Day 1: Time to hit publish

In 2015 I quit my job in hopes of becoming a writer. I dreamed of writing for magazines like The New Yorker, The New York Times, and FastCompany. But a year after I quit I looked back and realized I had done very little writing. In 365 days I published a couple blog posts and a series of angsty essays about my travels in Argentina.

That summer I visited one of my best friends in the UK. He asked me what was preventing me from writing and I told him the same excuse nearly every creative gives: I felt insecure about the quality of my work and rarely finished or published my pieces in fear of criticism.

Then he told me about an academic paper that had been published 6 years earlier that proved the most influential academics were the ones that published the most frequently. In other words quantity led to quality.

That summer I moved to Colorado and spent a month holed up in my parents house with a single goal: get published in a national magazine. Over the course of those 30 days I wrote 30 story pitches and sent them off to editors. My stories were rejected 28 times. But twice I received responses from editors at The Atlantic and Quartz respectively with interest. The next month I landed my first story in The Atlantic. Another month later I started working on a series of longform features for FastCompany.

I’d love to say that I continued pitching and writing everyday. But eventually the writers block and inner demons emerged again. By the end of the year I was hardly writing at all.

One day in this long period of writers block I woke up and started scrolling through YouTube. There I stumbled across Casey Neistat’s vlog and began binge watching videos on his channel. In the first episode of the vlog he said that he decided to challenge himself to make a video everyday. He was sick of working on long projects and wanted to publish more frequently. I quickly became obsessed with his channel and the daily vlog format.

A few days into my binge I picked up a camera and decided to make my first short film. I set a challenge of my own and decided to publish one video every week. Over the next 3 months I made 12 videos. In that short time period I learned more hard skills than I’d ever learned in my life. By the end of that year I landed two branded content deals. Somehow I had learned enough to actually get paid for my work.

It didn’t take long for the writers block to return though. It’s been two years since I challenged myself to make videos every week and I’ve only uploaded about 8 times. I told myself I wanted to pursue bigger projects and focus more on quality. But what I’m learning is that the pursuit of quality is a trap.

So that’s why I’m challenging myself to write something everyday for the next 30 days. The goal of this series won’t be poetic prose or slick story structure. The goal is to write. If I can only write a single sentence, so be it. I’ll publish that sentence.

Even as I write this now I feel my body tensing up. My 40 minute timer just went off and I’m struggling to find a conclusion.

Oh well.

Time to hit publish and move on to the next story.

About me 

Hi! I’m Michael Thomas. After selling my company, SimpleData I wrote stories for magazines like The Atlantic and FastCompany. Now I’m on a mission to fund ambitious social impact projects and help companies tell stories that inspire with my new company, Campfire Labs.