How I Became a Millionaire by Writing Online

Around five years ago, I took the plunge and started my personal blog. I had wanted to start a blog since basically my first year of university, and I knew I wanted to start writing on the internet, but I had all of these fears about it that I could never quite get over. Like, first and foremost, there was the fear of actually starting it.

It was things like, "You know what the hell am I going to write about?" Surely, if my friends and family discover that I’ve got a personal blog that I’ve been writing on, they’re going to make fun of me and think I’m a terrible person. and "I had this real barrier towards writing anything that was that there was nothing that I was going to produce that was original."

What the hell am I going to contribute to the world as a 20-year-old medical student? There was fear of perfectionism. You know, if my article sucks, what if people think it’s awful, what if my grammar is bad, or even worse, what if 10, 20, or 30 years down the line, some employer who wants to try and hire me as a doctor sees the fact that I’ve started a blog and is like, "Wait a minute, why did you start a blog in 2012 or 2013?"

These fears kept me from putting myself out there online, from starting a blog to writing a single word, but then on the 2nd of January 2016, so basically five years ago, I discovered this book, Show Your Work by Austin Kleon, and this book single-handedly changed my life. It’s actually the book that I have most gifted out of any other book that I’ve ever read. 

It was just completely groundbreaking for me and helped me get over these various fears that I had and actually take the plunge into writing online. And one of the things I really like about this book is that it’s really a guide to self-promotion for people who absolutely despise the idea of self-promotion. Like, I used to think self-promotion was like a dirty thing and oh my god ugh, if I put myself out there on the internet, what are people going to think?

But the way he talks about it, it’s not about self-promotion; it’s about showing your work right now.

That’s actually quite interesting, and back when the internet wasn’t really a thing, people couldn’t really get a behind-the-scenes look at other people’s work. It’s like a writer would go into their cave and write a book and come out with a book or an artist would go into their cave and do a painting, but everyone wants to see how the painting is made. They want to see how the sausage is proverbially created and so starting a blog is.

I was reading a lot of books back then, so I could have documented them and sort of shared my thoughts about them, as well as written book reviews. In fact, people often ask me what one regret I have or what one piece of advice I’d give to myself 10 years ago, and my answer is always I really wish I’d started a blog earlier and I wish I’d just been writing reviews of books that I’d read.

The other big fear I had was that I needed to be an expert on something, and I’m not an expert on anything, so how could I possibly write about it? Chapter one of this book says you don’t need to be a genius or an expert to share your process, document your work, and show how you’re learning stuff, and you can completely embrace the beginner’s mindset.

I’m not an expert on anything I don’t know, so I can’t write about it, just like I can’t embrace being a beginner.

Someone who is a beginner is often far better at teaching other beginners than someone who is an expert. C.S. Lewis refers to this as the "curse of knowledge." It’s like when you get so good at something that you forget what it’s like to be a beginner at it.

Another major concern I had was what my friends and family would think if I started a blog and got my own domain at aliabda.com, which was completely unnecessary because no one cares. We all think that other people are looking at us and judging us, but in reality, everyone is concerned with their own lives.

Let’s say you have a friend right now, or a cousin, or a brother, or something, and they’re thinking, "Hey, I want to learn the piano, and I’m going to write about my journey of trying to learn the piano." Would you really judge them for that? You probably wouldn’t, you’d be like "oh that’s kind of cool." You wouldn’t criticise them, you wouldn’t judge them. You don’t think they’re an absolute freaking idiot for having the audacity to post online. You would think "oh that’s kind of cool." It’s cool that you’re documenting your journey.

It’s completely ridiculous how we all think, "Hey, other people are going to judge me," but when we put ourselves in those other people’s shoes, we think, "Yeah, I wouldn’t judge anyone for starting a blog or an Instagram."

Imagine you’re living in a village and the only people you interact with are the other people in your village. Every now and then a train comes by and someone visits the village, and you kind of chat with them and stuff, but you’re really limiting the number of people you could possibly have connections with. You’re limiting the number of people you can be friends with. You’re limiting the serendipity that can happen to you because you’ve limited the number of people you can be friends with.

Imagine if you were the type of person who, once a month, went to neighbouring towns and started meeting people, saying hello to people, and connecting with people who are interested in the same things as you. That just massively, exponentially increases the interesting things that can happen to you. It increases your surface area for serendipity, and I really like the metaphor that David Perrell uses for this, which is the surface area for serendipity.

You put your ideas on the internet, which means that little robots can basically carry your ideas around the world, and then there are people sitting in Malaysia, Mauritius, and Algeria scrolling the internet, wanting to learn about whatever it is that you have written about or created a video about, and you pay no fee when you’re sleeping, playing tennis with your friends, or taking a walk along the river.

What’s even more amazing is that you can make something once and the robots will work for you for the rest of your life, and as they deliver your ideas to people, serendipity occurs, and you meet new people who want to give you money or help you with whatever it is that you need help with.

When it comes down to it, when you put your ideas out there in the world, you’re allowing yourself to make all of these really interesting connections. You might make friends, you might make business associates, you might even meet the person you marry because you’re putting yourself out there on the internet and you’re suddenly opening up your network to the entire world, and that is incredible.

I realised this back in 2016, when my company wasn’t doing particularly well. We’d been doing really well for a few years, and then our growth started to stagnate. I had all these thoughts and feelings about it, and I was sad and annoyed that this company wasn’t doing very well, and I had a real crisis of wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.

What am I doing with this company? Am I letting this really excellent thing go to waste? I thought about it for a long time, but it wasn’t until I actually made a blog post about it that I realised what I was doing.

Which is kind of what it came down to writing a blog post about it. Writing it publicly and publishing it on my blog helped me solidify and clarify my own thinking around it, and the cool thing is that by doing so, I connected with Austin Kleon, the author of the book that I told you about earlier, because I sent him an email thanking him for his book.

Having a blog or some sort of daily activity, even if it’s just posting one thing to Instagram every day or something small like that, having something you have to do every day teaches you that it’s not so much that you have something to say as it is that you learn what you have to say.

So that’s like writing every day. Some people say, "Oh, well you must have so much to say because you write every day." I’m like, "Actually, it’s the opposite. I have more to say because I sit down and write every day and figure out what I’m thinking and what it is that I have to say."

Writing is not only a way of communicating with the world; it is also a way of communicating with yourself. By simply sitting down in front of a keyboard for 45 minutes or pulling out your notebook for a half hour, you are creating space in your day for you to connect with what’s here and figure out what’s going on and what it is that I truly feel and think.

That’s something the beginner has to get over quickly: the idea of, "Well, I don’t have anything to say. What am I going to blog about?" It’s like the pressure, routine, and muscles of blogging every day means that you will get to something every day, and there are plenty of other reasons why writing online changed my life.

The butterfly effect is the final one I’d like to discuss here.

The butterfly effect is the idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil, the air currents produced by that can cause a chain reaction that produces a tornado further down the line, and so it’s just this idea that a seemingly small thing that you do can have a huge effect further down the line.

So starting a blog changed my life in the sense that it made me okay with putting myself out there on the internet. It gave me the baby steps to write a few blog posts in like 2016 and so when it came to 18 months later, in 2017, when I thought, hey, should I start a YouTube channel, I didn’t have that fear because I’d already taken the baby steps and started my personal blog.

I honestly believe that if I hadn’t started the blog, I would have been paralysed by the 'oh my god I can’t put myself out there. What if? What if people find out my real name? What if my friends and family see my youtube channel? What are people going to think? But because I had 18 months' worth of practise of starting things like writing online and realising that no one actually cares.

What to write about and how to get started writing online?

If you want a Google free website and you want to create an account on WordPress, which is completely free, or Sub Stack, which is completely free, or you can use Ghost, which is the platform that I use, it costs a bit of money, but if you’re genuinely serious about starting a blog that changes your life, it’s something that’s very much worth investing in, but if you are unable to, or if you simply have an allergic reaction to the thought of spending money on the internet, you can certainly ignore it.

This is a frequently asked question in terms of what I write about.

Think about what interests you and get to the point where you’re writing about super niche topics. If there’s one lesson to be learned from the internet, it’s that you are not the only person interested in whatever it is that you’re interested in. As we all know, the niche topics are the ones that will provide you with the most benefits in terms of meeting cool people and having interesting things happen, so start there.

Start by writing about whatever interests you, and then document your work, show your work, document your process, and document your learning. If you do that, along with being slightly active on Twitter, which we’ll talk about another time, you’ll just connect with other people who are interested in the same things, and you’ll make friends and business connections, and you’ll really enjoy becoming a global citizen of the internet.

So that’s really all you need to get started.