The downside of writing about personal development

I write a lot about how to make progress, how to become a better person and how to work a lot better. I want to write about that because first, I read a lot about those topics and second, it helps me figure out what I need to do in order to do everything a lot better.

But while this topic in general seems like it gets a lot of attention, writing about personal development is not as great as you think.

First, you get out of ideas pretty fast. There aren't a lot of things you can talk about that other people didn't mention already, especially on websites like Medium. If you go on that website and you take a look at the main page, you'll see at least one article talking about how you can be more successful, how you can do more in less time, how you can become a better person, and so on.

Some of those articles actually share some useful information and reading them may actually help you learn something interesting. But most of them just repeat what other authors already wrote in the past, which, if you ask me, is just a waste of time.

Another downside is that a lot of people who start writing, and who have no idea what topic to approach, start writing about personal development because it seems really easy. You just tell people what to do and you'll get some views.

But it doesn't work like that.

You see, there is so much information out there that doesn't really say anything about you, about life or about the world in general, that people got tired of consuming any type of content approaching those type of subjects.

People want to read about things that actually help them with something, at least those who spent a while reading and figured out what they want, more or less. It's a lot better to read a tutorial that teaches you how to do a bunch of things than to read an article where the author talks about how you can achieve success even if he never used the methods he shares with you.

And the last downside is the amount of common information out there repeated by a lot of people again and again, hoping to get your attention and to make some money with all those views and how that instantly makes you look like one of those people if you write about personal development.

For example, the easiest way to write an article is to use a title like "The main five reasons you're not succeeding" and to say things like "You don't work hard enough" or "You wake up too late" or "You spend too much time doing things that don't help you make progress".

I mean, sure, those are useful things to keep in mind when thinking about achieving success, but let's be serious, everyone knows that those are the reasons they're not successful. Is not like mentioning them is gonna help people be a lot more productive and do things ten times better.

Come up with a solution, bring something new, show people how to move on and how to become truly productive. Don't just talk about common things everyone can figure out on their own. That doesn't help them.

If you're thinking about approaching personal development in your writing, here's my advice - don't. Find something more interesting to write about and focus on that. Personal development is amazing in some way, but in a lot of cases you'll just repeat a bunch of information that's already available, just like I and a bunch of other people do from time to time.

If you do want to approach this topic, then keep in mind what I said and be prepared to write a lot before making any money or before getting the attention of other people. It's hard to find new information to share, and it's easy to fall into the trap of writing about the same things again and again just because it's easy.