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8 Things I Started Doing That Made Me 1% Better On Medium (And Everywhere Else)

none of them felt like progress while I was doing them

I used to think getting better meant a big change.

new strategy, new schedule, new version of myself waiting on the other side of enough effort.

It wasn’t that.

It was eight small things, none of which felt like anything on the day I did them.

A year later, stacked up, they were the entire difference.

1. I started reading my own articles a week after publishing, not the day of

The day of, you’re too attached to see it clearly. A week later, you read it like a stranger. That’s when you actually learn something.

2. I started writing the honest first paragraph before the “good” one

I’d write what I actually meant, then rewrite it into something that sounded smarter. Turns out the first version was almost always the better one. now I just publish that.

3. I started tracking which sentence people actually quoted back to me

Not which article did numbers. Which single line. That tells you more about your actual voice than any analytics dashboard.

4. I started letting a draft sit overnight even when I was excited about it

Especially when I was excited about it. Excitement and quality are not the same feeling, and I kept confusing them.

5. I started saying “I don’t know” in articles instead of forcing a conclusion

Readers trust an honest “I don’t know” more than a confident answer you made up to sound complete. That surprised me. It shouldn’t have.

6. I started writing down the ideas I thought were too small to be articles

Half of my best pieces came from a note I almost didn’t bother writing down because it seemed too obvious or too small to matter.

7. I started replying to the one comment that disagreed with me, not just the nice ones

It’s uncomfortable. It’s also where I learned the most about what I’d actually said versus what I thought I’d said.

8. I started measuring the week, not the day

A bad day used to wreck my motivation for three more days. zooming out to the week made a single flop irrelevant, and irrelevant things stop being able to knock you off course.

None of these is dramatic. none of them would make a good headline on their own.

But 1% isn’t dramatic. That’s the whole point of it. It’s the thing that looks like nothing is happening right up until you look back, and it’s the entire reason something did.

[embed]Nobody Is Watching You Post At 2 Likes. That’s Exactly Why It Matters. The version of you that quits here never finds out what was on the other sidemedium.com

[embed]I Didn’t Want to Be Rich. I Just Wanted to Make $1 Online. That one dollar almost broke me. It also changed everything.medium.com

Before you go

I write things like this once or twice a week — the honest version, not the optimized one. Escape The Ordinary — if that’s your thing, come find me there.

If this helped, you can buy me a coffee or check out the Writing HUB on Ko-fi.

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