The Compound Effect Will Make You a Top 1% Writer
Chasing instant results won’t work. Here’s what to do instead.
Success likes to sneak up on us.
It comes slowly at first, then happens all at once.
Our tiny wins seem like nothing at the time. Not until we’ve racked up a thousand… and then their weight comes down like an avalanche.
That’s the compound effect at play. You make small gains for months, even years, until the sheer momentum finally launches you forward.
What is the compound effect?
It’s something that happens over and over again with writers.
Mark Manson chipped away at his blog for years before publishing a best-selling book. He cultivated his ideas and his audience until success was almost a given.
It also went like that for George R.R. Martin.
He wrote a slew of short stories, novels and television episodes. But it was only a decade ago that his breakout series became the HBO hit, Game of Thrones.
And it’s the same thing with writing on Medium.
You’ll see writers scraping by on just a few dollars a month. And then the next month? They’ve started bringing in thousands.
No, they haven’t found a way to game the algorithm.
They’ve just put in a lot of hard work to make the compound effect work in their favor. And the good news is that you can do it too.
How do you do it?
It’s pretty simple.
You just start writing.
More importantly, you write short, self-contained pieces.
The compound effect is all about making lots of small gains. Yes, you can still work on your larger projects, but you also need to put out work consistently.
Try and publish something every day. Even if it’s just a few hundred words.
You might think something that short is pointless. But it’s not just about building your motivation or a body of work.
It’s about building your visibility.
Click-by-click, new people get to know you, they get to know your writing.
You’ll attract new fans so long as you’re putting out quality. Even if you put out some short pieces, there are plenty of people who like shortform content!
How it makes you better
You can’t dabble in writing for a few weeks and expect a big payoff.
Consistency is key.
You don’t get good at piano by playing for six hours every Saturday. You have to practice a little bit each day over a long time before you see results.
Writing is even more of a long-term game.
People who expect an easy win exhaust themselves. They clear the field for writers who’ve kept at it for years.
The progress is almost invisible, but it manifests in a few ways:
- You build your skills: It becomes easier to arrange sentences, find the right words and communicate with style.
- You learn from mistakes: The headlines that flop let you know what doesn’t work.
- You increase your odds: The more work you send out into the world, the more likely it is that something will blow up.
This is the stuff that writers use to build their success.
Sure, it takes a lot of hard work, but if it was easy then everybody would be doing it. That’s the simple logic of the compound effect.
So can you make it work for you?
There’s still no magic formula. You’ll have good luck and bad luck. You could put your whole heart into writing and still fail.
But you’ll have a much better chance with the compound effect.
Personally, I wrote for years before I saw any reward for it. I spent most of my twenties in soul-crushing call centers, writing in my spare time, before landing a full-time writing job.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was using the compound effect to develop my skills and put together a portfolio.
Medium will reward you for the same persistence.
You just have to keep building momentum — long after everyone else stops.
