Why I’m Starting to Write on Medium

Hello everyone!

Long time lurker, first-time poster.

Really first time posting anything on the internet. I guess I had some status updates on Facebook in middle school and the occasional Snapchat stories, but otherwise nothing.

It always frightened me to put something out there. Something that could be scrutinized by anyone on the internet. What if I misspelled a word? Or what if my sentence didn’t make sense? How could I live with the agony of knowing that I’m not grammatically correct 100% of the time?

Yeah, better to stay inside and not take any risks.

So why start writing and posting on Medium now?

Reason 1

I’ve always had this desire to be rich and successful (probably not the best goal in life, but hey that’s for another post). More specifically, I want to have flexibility with what I do in life. I don’t want to be constrained by a 9 to 5 job, which is never actually 9 am to 5 pm. It’s always 8:30 am to 6 pm, then break for dinner, but still have my phone notifications on and check slack or respond to alerts that fire. It’s always on in the back of my head.

Anyway, I want to be in charge of when I work and what I work on. I constantly look up ways to make extra money online by starting a business or doing freelancing. I’ll even go as far as buying an online course on starting a Shopify company or an Amazon FBA store. While I’m watching the videos, I think, “This isn’t too hard. I could do this, I have a college degree in Business. Why not me?” I even find something that I want to sell, but right before I’m ready to pull the trigger, I stop. I freeze before taking action.

So that’s where I landed on Medium. It’s easy to post something. Writing an article is taking action. I’m putting myself out there. Embracing the uncertainty of what other people are going to think of me. Get used to doing, instead of living in my head.

Reason 2

I‘m not a good writer.

I’ve never been very good at writing. It isn’t something that I’ve enjoyed doing and I’ve never tried to get better at it. Instead, I stuck to numbers and analysis.

But writing is important. It’s how we convey ideas to one another. It’s how we express our opinions and convince others to go along with us. And as I progress in my career at corporate America, I find it more important to be a good writer.

I work for a tech company. You might think, as I did when I started, that writing isn’t important for a tech company unless you’re writing lines of code. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Maybe when you first start out at the bottom of the rung, you can get away with not writing well. However, in order to progress, you need to be able to write and communicate well. You have to convince your superiors to go along with your projects and ideas. You have to showcase your analysis or the script that you just wrote. You have to create long term visions and plans for your teams. The more you move up in the company the more important writing becomes.

I know, I know, I just said I want to get away from my 9 to 5. And I do, but at least for the time being (until I can make enough on other jobs to quit), I want to do well at my job. I still want to get that next promotion and get a raise. In order to do that, I need to write well. And in order to write well, I need to practice.

Conclusion

So there it is, why I’m writing on Medium. Time to put it out there for millions of people to see. I don’t truly believe that. I’d be shocked if more than 5 people see this post, but hey it’s something. It’s a beginning to my journey that can take me anywhere, but hopefully away from my 9 to 5 job.