5 Life Lessons from 5 Years of Writing Online
Five years ago, on December 29th, 2019, I started writing online under the pen name Recovering Overthinker.
There was a need in him to express something. To talk about things that I believed matter: Love, death, freedom, responsibility, authenticity, human potential, and, most importantly...
Is this life worth living, and how to live like it is?
It’s been a wild journey since then. A journey that involved
writing something every day for those five years
leaving everything behind to start a new life
suffering panic attacks that left me doubting my sanity
questioning, on an hourly basis, whether I want to continue living
adopting a new attitude towards life and climbing out of despair
understanding the purpose of my creative expression
having millions of people read my writing
building an audience of almost 200K people
living in 5 different countries and making meaningful connections with beautiful humans around the world
As you can expect, I’ve learned many different lessons over these five years, lessons in specific areas like resilience, mental health, creative expression, and the digital creator economy.
However, everything that I’ve learned cannot be summarized in one essay, and not every lesson is relevant to everyone.
This time, I want to share five lessons that can be applied to any aspect of life. No matter what your journey looks like right now or what your goals are, these five lessons can help you live a more fulfilled and successful life.
1. You have no idea where you’re headed - and that’s amazing.
The point of every project or goal is to start the journey and then see where it takes you.
No matter how convinced you are that your goal is the right one, you have no idea what the journey will teach you about yourself. As you make attempts to move forward, you receive feedback from life. This feedback, in the form of wins, failures, and connections with others, helps you adjust your course or demands you to do it.
When I started writing, I did hope I would eventually build an audience. However, I never anticipated the direction in which my creative work would move.
The overall theme of what I care about talking about stayed the same. But instead of my introvert fantasy of building an audience and sharing my ideas without interacting with people much, I got something very different. I became an educator who spends hundreds of hours per month speaking to groups and having 1-on-1 conversations with people worldwide.
The fact that you have no idea where you’re headed, even if you have a clear goal, should be encouraging. One of the most paralyzing things for people is projecting too far into the future and in too much detail - thinking they need to have their journey figured out before it even starts.
This is your reminder to give yourself permission to start because no amount of preparation will "fix" the ever-changing nature of your journey.
2.What people need the most when struggling isn’t someone to fix their problem - it’s to know they are not alone in what they are experiencing
One of the most incredible things a human can do is resonate with others.
Whether you are talking with a friend or having your writing read online by strangers around the world, the most impactful thing isn’t solving other people’s problems but giving people the strength and endurance to grow through them. You do this by helping them realize they are not alone—as unique as their struggle feels, it’s a shared human experience.
All of my writing that ended up being most impactful and to which I received the most heartfelt feedback was the writing that aimed to relate to other humans in their struggle and suffering. People often need to hear that, no matter how broken they feel right now, they're not broken or messed up. They are a human being navigating this mysterious journey that no one, NO ONE, has figured out.
Think of your moments of struggle, especially internal struggle. The psychological and emotional exhaustion makes you start thinking you’re alone and no one can understand you. But the greatest sense of relief doesn’t come from someone offering you a 5-step plan to feeling better. It comes from listening or reading another person say something that makes you think, “They’ve been through the same thing. I’m not alone in this. I’m not messed up in some unique way - other humans have also dealt with this.”
That’s why your willingness and ability to express the struggles you’ve gone through or are going through is one of the most impactful tools you can possess as a human being.
3. There is reality only in action.
No one cares about your idea if you haven’t taken action on it.
We can engage in mental masturbation all we want and discuss whether something existing in your mind makes it real. However, that would just be escaping the uncomfortable truth: in the real world, only action counts.
Kindness that isn’t expressed and remains in one’s mind and heart is never recognized. The creative potential not expressed through creative work is as good as if it never existed.
Wisdom you have supposedly accumulated from books and life experiences isn’t real if you cannot embody it in your choices and actions.
I know this can be discouraging for many, but how you will take it is up to you. It can equally be viewed as a challenge to act on your potential.
Notice that I don’t say there is reality only in results or outcomes. If you put in an honest effort to bring your ideas and potential into reality, no one can judge the external result of that effort.
But you can’t expect anyone to acknowledge what you claim is in you but have never even tried bringing into reality through action.
4. Consistency is a cheat code for life
Continuing with action, we must note that not all action is equal.
When trying to assess what kind of action produces the best results, people engage in the old debate of quality vs. quantity. But the answer is neither. Consistency comes before both.
We all know, or at least should, that quality is the end goal. If you’re doing something, you want to be doing it on a high level at some point. But that’s why quantity deserves priority-because only quantity and the accumulation of “reps” can lead to quality.
However, only consistent output is what turns quantity into quality. Scattered and inconsistent quantity doesn’t translate into much more than wasted time. Writing 100 words daily for 30 days does more for your writing skill than taking 2 out of those 30 days to write 5000 words. Meditating 7 minutes daily for a week does more for your focus than sitting for 2 hours in silence on Sunday while having zero mindfulness practice on all the other days. I could keep going with examples, but you get the idea.
You need consistency for any skill you want to learn and any habit you want to adopt.
Consistency is the meta-skill and the meta-habit.
Also, consistency signals competence, even if there's little of it. This might have many negative implications in the online age of fake experts and gurus, but it’s a fact.
By simply showing up every day, you separate yourself from others. And if you keep showing up long enough and that showing up is documented, you signal competence. People stop caring, or care less, about the actual results of your showing up or the tangible progress made in whatever you are doing. Simply showing up screams competence because consistency is the single biggest obstacle, or the very first obstacle, most people are unable to overcome.
Whatever it is that you are doing, whatever it is that you are talking about, people are more likely to listen to you if you are consistent. It’s not fair, but it’s true. There are people out there with great knowledge and competence on certain topics, but they aren’t consistent enough. Meanwhile, someone with half their competence and capacity is regarded as an expert or an authority figure simply because they keep showing up.
Consistency is a cheat code.
5. Focus is THE skill for the digital age
Success, personal growth, mental health, and overall well-being cannot be discussed today without discussing the importance of protecting and training one's attention.
All, and I mean ALL, texts of wisdom, whether religious, spiritual, or philosophical, lack context if they were written before the advent of the internet . That doesn’t mean they aren’t still relevant and valid. If you’re reading this, you’re probably like me and have felt at some point that Seneca, Montaigne, or Nietzsche understand you better than your peers. However, they didn’t have Instagram, Twitter, tinder, or Netflix. At the very least, their wisdom lacks context because they didn’t write for humans who struggle to focus long enough to read one page.
No matter how timeless the wisdom of certain thinkers was, it doesn’t take into account a human being who can’t focus on a task or a train of thought for longer than one minute before being distracted by the most addictive device in the history of humanity—the smartphone.
All advice on living a better life must be placed in the context of the modern human being who is under a constant, vicious attack on their attention.
We live in a society where the economy thrives on influencing people's behavior by capturing their attention and preying on their insecurities.
From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep, your attention is being bombarded by stimuli sent your way by algorithms of billion-dollar corporations.
Even your sleep hours are being affected. Precisely because their attention is successfully hijacked, most people don't even get to choose when they fall asleep and when (and how) they wake up.
In that same society, schools still don't teach kids and young people the skill of observing (let alone controlling) where their attention goes.
That’s why you need to take it upon yourself to reclaim your attention and resist the invasion of your mind.
Focus is the life-saving and soul-saving skill of our age.
Conclusion
As stated at the beginning, this is far from a full summary of everything I’ve learned about the world and myself over the last five years. I haven’t even included the most important lesson: life gets infinitely better when you realize it’s not about you. However, the laws of the online world state that I must offer you something more than a message of focusing more on helping others. Otherwise, how would I manage to build an audience and grow in relevance over these five years?
I hope you found these helpful. Thank you for joining me on this journey, whether you’ve been reading my work since the early days or found out about me yesterday.
I can promise you that in 2025, I will invest an unreasonable amount of time, energy, and attention into helping others reclaim their focus, answer their call to adventure, and lead meaningful lives.
Happy New Year.
As always, stay strong, love life, and never feel sorry for yourself.
P.S. If you’re interested in better understanding yourself and the story of your life, I created a free self-exploration course called Clarity Quest. More than 2000 people have joined it and many have called it life-changing. Join here for free.
P.P.S. If you are struggling with doom-scrolling and feel like digital distractions are taking your time, energy, and potential away, I created Attention Mastery for you. Click here to check it out (not free).
Other Free Resources:
Clarity Quest - self-exploration course
My free ebook: The Lost Art of Reading
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Great insights. I just started my journey and this helps
Extraordinary! Fantastic, marvelous! That's how I perceive this text that you wrote, full of truths! How enriching it is to read something like what you have written. How wonderful that it can be read at the beginning of a cycle, this new year. There are phrases, concepts, revelations that, far from being said before even in the Bible, or in poems, the way you weave it and sustain it with your life, is delightful. There, just one paragraph, has given me a great life lesson, both on a personal level and as a strategy for intelligent productivity. Thank you very much for writing this!