I Don’t Get Too Attached to The Success of Any One Piece
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Sports, Freelancing, Writing, Marketing, Self

I Don’t Get Too Attached to The Success of Any One Piece

You can’t control your audience. So move onto the next one instead of fixating.

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Other writers have a lot of preferences, and I might just be weird, but a rule I have for myself is to not get too attached to the success of any one piece.

I put as much of myself into my writing and my personal pieces as much as anyone else. I put a lot of thought and a lot of effort, editing and craft into my pieces. I have articles that I read very quickly, and then articles I take hours if not days to write.

What I have learned is that once I have hit the “publish” button and released a piece into the stratosphere, I have very little control over how my writing is received. I have very little control over whether people read in the first place.

Sure, I can spam the messages of my friends and writing groups. But that doesn’t help because it’s just going to damage my credibility as a friend, and I’m going to just be that guy who spams other people with his blog links.

I wasn’t always good at this, but now, once I release a piece of my writing into the world, I let it go. I stop being attached. How it is received and the attention it garners stop becoming relevant, because I’ve become laser focused on something I have much greater control over:

The next one. Sure, I take breaks. I work. I live my life. I read my Bible and pray, but I don’t focus on how my piece does after it’s published. Do I give into human temptation to check? Yes, I absolutely do, like anyone else.

But the joy is in the writing. Where I make my success and focus on my craft is in the writing. The next piece beckons to me now more than my attachment to my latest piece of writing that I hope gets read, but sometimes am disappointed that it doesn’t.

Meredith Arthur asked me for her podcast today whether I had a piece I specifically wanted to share with the audience that I was particularly proud of. I had a lot of trouble answering that question because I don’t get too attached to any one piece, and I expressed that moving “onto the next one” has worked wonders for not only the quantity, but the quality of my writing.

You don’t become a better writer begging other people to read your writing. You become a better writer by living more, reading more, and writing more.

It’s important to me now to never stay stagnant — and fixating and being too attached to a single piece’s success is being stagnant to me. I used to do it a lot. I would refresh my pieces every 10 seconds to see if there was a new read — only to more often than not be disappointed.

You don’t control whether people read your work. Either they like it or they don’t. Either they click or they don’t. What you can control is what you write and how you write. You can’t force views and reads, but you can always write.

I have a lot of pieces that are duds, and some pieces that are hits. If I were to tell you I had a magic formula, I would be lying — some pieces take 30 minutes to write and go viral, while others I took days writing and barely got anyone to read. It happens. It doesn’t really make sense and there’s no rhyme or reason. I’m prouder of the ones that took days to write, even if no one read it. I’m the proudest of the pieces I wrote about my family and faith, even if no one reads them. Those are the pieces closest to home that I will always cherish.

But I would be lying if I said the reception of my pieces didn’t matter to me. At the same time, the reception isn’t something I can control.

To me, fixating and being attached to any one piece when you’re a blogger is like when basketball or soccer players argue with referees. What good is there in arguing with a referee? What can it possibly achieve that’s good? And why aren’t players focusing on the next play or getting back on defense?

So focus on the next play. Get back on defense. Stop arguing with the referees who made their call on the reception of your piece, whether you think it was deserved or not. Basketball players get a lot of unfair calls in any game — but they get unfair calls in their favor as much as they get unfair calls against them. Players get away with overt fouls all the time, it’s just a matter of whether you’re the beneficiary or the one who lost out.

Like foul calls in basketball, reception as a writer is not always fair and is prone to human error. So focus on the whole game instead of getting over-emotional about any one play, and in our case, any one piece. I don’t get over-attached to the success of any one piece, which doesn’t mean the piece didn’t mean something special to me, but that the success is defined by how I perceived it, not the audience.

You can control yourself. You can’t control your audience. So move onto the next one instead of fixating.