Stop looking for the secret, start focusing on improvement.
Adrian Drew
As a professional writer and business owner, I receive emails on a daily basis from people asking how to carve a career just like I did. It’s both flattering and disheartening. Flattering because people believe that I, a 21-year-old from England, have the wisdom to advise them on such topics. Disheartening because I don’t.
Let me backtrack a little here. I’m not going to sit here and say that I know absolutely nothing about writing or business, because that isn't true. If it were, I’d be a fraud, since that’s practically all I write about.
The truth I’m quickly learning, however, is that nobody has the answers we think they do. It’s all an illusion.
When I was just starting out, I looked up to those higher than me on the professional ladder of writing and assumed they had some magic bullet or secret hack that got them there. They didn’t.
Niklas Göke proved that to me around three years ago. Then, Nik was somebody I admired and looked up to but had never spoken to.
“Nik, what is it? What’s the one thing you and all these other writers are doing to build such huge audiences and make so much money? Come on, man. I won’t tell anybody. What’s the key? What’s the secret?” I pleaded in a naive Twitter DM.
Anticipating an essay-long message decorated with all the kernels of wisdom I expected Nik and his co-writers to have, I was shocked to read his response.
“Adrian, there is no secret. You’ve just got to write. Every day. Don’t stop writing until you get to where you want to be.”
A Bitter Pill to Swallow
In our pursuit of wealth, fame, and career success, we often lose sight of what’s most important. That is, simply improving our craft. Achieving mastery. Becoming the best at what we love to do.
Ryan Holiday went more in-depth on this point in an article for Human Parts back in 2018. Holiday outlines a conversation that Jerry Seinfeld had with a budding, younger comedian. The young man asks Seinfeld for tips on gaining exposure through marketing his work.
Seinfeld, a veteran in the industry, looked puzzled.
“Exposure? Marketing? Seinfeld asks. Just work on your act.”
Although a simple throwaway comment, we can learn infinite amounts of wisdom from Seinfeld's bewilderment. What we have in this exchange are two types of people.
One, young and naive, seeking the secret sauce that he believes his career success to depend upon from an experienced, established professional. The other, a seasoned comedian in possession of one simple truth. That is, that there is only one important thing for creatives to pursue. Improvement.
We live in a world predicated on quick-fixes. Fake gurus populate every corner of YouTube, seeking to convince us that they hold the keys to career mastery and financial freedom. The truth, however, is that they don’t.
So why do we place so much faith in these charlatans? It’s simple. In assuming that others possess the tools to fix the broken bridge between us and success, we relinquish ourselves of any potential blame. We can look at our failures and point the finger at our coaches for misinforming us.
Placing our faith in external advice and counseling makes it easy for us to ignore our inferiority. Confronting it head-on is the only way for us to truly become better.
I’m not writing this piece to denounce and discredit all coaches out there. In fact, I think coaching can be an incredibly valuable tool. Receiving guidance from those more experienced than us can both serve to hone our skills and humble us — a reminder that others are better than us and we still have a long way to go.
Rather, the point I’m making is this: There are no shortcuts to success. As Ben Horowitz put it,
“There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.”
The Secret is That There is No Secret
In the world of creativity, I think we’ve all become far too focused on trying to find quick and easy formulas for success — ways to ‘hack’ the system and build an audience instantly. We want to know how to write articles that’ll bring in massive amounts of readers or how to produce YouTube content that’ll skyrocket us into stardom overnight.
We look to giants like Hemingway and Orwell and even modern-day stars like PewDiePie and Casey Neistat for the ‘secrets’. We try to replicate what they’re doing, desperately wishing that our hopeless attempts to copy and steal and plagiarise will land us the views and engagements we’re so desperately searching for.
We’re looking for the secret to success. And the secret is that there is no secret. That’s not how this industry works.
Do you think Hemingway sat at a desk all day as an amateur, trying to figure out how to ‘hack’ his way into national newspapers and make a name for himself? Or do you think Orwell started out by copying what Dickens and Austen had done centuries before, mimicking popular trends in an attempt to coerce people into reading his content?
Of course not.
They practiced and practiced, writing every single day and reading the works of greats until they mastered their craft. Their work has been revered for many hundreds of years since its publication, not because they cracked some code or figured out an algorithm, but because their writing is great and people want to read it.
And here we are, at the beginnings of our careers, busy searching for hacks, memorizing algorithms, and paying to promote ourselves on social media instead of actually trying to improve our work.
In the beginning, middle and end, that should be your primary focus. For sure — continue to promote yourself online and maximize your engagements by marketing your content, but keep your eye on the ball. None of that stuff is anywhere near as important as mastering your craft.
When people love your content, content crafted from pure hard work, perseverance, and a die-hard commitment to honing your art, they’ll respond to it. They’ll clap your stories. They’ll like your videos. They’ll invest in your business.
They’ll support you as a creator not because you deceived them using clickbait, not because they stumbled across your sponsored Instagram story, and certainly not because you ripped-off somebody else’s original work.
They’ll support you because they like the work you produce. That’s it.
In the words of Ryan Holiday,
‘An artist’s job is to create masterpieces. Period.’
So learn how to create masterpieces.
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