You have to be yourself, to speak in a way that is true to you. This is the next step to claiming your life as a writer—taking yourself seriously so your audience will too.

found my dream not by searching for it, but by submitting to what I had always hoped was true: I was, in fact, a writer. All I had to do was write. Anyone can do this. All it requires is a simple, scary solution: Believe you already are what you want to be. And then start acting like it.

Real artists risk failure every time they release their work into the world. If your words are going to matter, you will have to do the same. You will have to let go. Until you do, you’re not creating art. You’re just screwing around.

Understanding this is essential to spreading your message and earning the attention of new readers. Either you build it or you just keep shouting into the crowd. And trust me, you don’t want to shout.

You can either create or react. But you can’t do both. Choose wisely.

If you’re writing something that matters, people will disagree with you. They may even attack you and call you names.

Someone put it like this: “If you’re ‘one in a million,’ and the world is full of seven billion people, that means there are seven thousand people just like you.” When you think about it like that, you don’t feel so alone anymore, do you? Which raises the question: If there are thousands of people out there waiting to hear from you, how do you find

The only person you need to worry about writing for is you. This is the secret to satisfaction in anything: doing what gives you life and not trying to live up to others’ expectations.

You make yourself unforgettable. As Seth Godin says, be remarkable in the most literal way—so people will remark about you. The point in all of this is not to turn into a marketing machine, but to get people to not forget you. It’s about making yourself memorable. About standing out in all the noise. This won’t just happen. You will have to work.