Writing Is Not Just a Side Hustle, It’s a Career

This Incredible Lesson I Learnt Changed My Perspective to Writing

Owen Coffey
3 min readNov 2, 2022

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Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

We usually don’t take writing as seriously as we are meant to at times. Why? Maybe because we feel we’re just doing it as a side passion, a casual affair or just something to do when we are bored.

Recently, I started to take my interest in writing more seriously. I always felt writing as something I did to kill time. Never really saw that much potential in my articles.

I just wanted to build my communication skills, establish a readership and an active audience who would help me discover my potential to influence people with my voice. I was Wrong, terribly wrong!

Not many people would step up to start up a career in writing or even study it professionally and that’s why our writing turns out to be mediocre, often times than not.

Writing online isn’t majorly a gift. I have read a lot of articles and I’m like “…this guys just wake up in the morning, sip a cup of coffee then put their hands on their keyboard and great content just started pouring out.”

But when I got into writing on Medium, I started to understand that writing was a process perfected over time and not just a gift.

Perfecting your writing skill takes a lot of time and a lot of practice. How far you go in writing depends on the amount of effort you put into it and you won’t be able to put in good effort if you just take it as one of your other side passions.

What Happens When Your Writing Changes from a Side Hustle to a Professional Career

  1. Your Writing Begins to Fetch You More Money — 
    Creating great content is the most essential part of writing. The second is “knowing the ropes in writing!” and what is a better way to get to know the ropes in a particular field than taking up professional courses, taking part in webinars and some other things.
  2. You Become More Creative — Any average person can write a great article with his creative juices alone but when you begin a professional career in writing, you’ll meet a lot of experienced writers and you’ll start to learn from the way they write their articles; you’ll start to learn writing flaws which were not obvious to you previously and your writing will take a new shape (hopefully for the better). What I’m trying to say is professional writing gives you exposure.

How Do I Kickstart My Professional Writing Career Today?

Step 1 — Learn to respect the process. You’ll definitely need to learn how to write, it can be from someone with more experience or it could be an online course on Udemy but whatever it is; you have to learn that they’re no shortcuts and even the best authors you know today started their journey with a pen, a paper and a dream just like you.

Step 2 — Get a blog for yourself. Think of it as a blueprint behind the work you do for your clients. A personal blog will help your dexterity, improve the quality of your article and build your professional career.

If you want to build a great blog today with complete control over your content and wonderful SEO tools, go for Wordpress .org + Bluehost Web Hosting (The No.1 recommended hosting service).

Final Thoughts

Writing is a great hobby that many people develop into careers over time. It is time for you to do what you love and still make a living out of it.

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Owen Coffey

Startup writer | Student of "the art of black and white communication" | I write about Writing Hacks, Life, Income and other new stuff I find out everyday.