Stop Checking Your Viewer Stats Twice a Minute
Fighting the urge to seek public validation
Dear those, who like me, know the feeling of obsessing over the views and reads on your Medium story all too well.
Let me set the scene for you.
You’re in bed at night, and come up with a great idea for a new article. You wake up early, excited to start drafting your idea into a sparkling piece of writing. After various revisions and several mental blocks, you’ve written a piece that you are really proud of.
You hit that submit button, sure that people will love your writing just as much as you do. After all, you just spent the last few hours researching and writing, so surely all of that effort will pay off.
The story is live, and immediately you head to your stats to check if your story has gone viral. It’s been 4 minutes and you have zero views.
You refresh the page, sure that the website must be slow.
Still no views.
You are confused, as what you’ve written is great content, and something you really care about. So why is no one wanting to read it?
You’re not even that concerned that the article isn’t making any money, yet you still hope for those claps and reads, to validate your assumption that you are a great writer.
Ah! You have just had a thought. Maybe your wifi has gone down (even though you are receiving Facebooks notifications on your phone, letting you know that your mother has tagged you in yet ANOTHER post). You rush to restart your router and wait patiently.
Still no views.
Anxiety can be a fickle little friend, and when something you are proud of isn’t successful, it can be a kick in the teeth.
You are a great writer, whether you are an amateur or a seasoned professional, so don’t let those lack of views stop you from doing what you love.
Stop checking your stats page, and feel proud of what you have written.
P.S. if you’ve read this far, then thank you for livening up my stats page, now I can go to sleep at night knowing at least one person has read my work.
