Ahoy and happy Monday!
Welcome to another week of Start Writing Online—where every week we dive into 1 of the 10 biggest problems all writers face:
- Distractions
- Over-editing
- Perfectionism
- Procrastination
- Self-confidence
- Generating ideas
- Impostor syndrome
- Writing consistently
- Finding time to write
- Loose feedback loops
(And, of course, if you want to crush all 10 of these AND master the fundamentals of Digital Writing in just 30 days, we'd love to have you in the next cohort of Ship 30 for 30!)
This week, we want to help you make writing a consistent practice by explaining the unexpected benefits we’ve gained from writing and publishing every day.
Writing and publishing every day has changed our lives.
For Cole, answering one question every day for a year on Quora led him to quit his 9-5 job as a junior copywriter, become a Premium Ghostwriter, and build his ghostwriting agency to 7 figures in revenue. It led to networking opportunities and ultimately put him in touch with Dickie and the creation of Ship 30. And all of this came from making that small (but important) commitment to himself.
For Dickie, it was writing every day for 30 days on X which changed his life.
After writing a thread a day for 28 days straight (and not seeing any results), Dickie almost gave up. But his 29th thread went viral (a curation of Balaji Srinivasan’s thinking about technology, inflation, the future of cities, and a ton more). It racked up over 1,000 likes, got retweeted by Naval, and Dickie was quickly having conversations with people he looked up to on X.
This led to his first ghostwriting client and, ultimately, the creation of Ship 30—and the rest, as they say, is history.
It’s so easy to point to these “tangible” benefits of writing: the networking and business opportunities people tend to focus on.
There are so many benefits to writing and publishing every day, beyond just the financial.
Here are five unexpected ways writing every day can lead to massive personal growth which we hope will motivate you to build your own writing and publishing habit.
Let’s dive in!
1. Give yourself accountability
Setting yourself a writing and publishing goal and sticking to it is transformational.
This kind of commitment is a promise to yourself. And as you build a consistent streak of keeping that promise, this starts to trickle into all other areas of your life:
- How you approach your nutrition
- Building more exercise into your routine
- Making extra time for important relationships
We see it over and over again in Ship 30—the writer’s act of showing up daily fosters a greater sense of accountability in other areas of their lives, too.
2. Get clarity on your feelings
Everyone talks about how writing leads to clarity of thought.
What doesn't get talked about is how writing leads to clarity of emotion. When you write about a topic, you discover how you feel about it and why it matters to you personally. This motivates you to write about it more (and so reinforces your writing habit) or shows you which topics just aren’t as important to you as you previously thought. In short, it creates and reinforces your worldview.
In Ship 30, we call this listening for internal “signal,” and it’s just as critical to finding your way as a writer as the feedback you get from your readers.
3. Create your writing “voice”
So many writers stress over "finding their voice."
But when you write a lot, you are actively creating your voice. Over time, as if by magic, your voice appears on the page in front of you. The most exciting part of this process, though, is you can be conscious in the creation process: experiment with different voices and blend different archetypes until you find one that suits you.
This leads us nicely to the next unexpected benefit.
4. Build your self-confidence
If you’re socially anxious or insecure (and everyone is to some extent), writing and publishing every day is one of the most powerful ways to build self-confidence.
When you write, you go through a three-stage process:
- You practice your ideas, beliefs, and convictions.
- The more you write, the better you get at articulating them
- As you get better at articulating them, you learn to trust yourself
This has a massive impact across all areas of your life: at work, at home, and in your relationships.
5. Practice patience
Writing takes time because thinking takes time.
Writing is not just about putting pretty (or smart) words on the page. It's about stacking thoughts to form a perspective. Sometimes, you won’t get it right the first time. So you need to practice patience. When you can learn to be patient with yourself, your thoughts, and your writing, it's much easier to be patient with others and theirs.
That's it for today!
Chat next week!
–Dickie Bush & Nicolas Cole
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