Write 100 Medium Articles To Find Your Voice

About a year ago, at the urging of a friend, I decided to get on Medium to write a few articles. About what? I had no idea. Correction — I had every idea, too many ideas — but no idea what I should be focusing on. Or even that I should be focusing on something. Sound familiar?

After writing 3 or 4 articles — on completely different subjects with no rhyme or reason — I stumbled across an article written by another Medium writer. It wasn’t just practical writing advice. It freed my mind from the burden of wondering what to write and how to write it, and more importantly — what the hell to do with it once it was written.

The advice was simple: write 100 articles. That’s it.

I can’t take credit for that sage advice, but I can pass it along to you. Here’s why it helped me:

When I first started writing on Medium I suffered from “paralysis by analysis” — stressing about how to gain followers, promote my articles, and get my message out to the world. Mind you, I’d only written a few articles and I wasn’t even sure what my message was (yet) — so this presented a problem. I didn’t want to “waste time” writing something if it wouldn’t help me reach my goal. Oh…did I mention that I had no idea what my goal was either?

The article told me just to write — and keep…