Cover Photo by Anastasia Shelepova on Unsplash
Sometimes, you just gotta be “selfish.” And remarkable.
They always tell you to write for an audience in mind. For the most part, that’s what I strive to do when I write. I write articles people can leave with lessons they can apply in their own lives. But one thing Tom Kuegler said stuck with me: “I write for myself.”
Why the heck not, right? I write a lot about skill development, and while ninety-five percent of what I write about are things I’ve experienced and lived, when people ask me precisely how I learn new skills, I still didn’t have a comprehensive answer.
So, I started writing a “learning how to learn” guide that would contain all the answers about learning. Little did I know I had so much to say on the topic. I spent over a month writing a few paragraphs every day.
The main reason I wrote this 75-minute article was that I wanted to get clarity in my own mind as to what I was doing when it came to skills development. How did I manage to learn 75 skills in the past three years? What have I learned during this crazy journey?
The article for me was some kind of journal. I think it will be useful for the right target audience, but I know it will probably tank with a general one. A typical success story is an article of a length of about five minutes and focuses on a very small aspect of a bigger topic. My article is fifteen times longer and talks about over fifty different topics.
I spent over a month of my time writing an article that will likely not make me more than thirty dollars and I regret no part of it. My friend Tim Denning wrote a book he spent months writing and thousands of dollars, and when I asked him how much he’s expecting to make with it, he told me: “Zero.”
I was baffled. He spent valuable time and money on this big project and he doesn’t expect to make any sales? Why did he do it, then? For the same reasons I wrote the 75-minute article:
I enjoyed it; and
It helped me organize my thoughts on a topic I care about.
The “return on investment” might not be immediate, but it’s there. Throughout this whole exercise, I skilled up. I’m a better researcher, content creator, and writer. There’s no better reward for my future self. It beats the thousands of dollars the piece could have made me if I stuck with the common “rules for success.”
With all that content, I can also repurpose it in many ways:
I can divide it into shorter, more focused articles;
I can convert it into a book; and
I can make a course out of it.
In fact, I’m planning to do all three options. For the most part, I wouldn’t even need to be involved much in the process. My assistant can handle the breakdown of articles and converting the article into a book. For the course, I’d just have to record short video clips.
Another reason I did it, is that it’s remarkable.
My one-word theme for this year is “remarkable.” What it means is that I aim to do what 99.99% of people don’t do. During a reflection day, I wrote down what most writers do and what I need to do to be remarkable. Writing crazy how-to guides was one thing. I don’t care that it’s an untested formula and that it’s likely to fail. At least it’s different. It’s remarkable.
I strongly believe that if I keep trying to do remarkable things, one day it will pay back greatly. As Steve Jobs said: “It’s the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world that do.”
I strongly believe that. I don’t want to write things that are already done. I’m tired of giving just another twist to a topic that’s overdone. I don’t care if that’s what people are looking for. I’m tired of being a sheep. I want to be a purple cow. And that article is a purple cow.