Member-only story
How To Fail At Medium
And How To Come Back From It
I’m not new here even if my follower count looks like it. I’ve been here before. And for a while, I was really enjoying myself. But metric lust, algorithmic overthinking, self-fluffed ego, and rigid ethical boundaries led to me leaving the site in a fiery hellstorm earlier this year. Don’t get me wrong, there’s not a lot that I regret. But just because I don’t regret it doesn’t mean it wasn’t wholly unnecessary.
I didn’t think I would return. My plan was to put all of my efforts into my personal site, my multi-author blog off-platform, and my podcasts. But my plan didn’t work. I wouldn’t call it a colossal miscalculation coupled with life happenstance, but it was a mild clusterf*ck at best. I failed. First, I failed at Medium. Then I failed off of Medium.
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.“ — Winston Churchill
One of my redeeming traits is that I don’t feel shame. I genuinely don’t give a crap about most of the minutia of life. It comes, it goes. It stays, it leaves. I just focus on my kids, my health, and my mental well-being and the rest is just kind of there. So my fall off the side of the Medium cliff was just that — a fall. I got up, dusted myself off…
