10 Reasons You Aren’t Writing Online (And How To Fix Them)

There's a reason you haven't started writing yet. Why? I have my reasons. Actually, there are 10 reasons. You're over distracted. You're over editing. You're a perfectionist. You're procrastinating. You have imposter syndrome. You lack confidence in your talents. Your daily writing habit is inconsistent. You don't know what to write. You don't know where to write. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't find the time to write. When you put it like that, any of these hit home. Then good, you're watching the right video because I'm going to tell you exactly why you're struggling with each of these problems, what you should do instead, and a simple reframe for each one so you never face these obstacles again and can finally start writing online. And if you're sitting there thinking, cole, I'm struggling with all of these, why does it feel like you're inside my head? That's because in Ship 30 for 30, our beginner writing program, we have helped over 10,000 people build their daily writing habit and start writing online. And these are the same 10 problems every single person says when they walk in the door. So you're not alone. Let's start with problem number one. You're distracted. Now, the reason you're distracted is. Hang on. Sorry. The reason you're distracted is. I'm sorry. The reason you're distracted is you haven't chosen your sacred hours. This is the time of day when you are most productive and least responsive. Doesn't matter if you're a busy college student or a parent with two toddlers and a demanding day job. Anyone who wants to write or wants to do any kind of deep work that matters to them needs to choose their sacred hours. It might first thing in the morning, early. It might be around lunchtime. Maybe when work calls are slow. Or it might be late at night after the kids have gone to bed. The point is, since we live in a distracting society, you will continue to be distracted until you choose a time of day when being distracted is no longer an option. So what I like to do, send yourself a calendar invite, label it sacred hours and start with a 30 minute meeting with yourself. Then work your way up to a 60 or 90 minute meeting with yourself. And that is when you're going to do your writing. Problem number two, you're over editing. Especially in the beginning. Editing is overrated. Hang on. Actually, I feel like there. I want to say, especially in the beginning, editing isn't important. I say important. Editing is A waste of time. Maybe I should say, especially in the beginning, I say important just like this little skit I'm doing here for you. Huge waste of time. Sorry for wasting your time. So many writers struggle to finish their drafts, let alone finish a single paragraph, because they're stuck in this never ending game of swapping out adjectives. And no, none of it matters. I promise the reason readers aren't giving you their attention isn't because you use the word overrated instead of important. And I want you to write this down somewhere as a reminder to yourself for the next 20 years. In the beginning, editing is pointless because you don't know what to edit for yet. There are only three types of edits that make a meaningful difference for readers. Structural Are you using the right format to communicate? Organizational Are you presenting your ideas in the right order? And Contextual do you need to give the reader more context to maximize their understanding? Or are you giving them too much context and it's subtracting from their understanding of the core idea? And in the beginning, you don't know the answers to any of these questions because you haven't gotten your ideas in front of readers yet. Which is why, fun fact. Almost everything I write on the Internet, I write and publish without editing because I don't want to edit in a vacuum based on what my intuition wants. I want to edit based on what readers want. So stop editing, write it, publish it, see what people think of the idea and refine from there. Problem number three, you're a perfectionist. So I'm going to give you a little tough love here. And I love the way my co founder Dicky Bush puts this, you are not a perfectionist. Your ego is just scared of feedback. If you really were a perfectionist, you would be working 10 times as hard and talking to 10 times as many people trying to improve whatever you're currently procrastinating putting out. So actually you're not a perfectionist. You're just using being a perfectionist as a defense mechanism to protect yourself against someone reading your writing and not liking it, or having to face the reality that you might not be as good of a writer as you think you are. And I know because for years I struggled with this too. And I would hide away in my studio apartment and write by myself over editing like a madman pretending I was the next Ernest Hemingway. And guess what? My writing didn't get any better. And for years I never hit publish. The only thing that cured my self proclaimed perfectionism was action. In 2014, what I did is I challenged myself to write one Quora answer per day, every day, for a year straight. I didn't care if some giant outcome happened. I just wanted to get comfortable sharing things that weren't perfect. And guess what? Not only did I become a much better writer much faster, but by the end of the year, out of 200 million users on Quora, I had become the most read writer on the entire platform, publishing answers I didn't think were perfect, but went on to generate hundreds of millions of views and get republished in major publications like Forbe Inc. And Time magazine. So, no, you're not a perfectionist. You're just afraid of getting feedback on your writing. Which is why in ship 30 for 30, our entire approach is to practice in public. It's the only guaranteed way to overcome perfectionism once and for all. Problem number four, you're procrastinating. You think tomorrow's idea is going to be better than today's idea, or you think you don't have enough time to really dig into it, so it's not even worth starting. Whatever the reason is, all roads that lead back to the same faulty belief. You think the future is going to be easier than the present. You think you'll be less busy. You think you'll have more time. You think you'll be more inspired. Blah, blah, blah. None of these turn out to be true. Ever. So what's the solution? Well, just like perfectionism, the only solution is action. You either figure out how to get your writing done while being busy without having a ton of free time, and even when you don't feel like the most inspired version of yourself, or you don't. Problem number five, you have imposter syndrome. Repeat after me. Imposter syndrome only happens to people who try to pretend they're something they're not. I have mentored thousands and thousands of writers. And whenever someone says I have imposter syndrome, it's because they're trying to write about something they haven't done yet. Which means imposter syndrome is a symptom. The way you cure imposter syndrome is by using what we like to call the two year test. This is an exercise we walk every writer through in ship 30. For 30, over the past two years, what have you done? What skills have you acquired? What hobbies have you picked up? What new experiences have you had? What knowledge do you have today that you didn't have two years ago or two months ago, or even two days ago? Back when I started writing on Quora in 2014, what I would do is spend all day working as my boss's assistant, following him around the office, taking notes, ghostwriting his emails. And then after work, I would walk to the Starbucks down the street, open my laptop and find find a quora question to an answer based on something I had learned that day. I was literally using the one day test and all of a sudden I didn't feel like an imposter anymore. Because I wasn't trying to be something I wasn't. I was just sharing whatever new thing I had learned that day. And to anyone who was one day or one week or one year behind me, that knowledge was valuable. Which leads to problem number six. You lack confidence in your talents. Here's how most writers go about increasing confidence in your in themselves and their writing. I could do this. I could do that. That's not even that hard. It's not that impressive. I. I could write like that. Are you serious? This is what everybody does. They read, they study, they repeat positive affirmations to themselves. They do everything except write and then wonder why they lack confidence in their writing. There's only one solution. And again, I'm saying this from years and years of experience. Confidence doesn't come from pretending to be confident. Confidence is a lagging indicator of your habits. The more you do something, the more confident you become about your ability to do that thing. Which means if you read and you study and you repeat positive affirmations to yourself but don't write, guess what? You're going to get better and better at reading and studying and repeating positive affirmations. But you're also getting better and better at not writing. So what's the solution again? Action. Relentless action. If you do the thing, even if it's just five or ten minutes of writing per day, your confidence will go up. And if you don't do the thing, then guess what? Your confidence is going to go down. Problem number seven, your daily writing habit is inconsistent. So here's where the problems start to compound. You don't have a daily writing habit because you lack confidence in your talents. You lack confidence in your talents because you have imposter syndrome. You have imposter syndrome because you're procrastinating and haven't proved to yourself that you are who you say you are. You're procrastinating by calling yourself a perfectionist. You're calling yourself a perfectionist because you're stuck in an endless cycle of over editing. All of which is why you allow yourself to be distracted, because it's much easier to just say I'm so distracted. And start scrolling TikTok or checking your email than it is to confront any of these things. Sound familiar? Again, no judgment. I've struggled with all of these things too, which is why I want to make you aware of why these problems are happening and how you can solve them. Problem number eight, you don't know what to write. No, you do know what to write. You just take your knowledge for granted and don't think it would be valuable to share. Let me tell you a quick story to show you how true this is. A couple years ago, I met this incredibly successful entrepreneur and angel investor out in Los Angeles. He invited me to his house up in the hills. I asked him all sorts of questions about how he thought about building and investing in companies, and he just started dropping knowledge bomb after knowledge bomb. Entrepreneurship frameworks I had never heard before, and I've read a lot of business books. I felt like he was giving me millions of dollars of knowledge for free. So I asked him if he'd ever considered writing online. He turned to me and said, why do you think other people would find this valuable? The fact he even had to ask me that question shocked me and made me realize how even the most successful people in the world take the knowledge they have for granted. Because what they know seems so familiar that they forget how many other people in the world don't know the same thing. And you are no different. Right now, you easily have $100,000 worth of knowledge sitting in your brain, and there are people all over the world who would love to pay you for that knowledge. All you have to do is start writing about it, sharing, practicing in public, and if you want to monetize it later, just package it up into a product. Problem number nine, you don't know where to write. Okay, let me just give you the answer. The four best platforms to attract readers and build an audience for your writing today are X, aka Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, and Quora. The reason is because all four of these platforms are text first social platforms with hundreds of millions of users. And I know what you're probably thinking. These platforms are too saturated. I'm late to the party, it's impossible to find readers. I have zero followers, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Every year people say this, and every year new creators find success on these platforms. And what you probably don't know is that follower count has never mattered less. Social algorithms today barely even take followers into consideration. If you notice your feed isn't showing you content from the people you follow, it's primarily showing you content from people you don't follow, but whose content is similar to what you engage with, which is how you can have a hundred followers and still go massively viral. Like my co founder, Dickie did here. This was his very first LinkedIn post ever, back when he had less than 100 followers and ended up getting over half a million impressions. Because when you write something that is clearly resonating with people, it's the platform's job to distribute it to more and more people. Which is why writing online is a game anyone can play and anyone can win. Problem number number 10. And no matter how hard you try, you just can't find the time to write. That's because you don't find time to do anything that matters to you. You make time. If your relationship matters to you, you prioritize it. You make time. If eating healthy matters to you, you prioritize it. You make time. If going to the gym matters to you, you prioritize it. You make time. Which means if you want your writing to happen, you can't sit around waiting for life to find the time for you. Life is really demanding. You have to make time. And the only way you make time, circling back to where we started here, is by first setting your sacred hours. You can't cancel. It's a priority. It's urgent. And the more days in a row you keep this meeting with yourself, you take action. You write something, literally write anything, the faster you will notice these 10 problems disappear from your life. And if you're sitting there thinking, well, this all makes sense, but I've tried. I don't know where to start. I don't know how to be consistent. Let me help you. Okay. We built ship 30 for 30 for writers struggling with these 10 problems. And we'd love to help you get your ship sailing. Or you can get started with the free version where we share all our favorite digital writing frameworks@startwritingonline.com either way, start writing, start hitting publish, take action, and watch these 10 problems disappear.