kept at it on Medium, my writing has improved. I used to dread writing long documents at work but now get on it a lot more comfortably. Structuring, editing, and finalizing have become easier. I got faster too. What used to take me a week now takes me a few hours. Improvements in my writing have helped me ship more confidently, but more on that below.
My speech has improved. For years I thought I was a good speaker. But now, somewhat unexpectedly, I feel like my speaking skills have improved too—structure, clarity, delivery, brevity. I believe as I write better, I think better, which is why the speech gets better too. This means I can be more impactful when I speak — something that is important in my work, but also in life in general. When you write, you see how messy your thinking can be. What you think you were crystal clear about — turns out, you are not. As you try to articulate a point in writing, you need to consider opposite views, improve the argumentation, and do additional research if necessary. As I read on Farnam Street blog once, writing makes it difficult to hide poor thinking. Writing encourages honesty with yourself and that translates into your speech.
My ability to focus got better. I am well aware that distractions are a problem, especially with the advent of mobile phones. But as I kept writing, my ability to zoom in on the task at hand improved tremendously. As Andrew Huberman explains, focus is something we can train and I experienced precisely that. As my articles got longer over time, the ability to focus has become more and more important. I got better at zooming in on a task at a moment’s notice. And it has been helpful to me in all aspects of my life.
My ability to ship has improved. This is another thing that can be improved with practice. I have always been a procrastinator. So producing an article per week or so was hard at the beginning, but it got better over time. I had to remind myself to be comfortable finalizing and posting the article once it was reasonably good, even if I was sure it could be improved. In writing, I feel there is always room for improvement. Of course, I don’t want to post a sub-par product. But if the process of improving and editing causes constant delays, then you should be careful not to hide your discomfort for shipping behind your quest to perfect your work. Another big factor was friends who were well aware of my interest in writing, and became my “accountability partners”. Their encouragement has been invaluable. I believe I also set realistic targets, aiming at 40–45 articles per year, rather than, say, 52. It was clear to me that there would be weeks when I would not be able to finalize articles. Finally, I read and re-read Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art and Seth Godin’s The Practice, their books are some of the best when it comes to advice about shipping and dealing with procrastination.
My listening skills improved. This is one thing I need to work on continuously. But writing certainly helps. I saw somewhere that writing is akin to exercise for the brain. As part of this process, your “information radar” becomes more powerful and more selective. You are constantly on the lookout for ideas. And conversations can be a great source of ideas. You can test, question, accept, or dismiss views, and to be able to do a quality job at this, you need to listen. Better listening can also be helpful to your writing — if you find good “sparring partners”, the back and forth can be a lot of fun, but also a great practice ground for the ideas that you want to write about.

As I changed, so did my writing. Here are 4 changes that have taken place in my writing.

The topics I initially thought I would be writing about, changed quite a bit. I write a lot more on literature, stoicism, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu, than I thought I would. When I started, I put together a list of some 20 topics I thought I would write about. Now, at article 100, I have only tackled half of the original 20. For example, I did not think I would be writing about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. But after writing one article, I wrote another, and then another. As my skills in BJJ grew, so did my capacity to write about it and (hopefully) be of use to the BJJ practitioners who come across my articles.
My articles got longer. My first articles were 3 to 4 minutes of reading time long. My last dozen are an average of 10. So while my production pace (one article a week or so) has not changed, the length of the articles I produce has more than doubled — which tells me that I have gotten better and faster at writing. Of course, I need to watch this so the articles do not get too long and bore the readers.
My list of drafts ballooned to over 100. As I wrote about a topic, read about another, or had an interesting conversation, ideas started popping into my head. All the time. Linking different concepts, a different way of presenting something, sharing my takeaways from a book, recommending books or music pieces, offering exercise advice, and so on. My draft list is a dynamic place where nothing ever stays the same. Sometimes I prune my draft list so it does not go out of control, and as I go over the list, I delete, change, or merge drafts. I thought I would quickly run out of things to write about, but the opposite has happened. But the idea generation is continuous. That was one of the biggest surprises. A related piece of advice is — inspiration is fleeting — act on it immediately. If an idea for an article comes up, you need to write it down somewhere. I immediately open a new draft on Medium or take notes in my Evernote. As a minimum, I jot down ideas on a piece of paper — I started taking photos of these pieces of paper to make sure I didn’t lose the ideas.
My reach has expanded. For a while, my page had 20–30 views a day. It is over 300 a day now. At first, most of the people who read my articles were the people I knew personally. Today, most of the feedback I get is from people I have never met before. The great thing about writing is it compounds much better than speech. You can reach a lot more people. Sure, YouTube has made it possible for speech to reach wide audiences as well, but writing will always have the advantages that speech does not — you can read, and then go back to the text as many times as you want. Finding the right part of the written message is much easier than searching through a YouTube video, despite all the technical possibilities (bookmarks, timestamps, etc.) available now. Thanks to the Internet, ideas can find their clients and consumers much more effectively. Writers no longer need institutions to reach their audiences. We can build our audience on our own now.

Finally, here are 4 takeaways on skill acquisition relevant to writing, which I think are also applicable in other domains:

When learning any skill, at the early stages, quantity beats quality. This is huge. Of course, the practice has to be deliberate, not random or robotic (Check out Peak by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, my takeaways here). But the curious thing about writing is, it forces you to be deliberate. This is not the same as practicing things where you can repeat something without improving — say when you mindlessly practice a physical movement. The more you write, the better you will probably get at it. The author James Clear refers to a story where in a photography class the teacher divided his class into two groups. One focused solely on quantity, while the other focused on quality. At the end of the test period, the quantity group ended up producing the work of the best quality. As they churned product after product, they could learn from their mistakes and improved visibly. At the same time, the quality group kept theorizing and in the end, did not have much to show for it.
Do not overthink trends and statistics. Keep at it. It is easy to be discouraged when the number of your readers is very small. When for weeks a month, no one claps, likes, or comments on your work. You put your heart and soul into it and the internet is silent. It is important to remember two things. One, the numbers will go up or down for reasons out of your control — something about the algorithm, or one particular article that got viral and generated a lot of interest. Focus on what you control instead — regularly delivering good quality writing. What you think will resonate, sometimes does not. What you do not expect to make an impact, suddenly becomes a hit. So sure, track the trends and statistics, but do not be obsessed with them. Second, I remember Chris Williamson talking about it — 90 percent of all podcasts do not go beyond episode 3. And the 90 percent of the remaining ones do not get to episode 21. So if you do episode 21 of your podcast, you are already in the 1% of all podcast creators. The takeaway here is the importance of persistence, but also that without writing the 1st, the 4th, and the 21st article, you never get to your number 100. Just like no one becomes a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu without going through the journey of being a white, blue, purple, and brown belt first.
Do not overthink what niche you should occupy. What your audience seems to focus on and what it seems to ignore is not entirely up to you. So when you look at your statistics, do not just keep churning out articles similar to what the audience has responded to. Sure, experiment with it, and see what resonates, but if you keep copying or repeating something, at some point the attention you get will fizzle out. Writers are often advised to find a niche and stick to what works. I disagree. Write what you want to write about. I am sometimes surprised to see which articles get the most attention. For example, I did not expect the article on Russian Literature (here) to be one of the most viewed and read on my blog, even coming up among the top results in Google Search on why one should read Russian literature. A genuine surprise. This then got me thinking — should I write more about literature? I wrote about Dostoevsky (here) and another one Bulgakov (here). The response has been good, and I will probably keep writing about literature, but not because it generates attention. I will write about the books and writers I love. Things I am interested in and curious about. I have written about learning methods, mental models, classical music, astrophysics, Stoicism, depression, dealing with difficult people, management, chess, movies, listening, writing, reading, and so on. Yeah, what was my niche again? :)
Get feedback. Get people who read your articles to share their thoughts. Be suspicious when they say: “Oh, it was great”. Be curious when they say: “There was one thing I did not quite agree with”. Learn from them. Feedback is a gift. So learn to ask good questions. For example, I like asking my regular readers what they think I should write about. Some of the answers I would have never guessed. I asked what was interesting, what was boring, if it was clear or confusing, if there was anything that stood out (Medium allows the readers to highlight text, so that can give good clues), what resonated with you, and so on. Have an open mind, give your ego a sleeping pill, and listen.

So where do I go from here?

Just keep going. One article at a time. As long as I enjoy writing. As long as I learn from it. As long as I feel it makes a tiny bit of a difference. As long as there are hundreds of people who place their trust in me, by spending their time reading what I write. At this point, I try not to think about turning this into a full-time job, or monetizing on Medium, or writing a book. At this point, I will just focus on the article number 101. And then the one after that. :)

If you have reached this point of the article, perhaps you are thinking about starting to write. But there is one thought that is a hard one to get over — why should people read what you write?

I had that same thought at the beginning and this question is perhaps why I did not start years earlier. What is my area of expertise? What do I feel qualified to write about? Working with refugees is perhaps the only area where I can be officially considered an expert, but turns out, as I write about literature, learning, including language learning, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and other topics, there is value I can bring in many areas.

You see, expertise is not a domain exclusive to a few world-class individuals. Many people can find a lot of useful information when learning from someone just a little bit better than they are. An Oxford academician, a world champion, or a concert pianist are so removed from ordinary people that their advice may even be counterproductive. But if I read about the experience, challenges, and lessons of someone who is working on a problem at a similar level to mine, I can relate to that, and I may find recommendations that would be immediately applicable to my situation. As James Clear says, what took someone from 9 to 10 is typically not useful for people who are trying to go from 1 to 2.

So I write because it makes me better. I lay my thoughts bare for others to see, and I learn better as a result. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, skin in the game. Writing also helps me make a tiny contribution to making the world around me better.

Here is another question that can prevent you from starting. It would have been an irrelevant question just a couple of years ago, but not anymore. Why write when there is AI? Anything anyone wants to read, they can just ask ChatGPT.

Right. And also wrong. ChatGPT is great. And will better and better. You can use it to improve your language skills, summarize books, explain concepts, help you problem solve, and so much more. It is a shame people use it nowadays to generate essays or texts that they are responsible for producing. That is cheating. Yes, it is much faster. Yes, it is probably a better quality product than what you would have written. But what you lose in the process is a chance to think more clearly. A chance to get better at testing your beliefs, structuring your thoughts, expressing yourself, reasoning, making an argument, focusing, listening, and developing a deeper understanding of things. You learn about yourself. When people read your writing they are not just reading your ideas, they get to know a part of you. Your writing is part of you just as your character and personality are part of your writing. You change and grow with your writing, and I am afraid ChatGPT cannot do that for you. Not now, not ever.

If you liked this read, check out my home page for articles about learning, self-improvement, literature, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and more. Here are some you may be interested in:

My Journey of 100 Medium Articles

Written by Rational Badger