When You Write, Quantity Kicks Quality’s Ass

This is an attention game.

Quantity vs. quality — such a weird debate.

I’ve published almost 540 articles online within two years. Do they all have mouthwatering writing quality for the writer to seek their teeth into?

Hell no!

But somehow, I’ve managed to garner some writing success with the amount of (possibly horrible quality) articles I’ve written.

• I’ve made thousands of dollars from my writing

• I became one of the top writers on Medium

• Some of the best writers on Medium fell in love with my work

This isn’t a flex. To be honest, this shouldn't have happened to me. I don’t think my writing quality is good enough to sit at the top of the mountain with other prolific writers.

I haven’t put in enough work for those accolades.

My writing success can only be from one thing — consistency.

You Can Beat Better Writers if You Publish Enough

Let me tell you a secret.

There’s one writer during my early days on Medium that got my ass in gear. I was already inspired to write one article per day for a year, but this dude attempted to do it as well.

I couldn’t let that guy show me up.

He was that extra motivation I needed to write and publish day after day.

This guy was by far a much better writer than me. He was already a freelancer and made decent money doing that. He had more experience (and I still think he’s a better writer than me).

However, I passed him up exponentially in followers and earnings on Medium.

How? I remained consistent.

He fell off way before I did during our secret race in 2020. He began posting one article every two weeks compared to my daily articles. I never thought I’d surpass him in readers (he started with more than me). But it happened — quicker than expected.

That’s just one instance of quantity kicking quality’s ass.

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How am I so consistent?

It’s a combination of coming up with ideas, the ability to write stuff on the spot, and not really editing.

• I come up with ten writing ideas per day. It’s a technique I got from James Altucher. You’re not going to come up with ten bangers a day, but if you’re willing to come up with nine shitty ideas, you’ll have a great one in there.

• I NEVER wrote an article with an outline. I always practiced the freestyle aspect of writing early on. The more I did it, the easier it became for me to write a 500-word article from one single thought.

• My editing process is horrendous. I just write the article, wait a couple of days, and check for grammatical errors. The article is good to me as long as it flows well. I mainly focus on having an amazing headline and picture.

Writing is an out-of-body experience for me.

I’m going to sound like Mr. Miyagi, but when I’m writing, I don’t think. I let my fingers make love to the keyboard. Everything pours out — and then I have an article on my hands.

You might be a different case.

That’s why finding your particular writing process and optimizing it for speed is the best thing you can do to become more consistent.

If editing takes too long, find ways to speed up the process. Download a grammar tool. If writing takes too long, time yourself and see what parts of your article you struggle with (e.g. intro, conclusion, body). If thinking of ideas takes too long, come up with ten every single day.

You get the point.

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Final Thought

If I had to pick either quality or quantity for the rest of my life, I’d take quantity with me.

Quantity kicks quality’s ass. It puts you ahead of people who are better writers than you. That blows my mind. But it makes sense.

People are more likely to pay attention to the person who plays outside the most.

To get great consistency, all you have to do is optimize your writing process. See what aspect of the process you struggle with the most and find different ways to make them more efficient and faster.

Write on.

And publish a lot.

P.S. I wrote this article in thirty minutes:)

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Watch This Free Zoom Training Below:

In this training, I talk about:

• Ways to improve your clarity as a writer

• How to structure your newsletters

• How to hook your readers with intro templates so you never have to think about it again

• The REQUIRED access code for this training is → egGq.iC3

https://us06web.zoom.us/rec/share/Lh0qjE7qHHgJNZnzZ3n1_ZuvYv3OFFp-XBYyRF4XiMWrT9cNqMaRECjFy-nhFxG3._5EQFbzSKAHcXyqu