Your Way Is the Only Way

The ultimate success metric is whether you get what you want out of life. But that’s harder than it sounds because it’s easy to try to copy someone who wants something you don’t.

I’ve seen this play out twice: An incredibly talented young writer with a big blog following joins a major media company where they quickly fizzled into irrelevance.

It was the same story each time: When the writer was young and independent they could write with their own voice, their own style, their own flair. They could run with their own intuition.

Then they joined a big media company, which said, “That’s not how we do things here. Here’s our style book, you must follow it to a T. And meet Gordon, he’s your new editor. He will tell you what to write and when to write it. Good day, sir.”

And these were very successful media companies. They knew what kind of writing worked and what their readers wanted. But of course it didn’t work out. What was right for the company was wrong for the writer. A talented person can quickly become mediocre when you force them to be someone they aren’t.

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