You’ve Been Using Medium Completely Wrong

A Guide To Actual Self-Improvement Using This Website

The vast amount of self-improvement posts on Medium make this website a treasure trove of information and self-help advice from people with experience, and I really appreciate that.

Until a few days ago, I used to devour these posts, thinking it would actually help me improve. That was until I came to the realisation that just reading them wasn’t going help me achieve anything.

Self-improvement requires an active mindset, one that needs constant measurement and refinement, and needs to be maintained over time.

By only reading articles, it’s passive, almost like watching Youtube or binging Netflix.

So how do you actually use Medium to improve?

Three steps — record, identify, and strengthen.

Record

Possibly the most important step to use Medium to improve, you must constantly record the activity or behaviour you want to improve. Want to write everyday? Use a calendar and cross off everyday that you wrote. Want to stop wasting time? Document every time you did something other than the work you were supposed to be doing. The key is to be aware of all the times you succeeded or failed so that you can be accountable.

Identify

Now that you know where you are going wrong, you can find out what are the obstacles, environments and activities that prevent you from reaching your goal. This is usually the problem you found an article to fix.

For example, I wanted to come up with more ideas, and to do so, tried to use Charles Chu’s Isaac Asimov: How to Never Run Out of Ideas Again post. After recording when I came up with good ideas and identifying where I fell short, I realised that there were many instances where I did things that the post explained how to avoid. What was left to do was to apply that advice.

Strengthen

Now that you know what to do, you must constantly follow the advice or activities mentioned, and then measure your results compared to before you did so. Like this, you should be able to find a marked improvement between before and after using the advice from the Medium post.

Of course, this method of recording, identifying and strengthening can apply to any form of improvement, not just using Medium. The important thing is that you make an effort to improve and not see these posts as just passive entertainment, which I confess, I was guilty of doing.

I’ll use this post as a catalyst to actually continue applying this method to coming up with ideas and come back to you in three months, and hey, thanks to Medium and a bit of application, it might just work.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Sarvasv