When we think of self improvement hacks we often look to cold showers, stretching, walking 10,000 steps a day, but one of the workouts we are neglecting is the one for our mind. Yes, the physical gym is important but what about the mental one? In our day in age of phone addiction and doomscrolling, perhaps the only remedy is the practice of writing.
Image sources: Pinterest (not author’s own)
As much as I advocate for consumption of educational content, creating through writing has a different effect. A lot of us are guilty of consuming a lot of self improvement content, we read Atomic Habits now because we have read a book on habits we have just absorbed the skill of keeping to ‘good’ habits. Reading and learning are essential, there’s no doubt about that, but actively creating has different benefits.
Writing is a habit that a lot of us neglect after we leave formal education. I used to think that only writers wrote, but thinking about that - it’s absurd. Not everyone that runs is a runner, not everyone that meditates is a monk. We can engage in these things even if we don’t feel like we’re an expert in them because they have a positive benefit to our lives.
Here’s the benefits i’ve seen:
Monetised on Youtube within 3 weeks of consistent posting using my writing as a base
An idea I popularised ‘Frugal Chic®’ featured in publications like Who What Wear
2,000 subscribers to my newsletter, growing by 30+ a day (I totally get a have a platform to drive traffic to it.)
Greater feeling of satisfaction about creating content, it’s undeniably more meaningful than putting out constant 60 second videos
What do I mean by writing?
There’s lots of forms, a lot of people start on microblogging platforms like X, Threads or even Substack has a feature. Let’s be real, 1,000 words a day for someone doing a 9-5 may not be realistic, maybe that’s what you’ll end up doing but you have to fall in love with the habit first.
If you think that one does not magically wake up one day with a 6-pack or 1m followers, it’s the product of consistently showing up every day. So I encourage you to write in a way that feels feasible to you but make it a consistent habit to actually see the benefits.
That being said, I said 1,000 for a reason. It sits in that sweet spot between too short to mean anything and too long to actually get done.
Here’s why:
Depth without rambling – A tweet or short post forces you to condense an idea into one line. Great for clarity, but it can’t always carry nuance. On the contrary, a 3,000-word essay risks fluff. Around 1,000 words forces you to actually wrestle with an idea without losing your reader’s attention.
Habit-building – 1,000 is big enough to feel like a challenge but not so big that it’s crushing. If you wrote 300 words, you’d barely get warmed up. If you aim for 2,000, you’ll probably procrastinate. Hitting 1,000 regularly is like doing enough reps at the gym to actually see growth.
Compounding effect – At 1,000 words a day, you’re sitting on 30,000 words in a month. That’s a book draft in three months. A blog archive in a year. Thousands of ideas you’ve actually processed instead of just letting them float in your head.
Clarity of thought – The process of getting to 1,000 words forces you past the surface level. When we write, we consolidate our thinking, maybe reach different conclusions, we’re forced to justify these thoughts with sources or use literary devices.
Now, you can ‘journal’ which might look more like a stream of consciousness and they can be extremely beneficial and therapeutic. What I mean when I say writing is writing on a public platform via a newsletter system or blog like Substack and Beehiiv. The effects of these two things are different, of course, a journal is personal, you don’t care about the person reading it - yes, you’re still improving your writing skills, but I would argue there is a lot more benefit in writing publicly. I tell people to ‘just start’ posting their content, their fear is that they don’t want to put their face our there and I totally get that, but maybe writing is the antidote for that. There are other ways of getting your ideas out there.
Furthermore, if you’re a digital creator it allows you to transcend the label of just being a ‘content creator’. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but something I noticed when walking into Waterstones the other day - stepping in there with now a creator lens instead of a consumer lens - I noticed many creators like Ali Abdaal, Gary Stevenson had written books. I knew Ali Abdaal had, but it really put things into perspective. Now I am not saying go write a book, my point is that these creators had translated their work into a different medium.
As someone fairly new to the creator economy, I didn’t quite understand the difference in weight that the different platforms had. It’s fairly easy to grow on a platform like TikTok, that pushes your content to strangers constantly, YouTube and Substack are incomparable. 100k followers on TikTok could translate to 10k subs on YouTube and 100 subs on Substack. Therefore, the only way to truly reach a ‘loyal’ audience invested in your ‘work’ is to use these long forms, including writing platforms and newsletters.
How to pick the topics
Since you’re writing to an audience a bit of personal branding comes in here. Now you don’t need to go and make a whole Canva Deck and get a professional profile picture taken, what I mean by this is focus on a topic of expertise that could be beneficial to talk about. It’s as simple as that, it doesn’t necessarily have to be something you have a full on qualification in because you’re not writing a textbook, you’re sharing an interesting personal perspective on that topic. In my case, I always ensured what I was talking about came from a personal lens instead of dictating to people how they should be. As long as you make that clear distinction in your writing, it is totally fine. Dropping in stories or lessons from your past sharpens your storytelling skills which inevitably help with your speaking and communication skills.
Writing prompts:
What transformation have you undergone and how did you get there? Mental or physical glow up? Spill it all.
Hot take - what’s something controversial you think or believe that you can only really explain in a long form setting.
Think about an area of expertise that maybe took you years to master, what would you tell someone starting?
If you could convince your close friend to take up one life-changing habit or mindset shift, what would it be?
A framework you can copy
Start with a hook, this is where you have to use your copywriting skills, you might have a great article but if it doesn’t grab attention how are people going to find it. Instead of something generic like ‘why I love writing’ I make it directed to the person reading ‘why writing a day is the smart girl hobby you’re missing out on’, instead of ‘here’s the best ways to save money,’ how I saved x amount in this window of time’ it’s more personal, it shows metrics and builds curiosity.
Make promises give context as to why this is important for the reader, ‘by the end you’ll leave with actionable steps you can implement right away’.
Deliver value - a transformation undergone, lessons learnt, mistakes to avoid, the options are endless, but ensure each point is truly valuable for the reader, the more personal and unique the better.
Action steps - people like summarisations, and let’s be real, very few people reading your newsletter will read the whole thing, for the skimmers, you need a quick bit of info at the end.
Here’s what to do TODAY:
Start small, write 1 thread a day, sharing your personal insights on a clear topic
Have the goal of creating value for others
Promote your work on social media and drive traffic to your newsletter by perhaps offering a free digital download
Hopefully, this gave you the inspiration to take this up. It’s particularly beneficial if you want to create a stronger connection with an existing audience. Or if you don’t post on social media at all, it could be the one thing you put out into the world.
The key ethos behind the Frugal Chic is to pursue intellectualism, create more than you consume, this hobby is extremely fitting.
Don’t forget to check out links to resources here.
Until next time,
Mia xx