The Secret Key to Writing a Pop Motivational Masterpiece on Medium in Five Easy Steps
Maybe you’ve started to make your mark on Medium and you’re wondering how to take it to the next level?
Maybe you’ve started to make your mark on Medium and you’re wondering how to take it to the next level?
Perhaps you’ve perused the top posts of all time and seen that motivation dominates the blogosphere like romance dominates the fiction charts?
Maybe you’ve dreamed of tens of thousands of followers overnight but you don’t know where to start?
Don’t worry, my friend. You’ve come to the right place.
I’m here to tell you that you can achieve your wildest dreams if only you follow my five easy steps for Medium post mastery.
As my father once said, “the best way to make a million dollars is to write a book about how to make a million dollars.” So let’s go!
Step One: Sprinkle Post Liberally with Inspirational Quotes
“You are the master of your destiny. You can influence, direct and control your own environment. You can make your life what you want it to be.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
First off, know that no great inspirational piece is complete without at least one quote from Napoleon Hill. I recommend investing in his entire collection (or just pirating quotes off of Goodreads).
But I also encourage you to think BIGGER. If other writers are sprinkling their posts with only a single nugget of Hillian wisdom why not try two or three or five or twenty? Think HUGE! Your goals are only as big as you let them be.
Remember: “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.” — NH
If you’re only going to put in one NH quote, I have to ask you “What do you think of a person who only does the bare minimum?”
However, here’s a quick note of caution about quotes. Under no circumstances choose something like the following:
After spending a decade writing his epic masterpiece in secret, struggling writer Joseph Grand finally decided to read it to the hero of Albert Camus’ The Plague. The dumbfounded hero realizes Grand has written only a single sentence after ten years. Grand explains:
“What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up — after he’s read it though, of course — and say to his staff: “Gentleman, hat’s off!” … “So you see,” Grand added. “It’s got to be flawless.”
Depressing! Too much gray area. Too much existentialism. Too much thinking.
If your audience has to stop to think, you’ve failed.
You do not want to highlight the absurdity of life here. Keep your message simple and upbeat.
Think Viktor Frakl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (which is in everyone’s top ten books they’ve never read) NOT Sartre or Hamlet.
Step Two: The Secret Key to Title Creation for the Ages
“To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles”
— Hamlet
(Shakespearean soliloquies on suicide are bad choices for motivating people)
The title is the foundation of your motivational masterpiece.
If people don’t click, you don’t get recommends.
If you don’t get recommends your post has just answered the old Zen riddle: “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?”
Answer: No.
I suggest any of the following super-power formulas:
How to ABC in X number of steps
X Simple Things to Do that will [make you lots of money/achieve anything you desire/accomplish something overnight]
The Secret Key to [Unlocking any dream]
In fact, we can turn to our friend Napoleon Hill again here for inspiration, because “Our only limitations are those we set up in our own minds.”
Every great title must include one or more of the following super-charged words:
Secret
Key
Easy
Master
Surprising
Success
Formula
Step Three: The Master Formula for Success: Personal Stories
“Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
― Napoleon Hill (a good quote)
“[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (not a good quote because it’s depressing and funny and points to the fact that life is totally absurd)
Be sure to include a personal anecdote, so that people can relate to your struggles. You’ll want to exaggerate here. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to draw on a brutal concentration camp experience like Frankl, so you’ll have to improvise.
The master formula is this:
You were living in poverty/suffered a terrible setback
You failed continually because your eyes were closed to the TRUE UNDERSTANDING that would set you free
The AWAKENING: Finally you saw the SECRET KEY that everyone else was missing (and it was so obvious all along).
Take ACTION! By applying this secret key you suddenly achieved wild success almost overnight.
GIVING BACK: This secret is so powerful that it cannot be contained. You must share it with everyone else so get out there and preach my friend (and remember to make sure everyone joins your mailing list and buys your personal coaching course for the low, low price of XYZ).
Step Four: Decide What You Want (And Get It Now!)
“Set your mind on a definite goal and observe how quickly the world stands aside to let you pass.”
― Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
Of course, nothing ever happens without figuring out what you want in life. This is the one place in your post where you will tell the truth. This is actually true. If you don’t figure out where you want to go, you can’t possibly get there.
However, under no circumstances should you continue to tell the truth after revealing this critical understanding. You will NOT want to recommend any book that really helps people do what is necessary to achieve, such as Do the Work by Steven Pressfield.
Doing the work is boring!
It’s easy for anyone to “decide” that they want something so give them that instant gratification now.
Unfortunately, the rest of the equation for success is this:
Do a lot of tedious, thankless work, every day, while nobody believes in you and most days you don’t believe in yourself
Sacrifice friends, family and personal entertainment time
Dedicate yourself to your craft by making time to work on it every stinking day even when you don’t freaking feel like it
Make tiny incremental improvements but feel like you’re getting nowhere for long stretches of time
Fight through depression and self-doubt
Win the long, bloody battle inch by inch
That shit don’t sell baby!
So avoid it at all costs.
We’re talking about winning here, not losing. You want to win so much that you’re tired of winning, right?
Right!
Instead of telling people something they don’t really want to hear, focus on step five, the true secret of success in the self-help universe:
Step Five: Into the Now and Other Things that Don’t Actually Work
“I’m working on being more fully present — ”
“Where?”
“What?”
“More present where? Deeper in the moment when?”
“In the present,” she says like it’s obvious. “In the now.”
“When?”
“What?”
“What’s the now? The present, uh, time?”
“Yes,” she says in a clipped way as if speaking to a dolt, which she may well be. Again, tiredness is throwing a shroud over everything, so I can’t tell if I’m being thick or if I’ve descended into a place of thickness.
“You want to be more present in the present?”
- Jed McKenna, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment
As we saw in step four, putting in real work to achieve your dreams is bloody hard. It’s worth it because you’re doing something that brings you joy, but it’s a freaking war every second, which is why Pressfield calls it The War of Art.
But again, that shit don’t sell.
So instead what you want to do is pick any number of tried and true solutions that sound awesome but don’t actually pass the sniff test, such as:
Going more fully into the “now”
Visualizing your dreams
Meditation
The power of positive thinking
Repeating motivational mantras
Choosing how you react
The law of attraction
Do not recommend any of the things that do work:
Making time to do the work daily
Spending quality down time with family, friends and pets
Having a good sense of humor
Conclusion
That’s it! Easy right? Anyone can do it, including you, if you just put your mind to it.
Now get out there and use the mysterious law of attraction to attract tens of thousands of followers and achieve beyond your wildest dreams.
When you do, be sure to share that success with others and remember that it was Dan Jeffries’ Five Keys to Success that lifted you up from the muck!
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A bit about me: I’m an author, engineer and serial entrepreneur.
You can check out my latest novel, an epic Chinese sci-fi civil war saga where China throws off the chains of communism and becomes the world’s first direct democracy, running a highly advanced, artificially intelligent decentralized app platform with no leaders.
If you like sci-fi, you can get a FREE copy of my first novel, The Scorpion Game, when you join my Readers Group. Readers have called it “the first serious competition to Neuromancer” and “like a double shot of fine whiskey after drinking watered down beer for weeks.”
Lastly, you can join my private Facebook group, the Nanopunk Posthuman Assassins, where we discuss all things tech, sci-fi, fantasy and more.
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I occasionally make coin from the links in my articles but I only recommend things that I OWN, USE and LOVE. Check my full policy here.
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Thanks for reading!