How To Write An Atomic Essay (300-500 Words)

What's up, friends? My name is Nicholas Cole. You can call me Cole. And if you love writing but aren't sure how to make a living doing it, you are in the right place. So it's 11:30. I'm going to show you how to write an atomic essay, which is 300ish words in 10 minutes. So let's go. So here I'm writing inside Typeshare. This is my library. And I go to create. I'm going to write an atomic essay, and I'm going to show you how this works. I'm going to pick a blank template. Okay? So first things first. We need to come up with a title. So let's say I want to write about. Let's see. I remember in 2016, I quit my job. I wanted to become a freelance writer. And let's see what comes to mind. I made a bunch of mistakes at the time when I was trying to save money, getting ready to quit my job and go out on my own. So immediately I'm going to go with, there's three mistakes that come to mind. So I already know that. This is how I'm going to organize the piece of. So here I'm going to go. I got a little intro, and I'm going to go, mistake number one. Mistake number two, Mistake number three. So I had a recent video. I call this prepping the page. All I'm doing here is dividing the page up. You know, here's what it's going to look like. And then here I also love doing this. Just makes it easier to visualize. I'm going to go through and put in my headers. So out the gate, I know I'm going to have these three sections. All right, so now I need to. I need to reinforce the headline. What direction am I moving in? So I'm gonna say, three mistakes I made saving money, trying to quit my job so I could become a freelance writer. Okay, so here I'm just putting out the idea, right? So this is kind of long and it's convoluted. So I can either take this time and go, I'm going to refine the headline for a minute, or I can just get started writing and then I'll come back and refine it as I go. I like spending more time on the headline. So I'm going to try and think, what's the problem? And what's the promise that I'm going to make to the reader. So here, if I think about it, the promise, the thing that I really want to give the reader is, if you want to quit your job, you're going to need some money to do that. You need some Runway. And you learn from my experiences, right? Don't make these mistakes. So I might take this and restart and try again. So if you want to quit your job, don't make these three money management mistakes. Okay? So then as I think about it, I'm like, is it really money management mistakes? Like, is that really what I'm trying to do? Maybe it's. Is it mistakes that I want to talk about? Or is it ways to save money so that you can give yourself Runway? Right. So you can see, as I'm playing with the headline, the idea is changing. So it's almost like there's no point in even really getting into the writing yet until we refine the idea. So maybe I go, it's actually better if I say, if you want to quit your job and go all in on your side hustle, you need to do these three things. Okay? So here, this is some. Now I have more clarity, right? I feel like this is a little bit more valuable to the reader. And I can shorten this by saying three things you need to do in order to successfully quit your job. Okay. Wow, that's 10 times cleaner, right? All right, so let's play with that. So here in the intro, there's a couple things I need to cover. What is this about? Who is this for? What's the promise? What's the why, you know, promise, and what's my credibility? So here, just as a little checklist, I'm gonna put this down here. See, we got six minutes. Let's keep going. So what is this about? Do you have a side hustle that you wish was your full time career? Back in 2016, I was working as an entry level copywriter for an ad agency. I had to commute to work two hours per day, every day, and then spend the other eight hours writing ads for everyone from local pizza joints to national coconut water brands. It was decent work, but not my life's work. I wanted, and maybe I say my dream was to write books, not ads, in order for me to quit my job. And then I hear I want to mirror. I want to mirror the headline, right? To successfully quit my job and go all in on writing, I needed to get a few things straight. Needed to get my income straight. And so here I can use this tool. I needed to get my income straight. I needed to get my work ethic and daily routine straight. And I needed to get my. We'll call it my portfolio straight. After all, how was I going to pay the bills, right? And then here I might say, so what is this about? We covered it, right? Who is this for? We're kind of implying, hey, if you want to quit your job, right, but we can. Let's reinforce this again. And I need to get my portfolio straight. If this sounds like you or you've been debating how you can successfully quit your job and go all in on your side hustle, let me save you some time, right? Benefit to the reader and give you the recipe that ultimately allowed me to achieve my goal, okay? And this is the credibility, right? Credibility is, hey, I did it, okay? So that's why you should listen to me. And the why, what's the promise? Well, hey, let me save you some time. I'm going to give you the answer, okay? Now here I got my conclusion done. I got three minutes. Let's go, go, go. So now I got to ask. I'm things, right? These are mistakes. So I need to change these real quick. So I need to go thing, thing number one, thing number two, and thing number three. So here, what was the first thing I needed to do? I needed to get my income straight. So here, I can mirror this if I want. I needed to get my income straight here. I needed to get my work ethic and daily routine straight. Three, I needed to get my portfolio straight. All right, let's just leave that for now. And then here is a technique I use all the time. It's called 1, 3, 1. So we have one sentence here, three sentences here, one sentence here. Okay? So first things first. I needed to start saving money. I projected I would need approximately $5,000 in order to quit my job so that I could continue paying my overhead expenses for roughly three months. My overhead, for context, sorry, for the truck looked something like this. Per month for rent, per month for food, and 100 per month for my train pass. So roughly all in, you know, that's 12, 15, 17, 18. That's 1800 per month to live. And if I could cover that, then I was good. Once I had this number in my mind, I relentlessly saved money to hit it. Okay? Now thing number two, I need to get my work ethic straight. I knew the moment I quit my job, my life was going to be completely different. I wasn't going to have to take the train to work anymore. I was going to be responsible for putting food on the table for myself. I would get to decide when I woke up the morning pro. And I would also have to figure out when I was going to show up to the office, my studio apartment, and work, which was a con. It was gonna be. It was a pro, and Conrad was gonna be a challenge. So long before I quit my job, I started challenging myself to come home and work at night on freelance projects. This allowed me to start practicing the daily discipline of working for myself. Okay, thing number three. All right, we've hit our 10 minutes. Maybe we'll do it in 2012 or 15. Third, finally, I needed a way to show prospective clients that I was worth hiring. Between 2014 and 2016, I had written hundreds of answers on a website called Quora. Quora, for those who don't know, is a question answer platform where anyone can ask a question and anyone can answer. In those two years, I accumulated tens of millions of views on my writing and essentially proved that I could write viral content over and over again. My Quora profile became my portfolio. And then here I'm going to go into a little conclusion. As soon as I recap right? By doing these three things. The moment I quit my job, I had. I don't like the sound of that. By doing these three things, I immediately started getting clients the moment I quit my job. And here I can even give this a little H2 if I want. Right? And again, I don't want to. I don't want to just recap all of it for the sake of recapping it. So I want to say something new. So. And what I learned was that in order to successfully quit your job and go all in on your side hustle, the decision has to come long before you leave the office. If you prepare correctly, it doesn't feel like a leap at all. Instead, it should feel like the next logical step. Okay, 13 minutes. So if you notice. All right, how did we do this? And I love doing stuff like this because I just. It's like demystifying the whole writing process. I got these crows just going ham outside right now. So we took all of 2 minutes, 3 minutes to think about the title. The title went through three or four iterations, and you can already tell, right, like, by the third or fourth iteration, so much cleaner, so much better than where we started. So don't settle for the very first thing that comes to mind. You got to play with it. You got to really ask yourself, is this really what I'm trying to say? Is this what I'm trying to say? Second is right. This part of the title then becomes the outline. These are the main points. So just remember, essentially, whatever words you're putting here, this is your map, and all you have to do is fill it in. The third is you can kind of see I was talking through it as I was writing the intro. But all you're doing is you're hitting on these couple main points, right? What is this about? Just telling the reader you're in the right room. Who is this for? Hey, you're this type of person who may be thinking about XYZ or struggling with 1, 2, 3, here's the promise I'm going to make to you. And then the credibility for me here is, hey, I lived this, right? Like, I already went through all of this myself. These birds are ridiculous right now. I already went through all of this myself. The other option for credibility is you can go out and curate other people's credibility as well. So you can go say, hey, I didn't necessarily experience this, but I have a friend who experienced this. Or I went and studied all the other people who experienced this, right? And you put that there. And then all you're doing is just filling it in, right? The main. The main points take care of themselves. And then you're just telling stories, sharing perspectives, giving a little, hey, here's a tip. Here's something you should think about and what's crazy and why. I love doing this, you know. Again, start to finish, 13 minutes. This looks like a refined piece, but the reason it looks refined is because each section is kind of following a proven methodology. I've written so many intros like this. I've written so many main points like this. I've written so many, you know, 1, 3, 114-1-1151 sequences like this. So now that I know they work, I just repeat them over and over and over again. You can do this. Steal the 1, 3, 1, steal the. Here's how to structure an effective intro. You know, I'm giving all this to you, so use it. And then finally here in the conclusion, you notice I didn't just go and say everything I said again, right? I added this new detail, this new piece to the story. And this is something, you know, I've talked about a lot. I've written this before, is if you prepare correctly, it shouldn't feel like a leap, you know, it should feel like the next logical step. And so when you. When you step back and you look at the whole thing, the average reader goes, whoa, how long did that take you? You know, but if you just slow down and practice each one of these things in and of themselves, this whole piece is basically four puzzle pieces. It's a title, it's an intro, it's your main points, and it's a mini conclusion. And you can repeat that over and over and over again. And to the average reader, or even to really great readers, to smart readers, when they look at this, they go, wow, this is such a great piece. This is so well written. This is so well organized. This looks so professional. But to you, after you've done it, you know, a gazillion times, you're like, yeah, I mean, it's basically just following the recipe. It's not, you know, it's not anything like, insanely complicated. You just learn. This is how it works. So I just wanted to show you how I go about doing this. I mean, at this point, you know, this is 13 minutes sometimes. Sometimes if I'm really going, probably because I was saying it out loud, I can. I can do it in 10. But there's no reason why you can't get to the stage two. And once you get here, you notice I was thinking a lot less about the actual writing, and I was thinking a lot more about the thinking. What do I want to say? And then the organization just takes care of itself. I know where all the puzzle pieces are going to fit, so I hope this helps. Use this framework. Enjoy it. Right inside Typeshare. It's great. Great interface. You have all the tools you need. And let me know in the comments if you. What you think or if you have any questions or anything else you'd like to see me write. I'm happy to take suggestions and tackle it in another video. All right, enjoy.