Why I Gave Up on Medium Success (And Why You Should, Too)
The surprising truth about defeatism.
Trying to be a success on Medium is hard — so I’m giving up.
That’s it. That’s the article. Subscribe below.
Ok, ok, maybe I do need to elaborate on this some more as it sounds a smudge defeatist and I’m essentially telling anybody who reads this that their dreams of Medium-fame will never happen.
Why should I listen to you? You only have like 2 subscribers.
Two things, mostly. First of all — ouch, that hurt — and number two, I’m going to argue that trying to be successful on Medium is killing your confidence, drive, and creative spirit. How do I know? Because that’s what happened to me.
I went from an eager Mediumer (not a word, but you know what I mean) full of p*ss and vinegar to an unmotivated, doubt-ridden hermit because I was too engaged with the fruitless pursuit of trying to be popular here. If an article I had spent a lot of time working on received hardly any reads, then I’d overthink it for ages and deem it a failure. I started to doubt my own work, and maybe you are too.
I had forgotten about that age-old paradox — that writing to be popular will your writing worse. If your writing sucks, then your blog will never be popular. Rinse and repeat.
It was only when I freed myself from the shackles of popularity that I started to enjoy blogging on here again. If this piece gets 2 or 2 million views, I’ll remain indifferent. You should, too.
Medium is not a rat race
No matter what people tell you, the goal of any blog is to provide value to your readers and create content that the audience can see themselves in.
It is not, and never will be, a popularity contest or a viable money-making option. Seriously. If making thousands upon thousands via the Partner Program was easy, then everybody and their mother would have a Medium account. I’m not saying it’s impossible and there’s certainly nothing wrong with having those ambitions, but if the goal of your page is simply to make money, then you’re going to have a bad time.
Allow me, if you let me, to describe my not-so-scientifically researched formula for wildly popular Medium blogs. We’ll call this the Medium Secret Sauce, and note that if anyone uses this term in the future, you’ll owe me royalties:
Successful Medium pages provide immense amounts of value for their readers. The creators of these pages think like readers, not writers, and they provide content that readers can see themselves in. The more often they’re able to achieve this, the bigger their stature grows.
Only a handful of pages possess the Medium Secret Sauce, and those people don’t give a scooby how many page views or shares they get. I mean, they probably do, but that’s not what guides them. Trying to achieve the Secret Sauce is hard enough, and the last thing you need is to be worrying about how popular you’re going to become.
The process is everything
It sounds cheesy, but the fact that we’re able to self-publish is a gift in itself. In two, four, or ten years' time, someone could stumble upon your work, share it around, and boom — you’re successful in a different time, just like Vincent Van Gogh or Nick Drake.
Maybe your work was just too deep for your contemporaries
I’ve learned to focus my efforts on creating. Everything else is outside my control. It’d be great if, for example, you liked this piece and gave it a clap, but I can’t control what anybody else does. All I have is my process.
It’ll take a while to fully reclaim my sanity, but realising that my only responsibility is to create helps Medium become a lot more manageable. I know I’ll never have 100,000 subscribers anytime soon, and that’s okay with me.
