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8 Unpopular (But Practical) Writing Lessons I Learned After Publishing 200 Articles

#6 Your friends don’t care about your newsletter

Cal Axe
ILLUMINATION
5 min readOct 25, 2024

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Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash

I often think about this quote from Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art.”

“The playing field is only level in heaven.”

He means you’re never going to have a perfect day or a perfect situation. I wrote the outline for this article from an Irish Pub at the Hilton Hotel in Chicago. I watched my girlfriend run the Chicago Marathon the next day, and she crushed it.

A hotel pub isn’t my ideal place to write, but I learned to write despite what’s happening around me.

Despite the trends.

Despite the changes to the platform.

Despite the changes in your life.

Writers play it as it lies.

I’ve been writing online for five years now and have written over 200 articles. Here are eight other practical lessons I learned about the craft.

1.) Your first draft will always be unreadable

I believe most people never get started writing because they can’t accept this simple fact:

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ILLUMINATION

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Cal Axe
Cal Axe

Written by Cal Axe

Practical advice about writing and running | Subscribe https://runwithcalaxe.substack.com

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