Don’t Set SMART Goals

August 30, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s. He made a scintillating discovery in a new scientific field of his day — cybernetics. He wrote in the book Psycho-Cybernetics that our “subconscious mind” is not just a mind but a goal-striving servo-mechanism.

He compared it to a torpedo or heat-seeking missile. It needs clear-cut targets to work on. And if you don’t give it one, it will find one.

Then why is it that most people don’t achieve their goals? There is no shortage of goals or goal-setters in the world.

That is because:

“These goals are filtered through the self-image, and if inconsistent, are rejected or modified.” — Maxwell Maltz

For the last five decades, we have been fed to set SMART goals. As you might be aware, SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Usually, the kind of goals we would set would be either outcome-based or process-based.

Outcome-based goal — Lose five pounds in three months.

Process-based goal — High-impact exercise for 30 minutes each day for three months.

The trouble is, both don’t work.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, has been studying habits and goal setting for more than a decade. Two of his famous quotes are:

“You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”

“Your goal is your desired outcome. Your system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there.”

James reckons your identity holds you back. He recommends setting identity-based goals.

An identity is a self-image chosen by you for you. And when things truly matter to you, you’re truly committed to making them happen. That’s because “the more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it.”

This is in line with Maxwell’s observation that your goals are filtered through your self-image and if they are not in line, they are either rejected or modified.

An identity-based goal is — I’m the type of woman that never misses a workout.

Here are a few more examples

Outcome-based goal — To earn $10,000 from writing by the end of this year.

Process-based goal — To write 200 articles on Medium and publish five e-books by the end of this year.

Identity-based goal — I am a market-savvy writer who can sell her work fair price.

Outcome-based goal — To write 2 to 3 articles a week.

Process-based goal — Write 750 words a day.

Identity-based goal — I am a writer who writes fast and fluently.

When I had outcome-based or process-based goals, I didn’t make much progress with my writing.

Rather I fought my own goals by keep telling myself that I was not a good writer.

As soon as I started seeing myself as a writer, I became a much more fluent writer. I am consistently writing 4 -5 articles a week on Medium and Substack and a post a day on LinkedIn.

In addition, I have written and published four books.

Add Spirituality To Your Goal Setting

Another thing that works is making your goals higher than yourself.

Recently, I came across a three-questions technique by Vishen Lakhiani to find out your end-goal.

End Goals is the term Vishen uses for identity-based goals.

The three questions Vishan Lakhiani poses are:

What are the experiences you want in your life?
How do you need to grow to have those experiences?
How can you contribute to the rest of the world?

There is a lot of merit in looking at goal-setting in this way.

When you think about experiencing the life of a lean and fit person, the motivation is much deeper and long-standing.

And since experience is embedded at the emotional level, the desire to achieve it is much stronger.

The second question is even more magical.

It makes you concentrate on the skills for the experience you want.

I realized I needed to put more of my work “out there” to grow as a writer.

So I started a Substack newsletter and started publishing short-form posts on social media and increased the frequency of article writing on Medium. Within months, I have become my “desired identity.”

The third question adds the spiritual element to the goal-setting.

When you make your goal bigger than your personal achievement, when there is an element of contributing to the universe, then the force of the universe clears the path for you (I wrote about it in Four Levels of Consciousness and How To Make Sure You Listen To Inspiration When It Whispers)

Here is the link to the video about the 3 Question Technique. And here is the format to use the 3 Question Technique:

How To Create Digital Products Using Your Current Knowledge

August 23, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Creating a digital product that they could sell is every new creator’s dream. Digital products are an amazing way to add a revenue stream.

The beauty of digital products is that they allow you to package knowledge you already have or skills and services you already performed into a product that you can build once and sell countless times. That allows you to save a lot of time, a lot of overhead and reach a lot more customers.

What is so special about digital products?

They’re a low investment.
They’re more profitable than physical goods because you don’t have to worry about shipping or replenishing inventory.
You don’t have to deal with the hassle of constantly producing stock, storing shipping, or any other logistics.
You can automate the delivery, and you can serve your niche at scale by providing valuable information.
Not only that, but the shifted digital business models and online education is a powerful market factor working in your favor. eLearning for example is projected to be worth $331 billion by 2025.

What should you create?

You don’t need to be an expert in what you do in order to create a digital product. You need to be two years ahead of the people you are teaching.

Think of something you have learned in the past two years. Chances are other people also want to learn the same skill. You can teach them through your product.

People prefer to learn from someone who is a little ahead of them rather than from experts. Experts are too far ahead in the game. Beginners can’t relate to them.

Make a list of the things you are good at. Things people ask your help for. It could be — how to create a website or how to choose a good board game to play when you have friends over.

Make a list.

Then choose one thing that you can work on straight away.

Once you have done that, let’s get started.

How to create a digital product

The first thing that you need to do when creating a digital product is to answer a very simple question.

What problem can you solve and what opportunity can you provide?

At the core, there are two main reasons people purchase a product.

To move further away from pain
To unlock a benefit.

In either case, these people are seeking to improve their lives meaningfully. So what you need to do is create a problem statement.

A problem statement is a concise description that highlights the gap between the barriers your target market is facing and their desired end state.

The reason you want to do this is so that you clearly articulate what the idea is and why it is useful in the context of the marketplace.

Writing a problem statement is actually quite simple.

It should be more like a paragraph that a sentence. Start by stating the desire. Then point out what is stopping them from fulfilling that desire. Then propose how they can fulfil their desire and how your product is going to help them reach that.

Last week, I created a digital product. The problem statement for that was:

Creating a digital product is every new creator’s dream. But most of them don’t do it because they don’t know what problem they should pick, how to create it and how to write the sales letter. They either keep postponing it. Or they start creating it, and when they get stuck, they give up.

My guide can help you create your first product in three hours. It will help you write the sales letter and select a platform where to publish it for repeat business.

Do you see how the problem statement helps frame and articulate my digital product idea and why it is valuable in the market?

Then I stated how my product was going to help them solve their problem.

This guide can help.

Written in a short and succinct manner, this short guide gives you all the information you need on:

• What to create as your first product.

• How to create it.

• Where to publish it.

• How to improve it.

• How to write a sales page.

Examples of products.

No matter whether you’re making software, a course or a digital download, don’t skip this step.

I have created a guide that can help with the entire process. You can download it here for free.

Hope it will inspire and help you with writing your first product.

How To Slow Down And Pay Attention

August 18, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Our whole life is rush rush rush.

We have become so accustomed to rushing that if we are not rushing to get somewhere or to do something, or to finish something that if we are not rushing, we feel we are not doing anything.

This is what I used to feel anyway.

Writing, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. To be a good writer, you need to slow down. You need to become more observant. You need to take in sensory clues and synthesize them. You need to allow your mind to make connections. To draw insights.

This week I was going through some old notes of mine when I came across one of the exercises in Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing newsletter back in 2020.

Take a familiar walk and identify five boring things that are of no interest whatsoever.

I decided to try that. Since it has been raining here, I decided to try this exercise while driving to the gym in the morning.

Invariably I am late for the gym. So while driving, my whole focus is to get past other cars and get through the light while it is still green (still within speed limits) to that I can make it to the class in time.

Needless to say, I start my day with unnecessary stress.

But on Tuesday, as I was noticing the boring things that were of no interest whatsoever, the things I would ignore otherwise, I relaxed a bit.

This is what I noticed:

Steam coming from the Canberra hospital building’s air-conditioning.
The hint of green on every branch of the willow tree by the creek.
An abandoned shopping trolly.
A wheely electronic sign-board that was switched off
The empty skating slopes of at the corner of the park

Then I forgot all about these things during the day.

The next morning when I was writing the morning pages, these things came back to me, and I wrote them down. While doing that, I started pondering why I noticed these things and not the other things.

Was my mind biased to pick these things?

Why did the steam coming from the Canberra hospital building’s air-conditioning stand out more than anything else?

Memories came rushing in. For the past eight years, Canberra Hospital has played a prominent role in our lives. I visited it frequently when both my parents and my mother-in-law were in and out of the facility with various aliments. I have spent many nights there. Sometimes I will go there in the middle of winter nights, and as soon as I would see the steam coming from the chimney on the tenth floor of the building, a sense of relief will fall on me. The air conditioning is working. It is warm in there. My parents are warm and comfortable. They are being looked after.

The boring thing wasn’t boring at all. There was a deeper meaning associated with it.

The hint of green on the willow tree by the creek announced that spring was just two weeks away.

The abandoned trolly reminded me of the homeless person I had seen in the city years ago, whose entire belonging were in a shopping trolly. How do the homeless survive the Canberra winter out in the open? Did this trolly belong to some homeless person too?

The wheel electronic signboard played a prominent role in our lives during the drought years in Canberra not so long ago. Each day while driving back, the commuters would read the water level in the dam and how much water Canberrians used that day. People stopped wasting water. They were careful while watering their gardens and conserved water as much as they could. The consumption reduced to half and then kept going down. The local government said that wheely electronic signboards they had installed at various arterial routes played a big part. Today that signboard wasn’t silent. There was no need. We have had plenty of rain this year.

This was an exercise in paying attention. It helped me to slow down and find the meaning of trivial things.

Attention is not a resource, but a way of being alive to the world.

Dan Nixon wrote an essay in which he talked about how attention is misunderstood and misused in the ‘attention economy.’

The ‘attention economy,’ portrays our attention as a limited resource at the center of the informational ecosystem, where various information outlets are competing to grab our attention.

But our attention is much more than that.

Attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda.

Dan Nixon talks about a trip to Japan where he found himself with few free hours in Tokyo. Stepping out into the busy district of Shibuya, he wandered aimlessly amid the neon signs and crowds of people.

My senses met the wall of smoke and the cacophony of sound as I passed through a busy pachinko parlour. For the entire morning, my attention was in ‘exploratory’ mode. That stood in contrast to, say, when I had to focus on navigating the metro system later that day.

By treating attention as a resource, and engaging both hemispheres of the brain (left logical and right creative)we can ‘deliver’ the world to us in two different ways.

The left hemisphere of the brain analyzes and categorizes things so that it can use them towards some end.

By contrast, the brain’s right hemisphere adopts an exploratory mode of attending: a more embodied awareness, one that is open to whatever presents itself to us in all its fullness.

This mode of ‘exploratory attention’ comes into play, for instance, when we pay attention to other people, to the natural world, and to works of art.

It is also the exploratory mode of attention that can connect us to our deepest sense of purpose.

This is what American philosopher William James had in mind in 1890 when he wrote:

What we attend to is reality. — William James

The simple but profound idea is that what we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, shapes our reality, moment to moment, day to day, and so on.

What are you paying attention to?

How To Convert Anecdotes Into Stories Using A Simple Framework

August 16, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Last week I was scrolling through my LinkedIn feeds while sipping the steaming hot tea on a chilly winter morning when a story caught my eye.

It was captivating and well-written, but what really intrigued me was the footnote. The author mentioned that she developed the story with the help of a story coach, and if anyone wanted to develop their story, they should DM (direct message) him.

Now, if there is one thing that I have been struggling with for the past three years, is telling stories from everyday life. I am very good at telling other people’s stories. But when it comes to telling stories from my own life, I feel inhibited.

So, I sent him a contact request. He immediately accepted it, and sent me a welcome note.

I was impressed.

I wrote back, telling him that I wanted to improve my storytelling skills. What would he suggest I should do?

He sent me a link to a TED Talk.

I listened to it, and before it was over, my mind was made up.

I wrote to him saying, “I am setting myself a personal challenge — To write 30 stories in 30 days on LinkedIn. Announcing it to you makes it official.”

“Then consider it official,” he wrote back.

As soon as I got his response, I said to myself, “OMG! What have I done? Am I even equipped to pull it through? In two weeks, I will be traveling. There is no way I could meet the challenge.”

I can go back and tell him that it was a mistake.

Or don’t go back at all. I don’t owe him anything.

But hang on, what will be the price of pulling myself out?

I will not learn storytelling. What’s the big deal?

Hang on. It is a big deal. I want to get better at storytelling. This is my chance. Why not give it a go? Write as many days as I can. Learn as much as I could. I have nothing to lose. Only to gain.

So, this was it.

I published the above story as Story #1. The story got 2760 impressions and 42 likes. I received more than 20 comments.

Since then, I have been writing a story a day. I even created a hashtag #30days30stories. Other people joined in, and we have a nice thread going where people are telling their stories while learning the craft of storytelling.

I have learned more about storytelling in the last week than I did in the past three years.

And it started by putting myself out there.

How to craft a story?

On the very first story, the story coach Dan Manning wrote to me,

“You can make any story better by getting really specific on the moment of change. Here it is in this story:

I listened to it, and before it was over, my mind was made up. I wrote to him saying, “I am setting myself a personal challenge — To write 30 stories in 30 days on LinkedIn. Announcing it to you makes it official.”

In all of your stories, make sure your audience knows this is THE moment they have been waiting for.

Later I had a Zoom call with him, and we talked about storytelling. He gave me a simple framework to craft my stories.

That framework was a goldmine. Using it, practically any anecdote from everyday life can be converted into a story.

It looks like this:

A story starts with a change. In your anecdote, look where the change is occurring and start building your story from there. Describe what was the situation (or the person) before the change and how it (the situation or person) changed after the change.

If there is no change, there is no story.

Phillip Berry Osborne said:

“Ultimately, the key to personal-experience stories is change. Where our personal lives are concerned, in fact, change is probably the biggest single challenge we all face and share.

That’s why the best personal stories explore our transition in life — if only to encourage us to accept ourselves in some new context or as we’re becoming.

Such transition or change is vital to storytelling since it’s bound up with the overall message that underscores any good story — and yet, too often, writers fail in this one key area of change and, especially, the message that comes out of it.

Another important element of a story is meaning.

Without a message, a story is like an egg without a shell.

Many of us, as writers, neglect this fundamental requirement.

We, humans, love stories because we are looking for meaning in them. Meaning could be as simple as:

making a decision to do something or not to do something.
an insight
a lesson
an epiphany
a realization.

Pick those moments in your day and weave your stories around them.

Follow me on LinkedIn, and you can read my stories there.

So want kind of stories can you write?

There are three kinds of stories:

Stories that motivate you and make you feel focused, and enhance your memory (dopamine generating)
Stories that make be more generous, trust and bond(Oxytocin generating)
Stories that make us laugh (Endorphine generating)

Want to learn more about them, watch this TED Talk.

How To Write Your BackStory

August 5, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

In 2018, when I was creating my website, the most difficult thing to write was the About page.

I wrote and rewrote it three times.

When I couldn’t make it any better, I put it aside, thinking that as I got better at writing, I would write it again.

I didn’t touch it for three years.

The same thing happened when I wrote the About Me post on Medium. It’s my pinned post and I wrote it about 18 months ago. I meant to update it but can’t bring myself to do it.

Why?

Because it is too hard.

We writers can write hundreds of stories but can’t tell our own story well.

Yet we need to be able to tell our backstory in a compelling fashion.

Nearly all successful entrepreneurs have a compelling backstory. The backstory helps entrepreneurs build their brand and generate loyalty among their customers.

As authors, we are building our brands too.

We, too, need a compelling backstory.

By that, I do not mean you need to invent a backstory or make up a false story.

What I mean is that we need to identify our authentic backstory and tell it in such a way that it resonates with our audience.

Recently, I learned how to identify and create my (true) backstory. I am sharing the whole process here so that you, too, can create your backstory.

It is done in 7 steps.

Step 1: The Obstacle

To begin, it’s important that our audience can relate to our story. We could be from different backgrounds, different countries; we might have different upbringings and different education, and different professions, but there is one critical thing that’s very relatable: overcoming an obstacle.

And everyone has to overcome obstacles in their lives.

So, base your story on what obstacle you have overcome.

My example: I wanted to win promotions in my current role, but there was one problem. My English was not very good. It was my second language, and the truth was I sucked at it.

Step 2: The Internal Struggles

Internal struggles are how we feel inside because of the obstacle faced in Step 1.

Internal pain is captured with words like fearful, insecure or anxious.

My example: During a performance review, my boss told me that the only thing standing between me and a senior management position was my written English. Even though he was polite about it, his remark left me shattered. Does that mean I will never be promoted?

Step 3: The External Struggles

External struggles can generally be seen or heard. An over-drafted bank account, a lost job, a poor living situation, etc.

My example: I was overlooked in many promotion opportunities. My superiors saw me as a workhorse rather than as a leader.

Step 4: The Change Event

The change event is the one critical decision that you made that leads you from your struggle to your newfound transformation.

My example: I couldn’t swallow that. What can I do? I asked myself. I decided to take a writing course. I thought it will help me become a fluent writer. But instead of joining a business writing course, I took up a Life Story Writing course.

Step 5: The Spark

The spark is that magic moment when you realize everything is about to change. When you go from feeling completely disconnected to reinvigorating.

My example: I learned that writing was nothing but storytelling. Even business writing. When I was writing a business case, I was telling a story. When I was writing a discussion paper, I was weaving several stories to make a case. Even when I was writing a resume, I was telling a story — my story. I became a storyteller.

Step 6: The Guide

The guide in the story is the person who lifts you up and helps you see your potential for what it really is.

My example: A few months later, my then boss gave me an important project — to create a monthly performance report for the department. A perfect opportunity to showcase my storytelling skills. I never looked back from there. I got promoted multiple times and eventually reported to the CEO of our organisation.

Step 7: The Result

The result is the continuation of the story to even bigger and greater success, leading up to your present situation.

My example: Years later, my storytelling skills helped me to launch my writing career. I went on to author four books. Today I am a full-time writer.

Stitching the steps together to tell the story

Now stitch together all the pieces. My backstory sounds like this:

I wanted to win promotions in my current role, but there was one problem. My English was not very good. It was my second language, and the truth was I sucked at it. During a performance review, my boss told me that the only thing standing between me and a senior management position was my written English. Even though he was polite about it, his remark left me shattered. Does that mean I will never be promoted?

I was overlooked in many promotion opportunities. My superiors saw me as a workhorse rather than as a leader. I couldn’t swallow that. What can I do? I asked myself. I decided to take a writing course. I thought it will help me become a fluent writer. But instead of joining a business writing course, I took up a Life Story Writing course.

I learned that writing was nothing but storytelling. Even business writing. When I was writing a business case, I was telling a story. When I was writing a discussion paper, I was weaving several stories to make a case. Even when I was writing a resume, I was telling a story — my story. I became a storyteller.

A few months later, my then-boss gave me an important project — to create a monthly performance report for the department. A perfect opportunity to showcase my storytelling skills. I never looked back from there. I got promoted multiple times and eventually reported to the CEO of our organisation.

Years later, my storytelling skills helped me to launch my writing career. I went on to author four books. Today I am a full-time writer.

Now I can use the various iterations of this backstory for different purposes. I can tell the full version where needed, and I can tell shortened versions or use snippets of the story when it makes sense.

Takeaways

Telling a compelling backstory isn’t just for entrepreneurs; authors need it too.
Everyone who has a backstory you admire has crafted it and perfected it.
Being vulnerable with your audience allows them to see you in a very transparent and human light.
Practicing your backstory using the seven steps gives you a consistent and compelling story that you can use for various purposes.

3 Ways Of Idea Generation That Can Make You Invincible

August 4, 2022December 5, 2022 Neera

Ideas are like bubbles. They vanish as quickly as they form. You got to build mechanisms to capture them.

Over time, I have tried several idea generations and collection processes. Although I keep switching from one to another, I would like to share them with you here.

1. Write Ten Ideas A Day

My first real system to generate ideas came from James Altucher’s article, Ultimate Guide to Becoming an Idea Machine, where he recommends generating ten ideas a day in two minutes.

Although he is talking about generating business ideas, I used his technique to come up with topics to write about.

I had assigned a separate notebook to it.

I would sit with a pen and paper and write down the heading in two minutes. Without evaluating them or thinking about how I was going to write them, whether or not I knew enough about the topic or not.

Coming up with five or six headlines was easy. Then they will become hard. The last two to three were the hardest. But since the clock was ticking, I would keep going.

This exercise really helped me to flex my idea muscles. I did it, on and off, for many months in the early years of my writing career. Not all the headings I generated made it to publication. Some did; others stayed in my Medium draft folder. Over time, I could use some of them as short LinkedIn posts. Recently I deleted 100+ half-written articles I was no longer interested in writing about.

If you want to learn more about the process, you can get James and Claudia Azula Altucher’s book Become An Idea Machine.

“The way to have good ideas is to get close to killing yourself. It’s like weightlifting. When you lift slightly more than you can handle, you get stronger. In life, when the gun is to your head, you either figure it out, or you die.”
― Claudia Azula Altucher, Become An Idea Machine: Because Ideas Are The Currency Of The 21st Century

Alternatively, you can watch this two-minute video and get the gist of it.

https://cdn.embedly.com/widgets/media.html?src=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fembed%2FQ74hqCt5a8g%3Ffeature%3Doembed&display_name=YouTube&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DQ74hqCt5a8g&image=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ytimg.com%2Fvi%2FQ74hqCt5a8g%2Fhqdefault.jpg&key=a19fcc184b9711e1b4764040d3dc5c07&type=text%2Fhtml&schema=youtube

Mind mapping To Go Deep Into A Topic.

My next technique was to mind map or brainstorm on a single topic in order to get deep into it.

I would either a topic I know a lot about or one I want to learn about so that I can research it and write about it.

To demonstrate that, I have picked a broad topic of storytelling. I have put ‘storytelling’ in the middle and wrote ten sub-topics that came to mind about storytelling.

Then I picked two sub-topics and went one level deep by writing ten sub-sub topics.

I just wrote one word for sub-topics and sub-sub-topics. No need to go into detail at this point. You can write a couple of words if it makes more sense, but no more than that.

Then I picked two more sub-topics and wrote ten sub-sub-topics for each one of them.

At the end of this exercise, I had 100 sub-sub-topics to write about on the broad topic of ‘storytelling.’

Then I wrote three sub-sub-sub-topics in each sub-category. Now I can go into a bit of detail and write headings. I would use Headline Generator, which gives 700 titles for a single keyword.

For example, for storytelling –>mistakes, I got the following headings which I tweaked to my liking.

13 Storytelling Mistakes Avoid
What Can You Learn From Common StoryTelling Mistakes
Why Mistakes Are An Opportunity To Tell Stories Differently

Now I can write something concrete and useful for a broad ‘storytelling’ topic.

Using this technique, you can come up with 300 headings to write about. And all uniquely generated by you.

Do this exercise for your topic, and you will never run out of topics.

Tip: Don’t take more than two minutes to write ten sub-topics. Then, each day, pick up three sub-topics and write ten sub-sub-topics. Keep going till you get to 300 subtopics.

Personal Experiences Idea Generator

This is my third tool for generating ideas.

It has three steps:

The Two-Year Test
Adding specificity
Use the 4A Framework + proven approaches to generate ideas

Step 1: The Two-Year Test

In the first step, I ask myself one simple question:

“What are the problems I’ve solved and topics I’ve learned about over the past two years.”

Then I do a brain dump of all the things I have done, the problems I have solved, or things I have learned.

Since everything won’t come to me in a single session, so I have the list going all the time, and as soon as I remember something or learn something new, I add it to the list.

This is a particularly good way because then I can write from my experiences like I am writing now in this idea-generation article.

Even though I am not an expert on a topic, I can write about my experiences.

I have also found that people rarely want to learn from experts; they prefer to learn from those who are just a few steps ahead of them on the same path.

Once I have the list going, I organise the topics into buckets, such as:

Writing
Productivity
Marketing
LinkedIn
Authorpreneurship
Fiction writing

Step 2: Adding specificity

Once I pick a topic that I learned in the past two years or a problem I have solved, I would use that to explain it to a specific audience. That audience could be me, two years ago, or a reader who has yet to learn that topic.

This is very important because now I am giving specific advice to a specific person. Which makes the article more useful for the readers and also brings credibility to me.

Some of my articles below, written from personal experience, were well received because they talk directly to the readers.

How I am Using LinkedIn To Establish Myself As A Writer

How To Write A Good Short Form Article

4 Types Of Articles That Work Well On Medium

Use Lego Block Technique To Help You Write Faster

How To Get Started On LinkedIn

How To Write A Good LinkedIn Post

How To Set Up A Good LinkedIn Profile

How To Write An Article In An Hour

There are other ways to get specific. Here are some levers you can pull:

By industry (LinkedIn for writers)
By demographic (LinkedIn for middle-aged writers)
By physical location (LinkedIn for Indian Writers)
By digital platform (Writing for Twitter)
By price (Productivity tools for free)
By distribution (Marketing to Libraries)
By problem (Writing during driving)

You see, each of these examples is very specific and hence makes much better articles.

Now you’ve got your topics, here’s where it gets fun.

Step 3: Use the 4A Framework to write headlines

I learned this framework recently from Dickie Bush of Ship 30 for 30.

4A Framework is about expressing your topic in 4 ways

Actionable (here’s how)
Analytical (here are the numbers)
Aspirational (yes, you can)
Anthropological (here’s why)

Actionable

These are actionable, implementable pieces of content.

The reader should gain some new insight or instruction they didn’t have beforehand.

Tips
Hacks
Resources
Ultimate guides

Take your core idea and help the reader put it into practice.

Analytical

These are breakdowns involving numbers, frameworks, and processes.

Take your core idea and support it with numbers and analysis.

Industry trends
Surprising numbers
Why your idea works

Help the reader unlock a new way of thinking.

Aspirational

These are stories of how you or others put your core idea into practice.

Lessons
Mistakes
Reflections
Underrated traits
How to get started

Help the reader understand the benefits they unlock when they see the world through this new lens.

Anthropological

These are things that speak to universal human nature.

Fears
Failures
Struggles
Why others are wrong
How you’ve been misled

Address these, and you will have an interesting read.

For example, if my topic is “Building a daily writing habit as a beginner writer” here are four ways to write articles about it.

7 mistakes to avoid when building a daily writing habit (actionable)
Why writing for 30 days is the key to building a writing habit (analytical)
3 lessons I learned from writing for 100 days in a row (aspirational)
The #1 reason people stop writing shortly after starting (anthropological)

Please keep in mind that so far, this is the idea generation phase. You got to refrain from writing the article. You are collecting and curating the headlines only.

How to develop them into articles is a different subject altogether. Let me know if you want me to write about it.