Is Success on Medium Luck?
How Much Control Do You Have on Your Journey
When I first decided to start my journey as a writer on Medium. I wanted to know from the beginning if becoming successful is luck or skill.
I wanted to know if it was a waste of time for me to peruse this type of goal.
I was going to write on Medium anyways, but this was to tell me if I should try to “make it big”.
What I Did
In my last few articles, I posted a question at the end for people’s opinion if they think success on Medium is luck or skill.
I also went around to get in contact with other writers for their opinion, both large and small writers and everyone in between. Some responded, some didn’t, but I think I have enough information to tell.
The Results
Looking through a blatant lens about whether they said it was mainly luck or skill, the data came to this.
The trend stayed roughly the same for writers of all sizes (however I couldn’t get enough information on the top writers).
Of course, this doesn’t tell the whole story, people didn’t just say it was just luck or just skill, everyone said that it was nuanced and a bit of both.
What Does This Mean?
We can all agree that you need both. It would be best if you had the skills of a talented writer and luck smiles upon you.
To be in the top echelon of writers on the platform it takes either already being famous such as Bernie Sanders, or having a combination of luck and skill.
But which one really dominates?
Here are the main points for success being skill based:
- Keep the reader’s attention
- More effort provides a better impression
- It’s what keeps long-term growth
- Making an effective story, header, and thumbnail is a skill
- Being able to stay consistent and publish regularly is favourable to the algorithm
- Marketing your articles is an extra effort you must do
Here are the main points for success being luck based:
- An article could become viral due to luck
- All you need is one post to do well for views to accumulate exponentially
- Most of the views o recommended are bottlenecked towards a few successful articles
- To get seen is based on luck whether you appear in someone’s recommended
Both sides have strong arguments and it’s easy to gravitate towards one and you’ll have enough evidence to back it up.
I think that the biggest dictator on which you believed is from your own experience.
If you have found great success on Medium through a slow and long career, you are more likely to believe that success is based on skill.
On the other hand, you’ve probably had articles that were after-thoughts, something you spent barely any time and they went on to be one of your best-performing articles. While articles you put your heart and soul into ended up seeing a fraction of those views.
Again I want to preface that almost no one solely believed one or the other, they all had nuanced opinions and recognized both points.
My Thoughts
Looking through everyone’s points as well as my own experience. I have my input for this.
My thoughts are that success on Medium requires more luck than skill. Making a catchy and attention-grabbing thumbnail and header does require skill, however, at least in the early stages it practically luck on whether a story will do well.
Someone could get explosive growth by riding the momentum from a story that did surprisingly well.
However, maintaining success, keeping the audience and growing from there is 80–90% skill.
A story could have got you a large following, but whether they stay or read your next articles is mainly based on how good of a writer you are. Can you keep people’s attention? Make interesting stories out of events or thoughts in your life.
People can have their time in the spotlight, but it is up to you to maintain it.
