Want to get started as a writer in 2021?

Here’s the only strategy you’ll need. Over the next 6 minutes, I’ll give you the entire roadmap from start to finish. Why listen to me, though?

Well, I’ve made over $225,000 from writing and selling courses over the last three years.

I average 120,000 monthly views on Medium, founded a publication that averages 500,000 monthly views, and have been writing online for the last four years.

I know my way around this game, and know how many others navigate the game, too. …

My Mom started crying on our video call.

Both my parents were lamenting to me about their relationships with my sister. I’d spent the last year in the Philippines, away from my family completely, and I missed them dearly.

“It’s like we’re always annoying your sister,” my Mom said. “She snaps at us all the time out of nowhere and we walk on eggshells around her.”

It made me sad. I grew up in a household where we were all very close. Me, my brother, my sister, my mother, and my father — we were all we had.

I remember when my siblings and I would have sleepovers together. We’d pull our beds into my sister’s room and quote movie lines dangerously close to midnight. We laughed so hard that my parents had to tell us to go to sleep already. …

I’m almost 28 years old. I started writing online when I was 23, and started writing in a journal at 21 years old.

Of all the things I’ve done in my 20’s, taking up writing was the best decision I ever made.

I’ve had regrets, though, too.

After writing some 1000+ blog posts and doing a lot of reflecting, there’s ten big lessons I wish I learned in my early 20’s that would’ve saved me a ton of trouble.

For those who are younger than me, my age, or perhaps much older than me, here they are. …

“I used to follow you Tom back when I got started on Medium.”

This is a statement I’ve heard a lot lately. While interviewing several famous Medium writers for my upcoming Side-Hustle Summit, I’ve heard them tell me they used my Medium advice to get started back in 2017 and 2018.

It’s an amazing thing to hear, but now that they’re all grown up and have 10,000+ followers of their own, I know for certain they don’t read me any more.

They’ve matured on their own journey, and moved on to consuming different kinds of writers.

And you know what? I’m perfectly okay with that. …

This past weekend, a series of tweets landed Twitter user Kristen Gray in hot water. She’s an entrepreneur who moved to Bali with her girlfriend in 2019 to start a better life. After talking about her new lifestyle, many Indonesians asked her about her role in the gentrification of Bali.

It was such a heated debate on Twitter, that “Bali” was actually trending on the discover page for a few hours.

Here are some screenshots of her original tweets:

I remember the time I quit Panera Bread in 2015 and started freelancing online. That was a very scary time for me.

Every day I had to get on the phone with clients, pitch potential clients, and basically get a lot of rejections.

I’m an introvert, so this was hard.

It scared me to turn work in to clients. It scared me to get rejected. It scared me to hop on a live phone call knowing that if it went south I’d probably be in a really crappy financial position.

But this helped me grow.

I promise that doing stuff that scares you is always horrible in the moment — there’s no getting around it. You feel awkward and weird and unnatural, but trust me — these are good feelings to have. …

My writing is like a metal concert or something. It’s just a bunch of loud sounds that somehow make a harmony. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why my blog posts work.

I sit down, write one sentence, then write the next sentence, and I see where it takes me. It’s a very spiritual experience that I find hard to put into words. I detail my process in my courses, but wrangling down those lessons from my brain was quite difficult.

One sentence incites the next, which incites the next, and then before I know it, I’m done one hour later. …

I remember reading a book called Do Cool Sh*t seven years ago at my local bookstore. Without this book I’d probably still be making salads at Panera Bread like I was three months after college graduation.

The author’s story captivated me. It was about a woman who started her own gluten free pizza restaurant in New York City with no restaurant experience.

She somehow made everything fun.

One time she snuck into a newspaper company right past heavy security to hand deliver a package of pizzas to the staff to win some free publicity. She just acted like she was on her phone. It was hilarious. She also played professional soccer and told funny stories about how she ditched her tour party in Paris to go play soccer in the park with strangers. …