Over a decade ago, I joined Lifehacker to work as a writer. The job required me to pitch and write three short stories per day, and two longer essays per week. 

While that’s a huge quantity of posts, the actually challenging part was finding stories that hadn’t already been covered by Lifehacker. All the easy and obvious stories had been written. 

Every day, I would pitch a dozen ideas, and barely three would make it through. It felt like my work was hanging by a thread.

A couple of months in, I finally pitched and wrote a hit article. I shared more about that experience in my speech at CreativeMornings. Here it is below:

Even from this small taste of “success,” I learned two lessons:

Lifehacker’s quantity driven business model was not sustainable for writers and media companies. I wasn’t set up to build any expertise in a specific topic. It was best for me not to spend too much energy on it, and instead focus on building depth and longevity. 

“Success” felt totally empty because the topic didn’t resonate with me. My best writing would come from topics that both resonated with me and were useful for other people. It couldn’t be just one or the other. I got a chance to explore some great topics with Lifehacker, like this post on luck, or this post on enviability, as well as some book reviews like this one. But none of them went as viral as the earwax post did, and that’s what Lifehacker needed from me.

One of the highest impact adjustments I made was in response to this. It took longer than I would have hoped.