My first source of online income was royalties from the Medium articles I was writing a year and a half ago for my growing audience.
And it did well. Really well. In my first full paid month on the platform I earned $600, and in the second the story was similar, where I scored $680. As a student who was only writing when I found the spare time, I was laughing.
This went downhill in August last year though and for a while, I was right down in the dumps - Medium changed the way their earnings were awarded and mine fell through the floor, no matter how many articles I wrote.
In hindsight though, this wasn’t a bad thing. It meant that I stopped chasing random views off of unrelated pieces and got a strategy together for growing a useful business off of the back of my writing’s attention.
That’s how PARAZETTEL was born. I worked flat out whilst I had free time over the university summer break and built, marketed and launched the product.
I’m still blown away by how well-received it was that first September launch. This just goes to show that you can never tell whether something is truly a letdown or a negative. It largely depends on how you go about responding to it. I could have moped, stopped writing articles and chased something easier but instead, I looked for another way to harness the valuable eyes that my work was receiving.
Many of the negative points that I’ve experienced in my life are the same. They’re only negatives as far as you let them affect you negatively. Lost a competition? You likely know how to improve better than the person who won does. And you’ll have more motivation to do so. Lost a friend? It hurts, but now you might have more time to focus on the other things you were putting off.
Situations might not be ideal, but in my experience, they’re never the end of the world. And when they are, you won’t care anymore because the world will have ended.
I hope this acts as a little bit of motivation! It’s something that I tell myself when I feel a thing or two going wrong.
– Theo
What I’ve read this week…
I am pretty ignorant of the entirety of politics and economics. I’ve been reading the following - Foundations - Why Britain has stagnated - to try and educate myself a little more on my home country. The outlook of this entire piece seems a little woeful but I’m always one to hope, and you can read the above issue to understand why.