What Do You Want Me To Write?

Members, I’m Here To Serve You.

4 min readOct 24, 2017

On August 22nd, I received one of the many fateful emails we get in our lives. The kind where you don’t even realize its potential until you look back six years later and think: “Man, maybe I should’ve pressed the button in that email.”

Except in this case, I had been waiting for it. Across the top, the message stood in bold letters. Loud and clear:

Get paid for writing on Medium.

I instantly clicked the button.

When I first got sucked into the rainbow-colored infinite canvas of human life that is the world of blogs in 2012, I was in a state of constant amazement. Think first time on an airplane: “WOW! WE’RE FLYING! FLYING!!”

I was amazed at the storytelling skills, amazed at the guts to share and amazed at the discipline with which writers did both.

The only thing that amazed me more than the work these people did was that they were able to make a living at it. Ads, ebooks, info products, coaching, speaking, whatever the mechanism was, there was one.

Right then and there, I knew in my gut that was the way I wanted my life to look like. Sit down. Read. Write. Research. Publish. Repeat. Of course it didn’t occur to me to start with the sitting down part for two more years, but that’s another story.

On September 28, 2014, I published my first blog post. Two months later, I republished it on Medium. Today, I have 258 public stories on here. Over these three years, the dream has remained the same.

Sit down. Read. Write. Research. Publish. Repeat.

If you’re a Medium Member, I would like to thank you, because right now, you are funding my dream. You may not realize it, but that’s why your choice to spend those $5 is so damn important. Thanks to your Membership, all humans, who share my dream, now have a shot at living it in its purest form.

The work has become the mechanism.

We don’t need to conjure an income from anything but writing, just to keep writing. We can and that’s awesome. But we’re not forced to any more.

Of course we’re not there yet, but hey, I just pressed that button. I waited for three years to press it. Now being patient is the easy part. What’s hard is figuring out what to write. And that’s where YOU come in.

Members, What Do You Want Me To Write?

I’ve published three posts commissioned for Better Humans as part of the new Member program so far:

I’ve also published six Member stories over the past six weeks:

I want to commit to writing one Member story each week, but to do that, I need your help. Sometimes, we forget the easiest way to get what we need is to just ask. So here I am, asking.

Members, what do you want me to write?

What do you care so much about that I should care about it too? What problem can I solve for you? What experience can I share that you can’t make yourself?

One-offs are fun, but I’d also love to explore topics deeper, with ongoing series. I think it might bring more value. A few possible themes:

Using technology to fight technology. The servant has turned against the master. But there are a few tools that help us eliminate most other tools. I know some, but I bet there are more out there.
Testing and/or reviewing popular productivity systems. My own productivity system is always one made of parts I pulled together from other systems. Maybe it’d be interesting to go back to those, review them or test them in full, and then pick out the most valuable parts. Also possible: how to assemble your own productivity system with this strategy.
If you’re not observing your own behavior, you can’t improve. In this context, I think self-awareness, meta habits and ways to cultivate both might be interesting.
Books. Getting paid means getting to eat. But it also means being able to re-invest. I could buy books, read them in full, and then do a deep dive on certain aspects. Or buy multiple books on one topic and assemble the big picture.

I write, you read, you pay, I eat. That’s only the most basic version of Members. It goes far beyond that. Just like the button in that email, it has so much potential. It’s limitless. But we must start. Right here, right now.

If you leave a response with what you’re interested in, together, we can make it happen.

PS: All of this doesn’t mean I’m not serving Non-Members. I still publish a ton of writing for free and it’ll always be this way. Plus, you can read a few Member pieces for free each month. If you’re not sold on it, here’s my pitch for you to join the revolution.

What Do You Want Me To Write?

Members, I’m Here To Serve You.

Get paid for writing on Medium.

Members, What Do You Want Me To Write?

Written by Niklas Göke