The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online: How Tokenization Can Drive Growth

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online: How Tokenization Can Drive Growth

For the first time in my life, I made use of the information I consumed. The friends I made shared my obsession with ideas. As I published, I realized that everything I wrote was a magnet to attract opportunities that felt like magic in the moment. Five years later, I can say that writing on the Internet is among the best life decisions I’ve made. The 90 minutes I spend writing every morning is my most important habit and the activation code for just about everything good that happens to me. Writing in Public is the art of broadcasting your ideas to the Internet so you become a beacon for people, opportunities, and serendipity. The game of online writing rewards people who publish consistently. Though frequency is the price of entry, quality writing is a force multiplier on your success. If your ideas resonate, the number of opportunities available to you will explode.

Writing from Abundance is the art of collecting ideas so you can think better and avoid writer’s block. Writing from Conversation is the art of using dialogue to identify your best ideas and double down on them. Build a bank of inspiration while you’re away from the computer and before you sit down to write. Capture your epiphanies. Save the best quotes you read. Identify ideas that resonate with you and jot them down as notes. If you capture ideas when they’re in the forefront of your mind, you won’t have to pray for them to come back when it’s time to write. Every great writer I know obsessively curates their information diet. They rightfully know that high-quality writing begins with good taste for what you consume. It’s easier to have unique ideas when you read things other people don’t.

We’re trapped in a Never-Ending Now — blind to history, engulfed in the present moment, overwhelmed by the slightest breeze of chaos. Here’s the bottom line: You should prioritize the accumulated wisdom of humanity over what’s trending on Twitter. Find people whose recommendations you consistently enjoy and subscribe to their newsletters. It’s not enough just to binge eBooks and list a stat on your website. You should save the best parts of what you read, so you can easily reference them later. Being a writer doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice huge swaths of your life. You don’t need to bunker down in a library for days straight in order to find inspiration. You already consume media, have thoughts, and write ideas in group chats. When you practice the habit of capturing what’s already happening, you’ll find that you have all the material you need to start writing. Effective ambient research happens when you capture the best ideas you consume, the epiphanies you have, and the things you’ve already written to friends and colleagues.

When I come across an interesting article, I save it to an app that automatically downloads it to my phone so I can read it later. Saving these articles gets me out of a reactivity loop, where I read things immediately after I find them. I want my reading to be much more intentional than that. By saving articles to an app and refusing to instantly read things you come across on the Internet, you raise the bar for what grabs your attention. With a Read-it-Later app, whenever you sit down to read, you have hundreds of articles to choose from. You can allocate your attention to the best one. The clarity of memory decays quickly, so we shouldn’t just save other people’s ideas. We should save our own ideas too. Until we have a central place to capture our best thinking, the joy of epiphany will turn into the anxiety of forgetfulness. Chances are, you’re already generating ideas. You just don’t realize it yet. Note-taking works best when the ideas are saved in a central location that contains the best reading and thinking you’ve ever done. The easier it is to search those notes, the faster you’ll be able to find them.