I find it very interesting that the time that I spend writing doesn’t seem to correlate with the success of what I write.
As an example, I once wrote a piece that I was very proud of that took about a week to write. Before I started I carefully outlined it. While I was writing I methodically developed each of the points. After my first draft, I printed it out and read it aloud and edited it with pen in hand. It was on a topic that should interest everyone.
I’m not going to say I released it to crickets, but won’t ever be confused for being one of my more successful posts (in fact, another random post I released that same day ran laps around it in terms of the stats.
On the other hand, this piece was one where I just woke up, threw it together in 40 minutes and hit publish before I left for work. It’s my second most successful piece ever and almost a year later it’s still attracting dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of views a day.
Like you wrote about though, there was more going on behind the scenes when I really stop and think about it. The seed had been planted 10 months earlier when I was answering questions on Quora. I ran across a question that asked “Besides exercise and reading, what productive thing can I do with ten free minutes alone?” This was related to something I had been thinking about and I thought I had a clever response, so I wrote an answer.
The day I wrote my Medium post, I was feeling uninspired and decided to try to recycle or repurpose some old content. I looked at my Quora answers and stumbled on that one. Eureka! I started writing.
So while in one sense I could say that I woke up and 40 minutes later wrote a post that has so far earned more than $1,500, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg. The ideas I shared where my own spin on lessons that I had learned from books and courses that had been ruminating in my brain for months.
There are a couple of other takeaways here. The first is that recycling content is a great idea. Your probably going to do a better job your second time around, and there are more people out there that haven’t read your article than people that have.
The next lesson is that there’s something to be said for directly answering real questions that people actually have. One of the reasons my post was so successful was because it had an amazing title: “The Most Productive Thing You Can Do With 10 Free Minutes Alone.” Here’s the thing: I didn’t even come up with that title, I lifted it directly from the question. When you use the words and images your audience uses, they feel like you understand what they want to read.
I think the biggest takeaway here though is the need to persevere. Your most successful work comes from the long-term confluence of a variety of sources that come together and become more than the sum of their parts. If you don’t stick around long enough, you won’t ever see the magic happen.