Be Your Own Country & Print Your Own Money!
How do you motivate yourself to keep writing? Does getting $$$ work?
I came to believe that writing online is like printing your own money. It’s legit too. Check out the connections between money and writing.
The Parallels Between Money and Writing
Durability
$20 bill isn’t perishable. So is well-written content. Ideas embedded in writings remain relevant for years and on some occasions, beyond millennia. The compounding effect is a nice kicker.
Portability
We designed bills and coins to be small and light for reason. And thanks to the internet, online content is ubiquitous.
Divisibility
You can exchange $100 for smaller denominations. Similarly, you can package the digital content into a video, tweet, podcast, etc.
Limited supply
A central bank controls the money supply to avoid the risk of inflation. For online content, each creator has an incentive to protect his/her own personal brand.
(Source: Functions of Money)
So, shall we get printing?
No Universal Value
Question: Who’s going to actually read your ideas? When you have no military might or media moat of a sovereign state, how do you plan on guaranteeing what you create has some real value? When you want everyone to read your writing, it helps to acknowledge that there is no universal value. Even the almighty US$ is not accepted everywhere. Your writing? Ditto. So the better question to ask is: Which group wants to hear your idea?
Rolling With The Money Metaphors
Your idea will resonate most in your country where you share the same customs. But, it still takes great effort to get your idea accepted as a medium of exchange. Like the 3 major currency blocks in the world, there are three different groups of people who write toward their compatriots.
Experts | Executives | Evangelists
Taking a cue from how most currencies are circulating within cultural borderlines, you need to write in the right community as well.
- Expert Nation: Like USD making up over 60% foreign exchange reserves, most of the writings online are done by experts for other experts. Headed by academia, the writers with a firm command of jargon and latest industry trends are most valued in this nation.
- Executive Republic: EUR makes up 20% of known central bank foreign currency reserve, and writers in "the ER" write toward 20% of the population, meaning to their bosses. In there, “know-who” > know-how. A successful writer knows how to camouflage his/her voice with the boss's favorite celebrity.
- Evangelical Kingdom: JPY, CHF, CAD, etc. have relatively smaller shares but they do have important roles in rocking the FX market with fear and excitement. Likewise, the citizens of the EK enjoy the emotional roller coaster ride to holler and preach their morals. No logics. Length and repetition are what count most.
So, Where Are You From?
To print your own money, find your tribe, and write to them. Isn’t that the essence of finding your niche? If you are a software engineer, you should definitely write to your good fellas. Write consistently, you will accumulate respect. Then if a rockstar tech CEO mentions you, your Twitter would explode with new opportunities. You’d feel much better being with your own people—a group of like-minded people who share your values is the ones that would complete your life.
What If You Are a Refugee?
You might have sensed some cynicism in a way I described the 3 different cultures earlier. Yep, my problem is that I don’t belong in any of those nations anymore. Growing up in Japan and in the US, I went from the Executive Republic to the Expert Nation without ever knowing. For the longest time, I’ve adopted their worldviews. But deep down, I’ve always felt like a refugee getting shoved around between their border walls.
That’s why articles written by monocultural writers bored me. That’s why I felt like my ideas were irrelevant to their domestic readership who are interested only in localized ideas.
But now I know.
My inspiration to write this article came from a question I had: Why am I bored with articles that others are raving about?
After a few weeks of pondering, I realized that they are from different “mental” countries and I was experiencing chronic culture shock. Eventually, it came to me that I didn’t belong in any of the countries.
I refused to be a refugee anymore. Instead, I became an expat.
