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Setbacks Are Necessary for Success
Achieving your dreams means very little without any experience in failure.
If there was one thing that I wish someone would’ve told me about writing, it’s that you need to have incredibly thick skin in order to do it. Writing is not something for the faint of heart. It requires a certain level of toughness that I feel is often underappreciated and overlooked by newcomers. This toughness is what keeps us writing after rejection and what allows us to use the critiques that can help us become better writers.
In addition to the toughness, writing also requires a person to exhibit a fair amount of vulnerability. Without vulnerability, readers will never get to see you through your work, and instead, they’ll just see words on a screen instead of the person behind the keyboard, causing your writing to lack the character needed for it to stand out.
I often joke with my non-writer friends that writing is essentially like pouring out your heart and soul into a diary and then passing it around for all of your peers to read during lunchtime. Yes, it’s that terrifying, hence the need for thick skin and a willingness to be vulnerable.
Vulnerability and thick skin aren’t just the requirements for being a good writer, but the requirements needed to be good at virtually…