Don’t Wonder What Could’ve Been and Seize Your Opportunity
Learning to take a chance on yourself and building your future
Growing an audience and focusing on the writing
I‘m writing this about seizing opportunities for earning and other investments in myself on the writing platform. This lesson can and should be applied to life in general, of course, and considering all I’ve been through is definitely a huge takeaway from life’s lessons. I’ve voluntarily kept myself out of the money game with this journey because I’m trying to see how far my reach can go when I solely focus on the writing and not the monetary gain at all.
Sharing ideas and building a community and an audience
Now I’m nearly 8 months into my journey. I started on here back in August 2021. I had no idea what I was going to do here. I just wanted to try something different than what I had been doing. I had never written anything before except for school, much less online for an audience of people. I seized the opportunity to take a chance on myself. I had to do something that I could look back on and see some progress from. If I wasn’t going to write for myself, I’d be writing to try to help enrich other people’s lives with the lessons of my past and my experiences.
Growing through the love of the craft
That has worked out way better than I had ever imagined. I’m close to an audience now of nearly 1,000 followers and over 50,000 views, most of the views being in my most prolific last three months. I started writing because I loved it, not because I felt like I had to force myself to put something out there. I got to a point where I’d fully seized my opportunity and the growth was proof of that.
Maybe one regret...
There is one thing I could’ve done better and that I should’ve listened to other brilliant writers about though. I should’ve monetized my work once I was eligible for the Partner Program. I started considering it as I got closer. I just never fully seized that. Part of the reason is that I saw how money affected the way top writers created content, in my opinion.
Another reason was that I was scared that I would very much become like that as well and lose sight of the journey and growing through writing. I wanted to continue to write how I wanted to and what I wanted to without having to feel guilty about earning while doing it.
Don’t want to have to be that mindful of limited income
I know, at this point, that my work is good enough to seize my moment and create some extra income for myself as I struggle through some obstacles in my life currently that have my partner and me accounting for every penny. We even switched phone carriers recently because in large part we had to pay even less than the $77 we were paying with T-Mobile prepaid for two phones.
For me, being validated through the views has been enough for me at this point. It does make me wonder at times though how that would’ve translated through the earnings in the Partner Program. I definitely signed up at the very first chance I got once I hit that 100 follower mark. I’ve just left the meter my stories toggle alone and also left the subscriber link out of my stories as well. I really, really didn’t want to earn any money doing this.
Learning from my experiences throughout and finally making the decision to invest fully in myself
Now that I’m getting much wiser in my journey and much further into it and have gained the confidence to write and share my ideas and experiences freely, the thought of seizing my next opportunity weighs on my mind more and more. I think that there will be a tipping point for me. I don’t know when that’ll be. It could be as soon as my next story, it could be a year from now.
I just know that when I decide to, which now I’ve decided that I definitely will because of “carpe diem, and all that jazz,” but at that point, I’ll be all in growing my audience, keeping my quality up, and learning to invest in myself more freely. I’ve figured out that I can actually do this and I’ve gotten pretty efficient and good at it.
I need to seize each opportunity I get to gain more confidence, attract the right type of people into my life, and turn my misfortune around. I’m in a tough spot and I’ve shown I can overcome. Now, the next step for me is finding a path to prove that I can not only overcome but excel and thrive.
