So, suppose you got kidnapped. Someone put a gun to your head and say “Go get 1000 Twitter followers this month or go see Abraham Lincoln!”
What do you do?
Here’s what I did. I do not recommend it. But in case you get kidnapped, you’ll want to reference this post.
First, I did not encounter no terrorists.
Instead, I met the notorious @dickiebush and @nicolascole77, who tricked me into joining their 30 day writing challenge gang. So they’re to blame for everything happened next.
The idea of the challenge is you write a 250-word essay a day for 30 days in a row, as a way to build a writing habit.
“Surely I can do that for a month,” I thought. 250 words is not much, right?
First day started. 250 words quickly turned into 1000 words. Before I knew it, 3 hours went by. I had no time left to edit it down to 250. When Twain said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one”, he ain’t kidding!
By day 3, I had spent 3.5 hours each day on my daily essays. There were 27 more days to go.
I need to fix this fast, so I called up my accountability coach, Dave.
Me: “I’m f*cked, Dave. I can’t spend more than 1 hour on these, or I’ll end up killing myself.”
Dave: “Set a timer then. Ship it when time’s up. Stop being a perfectionist. It only pleases your ego and your ego’s worth sh*t!”
Alright Dave, you have a point. So I did the timer thing. It did make me writer faster, but was stressful as hell. I also streamlined my morning phone routine, which you can read about here.
Still, I never managed to write only 250 words on any day. I ended up with 23k words in 30 days. So about 800 words per essay.
Though that doesn’t seem much, the research I needed for those 800 words often took a lot more time than writing. It was 30 days of intense researching, thinking, and creating.
That was on top of an already overbooked life. By end of 30 days I was totally exhausted. I’m still having a neck pain from the extra stress. Ouch!
So why didn’t I just quit?
You say, stop whining so much, b*tch. If you have such a hard time, don’t do it.
Right, nobody actually held a gun to my head after all. But we humans are all prisoners of our own neurological programmings. Those were installed long time ago and are hard to shake.
I have this programming called “You shall always honor your promise”. Once I make a commitment, this script kicks into gear and forces me to keep the vow come hell or high water.
This is a useful programming. But it can also be masochistic, and at times create more pain than what’s worth.
So the answer to “why didn’t I quit” is simple. It’s hard to shut down a sneaky computer script that self-executes.
How is this related to twitter followers?
Once upon a time I was active on Twitter, then lost interest. My account had been static before I started the writing challenge.
Since the challenge began, my tweet impressions has gone up over 1000%.
Where did the impressions come from? 8 out of 10 of my most popular tweets were my daily essays that I posted as threads.
It’s a Pareto distribution. The top essay alone accounted for 25% of total impressions in those 30 days. It was a post about why I sold all my bitcoins.
You say, oh nice you got 264k views on that post, you must be happy.
Well, wait till you see the comments.
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I got an ocean liner of abuses and ridicules thrown at me because of this post. And I was not used to being bullied online like this. It was a hard week. Every time my phone dinged with Twitter notification, I felt like I was going to puke 🤒
But would I have changed a thing? No.
You see, I didn’t set out to be controversial. But once I form an independent opinion on something, I don’t mince words. That’s bound to set some people off.
If you want to dish it out, you need to be willing to take it, too. (and BTW, if you think it’s easy to be Kim Kardashian and all it takes is a nice ass, you’re mistaken.)
So what can you learn from this?
My 30-day experiment is not sustainable for me in the long haul. But it does show that if you want to grow an audience, regularly creating content is a reliable way to go.
2/ Do have something to say.
Consistency alone is not enough. You won’t see growth if the writing doesn’t take much from you. You need to think your own thoughts and express those in simple, clear ways. That’s not easy and the ultimate practice is consciousness + effort.
It took $240k and 6 years to get my PhD. 4 out of 5 of my classmates didn’t make it to the end.
— Tascha (@TaschaLabs) July 14, 2021
It was brutal, but it taught me how to think.
To save you quarter million dollars, here are 10 lessons on how to learn about any topic & form your own original insights, quickly👇
And like it or not, social media penalize nuanced writing because people’s attention span is short. You have to make your point loud, clear, distinct.
3/ Controversies create publicity, but don’t seek them.
There’s so much herd mentality online and in life. So if you can think independently, you’ll be naturally controversial half the time, and you don’t even realize it.
Looking back, all my most popular Twitter threads are controversial in some way. But I wasn’t aware of it most time since I was in my own bubble when writing, until other people told me so after I put out a post.
Now that you know what to do if you urgently need 1000 Twitter followers, I’m going to go book a neck massage. Bye!
Like this? I write about ideas to help you become freer, richer, wiser. Follow me on Twitter for updates 👉 @realnatashache .