• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer
  • Home
  • Articles
    • ✍🏽 Online Creators
    • 🎯 Better Living
    • 📚 Knowledge Management
    • 🧠 Learning Hacks
    • 🧱 Transforming Education
  • Courses

learntrepreneurs

make the most of your mind

  • About Eva
  • Books
  • Contact

Articles

How I Built a Six-Figure Business on the Back of Writing Online

March 10, 2023 by luikangmk

Creating my dream job while working four hours a day.

Speaking at LEAP23 in Riyadh (credits: Mohammad Al-Suraye)

Many online creators complain about how hard it is to make a living from writing online. But if you take a more strategic approach, it can become easier.

Back in 2020, I had a couple of +$5,000 months on this platform, primarily through shallow buzzword articles like this one:

Source: screenshot by the author

This article took me a bit under three hours to write.

Money printing, huh?

But the truth is most earnings from my articles on Medium look like the one below, or even worse.

Source: Screenshot by the author

If I had relied on making a living through this platform alone, I could have never made a living as a solopreneur.

In this story, I share how I built a six-figure business on the back of writing and what you can apply to your journey.


Master These Two Areas to Unlock the Rest

If you want to build a sustainable online business on the back of writing, there are two areas you want to pay attention to — learn how to write articles people want to read and become a subject expert.

Write articles people actually want to read

When you start writing online, you have no clue what you need to do so that people read your work. Many new writers start with an illusion of superiority. They expect their first article to be a hit (including me back in April 2020).

New writers know so little they fail to see what they don’t know. It’s not as simple as having an idea, writing it down, publishing it, and watching it reach millions of readers.

Moving from idea generation to a well-articulated article requires multiple sub-skills you must master. For example, idea generation and selection; headline, hook, and paragraph title writing; editing; reader-centricity; formatting; consistency; and more.

I invested in writing courses and spent hundreds of hours experimenting and learning. (I am now offering a live writing course myself, scholarship application here.)

By the end of May 2020, I had spent around 200 hours writing online, earning roughly $0.07 an hour. I kept going, although I had zero followers and was invisible online.

Becoming a decent writer requires discipline and constant improvement. It’s hard to keep going when no one would care if you stopped. So many writers don’t stick around for long enough.

But if you’re willing to put in the effort, keep learning, and consistently publish high-quality content (I published 176 articles in my first 13 months of writing), you will become a good writer.

But good writing isn’t enough. Most likely, this platform alone won’t generate enough of your income for you to stick around. That’s why you want to focus on a second area.

Become a subject expert

One side effect of writing many writers ignore is that when you share what you learn and know for long enough, people will recognize you as an expert.

My deep-dive articles on learning and education have attracted most of my ongoing clients (more on that in the next section).

So how do you become a subject expert? There are three repeatable steps:

  1. Pick a topic or area that you feel curious about
  2. Learn and read about the topic
  3. Synthesize what you learn in great articles (this requires you’ve mastered the first skill — writing articles people want to read)

When selecting a topic, don’t chase the next big trend. Focus on a topic you feel genuinely drawn to.

Pick a topic or industry that you could imagine working for. For example, I chose education and learning, and Julia Blum chose psychedelics.

Don’t pick your area of expertise before you have mastered writing. Practice the craft with whatever comes to your mind. You want to explore anything that potentially excites you.

In the first months, I wrote about nutrition, relationships, spirituality, and much more. Monitor what you enjoy writing and feel curious about exploring even further. As widely-read blogger Mark Manson says:

“Until you’ve written 100 posts, you generally have no clue what you enjoy writing about or what people enjoy reading from you.”


Diversifying your income streams

In 2020, when the first potential client asked me about my hourly rate, I replied with the only reference point I had — my last student job. (Yes, in 2020, I sold my first 100 hours of working as a writer and researcher for $20/hour).

Less than three years into my online writing journey, my day rate is $1,400 (with a discount for non-profit organizations).

How?

Five months into my online writing journey, I started to receive LinkedIn messages like this one 3 or 4 times every week.

Source: screenshot by the author

I didn’t have a homepage.

I didn’t advertise any services.

Hell, I didn’t even have a fixed day rate.

But the better I became at writing, and the more I published high-quality articles on my key subject area, the more requests filled my inbox. And this never stopped.

I still don’t have a proper homepage.

I still don’t do sales calls.

I publish only a couple of articles a month on Medium.

And yet, I have sold my available work days until the end of July. My projects vary — from writing and research to consulting, project management, public speaking, and advisory roles, but all within the realm of learning and education.

Naval Ravikant says: “You’re never going to get rich renting out your time. Earn with your mind, not your time.”

Online entrepreneurs can indeed become wealthy by establishing systems that make money independent from time. They build products without costs for selling additional units such as books, online courses, media, movies, and code.

But I realized I don’t care about this truth. Because my life became richer the day I stopped optimizing for passive income.

I am fully committed to a few projects aligned with my purpose and long-term goal of creating learning and education systems that allow all learners — independent of their socioeconomic background — to thrive.

Attracting clients through writing has been the key to unlocking this life. It created tremendous opportunities and helped me build income streams I couldn’t imagine when I started three years ago. And I am convinced it can do the same for you, even if your journey might look different.

Speaking at the European Education Summit in Brussels (Source: European Commission)

Final Words

Writing has become and will remain integral to my life. I’m deeply grateful for the insight, people, and projects writing has brought to me. I’ve created a life I enjoy living, and this reality wouldn’t have been possible without writing.

Most likely, writing alone won’t generate an income to live from, but it can open up incredible opportunities and help you create your dream life.

Whether searching for more purpose in what you’re doing, feel as if you have not yet unlocked your professional potential, or are looking for ways to have a higher income, know that writing can be the tool to help you get there.

Writing does not remove systemic barriers and privileges. Timing, luck, and other factors determine whether you can up-level your life through writing.

But when you consistently commit to writing and publishing online, you put yourself out there and showcase your work. If you stick with it long enough and become good along the way, people will recognize you as an expert, bringing new opportunities along your way.


Ready to fuel your career through writing?

Subscribe to the bi-weekly write letter to get inspired, or join the next cohort of my writing online accelerator (scholarship application here).

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: Entrepreneurship, Ideas, inspiration, Writing

Here’s How Writing Unlocked a Life I Never Dared to Dream of

February 23, 2023 by luikangmk

And why I don’t want to live another day without it.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credits: Jana Hofmann)

When I wrote my first article three years ago, I had no idea how writing would change my life.

Here’s my most personal story on Medium so far. It’s a short but sharp snapshot of how I went from being depressed to a life I love living and the role writing continues to play in it.


How I hustled myself into depression

As a first-generation student from a middle-income family in rural Germany, hustle culture was in my blood, slowly pushing me into depression.

At age 16, I spent my summer holidays as a factory worker. (I bought a new phone with the money I earned, which I lost the first week after the holidays).

At age 18, I worked as a full-time postwoman, getting up at 4 AM to deliver parcels and letters.

Before turning 21, throughout my undergraduate degree, I worked my way “up” in part-time jobs — from a hostess to a sales agent in retail, to a FinTech human resource manager, to a prestigious internship on the 91st floor of Shanghai’s world financial center.

2015 at my internship in Shanghai (Source: Author)

At age 22, I hit rock bottom. I hoped to be sick forever, so I would never have to leave my bed again. I gained 10kg in two months. I felt depleted and empty. I entertained the idea of ending my life.

I won’t bore you with the details of the slow recovery (which involved pausing my studies, relying on financial support from my parents and emotional support from my school friends, therapy, and working in India).

But I will share one crucial lesson I learned very early in life: hustling doesn’t lead to happiness.

From the outside, it can seem as if someone has everything when on the inside, they have nothing.


My journey toward a life I never dreamed of

In my early twenties, I didn’t accept and like myself, so I focused all of my energy on excelling in a way validated by society.

I worked long hours not to face the emptiness and insecurity inside myself. Like many others, I used hustling to cope with unresolved trauma.

But thanks to winning the passport lottery and the privilege that goes along with it, I could use my remaining willpower and perseverance to do the inner work.

Facing and working through my trauma led to profound changes in how I work and who I work with.

I still approach work with ambition, and I strive for excellence. I deeply enjoy the work projects I commit to and receive feedback I am incredibly proud of.

But work is no longer the only cornerstone of my understanding of a successful life. I aim for four-hour laptop work days (which works nine out of ten times) to have enough capacity to care for myself and others. As a result, I can show up for projects as my most present, clear, and energized version.

I finally have time to do many of the “one day maybe” things. For example, I developed new skills and passions, such as DJing, delivering a TEDx talk, hosting a weekly podcast with my partner, and volunteering for a community project.

I feel more mental and physical strength than ever before. Not because I am a hyper-productive hustle machine but because I give myself enough space and time to live life at my pace.


My not-so-secret fuel for learning and growing

While writing has not pushed me out of depression, it has fueled my personal and professional development. Writing in public has helped me shape a life filled with flexibility and joy.

It all started in the earliest days of the first lockdown in 2020, when I saw a video on Facebook about a writing course.

A friend shared how she had made $7,000 from a single Medium article. Money was never my key motivation for changing careers, but I felt intrigued.

I took her and many other writing courses and started publishing consistently. From there, plenty of new opportunities and insights evolved, on which I will elaborate another time. But in short, writing online has helped me:

  • better understand my purpose in life.
  • unleash my inner voice.
  • organize my thinking.
  • connect with some of the most inspiring humans.
  • find an activity that brings me into blissful, creative flow states.
  • build a six-figure one-person business.
  • discover some of the most powerful tools and mindsets for living.

Writing has been the key to pushing me toward a life I never dared to dream of. I know my purpose in life. I have a full mind, body, and soul YES to the projects I committed to. I earn more than I have ever dreamed of. I have time and energy for the people I love. I know everything I want is available to me. I am calm and happy, connected with this present moment.


Final thoughts

Whether you are struggling to stay afloat in hustle culture, searching for your purpose in life, or feel as if you have not yet tapped into expressing your voice, know that you are not alone.

Writing won’t fix everything. But writing in public is a potent tool to gain clarity and insight toward a life you never dared to dream about.


Ready to start writing online?

Subscribe to the bi-weekly write letter to get inspired, or join the next cohort of my writing online accelerator.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: inspiration, life lessons, Writing

Audre Lorde Completely Changed How I Relate to Pleasure and Sex

January 15, 2023 by luikangmk

These revolutionary ideas can rewire how you think about the erotic.

Created by the author via Canva.

When my tantra teacher read out a sentence, I didn’t anticipate how much the words would influence my life.

It was last August, and the sentence was one of those where you need to put in some mental effort to get it. I didn’t.

My brain was fogged from Vienna’s summer heat, and I only managed to save a link in my read-later app.

A week afterward, I read the entire essay. Again. And again. I have read it ten times since. And I discover new layers of meaning every single time.

Audre Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ is one of those timeless essays with the power to change you. Below are some of her ideas that have transformed how I relate to pleasure and sex.


Tapping Into The Most Underrated Source of Power

I remember the moment I started to fear the yes within myself.

It was a week before I turned 13, in the bedroom of my then-best friend. We stroked our skin, and I felt an until-then-unknown heat arising from deep within.

It was in this moment of embodied desire towards another woman that my friend’s mum opened the door — eyes wide open, lips pressed together, her head shaking in disapproval.

I froze.

My deep-felt YES turned into something shameful to be ignored and avoided at all costs.

Audre Lorde writes, “We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.” She goes on to dismantle the oppression of the erotic in a patriarchal society.

Depending on where you live, there are implicit and explicit rules for acceptable behaviour in sex, pleasure, and desire.

Most societies are organized around patriarchy, with laws and media representation of practices that keep existing power dynamics in place (e.g. sex in a marriage between a cisman and ciswomen), and stigmatization, violence, or laws against practices that threaten them (e.g. free love of whoever they want, including other women and trans bodies).

Forty-five years after Lorde published her essay, cisgender women still learn to be submissive and obedient instead of being self-affirming, emotionally complex, and erotic powerhouses.

And while I feel troubled by the fact that Lorde’s text from 1978 applies almost half a century later, her words also make me feel hopeful.

Because as Lorde writes, “once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered.” Calling out dysfunctional structures and learned behaviour is empowering.

Despite global suppression, our deepest non-rational YES is still there.

“We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Before, I was unaware of the erotic as a resource, a replenishing and guiding life force. But, since reading her essays, I started to prioritize pleasure.

Thanks to women who have done this for a much longer and are now sharing their tools, I learned to invite and embrace the DEEP YES within myself.

I am doing practices that teach my brain to connect power and pleasure. I am letting go of shame. I am uncovering what happens if I replace the roles patriarchy has scripted into me with actions guided by what I want to create instead.

I am learning my feelings are the most genuine path to knowledge. I am unlocking new levels of satisfaction, power, and completeness.

Eroticism is a source of female power — and power not meaning power over (as within our Western framework of individuality and independence) but power with others (self-actualization linked with the community).


Unlearning How Porn Fucked Up My Mind

Lorde writes how the erotic is a question of what we do and how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. She argues pornography isolates sex from feelings, thereby abusing the erotic.

In my first few reads, my mind objected. Porn can extend our spectrum of sexual imagination. Some films blend feelings, sensuality, and sex (see, for example, Getcheex or Erika Lust).

But most porn doesn’t.

I must have been around 14 when I watched my first YouPorn video. At that point, I had no sex education from school or my parents (beyond contraception and wrong depictions of female genitals).

I did not know almost all porn videos portray sex (seemingly) optimized for male pleasure, the male gaze. I did not sense that the sex I saw was only one very limited and female pleasure-ignoring form of sex created inside a mainstream paradigm stretching between rape culture and a culture of repression.

The most popular search terms on pornhub, a site people visit more often than Amazon or Netflix, revolve around racialized power dynamics, incest, or sexual encounters with women as objects.

Building upon Lorde’s essay, adrienne brown writes in her ‘Pleasure Activism’ “, While we didn’t create the water we are swimming in, it’s still poisoning us.”

“But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde helped me investigate how porn has shaped sexual interests and behaviours.

The sexual scripts I learned from porn guided my sexual self-expectations and made me fake orgasms long into my twenties. I pretended to be satisfied, thinking this was normal, while now understanding, I followed scripts robbing any real sexual pleasure.

Lorde’s essay helped me understand how most porn was created from a patriarchal standpoint. These storylines wired my brain around fantasies and desires that are unhealthy for me. I also acknowledge the power of fantasies, as they can contribute to perpetuating existing inequalities.

I have started to retrain my brain around desires that stem from a new paradigm that centres around female pleasure, inclusivity, consensual non-monogamy, non-gender conforming roles, and a broader spectrum of beauty and attraction.

“I have been intentionally working on developing new fantasies. Fantasy is where I first explored the impossible idea that I am desirable. The improbable idea that fat bodies, brown and Black bodies, scarred and dimpled bodies, bodies that hurt and lurch and roll, bodies with hair and acne, bodies that sweat and make sounds and messes — that all of our bodies are desirable. This work has shifted my reality of lovers and my reality of how I see myself and let myself be treated.”

— Adrienne Marie Brown

Not Settling For Less Than Excellence in Life

Have you ever felt you are asking for too much?

Many women have been taught accommodation and obedience, with partners or families expecting them to sacrifice their desires for their partner’s or families’ greater good.

In her essay, Lorde encourages striving toward excellence in the erotic and not misconstructing it as demanding something impossible.

And this goes beyond intimate connections with ourselves or others. The erotic is a form of embodied energy that can inform many areas of our lives.

Lorde writes, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” She invites us to connect with our capacity for joy.

“It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

— Audre Lorde

How this changed the way I relate to pleasure and sex:

Lorde made me realize that liberating pleasure is a precondition for satisfaction, joy, and excellence.

I don’t fear the yes inside myself, but I invite it. I dare to demand and aspire for what I truly want and not settle for less. I show up as the most empowered version that feels most like me in the context of the reality I was given.

Her words, and the interpretation of her words by brilliant minds such as adrienne brown, Minna Salami, and bell hooks, helped me understand that our power starts from within. Our pleasure and most non-rational knowledge can guide us to our most authentic desires.

I will continue to explore the erotic as power by sharing my deepest desires through my writing and the spoken word, engaging in more activities at a speed that allows me to feel fully (ecstatic dancing, self-pleasure practice and embodied awareness through breath, sound, feeling), and cultivating all my senses, and especially my felt-sense of touch (as opposed to my overdeveloped sense of sight).


Source: Created by author

Final Feelings

Every woman, cis or trans, experiences the erotic and discrimination against it. Yet, the ways of experience differ because of factors like race, class, disability, and gender presentation.

Lorde’s words still hold revolutionary power for all of us, as she shows how the erotic is a form of power that both reveals and endangers oppressive forces.

Organizing your life around pleasure is one of the most revolutionary things to do while nourishing our minds, bodies, and souls.


Ready to bring more pleasure into your life?

Sign-up free for the Pleasure Letter, a monthly newsletter where I share the best resources, reads, and tools for leading a more pleasurable life. If you want to become a fearless writer, sign-up for my free Write Letter.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: advice, Ideas, inspiration

15 Insights From Learning Science That Help You Master New Things Faster

January 6, 2023 by luikangmk

Vital lessons you likely didn’t learn in school.

Source: Created by the author via Canva

Learning how to learn is the meta-skill that accelerates everything else you do.

Once you understand the fundamentals of learning science, you can save hours every time you learn something new. You become more strategic in approaching new subjects and skills instead of relying on often ineffective learning methods many pick up in school.

I love the science of learning, an interdisciplinary domain that builds on cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, and more. I can spend hours learning about how our brains absorb and retain information (here is a list of the recent books I’ve read).

Below are key insights I’ve learned about how we learn. Every single one will help you understand how your brain learns. By doing so, you’ll make better decisions on your journey to wisdom.


#1 Unlearn this common learning myth

You don’t learn better when you receive information in your preferred learning style (e.g., auditory, visual, kinesthetic). There is no evidence from controlled experiments that suggests teaching in a person’s preferred learning style will help them learn.

“​Brain imaging shows that we all rely on very similar brain circuits and learning rules. The brain circuits for reading and mathematics are the same in each of us, give or take a few millimeters-even in blind children. We all face similar hurdles in learning, and the same teaching methods can surmount them. Individual differences, when they exist, lie more in children’s extant knowledge, motivation, and the rate at which they learn.”

— Stanislas Dehaene in “How We Learn”

#2 Forgetting is not your personal flaw

I always thought forgetting was a character’s flaw. But it isn’t. Forgetting is no error in an otherwise functional memory system. While science is not clear yet about the exact rate of forgetting, there’s a consensus that your ability to recall things from memory decreases over time. The most effective learning strategies interrupt the process of forgetting.

For example, spaced repetition, which allows some forgetting to occur between your learning sessions, strengthens both the learning and your capability to use the routes and cues for retrieving that piece of knowledge.

“Spacing out your practice feels less productive for the very reason that some forgetting has set in and you’ve got to work harder to recall the concept. What you don’t sense in the moment is that this added effort is making the learning stronger.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#3 Human memory works in these three stages

In the acquisition phase, you link new information to existing knowledge; in the retention phase, you store it; and in the retrieval phase, you get information out of your memory.

Adapted by Dunlosky et al. (2007) based on Nelson & Narens’s (1990) framework for metamemory.

Storage and retrieval strength are two factors that determine whether you’re able to remember and recall what you learn. Storage strength shows how associated or “entrenched” it is with everything else in one’s memory. The retrieval strength of an item in your memory determines how easily you can access it.

“Current retrieval strength is assumed to determine completely the probability that an item can be recalled, whereas storage strength acts as a latent variable that retards the loss or enhances the gain of retrieval strength.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#4 Move things from your short-term to your long-term memory

Your working memory is limited, but schemas stored in your long-term memory aren’t. So the goal of learning is to move things from working memory into your long-term memory.

Several methods have received robust support from decades of research. Below are two highly effective ways to make learning deeper and more durable:

  • Elaboration. When you elaborate, you explain and describe an idea in your own words. Thereby you connect and relate the new material to what you already know (=more meaningful encoding).
  • Dual coding. Using visual and verbal cues, you can more effectively keep information in your long-term memory. The next time you try to remember information, attach an image or picture to visualize it.

The more details and the stronger you connect new knowledge to what you already know, the better because you’ll be generating more cues. And the more cues they have, the easier you can retrieve your knowledge.


#5 Focus on these two factors for meaningful practice

Repetition by itself does not lead to good long-term memory.

Practice doesn’t make perfect.

Practice makes permanent.

You can repeat a specific behaviour indefinitely without getting better at it. All you do is manifest the existing technique. It depends on how you learn and practice.

One thing that helps is adding variability to your learning. Work with different teachers, peers, and styles. Mix up your problems.

The second thing you want to include is feedback. To improve, you need to know what exactly you’re striving for and become aware of your shortcomings. Feedback helps you manifest the correct revisions rather than repeating ineffective behaviour.

“Purposeful practice involves feedback. Without feedback— either from yourself or from outside observers — you cannot figure out what you need to improve on or how close you are to achieving your goals.”

— Ericsson and Pool in “Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise”

#6 The reason why learning needs repetition

In the past decades, neuroscientists argued neurons in gray matter would be a key factor for learning. But more recently, neuroscientists revisited this assumption. They used magnetic resonance imaging to observe the brain’s structure while learning.

Below the gray matter surface lies the white matter. It’s white because it contains billions of axons coated with a fatty substance called myelin.

Myelin is a critical factor for learning as it determines your brain’s information transmission speed. Myelin makes signals faster, stronger, and more precise.

Every time you repeat a practice, the myelin layer thickens. The more you practice a specific skill, the better insulated the circuit becomes. In return, your thoughts and behaviour become faster and more precise.


#7 Don’t reread a book or a presentation but test yourself

When it comes to learning, don’t trust your intuition — it can lead you to pick the wrong learning strategies. While rereading feels efficient, it is less effective than retrieving (trying to recall something from your memory).

When you practice retrieval, you withdraw learned information from your long-term memory into your working memory. While this requires effort (and increases germane cognitive load), it directly improves your memory, transfer, and inferences.

“Mastering the lecture or the text is not the same as mastering the ideas behind them. However, repeated reading provides the illusion of mastery of the underlying ideas. Don’t let yourself be fooled.”

— Brown et al. in “Make it Stick”

#8 For optimal learning, use both of your brain modes

For effective learning, you need your brain’s focused and diffused mode.

In focused mode, you think based on prior knowledge and rely on often-used neural connections associated with problem-solving on familiar tasks.

The diffused mode, on the other hand, feels like daydreaming and enables unpredictable, new neural connections.

Many people optimize their days for focused mode thinking — through deep work, flow states, and other work sessions. Learning can happen during focused attention.

But the diffused mode is equally important. Diffused thinking only occurs when our minds can wander, for example, during a shower or while going for a walk. While this feels like taking a brain break, our mind continues to work for us.

To integrate the two thinking modes into your daily schedule (and to beat procrastination), you can use the Pomodoro technique — focusing for 25 minutes and giving yourself a pleasurable 5-minute brain break afterwards.

“Learn a new skill in short blocks of around 20 minutes followed by short rest periods. Why? Because mind wandering will occur after 15 to 20 minutes. This finding calls for professional moderation of any event at which people participate. Skill development involves periods of growth followed by periods of consolidation or even lack of growth.”

— Hattie and Yates in “Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn”

#9 Fact-learning is essential for mastering “21st-century skills”

Declarative knowledge (such as facts) is needed for procedural knowledge (such as skills). It’s not either facts or skills. You need both.

If you don’t memorize facts to encode them into your long-term memory, you’ll never have the same processing fluency and thought quality as someone who has. It’s as if you’re trying to win a race walking barefoot while the other person sits on an e-bike.

Your long-term memories can store thousands of facts that form a schema. This schema helps you learn new facts about that topic and is the foundation for conceptual understanding. While you’re problem-solving, you have more working memory capacity available because a lot is stored in your long-term memory.

The benefit of remembering information is not in the knowledge itself but in the way you can deploy it. You build a mental structure that helps you develop new thoughts and knowledge through memorization.

When solving problems, thinking critically, or generating new ideas, you don’t rely on your limited working memory capacity but on your basically unlimited long-term memory.

“Our long-term memory does not have the same limitations as working memory. It is capable of storing thousands of pieces of information. This allows us to cheat the limitations of working memory in lots of ways.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

#10 Your brain’s capacity is basically unlimited

There’s no such thing as a full brain. What can feel like juggling too many pieces at a time is a high cognitive load on your working memory.

Your long-term memory capacity is unlimited — and the more you learn, the more possible connections you create for future learning, which makes additional learning easier. There’s no limit to how much you can remember as long as you relate it to what you already know.

“It is far easier to build on existing knowledge than it is to learn new material from scratch. New information, which cannot be related to existing knowledge, is quickly shed.”

— Hattie and Yates in “Visible Learning and the Science of How We Learn”

#11 Pay attention to attention

Attention is the gateway to learning: you can’t remember any information if it hasn’t been amplified by attention and awareness. Become a master at directing your attention to what matters.


#12 Active learning always trumps passive learning

Learning does not occur passively through simple exposure to data or lectures. Ideally, you are active, curious, engaged, and autonomous in your learning.

You learn best when you’re focused and engaged through questions, reflection, or discussions (rather than passively listening to lectures or watching videos).

“Growing bodies of research and practice, from early childhood to university classrooms and beyond, demonstrate the benefits of moving beyond traditional lecture-driven approaches in favor of ‘active learning.’”

— Hirsh-Pasek et al. quoting Yannier et al. in “Making Schools Work: Bringing the Science of Learning to Joyful Classroom Practice”

#13 Set yourself a learning objective

You learn best when the purpose of learning is explicitly stated. Before you dive into practising, consider which goal you want to achieve. Set clear learning objectives for yourself.

Break down your ultimate goal into sub-steps. Instead of saying you want to become better at playing the guitar, focus on one specific part of it, e.g., learning three new strumming patterns or five new chords. One clear outcome is a thousand times better than overarching terms such as “succeed” or “get better.”


#14 Eliminate any distractions that distort your focus.

How easy you find learning something depends on your cognitive load. And while you can’t influence the intrinsic cognitive load (= the difficulty of the subject you want to master), you can optimize for extraneous cognitive load — by using great instructional design and minimizing any distractions.

When working on hard tasks, remove triggers towards other tasks. For example, close your tabs and e-mails, and put your phone on flight mode.


#15 Appreciate your progress rather than talking yourself down

Feeling appreciated and the awareness of your progress are rewarded in and of themselves. Let go of anxiety and stress as much as possible and focus on your effort and progress. Low emotions crush your brain’s learning potential, whereas providing the brain with an encouraging environment may reopen the gates of neuronal plasticity.


Want to feel inspired and become more thoughtful about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning. I’ll share my Top 10 All-Time Articles immediately as a thank you.

Filed Under: 🧠 Learning Hacks Tagged With: How to learn, learning, neuroplasticity

A Reasonably Detailed Annual Review Guide for Better Health, Wealth, and Wellbeing

January 4, 2023 by luikangmk

A no-fluff template for living a more intentional life.

Los Muertos Crew on Pexels

I should not compare myself to others, but I do it anyway.

I browse social feeds and see acquaintances mastering the most challenging yoga pose or raising millions of venture capital. I then enter thought patterns of no being and doing enough.

At the turn of the year, it’s easy to get lost in thoughts about what you don’t have instead of focusing on all the things you do have. But not much good can grow from the feeling of insufficiency.

One tool that helps me overcome feelings of inadequacy and start the new year with a deep sense of trust and power is my annual review.

I have done the review for six years in a row, and it has been life-transforming, specifically through two side effects:

  • Boosting self-efficacy— you zoom out to take a more nuanced look at your progress, revealing the factors that contributed to your failures and successes, recognising patterns, learning from key insights, and integrating them into your next year.
  • Increasing intentional living — you develop an understanding of what matters to you; you can see whether what you’re doing with your life is what you actually want to direct your time and energy to.

For example, as a late millennial and first-gen student from a well-resourced country, I grew up in a society that equates hard work with success. I unconsciously learned what’s acceptable (attaching self-worth to productivity) and what’s not (embodying felt emotions). Reflecting on how I relate to work helped me see patterns and unlearn beliefs and habits I perceived as harmful to my well-being and relationships.

This article guides you through the process and questions I use to look at the past, the future, and distinct life areas — from health to work to relationships, wealth, and more.


“My Annual Review forces me to look at my actions over the past 12 months and ask, ‘Are my choices helping me live the life I want to live?’”

— James Clear

Before you start, keep this in mind

I review my review each year and look for ways to improve it. Over the years, different brilliant minds and resources have inspired my thinking, such as Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Sara Blakely, James Clear, Michael Simmons, the free YearCompass, and the book Designing Your Life.

There is no single right way to do it. The best way to complete it depends on how much time you have and what you want to focus on.

Take anything that feels helpful for you and ignore the rest. You might do the entire review or just answer one or two questions.

This is not a test you need to pass — it’s a framework intended to help you wherever you are. So treat it like a buffet, and just take what looks delicious and nurturing for you.

The review is split into three parts — your past, a deep dive into your life’s areas, and your future. The below screenshots are from a template I create (access it free here).

Doing such a review is intense — you’re revisiting your key emotions and lived experiences. It’s normal to feel resistance or tiredness. Take breaks whenever you need them. I like to spread my review over an entire week, completing it a couple of questions at a time. But again — you are the only one to judge how you want to do it. Ready? Let’s start.


1) Reflecting on the past

Starting with open-ended explorative questions allows your most memorable experiences to bubble up. How have you lived your life? What feelings remain? By beginning with an explorative investigation, you allow your

Start with recalling things from your memory. Once you’re done, look at journals, calendars, diaries, and your camera roll, and add anything note-worthy.

Access the entire template free here.

Once you feel your answers are more or less complete, you can stop. Then, if you feel like it, share your highlights and lowlights with a friend, or send kind messages to people that were part of your most memorable experiences.


2) Diving deep into your areas of life

In this part, you take a more in-depth look at each area of your life. If you don’t feel the six life areas apply to you, feel free to replace them with whatever seems more adequate for you.

I’m most happy when I put equal focus on all life areas. I can be in perfect health, but I might be unhappy if my relationships are loaded with unresolved conflict and a feeling of disconnection.

Source: Your Annual Review Template (get the full template free here).

When looking at each life area, it is most helpful to consider three prompts. When answering “What went well?” and “What could have gone better?” I focus on the things you had an influence on — something where my choices or behaviour made a difference.

“Next year’s goals, focus and action steps” implies the following sub-questions: What habits, behaviours, or attitudes will you need to develop or adopt next year? What things or habits do you need to stop doing? Have you developed any healthy habits you want to keep? What helped you learn them?


Look at your overall health and well-being in the past year — how were you physically, emotionally, and mentally?

Which activities left you feeling drained, and which activities gave you energy? Has your health improved, deteriorated, or remained constant? How do you feel about your levels of movement, sleep, stress, awareness, pleasure, and time with yourself? Did you move in ways that supported your strength, health, and energy levels?

It can be tempting to lose yourself in storylines — either on how great you are doing or on how much you fucked up. But neither is true. Try to let go of any judgment and take stock of what you did and didn’t do.


Think about the relationships in your life and the people you spend time with — your partner(s), friends, parents, siblings, and more.

Which relationships gave you energy? Which relationships drained your energy? With which people do you feel safe? Who can you be vulnerable with? When have you felt connected to your community? How have you supported the people you love? Which conversations moved you? What new relationships would you like to bring to your life in the next year?


Consider how you spend your time and energy on work. Use your work emails, your work calendar, or meeting notes as evidence to get a better picture of what you worked on this year.

How do you feel about the role work has in your life? What achievements and challenges are you most proud of? What were your favourite projects? What professional relationships impacted your trajectory? How have you supported fellow workers? When did you feel most and least productive?


Most people live from paycheck to paycheck. Don’t feel bad if you have neglected this part of your life so far. Financial literacy is inherited — if your parents aren’t smart about money, chances are high that you don’t know essential investing principles.

Your annual review is a chance to take stock of where you’re at. Are you happy with how much you earned, spent, saved, and invested? How did you develop your net worth (assets (what you own) minus liabilities (what you owe))?


Knowledge isn’t permanent. Most of what we consider truth today decays within a decade from now. Nothing will benefit you more than learning how to learn and becoming a lifelong learner.

When you look at your year, ask yourself what things you have learned, e.g. through online courses, books, podcasts, or formal training. What was the most helpful thing you learned this year? What skills have you developed, and how did you progress? What do you need to continue and accelerate your desired learning path(s)? What new skills do you want to develop?


Your purpose is a deep understanding of the impact you’d like to make on the world. It’s the fuel behind your efforts and where you spend your time and energy. I find this the most challenging part, and I never felt done.

What fills you with excitement and passion? What can you contribute to have a positive impact on the world and our interconnected beings? What makes your life meaningful? How are you useful to humanity?

Write down your best version of your purpose statement(s). Don’t stress about the perfect purpose(s); you can adapt and change them anytime. You can have as many purposes, statements, and goals as you like.


3) Looking into the future

In this last part of your annual review, you look into your next year. You write from your future self, involving all of your senses.

Where do you live? What do you smell, see, hear, or touch? How do you feel when you wake up? Which habits do you follow? What do you work on? Which projects have you committed to? What have you let go of? What people do you spend time with? What hobbies are you pursuing? What are you learning?

Don’t edit yourself while writing the story — it can be as long as you like. You can do it in your journal, on a piece of paper, in the template, or in a text file.

The more vividly you describe your future life, the more emotions will emerge. And your feelings can serve as a helpful primer for your unconsciousness. This narrative is no fixed roadmap; this prompt invites you to dream and think big. Don’t edit yourself while writing it; try to ignore your judgmental voice as much as possible.


Conclusion

Taking the time to do your review, one question at a time, will help you reveal life lessons and critical insights you can integrate into your next year.

Do it a couple of years in a row, and you self-witness the power of consistency over a long period. You can replace all-or-nothing sprints with a more sustainable marathon mentality.

Whether you have 15 minutes or 10 hours doesn’t matter — the most important part is that you do it. Save the template, schedule in a couple of minutes, and give yourself space for one of the most direction-setting activities you can do all year.


Want to get more helpful tools like this?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven resources that elevate your love for learning and help you live a happier and healthier life.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: Ideas, inspiration, life lessons, Reflection

How 9 of the World’s Most Innovative Schools Ignite Children’s Love for Learning

December 17, 2022 by luikangmk

And equip the next generation to become changemakers.

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash

As a teacher, I witnessed how most children lose their love for learning with every additional year of schooling.

Many schools still operate on a purpose from a century ago — mass education to produce a conforming workforce. So we batch students by age group, expect them to sit quietly for hours a day, follow the rules, and do context-switching between silo-based subjects.

But what if we reimagined schools? What would schools look like that build on a new purpose of education that supports children in keeping and fueling their innate love for learning?

In 2022, I visited classrooms in different countries, attended global education conferences, and read dozens of books on education and learning.

Below are some of the world’s most innovative schools that push the boundaries of what schools can look and feel like.


1) NuVu Innovation School — Boston, MA

At NuVu innovation school, you won’t find traditional classrooms and grades. Everything at NuVu— including the curriculum, the pedagogy, the schedule, and the assessment system — is designed around a new education paradigm.

The full-time school for students in grades 8–12 enables young people to solve open-ended problems with creativity, collaboration, communication, interdisciplinary knowledge, and empathy.

Learners spend most of their time in so-called studios, immersing themselves in interdisciplinary projects. Around 12 students work closely with their two coaches on solving open-ended problems.

Problems are not framed around subjects but themes and can include, for example, “The City of the Future,” “Storytelling”, or “Global Warming.” A student focuses on one single theme for two weeks. There is no hour-to-hour schedule. Instead, students and coaches learn and work from 9 am to 3 pm with the option to stay until 5 pm.

Within each multidisciplinary studio, coaches mentor students to develop their projects through an iterative process.

What happens inside the studios? Source: NuVu

Students develop multiple solutions to open-ended problems. They learn the relevance of moving from one solution to the next, combining, exploring and changing perspectives.

Moreover, studios are designed for a feedback-rich environment that provides learners with information and support for continuous self-evaluation, reflection, and improvement. Learners can also access resources outside the school. For example, they can ask leading thinkers and experts, present their framework and receive feedback.

NuVu doesn’t grade students but assesses through portfolios. These portfolios are meant to show the student’s growth over time.

Through real-world problems, iterative processes, and constant feedback, NuVu aims to empower the next generation of makers and inventors who will impact their communities and the world through their work and ideas.

Source: NuVu Innovation School

2) Learnlife — Barcelona, Spain

Learnlife is not just a school but a community that aims to empower children to thrive in the future. Personal learning programmes guide learners through a self-directed journey of learning and exploring their passions, skills, and needs.

Backed by science, research, and site visits to over 100 of the most innovative schools worldwide, Learnlife created a learning paradigm of 21 elements.

The elements of Learnlife’s learning paradigm. Source: Learnlife

These elements support the design of learning experiences that involve body and mind. One of the elements, for example, is ensuring the emotional, physical, social, cognitive, and digital well-being of children.

Learnlife offers year-long full-time programmes for learners aged 11–18. Individual learning paths are supported through technology, coaches, and an inspiring environment.

Students say Learnlife unleashes their creativity, makes them feel welcomed and heard, and helps them get a clear idea of who they want to be and the steps they need to take to get there.

What I love about both Learnlife and NuVu is that learning is active, not passive. Science is clear that children learn best when learning is active or “mind-on.” — focused and engaged through questions, reflection, or discussions rather than passively listening to lectures or watching videos.

LearnLife Hub Barcelona (Source: LearnLife Barcelona)

3) Prisma — Remote, online

Prisma is a personalized, full-time online school for 9–14-year-olds and aims to create the world’s most effective and inclusive connected learning network.

Prisma follows a learning paradigm that is socially connected, interest-driven, and oriented towards educational, economic, and political opportunity.

Students at Prisma learn through peer cohorts — a group to collaborate, socialize and learn with —daily learning coaching, and live workshops focusing on communication, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Similar to Learnlife, Prisma created its own learning framework that is fit for time and context and consists of the following:

  • Foundational knowledge (language literacy, numeracy, history, technology literacy, and science principles)
  • Powers (creativity, critical thinking, communication)
  • Perspectives (global perspective, empathy & compassion, mindfulness)
  • Practices (collaboration, design thinking, reflection, discussions, self-care)
  • Mindset (self-efficacy, emotional awareness, purpose, growth mindset, ownership & self-direction, love of learning).

While their site states they’re a global online school, admission is only open to anyone who can operate in US time zones. So unless parents want to mess up with their child’s sleep cycle, Prisma is instead a US online school.

The differences between Prisma and other schools. (Source: Prisma)

4) Riverside — Ahmedabad, India

Riverside school reshapes education through its student-centred learning approach, practical curriculum, and real-world opportunities.

The school emphasizes developing humane skills and helps children build a mindset rooted in compassion and purpose. For example, the school’s Design for Change program focuses on play and exploration, helping children develop 21st-century skills and become future changemakers.

The Design for Change program unlocks students’ sense of agency (Source: Riverside).

Riverside’s practices have been recognized worldwide as committed to raising changemakers willing to tackle real-world problems, including climate change.


5) Templestowe College — Melbourne, Australia

Recognized by the Australian Education Awards as a secondary school of the year and HundrED, Templestowe College offers high-quality learning experiences within an inclusive and supportive community.

Templsetow college focuses on student empowerment and unlocks students’ agency — learners can follow their interests and choose 100% of their courses from more than 150 electives.

Templsetow college also rethinks assessments. Assessment is learner-centred and designed to support young people in their work and study habits, academic achievement, and academic progress.

As one of three parts of the assessment, students receive feedback on their work and study habits from each of their teachers three times per semester against the following criteria:

  1. Readiness to learn: Do you come to class with the required materials, pre-learning completed and an open mind?
  2. Behaviour: Does your behaviour help to build a focused and inclusive environment?
  3. Participation and contribution: Do you actively engage with and contribute to classroom learning?
  4. Academic effort: Do you complete all required tasks and actively seek to extend your skills?

For each criterion, students receive a scale statement, either ‘Exemplary, Consistent, Needs Improvement or Not Yet Demonstrated’ — demonstrating that learning outcomes are not fixed but depend on the learner’s decisions and choices.


6) Agora School — Roermond, Netherlands

Agora School enables young people to lead learning. Classrooms feel like co-working spaces, kids aren’t badged by age groups but mixed through ages and backgrounds, and there’s no hour-to-hour subject change. Unlike fixed curriculums and learning objectives set by teachers, students at Agora set their learning objectives.

A student’s day starts with answering the question, “What do you want to learn today?” Other students will then help determine whether this learning goal is achievable in the set time span.

After this initial 30-minute start of the day, students follow their individual agenda. Personal coaches support and supervise the student’s learning process. The learning outcomes are assessed by coaches and presented to the student body, so everybody else can learn from them.

A school without classrooms. (Source: Agora Schools)

7) Oerestad Gymnasium —Kopenhagen, Denmark

Orestad Gymnasium built a curriculum around real-world case studies, designed and taught in collaboration with the Danish Design School and the University of Copenhagen.

“We want to have teaching where the students do research and work together in solving real problems,” principal Allan Kjær Andersen told Tech Insider. “It’s not enough to give learners knowledge; you also have to give them a way of transforming knowledge into action.”

One of the most open school architecture. (Source: Oerestad Gymnasium).

8) School 21 — London, UK

School 21 is a state-funded 4 to 18 school set up to empower young people to take on the world. The school has developed a series of pedagogies and approaches that support students in finding their voice, developing deep understanding and knowledge, and creating value in the classroom and beyond.

Focused on teaching 21st-century skills, the school has three pedagogies in its curriculum: well-being, oracy, and project-based learning. School 21’s approach also includes targeted support for vulnerable students and reinforcing well-being provisions across the school.


9) Think Global School — Four Countries a Year

Think Global School offers an unparalleled experience as students live and learn in four countries yearly. Education is place-based and project-based and organized around a changemaker curriculum.

Think Global students come from all over the world and represent various socioeconomic backgrounds, ethnicities, gender identities, and belief systems. After graduating, learners apply their global outlook and changemaker mindset in diverse settings:

  • Ayesha Kazim worked as a photographer and recently delved into NFTs and web3. She explored how blockchain technology could digitize photography collections and create a historical record for future generations.
  • Yada Pruksachatkun became an engineer and data scientist, working on empathetic machine learning and making technology more considerate. She developed, for example, a tool which displays how well a company treats their female employees based on the pay gap, the percentage of women in the company, and reviews from women who have worked at the company.
  • Kryštof Stupka had an impact right after entering university life. As a student representative at Sciences Po Paris, he pushed for a new health centre, making all bathrooms gender-neutral and free contraception and HIV testing.

When I spoke with Russell Cailey, former Think Global principal; I was impressed by how the school changed from a more traditional curriculum to student-led learning.

“Our shift to the new model was uncomfortable. We had to unlearn our teaching practice that we were trained for at university. I learned to deliver content, and all of a sudden, I got into a project-based learning world and was more of a facilitator and a guide through the odyssey of learning. It’s like teaching architects to swim — these are two different worlds.”

— Russell Cailey, former principal of Think Global

Conclusion

Scientists agree learning works best when environments allow choice, exploration, and social interaction and where learners play an active role rather than being forced to attend and listen.

All the above schools prioritize active learning in feedback-rich environments that prioritize student agency — learners are in the driver’s seat and are supported with the tools needed to succeed on their chosen route — thereby demonstrating how schools can ignite and fuel children’s love for learning.


Want to learn more about the future of learning?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🧱Transforming Education Tagged With: education, education system

How Optimizing Your Workdays for Focus Can Help You Do More in Less Time

December 7, 2022 by luikangmk

Staying productive, sane, and healthy as a solopreneur.

Source: Salzburg Global Seminar // Katrin Kerschbaumer

The first six months of working self-employed felt like a constant struggle between doing too much and barely enough.

Nobody sets your priorities or boundaries. You’re maximum self-reliant.

I felt guilty when I wasn’t working and stressed when I was.

It took me more than a year to benefit from the freedom and impact that can go along with it. Two and a half years in, I feel at peace with my workload most of the time.

Below are the mind shifts I took and tools I use to spend only a couple of hours at my screen each day.


1) Understanding that Working Less Doesn’t Equal Laziness

Are you sometimes judging yourself for not doing enough?

Societal structures have shaped our thoughts about productivity, rest, and enjoyment.

The working world values busyness and working for long hours. Rest, pleasure, and play are often equated with laziness. No wonder we often measure our worth by how much we achieve.

It took me years to unlearn this belief and untie my self-worth from achievement.

My grandparents were World War II survivors and peasants in a rural 800-village. My parents worked hard to offer my sister and me a childhood with more opportunities and prosperity than they had experienced.

For a long time, I felt guilty just thinking I wanted to work less than my parents. Their words always echoed inside my head:

  • Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.
    (Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen.)
  • Work hard, play hard.
    (Wer abends lange feiern kann, kann morgens auch schaffen.)
  • “You can’t make something out of nothing.”
    (Von nichts kommt nichts.)

It took me years of inner work, which included psychotherapy, rapid transformational therapy, and psychedelics, to feel my self-worth even in unproductive times.

I now know and feel (most of the time) that I AM ENOUGH — just in being, no matter what I do or don’t do.

This led to major behavioural shifts. I no longer sacrifice my health and relationships for work. I won’t wait for retirement to do what I really want to do. And this all doesn’t mean I’m lazy. It just means I no longer need productivity to feel worthy.

And yet, I want to have an impact on what I do. So apart from this inner work, I changed a couple of things in my working days to do more in less time.


2) The Key to Doing More in Less Time

Energy levels change during the day. The longer I sit, the slower I think. Writing an email at 5 pm might take thrice as long as writing it at 10 am.

I used to think the more hours I put in, the better the results. And I know so many people who brag about working long hours. But time spent is only one part of the equation.

High-Quality Work Produced = (Time Spent) x (Intensity of Focus)

You can spend eight hours with zero focus and not produce any high-quality work at all.

I decided to optimize for focus, thereby reducing the time I needed to produce my desired outcomes.

But building focus takes time.

I started with a single 20-minute block daily. I increased the duration to three to four 50 minutes blocks a day.

You won’t believe what’s possible if you work with a complete focus for four uninterrupted hours each day.

As Tim Denning wrote: “As much as it sounds like clickbait, 4 hours of deep work a day can be enough for most people to finish all their work.”

On most days of the year, I work up to four hours a day at my computer.

There are exceptions, though; weeks with time-sensitive client work while running my cohort-based online course, where I am back at 50-hour work weeks and many weekdays on which I don’t work at all.


3) The Things I Stopped Doing to Get Everything Done in Four Hours a Day

If you only have four 50-minute intervals a day to get your work done, there are some things to unlearn and deprioritize.

I no longer have my phone at my desk. My phone is in a different room. I enable flight mode until I’ve finished my focused work intervals.

If I have thoughts that require a phone, I write them down to do it after the in-depth work sessions (e.g. using the tan app for sending bank transfers, texting a friend about something etc.).

I don’t do online meetings except with my direct clients and those who work for me. I ask for or prepare prioritized agendas for weekly check-ins.

I “grab virtual coffees” audio-only over a walk in the park.

If you look at my calendar, you will barely find more than three hours of meetings in a week.

I don’t talk to people when I’m in focus mode. People around me know that if I wear my headphones, they can’t speak to me until the next break.

I don’t use messaging apps on my computer. I don’t have the WhatsApp application, and I’m not logged into LinkedIn, Facebook, or Slack.

I disabled all notifications on my computer and phone.

I don’t ever get notifications on my computer. I’m writing this in Manila, where I am visiting a friend and classrooms in the Philippines.


4) The Tools I Use to Maximize Productivity

There are only a couple of tools I use every day.

Headspace is the first app I use in the morning. I open the app on my old phone (while my real phone is still in flight mode in another room) and meditate for 10 or 15 minutes.

When I meditate, I follow my breath — inhales and exhales. The goal of meditation isn’t to get rid of thoughts. Thoughts are the weights in your mental gym. Your job is to return your attention away from them and back to your breath.

You can land a prestigious job, earn tons of money, and find a wonderful partner — if you don’t change your mind and the lens through which you look at life, none of it improves your well-being.

You’re truly happy when you silence your inner chatter. You feel content when you stop judging what you’re experiencing and just experience.

Happiness is a by-product of complete presence, and meditation is one entryway into this presence.

Screenshot of my Headspace App

Once I get to work and deep focus, I rely on three tools — noise-cancelling headphones, the free beFocused apps to schedule 50-minute intervals, and the free BlockSite extension that prevents me from visiting my distraction sites.

I start my workdays with the most thinking-intense task, which often includes some form of creation (writing concept notes, papers or articles).

Readwise and Roam power this creation process (more here).

My newest extension to this powerhouse is the Reader App by Readwise. It allows me to read through RSS feeds and newsletter subscriptions and manually save documents in one beautiful interface. All highlights get synched to my Roam.

The Reader App is still in private beta mode, but anyone who signs up at Readwise through my link (even free trial users) can get access.

I often end my work hours by providing feedback to people who work for me. For that, I use a free project management tool called Clickup.

And that’s when I’m done with using digital tools (apart from my Kindle and a sports aggregator app called MyClubs). In the afternoon, I travel, read, meet friends, or learn something new (e.g. DJing this year).


Conclusion

The above advice doesn’t apply to most people on this planet.

I’m a cis-gender woman in a Western European Country where a single income can afford rent, food, and travel. I am privileged, and most of what I have achieved is not due to hard work or focus but rather my privileges.

But if you read this and can afford a $5 Medium subscription, you might be similarly privileged. In this case, the above strategies and tools can help you spend less time working on a laptop if you want to.


Want to feel inspired and become more thoughtful about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: advice, Productivity, Time management

How a Zero Maintenance Roam Setup Can Save You Hours Every Week

November 17, 2022 by luikangmk

This is how I currently write and research my articles.

Source: Canva

Tools like Roam and Obsidian can cut your research writing time in half and increase productivity.

In essence, these tools are online workspaces for organizing your knowledge. Unlike in linear structured note-taking apps, such as Apple notes or Notion, in Roam and Obsidian, each note represents a node in a dynamic network, which allows you to discover and connect ideas beyond folder structures.

When I first learned about Roam, I watched and read every tutorial I could find online, studied Sönke Ahren’s how-to guide, researched coaches, and hired one.

I optimized for Roam for the perfect Zettelkasten structure, with different notes for different purposes and a clear tagging system.

And while I enjoyed learning about the system, my motivation to actually sit down and do the note-taking work soon decreased. Writing permanent notes felt like a self-serving activity, unlinked to any creative outcome.

At one point, I stopped.

At least, I thought, I stopped.

It wasn’t until a couple of months later, writing an article on the metaverse, that I discovered I still get most of the benefits with zero maintenance.

My Roam now runs on autopilot. And it still gives me most of the benefits for writing, but with zero maintenance. Here’s how.


I’m not paid by Roam or Readwise for writing this. I pay $15 and $8 a month for their services. Free alternatives for Roam include Obsidian, RemNote, Amplenote, TiddlyWiki and Org-roam. I’m unaware of free Readwise options (except for importing highlights manually or setting up the automations yourself).


My Roam Set-Up For A Curated Search Engine

The entire setup works without me spending a minute organizing my notes.

Before, I dedicated half an hour every day to optimizing my Roamkasten. Now, all I have to do is what I love — read inspiring books or articles, and highlight anything I find valuable or noteworthy.

Anything I highlight from one of the below sources will be imported to Roam via a service called Readwise.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim via Canva // Screenshot of Readwise.io

Roam is now my curated personal search engine. It only contains highlights from books, articles, websites, and PDFs, which I found valuable.

This setup works on autopilot. I needed about 20 to 30 minutes to register setup up Readwise to import from my Kindle, Medium, Twitter, and Highlights from the web.


How I Use Roam in My Writing Process

When I start to write an article, I first select an idea from my idea board in xTiles.

My idea board in xTiles (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of xTiles)

Once I select an idea from the board, I type the idea name and first title idea in my daily notes.

I then use my headline template to write ten headlines and CoSchedule to optimize for the best one.

How I start writing an Article — Source: Author

To create a headline template, I use the following structure:

• TemplateName #roam/templates
• [[Template Title]]
• Your template's content

Here’s what my current headline practice template looks like:

• Headline Template #roam/templates
• Headline Practicer #headlines
• 1.
• 2.
• 3.
• 4.
• 5.
• 6.
• 7.
• 8.
• 9.
• 10.
• https://headlines.coschedule.com/headlines
• great examples

Under the bullet “great examples”, I collect inspiration for recent headlines I read and loved and some more general advice, like this one from Wes Kao.

Source: Cohort-Based Course Accelerator by Maven

Once I have the headline, and before I start writing, I type the hashtags and keywords related to the article.

Let’s say I write about different types of knowing. I’ll type in all tags related to that idea (e.g. #knowing and #knowledge). I then the right-side panel and search for linked and unlinked references that are relevant.

I drag anything relevant into the article, link unlinked references, and sometimes add more keyword tags to very interesting ideas.

How I search for Tags within RoamResearch — Source: Author

So when I type in a keyword and check for references and unlinked references, Roam will provide me with all sources related to that keyword — all in one place.

This looks a lot messier than the neat Zettelkasten structure. And it’s definitely incomplete. But it works really well for me.

I don’t need to spend a minute on maintaining Roam, but still get most of the benefits (all resources I highlighted that contain the keyword).

After I’ve written my article in Roam, I go to this site and change the markdown formatting to medium-friendly text.

How I format written text from Roam to Medium — Source: Author

In Conclusion

At one point, given speed, pricing, and security restrictions, I switched to Obsidian. People love Obsidian. And while I understand why, I didn’t like it and switched back to Roam.

Whether you use Roam, Notion, Obsidian, or your journal doesn’t matter at all. The best personal knowledge management system is the one that’s most helpful for you — freeing up your time while providing you with what you need.


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Join +4K others and subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 📚 Knowledge Management Tagged With: Productivity, roam, Time management

3 Things I Learned About Education at the United Nations in New York

November 15, 2022 by luikangmk

Can this once-in-a-generation event transform education systems?

United Nations Transforming Education Summit 2022; UN Headquarters in New York (Source: Canva)

We’re in a global learning crisis that had worsened even before the pandemic.

In 2015, 53 per cent of all children in low- and middle-income countries suffered from learning poverty, unable to understand a simple written text by age 10.

In 2019, global learning poverty rose to 57 per cent.

For 2022, experts project 70 per cent of all 10-year-old children can’t understand a simple written text.

Learning Poverty Globally and by Region. (Source: The State of Global Learning Poverty by World Bank, UNICEF, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and others)

The reasons?

Manifold and often systemic — undertrained, undervalued, and underpaid teachers, access to education, an education financing gap, a lack of early childhood education, and poverty traps perpetuating existing disparities.

And last but not least the relatively recent realization that schooling doesn’t equal learning.

Even though more and more children attend school worldwide, many go there day after day, not understanding anything. Education systems leave a lot of children behind in learning as they progress in schooling.

So, do we really need to solve another crisis?

Yes, because education is the key.

Education and learning underpin almost all individual, social, environmental, and economic goals. If we solve the education and learning crisis, we solve many other prevalent problems, such as climate change, poverty, equity, and mental health.

So how can we solve the learning crisis and create education systems that enable all children to thrive in life?

In 2022, I explored this question from different angles — I interviewed brilliant people for my work with Big Change and Teach For All, among others. I gave a TED talk on learning, visited schools in Estonia, and attended education conferences in Paris, Salzburg, and New York.

This article summarizes what I’ve learned about changing education systems. You first get a framework to think about system change and transformation, followed by three things I took away from the United Nations Transforming Education Summit.


“If you are serious about creating a safe and sustainable future for children then be serious about education.”

— Malala Yousafzai, Education Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

1) What is Education Transformation?

To set the scene, we need to clarify two things — the difference between transformation and reform (and why it’s no contradiction) and a tool for thinking about systems change.

The difference between education transformation and reform

“A candle does not become a light bulb through many small improvements,” Dr Teresa Torzicky, from the Innovation Foundation for Education, told me during a joint project in 2020.

At that point, I didn’t grasp the complexity of her words.

As a former teacher, I felt improving what and how we teach young people is the most valuable thing to focus on.

I conceptualized and co-authored a publication on what we can learn in and from the pandemic for the foundation for innovation in education.

I co-led the Youth Entrepreneurship Weeks, an Austrian government-funded program we ran in 55 schools with 1800 students to unlock young people’s agency.

I supported the formation of a foundation that supports schools, and teachers, to enable all young people to shape the economy and society.

And while all these initiatives improved education systems, they were, as Andreas Schleicher labels efforts that don’t change systems, just the tip of the iceberg. The much larger part, he says, lies beneath the surface and concerns the interests, beliefs, motivations and fears of those involved.

Education reform often tackles the tip of the iceberg. Source: Canva

Education reform, tackling individual problems, such as teacher recruitment, or changing individual inputs, such as updating curricula, laws, and infrastructure, is often necessary and can improve education systems.

But education reform doesn’t turn a candle into a light bulb.

António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, said in New York: “We will not end this crisis by simply doing more of the same, faster or better. Now is the time to transform education systems.”

In contrast to reform, transformation shifts the dominant logic of a system by revisiting its current goals and co-defining a purpose that is fit for time and context. Transformation then redesigns all system parts to coherently contribute to this collectively owned purpose.

So what are those things we need to focus on to create lightbulbs, not just better candles? What is required for education transformation?


“We will not end this crisis by simply doing more of the same, faster or better. Now is the time to transform education systems.”

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations

Systems Thinking for Transforming Education

Systems thinking is a set of theories, tools, and mindsets to understand complex and interconnected systems. Applied systems thinking can bridge the gap between reality and our visions.

One widely accepted theory in system thinking for change is the Leverage Points Framework by Donella Meadows. She writes about which points to focus on when aiming for sustainable intervention and action for system-level change.

Meadows describes these power points in increasing order of effectiveness. She starts with the tip of the iceberg, parameters that are easier to implement with weak leverage (infrastructure, metrics, materials). She ends with points that are harder to implement but have stronger leverage (goals, mindsets, beliefs).

Leverage Points for System Transformation (Source: A New Education Story adapted by Winthrop et al. from Meadows (1999) and conversations with Populace)

The takeaway?

Systems lead to the results they are designed to achieve. Our systems are not broken but just a result of our systems’ design. The most-effective point for change is the mental models that underpin our system.

Hence, a shared purpose, an alignment on what a system is for, is critical to system-level change that endures over time. It’s impossible to transform education unless you know where you are headed.

Hence, education transformation needs to question the purpose of a system. Such a purpose is anchored in identity, values, beliefs, interests, and fears.

But revealing, redefining, and changing the purpose of a system is easier said than done.

Different studies and research from RISE show leaders often fail to change education systems because they aim to change the visible, lower-leverage elements of a system (resource flows, regulations, metrics) without changing the invisible factors such as the purpose (mindsets, goals, beliefs, and values), and without considering the interrelations of system components.

For example, in a country, Sarah leaves school without foundational skills. To improve outcomes, people from the education ministry ask: “What needs to change in this classroom for Sarah to have foundational skills?”

If textbooks are missing, government officials might decide to provide more textbooks. If teachers are undertrained, they might introduce more teacher training.

Yet, this symptom-only thinking neglects that teachers and students are embedded in a larger system. A lack of system thinking often leads to false conclusions about the cause (something I’ve unknowingly done before).

Source: Edscyclopedia — Introduction to Systems Thinking

Programmes that fix singular elements might improve some learning outcomes, but without considering the wider system, they are likely doomed to fail.

Education transformation that leads to sustainable system change (not a better candle, but a lightbulb) needs to understand, address, and be coherent with the system’s structures.

So how to work on high-leverage points that can transform education?


“All too often, programmes are designed to address one of these symptoms (e.g.: students drop out, teacher motivation), are implemented faithfully, and yet fail to improve learning outcomes. When a programme fails to have the desired impact, it is tempting to look for a devil in the details, some aspect of programme design or execution that could be tweaked to produce better performance. But often the devil is in the system, not in the details. The programme failed not because of a design flaw, but because of its overall incoherence with the rest of the education system.”

— Marla Spivack, Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Directorate

3 Lessons from the Transforming Education Summit

In September, world leaders, young people, and other civil society members met at the first-time-in-history United Nations General Assembly Transforming Education Summit in New York.

The Summit’s goal? Creating a global movement for education transformation that pushes policymakers to achieve sustainable development goal four (SDG4) — to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.

Transforming Education Summit — Source: Eva Keiffenheim
#1 A Collective Commitment and Movement

While we’re not even close to SDG4, there’s a consensus on what’s needed to progress. Education transformation requires a collective commitment and action from leaders at all levels, students, parents, teachers, policymakers and the public at large.

But how do you build a movement, a collaboration between all stakeholders, driven by the public?

In an attempt, the United Nations asked governments to host national consultations to revisit education’s purposes and develop a shared vision, commitment, and alignment of action.

The result was a statement of commitment from each country (full list of all statements here and an interactive map here).

But what’s in these statements that resulted from national consultations?

The centre for global development analysed 106 country submissions and found teaching, learning, and teachers mentioned in almost every statement; Technology (or ICT or digital) was the third most popular term.

Is creating commitments a reason enough for bringing delegations from all over the world to New York (and justifying the climate and human resource cost attached to it)? How do abstract commitments and shared intentions reach the classroom level?

Critics have long been arguing the UN is an inefficient talking shop with insufficient mechanisms to keep countries accountable for their commitments.

Whether these commitments translate to impactful action at the classroom level has yet to be shown, but I can see three benefits through the Summit itself.

First, an international organization prioritises and recognizes localisation and grassroots efforts as mandatory partners in transforming education systems.

Second, the design of the consultations acknowledges intersectionalities. Transforming education requires cross-sectoral involvement, for example, embracing public-private partnerships or learning from evidence-driven system change in health.

Third, the global convening opened the stage for countries already successfully mobilizing and including the broader public in their transformation efforts.

#2 Learning from Countries Walking the Talk

At the Transforming Education Summit, many countries such as Belize, Niger, and Malawi demonstrated transformation efforts, but one country stood out particularly — Sierra Leone.

In Sierra Leone, 80% of the population is under 35. The country faces various challenges — teacher management with significant reliance on non-government paid and unqualified teachers, narrowing persistent gender and geographic disparities, a lack of resources at organizational units, and capacity building at the staff level. And as of 2022, 64 per cent of students in grade four cannot answer a single comprehension question on a basic text.

Yet, Sierra Leone envisions becoming a nation with educated, empowered, healthy citizens capable of realizing their fullest potential by 2035.

How? By making education a top national priority, supported through financial commitment and evidence-informed interventions and innovations.

Education spending as a percentage of total government expenditures, changes from 2014–2015 to 2019–2020 Source: Education Finance Watch 2022 referring to UNESCO Institute for Statistics; Unit: US$ (2020=100)

In addition to this top-down commitment to education transformation, Sierra Leone follows a bottom-up approach and includes all members of society.

Sierra Leone was among the only countries to overcome visa and travel barriers and brought students, teachers, partners and civil society members. They all shared key insights from four years of transforming their education system at more than 19 formal events.

David Sengeh, Sierra Leone’s Minister of Education and Chief Innovation Officer, is a role model for unlocking young people’s agency, one of the key drivers for transforming education.

Sengeh shared how lucky he feels to serve the children of Sierra Leone. He even wrote a letter to all pupils in his country.

David Sengeh’s letter to all pupils in Sierra Leone. Source: David Sengeh on LinkedIn

A letter is not enough to transform education systems. But a genuine interest in listening and learning from young people can shift mindsets from resentment to hope, which can translate to action and co-creation.

Sierra Leone also led consultations with every single district and many stakeholders, including parent organizations, teachers’ associations, disabled person organizations, development and donor partners, and government personnel outside of education.

Based on these consultations, Sierra Leone’s President Bio launched the 5-Year Education Sector Plan with clear goals and broad support to improve learning outcomes for all children and youth.

The Centre for Universal Education at Brookings which works with the Sierra Leone Ministry of Education, argued that the government’s vision was well placed given it treats the essential component of foundational literacy and numeracy as a floor, from which to grow from, rather than a ceiling that limits the aspiration for children’s learning


“What do you wish for in your community, and how might you contribute to that development? What do you want your politicians to know and do?”

— David Sengeh, in a letter to all pupils of Sierra Leone

#3 The Need for Intergenerational Partnership

We live in an era of youth-directed age discrimination.

Processes in society and education ensure that people of different ages differ in their access to society’s rewards, power, and privileges. Young people are often seen as minor to older people, their ideas under-supported, and their opinions not included.

For a long time, youth have only tokenistically been included in the policy and decision-making processes. They’ve been used to demonstrate inclusiveness as a “youth voice” without really giving them a seat at the decision-making table.

But as Rebecca Winthrop said at the launch of the Big Education Conversation: “Adults do not need to give young people a voice. They already have one. Adults just need to listen to it.”

More and more power holders recognize that education transformation needs to happen with young people and for young people, and the Summit was stated to be designed around Youth Mobilization.

The United Nations even launched a new instrument, the Youth Declaration, for all stakeholders to shift power to young people and lead us to an age of intergenerational responsibility, co-creation and co-ownership in the process.

More than half a million young people from over 170 countries contributed to the Youth Declaration; through in-person and online, global, regional, national, and grassroots-level dialogues.

The first of its type, the Youth Declaration requests 25 actions by governments for fully accessible and inclusive education systems — centring on the needs of girls and young women, refugees, persons with disabilities, LGBTIQ+ persons, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and other vulnerable and marginalized groups, also emphasizing the intersectionality of these.

And while the declaration is a great sign of the UN’s efforts to include young people in the debate, it’s barely sufficient.

As Restless Development argues, Youth engagement at the Summit was not reflective of young people.

I’m 29 years old. At the Summit, I mainly met young people my age, 25–30. But where were the truly young people? The pupils?

Moreover, young people’s involvement felt gate-kept from the discussions and events attended by current power-holders. The Summit launched seven initiatives, the last being empowering young people to be influential leaders to shape education.

Alex Kent from Restless Development argued that young people don’t need further commitment from older people to be ‘empowered’. Instead, global summits such as the one in New York should acknowledge youth power and then work with young leaders to draw youth power into its core.

Intergenerational collaboration goes beyond youth voice and sees young people as collaborators, or ‘co-agents’, rather than beneficiaries.

Big Change, The Center for Universal Education at Brookings, and the Lego Foundation worked together to launch a tool for intergenerational collaboration — the Big Education Conversation.

The Big Education Conversation, available in seven languages so far, is supporting people and communities worldwide to come together to talk about what education is really for so that it can change for the future.

Source: Big Education Conversation

„We need a movement in the world that puts education front and center! That needs mobilization and voices amplified to help governments that are trying and move those that are not.“

— Amina Mohammed, Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations

In Conclusion

If I had to break down everything I learned into four statements, they would be the following.

  • Do we need to build back better or new systems? Reform and transformation are no dichotomy. We need both. But we can’t misuse reform to delay transformation. Instead, we must collectively co-define and build upon new purpose(s) for education while improving the existing system.
  • Which purpose(s) to focus on? Different purposes of education don’t compete against each other. It’s not post-pandemic recovery or tackling the poor learning outcome, mental health, or girls’ education. Transformation agendas are not a contradiction but can go hand in hand and can cross-amplify progress.
  • Who is deciding the why? And which voices are not heard? Young people aged 10 to 29 need to co-lead the change. Their ideas must be included through intergenerational partnerships and alliances, supported by organizations that know how to involve young people meaningfully.
  • What’s the education equivalent to getting to net zero? We need a global metric for education transformation to hold countries and decision-makers accountable and learn along the way. A metric should be rooted in learning outcomes, as well as the health and well-being of all people involved.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us to radically transform education,” U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told reporters ahead of the education summit at U.N. headquarters in New York. “We owe it to the coming generation if we don’t want to witness the emergence of a generation of misfits.”

With the Transforming Education Summit over, real work starts to happen. Whether the Summit will lead to global action to recover learning losses and transform education systems has yet to be shown. But we owe it to all young people on this planet.


Do you want to read more from me on learning and education?

Subscribe free to my weekly Learn Letter, where I’ll share reflections, tools, and resources that can elevate your love for education and learning.


More Resources

  • The Education Changemaker’s Guidebook to Systems Thinking and RISE’s Edsyclopedia
  • The World Bank Education Statistics, The World Development Report 2018 on Education, and the Global Education Monitoring Report
  • How Education Can Unlock Big Change
  • Transforming Education Summit Knowledge Hub, the Youth Declaration, and UNESCO’s report on Futures of Education
  • Big Change’s A New Education Story, and Brooking’s Transforming Education Systems: Why, What, and How

Filed Under: 🧱Transforming Education Tagged With: education, education system

3 Applicable Lessons I Learned From Building a Profitable Online Course

October 25, 2022 by luikangmk

Here’s what you can take away from it.

Source: Canva

Have you ever wondered what it takes to build an online course that will earn you a living?

When I thought about leaving my job as a teacher at the beginning of 2020, earning money independent from time seemed like a distant dream.

Now it’s reality. I’ve just wrapped up my third cohort-based course cohort. 72 students have joined three cohorts, with a rating of 9.1/10.

If you’re toying with the idea of running a course one day or you’re already running a course and want to improve it, this article is for you. I share my biggest learnings from building and running a cohort-based course with you.


1) The Only Metric Needed for Building a Course Your Students Will Love

Many online courses are money machines for course creators but time-wasters for their students.

Most of the time, people who’ve excelled at their craft aren’t the best teachers. Moreover, the most dominant form of online courses (watching videos) does not align with how our brains learn best.

As a former teacher and learning weird, I didn’t want to settle with how things have always been done. I researched better ways to help students achieve their desired learning goals through online education.

The answer? A format that aligns with the science of learning: cohort-based courses (CBCs).

In CBCs, learners move through a course together, with direct access to instructors, ongoing deliberate practice, and a high accountability system.

The key reasons why I decided on CBCs are the benefits for students:

  • Real-time feedback on learning progress.
  • Structured access to a subject-specific community.
  • Assignments that are directly linked to their desired learning outcome.
  • Accountability through communities and instructors helps follow through when things get complicated.

What you can take away from this:

You don’t need extensive teaching experience but the willingness to learn and deliver. Your students learning outcome is the only metric that matters. Make student success your number one priority by building a no-BS course your students will love.

How?

You want to be crystal clear on what your students should be able to achieve with the help of your course.

You want to make your course highly outcome-focused (e.g., mastering a skill, landing a job, growing an audience) and focus on the how instead of the why.

Source: Created by Eva Keiffenheim inspired by Wes Kao.

A helpful framework is the following, suggested by Wes: “By the end of the course, you’ll be able to do X without Y (usual blocker or friction).”

Lastly, use backward design to structure your course. Two questions that led my thinking were: “Which activities would students need to practice to achieve the desired learning outcome?” and “Which input is required so they can best complete this activity?”

Consider the learning outcomes and the necessary practice for achieving them before considering how to teach the content.

Design the lessons around action orientation. Provide guided exercises, templates, and step-by-step guides to help your students succeed. This way, you will create a course your students will love.

Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Community Cohort 3

2) Without This My Course Would Have Failed

A friend told me he attempted to copy Ali Abdaal’s structure to make $2,000,000 on Skillshare. My friend soon gave up. He neither had the video experience nor an existing audience that followed him everywhere.

The best tutorial is useless if you compare yourself against someone too different. So here’s a thing I need to reveal.

Before creating the course, I had 15,000 followers on Medium, 2,500 on LinkedIn, 10,000 podcast listeners, and 2,900 loyal email subscribers of the weekly Learn Letter.

I am convinced my course would have failed without this existing group of online friends.

Before building my course, I followed Julia Horvath’s instructors to first understand my customers.

I sent several emails to my subscribers asking things such as: “I’m thinking about building an online course. Which topics would you like to see me cover?” People replied with questions about how to write online.

In my next mail, I asked: “What’s the number one biggest challenge when it comes to learning or writing?” Informed by around 25 replies to these two questions, I wrote this email and created this survey. Two hundred people replied to the survey, which helped me with the subsequent step.

The email template I used to ask my audience.
The email led to this survey, where I would capture initial interest.

What you can take away from this:

The biggest struggle most online creators have is selling their courses. This is so much easier if you have an existing newsletter subscriber base.

Build an audience before you build an online course.

If you have close to zero followers on any platform, this might sound frustrating. But what a waste of time would it be to create an online course that nobody ends up buying?

So how do you create an online audience?

Provide value online by being helpful. That’s how James Clear, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, Ali Abdaal, and many other successful online entrepreneurs did it.

This requires a lot of investment upfront, without expecting anything in return.

But once you have an online audience, you can build a course and basically do anything you want. Where do you start?

Choose a means (video, writing, or programming). Then, start creating content and follow your audience’s clues.


3) The Tools and Resources I Use For Running a Cohort-Based Course

After deciding on the CBC format, I researched the best options to host cohort-based courses. I looked into Teachfloor, Teachfloor, Virtually, Graphy, and Classcamp, and ultimately settled for Maven.

Maven was started by the founders of Udemy, altMBA, and Socratic. And you can tell Wes, Gagan, and their team knows what they’re doing. Their creator course accelerator has been the best online learning experience of my life.

What does the platform do for me as a course creator? Maven handles the payments via Stripe, has a landing page builder, sends out calendar invites and emails to students, and offers excellent support if something is not working. I’ve run my first three cohorts on their platform and am very content.

In addition to Maven, there are a couple of further resources I use.

  • Convertkit to run my newsletters and email marketing campaigns ($80/month).
  • Zoom pro for the live sessions and recordings ($50/month).
  • Canva for creating slides ($15/month).
  • Slack for communication (even though I’m considering moving to a different platform, such as Circle or using Maven’s newly inbuilt platform).
  • A second screen, a high-quality webcam, a ring light, and a solid microphone.
  • Clickup to do project management of everything required for pre-launch, launch, running the cohort, and strategy.

And lastly, I have support from brilliant Eszter Brhlik, who supports operations, project management and leads our sales strategy.

What you can take away from this:

Building and running a cohort-based course requires different subskills and some tech tools.

Spend time researching the infrastructure that works best for you. Then, think about the people you need to support you (marketing, sales, creating course material, student support).


What’s Next

Building this course has been one of the most rewarding learning experiences of my life (apart from teaching kids at a school).

I hope you will find similar enjoyment and financial success in building a course your student will love.

May you enjoy your journey as an online creator 🙂


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: cohort based courses, Editing, Writing

The Ultimate Guide to Help You Write Non-Fiction Articles

October 25, 2022 by luikangmk

The skills needed to grow an audience, create career opportunities, help people, build a side hustle, and become a lifelong learner.

Eva Keiffenheim (Golden Hour Pictures)

I never thought I’d write online and earn money independently from time.

Before March 2020, I hadn’t published anything on the internet. I thought you’d need to study journalism, have a writing degree, a big goal, or at least some relevant experience.

I had none of these.

But I was curious. And I started writing. I took courses, spent my money on writing coaches, read countless books, contacted fellow writers, and kept perfecting my process day by day.

Two years later, more than 2 million people have read my articles on learning and knowledge management, 27k people follow me on Medium, and more than 4k people subscribed to my weekly Learn Letter. More than 60 students took my cohort-based online course and rated it 9.1/10.

But apart from the numbers and building diverse income streams, I found writing to be a vehicle to explore my curiosity, clarify my thinking, and support other people. There’s nothing more rewarding than people telling me my writing has helped them.

As an education expert and ex-high-school teacher, I’m passionate about creating learner-centric material that provides learners with the clear, practical advice they need.

In this sense, I created this long-read article for people who are about to start their writing journey or who are midway through and looking for applicable tools and resources to improve their process. It contains the sub-skills needed to write non-fiction articles.

Whether you’re a curious mind wanting to explore online writing, a professional looking for exciting career opportunities, someone who hopes to share their experiences with the world, or a lifelong learner wishing to clarify their thinking, this article will give you all you need to accelerate your journey.

You’ll find here everything I wish I had when I lacked a process for online writing.

The article is structured in 10 sections containing the exact system I created for writing online. I designed this guide to help you in the best way possible, so each part has actionable steps you can follow.

Once you’ve read this article, you’ll have a well-suited theory and actionable tasks that will help you practice the ideas.

Likely, you won’t read this article in one go, but start with the section you’re most curious about, and come back to this piece when you’re ready to learn more.

Table of Contents
1. How to Stick Through Until You’ve Gone Viral
2. The Key to Audience Growth Many New Writers Miss out On
3. ​​How to Always Live in an Abundance of Writing Ideas
4. Find Your Writing Niche for Growing an Audience
5. How to Write Headlines That Make People Click
6. This Introduction Technique Will Help You Hook People In
7. A Clear Editing Blueprint for Improving Your Writing in 5 Steps
8. How You Can Keep Writing No Matter What
9. The Only 9 Writing Tools I Use For Maximum Efficiency
10. All Free Resources in One Place

If you feel you want to go deeper to accelerate your online writing journey, join my 3-week cohort-based course that runs twice each year. You transform into a consistent writer and lifelong learner. You learn to express your thoughts online effectively, attract an audience, and use your ideas to help and inspire others.

The course is unique because you won’t only learn, but you’ll also apply your knowledge and leave the cohort with three high-quality articles. Because you can only improve your writing skills if you sit down and write.


1. How to Stick Through Until You’ve Gone Viral

Most people fail to attract an online audience because they quit too early.

They expect prompt results. But writing online is no sprint. You see the effects of your work only once you’ve passed the invisible virality threshold. And to pass it, you need to learn and improve while no one reacts or replies to your work.

The issue is that as you put more time and energy into writing, sticking through becomes harder and harder.

When I hit publish for the first time, I felt insecure but great. My friends cheered me and shared one of my first articles across their LinkedIn and Facebook accounts.

As with every new learning adventure, initial enthusiasm vanished fast and made space for reality. I became more aware of my unknown unknowns — the things I wasn’t even aware of in the first place but that I realized later are relevant for succeeding with writing online.

And as if this burden wasn’t enough, no one read my work.

What I call “writing in the void” (aka practising in public) is the hardest part of becoming an online writer. Until you’ve crossed the virality threshold, no external factors attest to your learning.

You don’t get thoughtful comments.

You don’t receive emails of gratitude.

You don’t see any financial rewards.

And that’s where most people give up.

If you want to experience the diverse benefits of writing, don’t be one of them. Instead, treat writing as a marathon.

It took me one single article to reach 100,000 people and gain 500 subscribers. But there were 39 articles before where I didn’t get any reaction at all. If I had quit after article 39 (and about 300 hours of writing and learning), I would have never crossed the threshold.

If you stick to a consistent, deliberate writing practice (more on what it contains in the sections below), you can achieve the same.

Your single most important goal when starting to write online is to not expect anything in return until you’ve published 100 articles (thanks for this wise advice Sinem Günel).

Growth in your writing audience is not linear, but exponential. Source: Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

What you can do now

Prepare yourself for long-term writing, with a realistic plan you can stick to even when you don’t see any traction.

Approach writing online as you would approach preparing for a marathon. Instead of having the goal of running for 42.195 kilometres, you want to set the goal of publishing 100 articles online.

When tracking your progress, don’t focus on any external metrics such as followers, claps, or subscribers. The only thing you should track is the time you’ve spent writing and the number of articles you’ve published.

To stick through until you’ve published 100 articles, plan backwards. Grab a sheet of paper or open your note-taking app and answer these questions:

  • How many hours a week can you spend writing? (Hint: the ideal number is the one you can stick with)
  • When are you actually going to sit down and write? How can you block out time for writing? What do you need to stop doing to have time for writing?
  • How many hours do you need per article? (Hint: with practice, your writing time will decrease; my first articles took me about 12 hours per article, but I’m now at roughly 3 hours per article).
  • When will you have published your first 100 articles?

2. The Key to Audience Growth Many New Writers Miss out On

Most writers don’t set up their email lists from day one because they think it’s unnecessary.

They believe nothing can be more important than writing and learning how to write better. An email list feels like a painful extra step.

Many people also feel as if they lack the tech knowledge to do it and don’t want to waste hours figuring out the setups. There are too many providers, and precious writing time can fly away trying to figure out how to set up an email list.

Yet, ignoring the importance of starting an email list from day one is a mistake you can never engineer backwards.

When your first article goes viral without a call to action, you’ve lost your first hundred-something subscribers who’d be genuinely interested in your work. You’ll grow slower, and you’ll be at the mercy of algorithms.

And even though I felt awkward asking my seven readers to subscribe to my non-existing newsletter, it was the best thing I could’ve done for my writing career.

Because the thing is, platforms change. Emails don’t.

If you one day want to sell any digital product, you need an email list. You won’t depend on an algorithm: your readers will see you even if your writing doesn’t appear in their feed.

What you can do now

The good news is that setting up your email list isn’t rocket science. You can do it in less than 30 minutes. Three steps are required: registering on Convertkit, choosing a landing page, and creating a Call-to-Action through which you ask your readers to subscribe to your list.

First, register on Convertkit.

Second, sign up free in the right corner of the website and create a free account. I recommend Convertkit over other email providers because the platform will cost you nothing for your first 1,000 subscribers, and it is optimized for online creators.

Third, pick a landing page. When you set up your landing page, keep in mind: the longer you try to create a well-designed landing page, the less time you’ve left for writing articles.

Especially in the beginning, the appearance of your landing page doesn’t matter much. It’s better done than perfect. Add a picture of yourself to make your page more personal, or a royalty-free image from Pexels, for example.

Then, add a Call-to-Action (CTA) underneath each of your articles

In the beginning, start with a generic CTA: It’s better to start with a good enough CTA than not at all, and you can easily adjust your CTA once you’ve figured out your niche and know what you want to do with your list.

Your first Call-to-Actions can sound like this:

  • “Want to improve X? My newsletter will help you create the Y you need to move towards a Z future.”
  • “Get access to exclusive X content. Subscribe to my free newsletter here.”
  • “Want to stay in touch? Subscribe to my email list.”

If you don’t want to do this now, grab my free 5-day email course on setting up your email list in 20 minutes. Each day you’ll get straight-to-the-point help with exact steps and to-dos on why and how to set up your writing for audience growth.


3. ​​How to Always Start From an Abundance of Ideas

Ideas are the most essential building blocks of articles because the writing can’t even start without having them.

When I started, I feared I’d soon run out of ideas.

I feared sitting in front of a blank page. I worried about writing “too early” about my best ideas and running out of topics afterwards. I doubted I had anything worthy to say.

The thing is, writing isn’t about sitting down in front of a blank page and waiting for the best idea to come.

Most people think they don’t have ideas when in reality, the problem is they don’t train their minds to pay attention to their ideas and then don’t collect their ideas.

If you judge your ideas and don’t capture them with an open mind, they’ll be gone. And without having ideas, it’s impossible to write.

The good news is you don’t have to wait to have more ideas.

Creativity is practice. The more you create, the more creative you’ll become. If you train your brain to develop ideas, they will, at one point, just flow into your life.

What you can do now

In the beginning, you need conscious practice. Ask yourself a couple of times a day what do I want to write about?

Put a sticker in your bathroom, on your fridge, or your phone screensaver. Even if your mind doesn’t have answers in the first place, trust the process.

If you ask yourself these questions five days in a row, you’ll have plenty of ideas to pick from.

There are a couple of things you can do to facilitate this process.

Pay attention to your surroundings, read books, pay attention to your mind, and talk with people.

Most importantly, when a new idea comes into your mind, don’t judge that early idea. You only know if they’re good once you’ve written about them.

If you label your early ideas as “bad ideas,” you tell your brain that it’s wrong to develop new ideas. That way, you hinder your ideation process and make it harder for your brain to come up with a new idea next time. Thus, to generate more ideas, treat your new ideas very gently.

Once the idea is there, note it down, no matter what. You make sure to never again run out of ideas by taking the process into your own hands. That is, having a safe space where you capture and store your ideas.

I’ve experimented with a lot of idea-capturing tools. I used Trello, Notion, an excel sheet, and Milanote. Lately, I’ve discovered and settled for xTiles because the platform combines all features I was looking for.

Here’s what it looks like:

My current idea board xTiles (Screenshot by author).

The lesson is — it’s not about the tool but about your process.

Commit to capturing your first five article ideas in the tool. Some helpful prompts to come up with writing ideas: I used to be Y, this is how I turned into Z (e.g., I Used To Have Social Anxiety. These 4 Mental Shifts Made Me More Confident), What you can learn from Z will change Y (e.g., 3 Resources about Learning that Will Change How You Look at Education), or questions and topics you’re curious about and want to learn more.

The next section will guide you on how to pick the ideas worth writing about.


4. Find Your Writing Niche for Growing an Audience

“How do I find my niche?” is a question I get asked a lot. Many writers think they should have a focus area when they start writing.

And while this gives you some form of security, it’s the wrong thing to do. When you niche down too early, you miss out on growth opportunities. Because you have no data on what resonates with your audience. And you can’t know which topics you love writing about.

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 1

When I started, I wrote about anything from relationships, SEO, and intuitive eating. My assumption was I’ll end up writing about love and psychology.

Soon I realized while I love talking about these topics in my podcast and with friends, I don’t like writing about them. Only 20 stories in, when looking at the data, I realized the stories on learning and books perform best AND that they were the ones I loved writing.

Don’t try to niche down when writing your first 30 or 40 articles. Embrace the opportunity only beginning writers have — writing about anything you’re curious about.

Niching down will happen with time if you write about topics that make you curious and monitor the stories that engage your audience.

What you can do now

Open your idea tool (check the previous section if you don’t know what that is) and add five broad themes that you would like to explore (e.g., computer science, biographies, history entrepreneurship).

Then, look at these themes and a couple of specific article ideas by asking yourself for each of them:

  • What could be a specific topic I’m curious to explore?
  • What’s a topic I have strong emotions or opinions about?
  • What’s a question inside this theme that I have found an answer to?

When writing your next articles, commit to picking ideas from different topics. Use the Meta log (more in section 10) to track whether you actually enjoy writing about it.

Once you have published at least 20 articles, look at the data. Sort your articles by clicking on your preferred metrics, for example, views. You will see how many people clicked on the article.

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

After you’ve published more than 20 articles and filtered by the view, check whether there is an intersection between your top-performing pieces and the ones you love writing about. No? Continue writing and check again after 20 more articles. Yes? You’ve found your niche!


5. How to Write Headlines That Make People Click

If your headline isn’t good enough, no one will read your articles. Your content can be perfect. But you drive the audience into your writing through the title.

The title is the very first thing a reader sees, and online platforms have an infinite amount of content. Thus, if your headline doesn’t stand out from the crowd, online readers will scroll further and pick a title that awakens their curiosity.

As a result, even if you invested hours of work into perfecting your article, you won’t have many readers with a meh headline. No matter how great your content is, you won’t be able to drive an audience into your writing. No one will read your work if your headline isn’t interesting enough.

Your title can literally make or break the success of an article.

Almost no one read my articles in early 2020. It’s no wonder as my headlines were as boring as “The digital gap is increasing — we need to act now!” and “Out of your head and into your body in less than 5 minutes”.

Researching and implementing some headline components in my titles helped me reach more than 2 million readers in less than two years.

If you ever want to be a successful writer, you need to start working on your titles. Because if no one clicks on your heading, you’ll always have zero readers.

The good news is headline writing is a skill you can master.

Once you understand the components of successful headlines, you can create your own engaging titles.

But consistently writing headlines that make people click is more complex than you might think. It requires continuous practice and re-learning.

Six core components will help you craft titles that make people click. If you internalize them and deliberately practice headline writing (more on that in the section below), you’ll be able to create your own highly engaging headlines.

The first component is the reader’s benefit. Great headlines focus on the reader and deliver value either directly or indirectly. It is clear that the writer didn’t write the content to herself, it’s not a journal but something useful for the people. For example, If You Want to Be Rich, Spend Your Time Buying Assets, or The Feynman Technique Can Help You Remember Everything You Read.

The second component is breadth. Choosing a topic that’s appealing to a large audience is usually present in popular headings. While I love writing about education and learning, I also accept that an analysis of Estonia’s education system likely won’t go viral. Whereas the title 9 Micro-Habits That Will Completely Change Your Life in a Year speaks to a very broad audience.

Thirdly, people like sharing things on the internet that either make them look smart or helpful. An article with the title The 7 Emails You Should Send Every Week to Get Ahead in Your Career has a great chance to be widely shared on LinkedIn.

The fourth component is novelty. Don’t try to recycle the old but well-performing headlines because people will realize it. What worked well in the past won’t go viral today. Unless you bring some novelty to the discussion and show your spiky point of view — a view that is slightly controversial and with which some people would disagree. An example of this is Self-improvement has made me worse,

Next, when I did my headline research, I realized headlines that contain proof are likely to perform well. The proof can come from famous people, such as Elon Musk’s 2 Rules For Learning Anything Faster. Or you can also add self-proof as I did with the article This is How I Made My First $30,000 From Writing Online.

Lastly, countless viral articles provoke emotions. They’re either controversial or use powerful words, such as the ones in the gif below. An example of an emotion-provoking headline is Today I Learned Something About My Boyfriend That No Girl Should Ever Have to Discover.

Emotional word bank. Source: Coschedule

What you can do now

Now, knowing the components of well-performing headlines isn’t enough. It’s like reading a book and believing you’re well-prepared for the exam.

To craft headlines that make people click, you need to practice. Headline writing is a skill you can master, but you’ll need to spend time crafting multiple headline variations.

So these are the exact steps you need to craft a high-performing headline.

First, collect the headlines you click on in your idea board (more on that in section 3). They will serve as inspiration to you.

Second, before starting to write an article, ask yourself, “what’s in it for the reader” and “which 2–3 headline components would fit the topic of my article?”

For each article, you write, try to craft ten headline variations as I did in the picture below. Don’t worry about perfecting the title yet; this time, just write what comes into your mind.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

Once you’re ready with the headline variations, pick the one you’d click, or ask your friends or writer buddies to choose for you.

To further boost your chosen headline, I recommend the free version of CoSchedule. Insert your title, and swap words until you reach a score that’s above 70. Repeat this practice for each article you write.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

I know this process can be tiring. But it’s worth it. Keep Ayodeji Awosika’s wise words in mind:

“I’ve written more than 15,000 headlines since I’ve started writing. Only one per cent of them are really good. Those one per cent of headlines I’ve written created 100 percent of my viral successes. Every single morning, I write down 10 ideas for headlines. […] I promise, if you don’t learn how to write good headlines, you’ll never have a career as a blogger. Never. So do I.”


6. This Introduction Technique Will Make People Interested in Your Work

Countless writers start their articles as if they were writing their life stories. Lengthy anecdotes, unrelated information, and a lot of beautifully written fluff.

Online readers are barely interested in such introductions. They clicked the headline because they wished to have something out of the writing, such as advice, entertainment, or a piece of specific information.

Sloppy introductions can destroy the time investment you put into crafting your articles. You convince your readers to click on your story with your headline. But you hook them into the story with your introduction.

An efficient tool for writing engaging introductions is the PAS formula. The acronym stands for Problem, Agitation, and Solution. That’s how you structure your introduction.

In the problem part, you need to pick a painful issue and describe it in one sentence.

In the agitation, you make the problem more specific and more emotional, almost unbearable.

Lastly, in the solution, you offer a way out. You propose a solution.

Here’s an example from one of my articles:

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 4

What you can do now

To write a powerful PAS arrange your introduction into three parts.

In part one, ask yourself: what is the problem I’m trying to solve? Why is it painful for the reader? What is the pain about? You can start with prompts, such as:

  • Have you ever wondered…?
  • Do you ever…?
  • Do you also?
  • Most people face….problem.

In the second part, agitate on the problem. Ask yourself how you can be more specific. Is there a real-life situation that happened to you or to a friend that would fit the context and could help you make the problem more vivid? You can continue with sentences, such as:

  • If you also feel like….it’s likely because…
  • I/ My friend also…insert problem that happened frequently.

Lastly, offer a way out for your readers. Ask yourself: How can I describe the solution briefly? Tell why the article would immensely help the reader. You can close your introduction, for example, with:

  • By….., you’ll….
  • Discovering….helped me…. It’ll also help you with…
  • These are….that you can easily apply in….to….
Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 4

7. How You Can Make Your Articles 10x Better With This Clear Editing Blueprint

Have you ever invested too much time into editing your articles?

I know the feeling of desiring the perfect article. I feared of being judged by the online world.

The problem? With this mindset, an article will never be good enough.

Writing is creative work. You’re never done if you aim for perfection, as you will always find something to improve.

At the beginning of my writing journey, I spent 17 hours editing a single article. And the outcome was average. The article only had a few hundred views.

The problem with this mindset is that the time you spend editing is the time you don’t spend writing. I could have spent those 17 hours writing instead of perfecting one single article.

And in the online world, quantity matters. If you publish less, you have fewer chances of going viral. You can think of each article as a lottery ticket. Maybe it’ll take off and bring you exponential growth.

But if you spend hours perfecting your work, you won’t be able to publish more.

To avoid this, define an endpoint for your editing process. I now have a clear structure I follow to know when my article is good enough. I hit publish despite any insecurity, accepting my fear of being judged. Good is better than perfect, and I know the opportunity costs of not starting to write a new article.

What you can do now

Here are the steps I follow when editing my articles. Feel free to steal them, if you struggle to edit the paper in a way that makes you feel content with your work.

First, put the heading in the title case format with this free app by inserting your heading into the “Add your title in here” white space. When you scroll down, you can copy the result. (1 min)

Second, read the text out loud to recognize inconsistencies and check the flow. When you read out loud, you put yourself in the reader’s role, and that way, you can spot flaws in your writing. Delete everything that doesn’t add value to your article. (30 min)

Third, improve the section headings. Think of your section headings as they’d be mini titles of your article: they need to encourage your readers to keep reading. Thus, they should also follow the principles of great headlines — more on that in section four. (5 min)

Fourth, polish your word choice and cut the fluff. Great online writing is simple. You don’t need to use sophisticated words and lengthy sentences to convey deep messages. (5 min)

Fifth, check the grammar with the free version of Grammarly. You can write with flawless grammar even if you’re not a native speaker. Sign up, add the app to your browser as an extension, and enable the grammar check for the platform where you write. (5 min)

Sixth, format the text according to the requirements of the platform. Like most platforms, Medium also has formatting requirements. The most important ones in a nutshell: Put your heading and subheading in the right format. Add section headings. Add section breaks to divide your post into sub-paragraphs. If you quote someone, use the quotation format. Get my Free Medium Formatting Guideline for visual examples. (5 min)


8. How to keep writing no matter what

After a few months without much traction, writing can feel like an aimless, soul-draining activity you can’t get out of your head. A tempting black box that might one day bring you the desired outcome.

You’re barely getting any better, keep repeating the same mistakes, and can’t get enough motivation to write nearly every day. You don’t track how much time you invest in writing, and you’re also unaware of what you actually like writing about.

If you don’t find a solution and continue writing without reflecting, you will either give up writing at some point. Or your writing will always remain mediocre, and you will never reach a broad audience.

You can end up wasting the precious hours you’ve invested and say goodbye to your dreams of becoming a writer.

I’ve almost been there. I didn’t know how to track my writing progress in a meaningful way.

Building on my background in education, I came up with a tool. The goal? Keep getting better at writing while getting my motivation high. This tool can also help you build a consistent, deliberate writing practice.

I call it the writing meta log as it fosters your metacognition skill. In essence, this skill helps you understand the way you’re thinking, and it makes you aware of both your strengths and weaknesses. It helps you create the process that suits your unique needs and supports you in the long run.

This is my meta log from April 2020:

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

What you can do now

The framework of meta writing log looks like this. You can either create your own in a spreadsheet or get the template free here.

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

To make the best out of it, fill a line every time you finish your practice. Rely on these three principles to make the best out of the meta writing log:

  1. Write it for yourself. No one will read it.
  2. Use it every time you write: the longer you keep collecting data, the more useful it will be.
  3. Highlight your critical lessons, for example, by bolding them.

As an extra motivation, you can reward yourself for days you’ve filled this out straight. You can invite yourself for a coffee or treat yourself with something you enjoy. It can be a hot bath or a long walk in nature. It totally depends on your preferences.

If you use the metalog consistently, you’ll discover a pattern and see which topics flow well and which are the ones you don’t prefer that much. You’ll reflect after every writing session and through it, you’ll develop a writing process that serves you the best.


9. The Only 9 Tools I Use to Write Great Articles in Three Hours

Most people think they need expensive equipment and fancy tools to become professional writers. Yet, that’s not the case.

I only rely on nine tools, and most of them are for free. Here’s the list:

  1. The free version of BlockSite Extension disables websites at the time you want. I blocked LinkedIn, Gmail, Slack, and Facebook during my writing time (7AM–10AM).
  2. BeFocused is one of my favourite productivity tools. I use it as a game against myself. I work in 50-minute intervals. Before I start the timer, I set an intention (e.g. editing an article and hitting publish in 50-minutes). The next 50-minutes require full focus to beat the clock.
  3. I bought noise-cancelling headphones that help me quickly get into and remain in the flow state. This way, I’m not distracted by any sound and I even enjoy writing on a train.
  4. I collect and manage my ideas with xTiles. More detailed description of this is in section three.
  5. English is my second language, so I use Grammarly for (mostly) mistake-free writing. I got the paid version, but the free version also does a good job.
  6. Readwise and Roam help me optimize my writing process. Too complex to explain in a bullet, but I share it in my writing course.
  7. For correct title case creation, I use the free Title Case Converter.
  8. Power Thesaurus helps me expand my vocabulary and increase my word choice. It’s a fast, convenient and free online word bank. I use the free chrome extension to have in-text suggestions.
  9. CoSchedule turns good headlines into great ones. Check out section five for more details.

What you can do now

Check out the tools that you consider the most helpful for your current stage and start working with them.

But remember, the most important “tool” for your journey is your undisturbed writing time.


In Essence

Writing has changed my life.

It has created career opportunities I never dreamed of. I’ll be, for example, a speaker at the European Union Education Summit in Brussels this winter.

It’s my lifelong learning tool. I discover something new about myself or the world every time I write. It has advanced my industry knowledge, altered my physical and mental health levels, and improved my relationships.

Writing is one of the most rewarding habits you can build. And I know from experience writing online isn’t only for writers.

  • It’s for anyone who wants to grow as an individual. You can clarify your thinking and become a lifelong learner through writing.
  • It’s for anyone who wants to reach more people. Sharing your thoughts online enables you to reach an insane amount of people.
  • It’s for anyone who wants to accelerate their professional life. With every new article you write, you show the online world the expertise you have in a given field. People who’re interested in your expertise will pay attention.
  • It’s for anyone who wants to meet and exchange with like-minded people. In the internet era, you don’t have to stick to your local communities to build connections.

If you’re still here, you know all the components you need to kickstart your writing journey.

  • Your mindset to fuel sustainable growth
  • Your email list to build an audience
  • Your ideation process to never run out of writing ideas
  • Your headlines to drive people to your work
  • Your introductions to hook your readers in
  • Your editing process to avoid perfectionism
  • Your tools to make technology work in your favor
  • Your ability to reflect to see the bigger picture and improve deliberately

If you’re just starting, this article can be a lot to digest. But no worries. You don’t need to feel overwhelmed. You can revisit this article at any time and progress at your own pace.

Work on one section for at least a week. Then move on to the next one. If you’re at the very beginning of your journey, I suggest you start with creating your idea board and then learn to sit down and write regularly. Then, focus on headline practice, and set up an email list.

If you want to level up and commit, join the waitlist for the next WOA cohort (scholarships available). In the course, we will cover all of this in more depth. As an education expert, I’ll guide you through practical tasks, and you’ll leave the cohort with three high-quality articles reviewed by experienced editors and by me.

The course is for you if you’d like to learn from someone who doesn’t only have expertise in the field of the skill but also teaching. Because no matter how experienced someone is at cooking, writing, painting, or photography, their course will be useless if they don’t know how to teach.


Join the waitlist for the next Writing Online Accelerator cohort

Bonus: All my free resources in one place

I’m here to help you. So below, you find a list of all the free resources I’ve created for writing online.

If there’s something else that you’d love to be on this list, reply to one of my emails with what you want.

  • 5-day writing course on how to attract an audience online
  • Free Medium Formatting Guideline
  • Inspiration board to collect the inspirational content you consume
  • Writing Meta-Log template to reflect and track your writing process

If you’d like to read more on the topics of this article, check out the articles below:

  1. How You Can Write with the Right Mindset to Fuel Sustainable Growth
  2. The Simple Hack for Audience Growth Many New Writers Miss out On
  3. I Used to Run out of Writing Ideas. This Repeatable 3-Step Process Helped.
  4. How to Easily Find Your Writing Niche for Growing an Audience
  5. 6 Principles That Helped Me Write Effective Headlines
  6. How to Master the Most Important Yet Underrated Writing Skill
  7. This Introduction Technique Can Make People Read What You Write
  8. The 51-Minute Editing Framework to Feel Confident When Publishing Your Articles
  9. The Only 9 Tools I Use to Write Great Articles in Three Hours
  10. How the Meta Log Can Turn You Into a Better Writer

Other articles I’ve written on writing:

  1. This is How I Made My First $30,000 From Writing Online
  2. How to Create like Elizabeth Gilbert
  3. How a Leftover Graveyard Will Make You Edit Without Mercy
  4. Stephen King’s 8 Tips Can Improve Your Writing and Editing
  5. The Two Learning Curves First Time Writers Need to Master

A very special thanks to Eszter Brhlik for co-creating this article with me.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: Editing, Writing

A Comprehensive Metaverse x Learning Guide For Curious But Busy People

October 11, 2022 by luikangmk

Research-based predictions for a soon-to-be reality.

Photo by Fábio Lucas on Unsplash

Have you ever wondered how the metaverse might shape the future of education and learning?

Trying to find answers can be frustrating. While there’s much writing on the metaverse, most of it lacks substance. Unless you’ve got time for thorough research, finding no-fluff scenarios is a challenge.

But don’t worry, I’ve got you.

As a teacher-turned-writer, I have the time to follow metaverse rabbit holes so that you don’t have to. In the past weeks, I read everything I could find on the topic (I even visited a web3 exhibition in New York).

This comprehensive guide is a no-fluff, distilled version of what I learned about the metaverse and its impact on education and learning.

The article will help you understand what the metaverse is (1), how it might — or might not — disrupt learning (2), companies worth knowing (3), and what is required to build a great metaverse for all (4).


Table of Contents1 The Metaverse is More Than Meta
1.1 A brief history of the metaverse
1.2 How tech leaders define the metaverse2 Can the Metaverse Do What EdTech Failed to Do?
2.1 Doing the Same, Only Better
2.2 Disrupting How We Learn3 These Companies Are Already Disrupting Learning
3.1 Roblox
3.2 Labster
3.3 FundamentalVR
3.4 Talespin, Mursion, and Unimersiv4 Prerequisites for Building Something Great
4.1 Diverse content development teams
4.2 Hardware access for all learners
4.3 Governance to ensure privacy, safety and security5 Conclusion

1) The Metaverse is More Than Meta

Since Mark Zuckerberg’s presentation in October 2021, the metaverse has been on most people’s radars. But what many don’t know is that there won’t be just one metaverse.

Here’s a brief history of the metaverse, as well as the current definition of what it actually is.

1.1) A brief history of the metaverse

The term metaverse first appeared in Neil Stevenson’s 1982 novel Snow Crash and referred to a hellscape of corporate control.

At the time, Stevenson wrote, “the people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the metaverse.”

Since then, different companies have started to develop and build on metaverse technology. For example, they have introduced VR machines, glasses, and applications long before Facebook’s metaverse (for example, IKEA’s place app in 2017).

History of the Metaverse. Source: Days Tech

1.2) How tech leaders define the metaverse

Since Stevenson’s novel, the understanding of the metaverse has shifted. Cathy Hackl, an expert on web3, asked 20 tech leaders how they’d explain the metaverse.

In essence, what they said is that the metaverse will bridge the gap between reality and a virtual world by relying on technologies such as virtual reality (a full immersion in virtual environments, e.g., through a VR headset) and augmented reality (the real world enhanced with virtual objects, e.g., through your phone).

“The Metaverse is the internet, but you can go into it (VR) or it can come out to you (AR). As with any new technology we invent, there will be unintended consequences which require us to stop and think ‘What is the future we all want to see?’”

– Alan Smithson

Experts are predicting several use cases, including virtual retail venues for shopping, virtual co-working spaces, advertising channels for brands, fitness and telehealth hubs, social gaming platforms, space for global convenings, and even digital lecture halls.

Yet, tech leaders agree that we’re still far from the metaverse becoming our new reality. We’re still in the early stages of development.

Eric Hazan, one of the lead authors of a McKinsey report on the metaverse, writes: “There’s a lot of excitement about the potential this technology holds, but the computing power isn’t there yet to make the metaverse of people’s imaginations feasible.”

For instance, the graph below shows the different layers needed to unlock the metaverse’s potential. As you might notice, we’ve barely unlocked each stage.

Source: Jon Rodoff

But supposing we had the sufficient infrastructure, human interfaces, and enough computing power, what would the actual predictions for the metaverse’s impact on learning in future scenarios be? And can the Metaverse achieve EdTech’s promise?


2) Can the Metaverse Do What EdTech Failed to Do?

Analyzing the past twenty-five years of education technology, you’ll realize that EdTech often has over-promised but under-delivered.

Massive Open Online Courses scaled traditional chalk and talk settings, and you can now learn from the best experts on MasterClass. However, despite the high-quality videos, the format remains painfully static. Even though learning science revealed the ineffectiveness of passive content consumption, it often remains a predominant paradigm in EdTech.

Education technology has yet to transform how we learn, but a true disruption of this paradigm should include fully immersive, active, and experiential learning experiences.

The metaverse could enable such unpredictable, real-life scenarios by combining augmented, virtual, and mixed reality within a shared, explorable, and adaptive virtual universe.

But will the metaverse live up to its potential? Here are two predictions for how the metaverse will or won’t change how we learn.


2.1) Doing the Same, Only Better

This 30-second clip by Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook ) displays what happens when metaverse builders fall into the same trap that many EdTechs have fallen prey to — doing the same, only better.

Source: Meta/Youtube

The metaverse allows you to “step inside your textbooks.” You can see learning objects — such as the planet Saturn — in 3D, and you can zoom in and zoom out to study its details.

So what’s the problem?

We’re doing the same thing we’ve always done. It’s just bigger and a bit better, but not different.

Meta Platforms, Inc. is not the only metaverse builder following that route. Most examples I came across are variations of the following two use cases.

Visit the world without the cost, effort, and climate footprint of traveling. You can do field trips and visit museums, nature, monuments, and historical sites worldwide. You could be living in Austria but visiting the Museo Frida Kahlo in Mexico City or exploring biodiversity in South Africa.

Travelling becomes less resource-intense and more accessible, which is disruptive for travelling.

But is it for learning?

Learning remains the same; it’s just delivered in a different format. You’re still a passive consumer, watching, seeing, or witnessing the learning objects.

Here’s another example that feels innovative but doesn’t disrupt learning itself. Knowing what you know now, you might already sense the missed opportunities behind the initial excitement.

Imagine not reading about historical events but immersing yourself in them. You could be participating in key historical moments to feel how they changed the course of humanity. You might, for example, stand in a crowd of 250,000 people while Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.

Again, this use-case copies what we’ve been doing into a new format while not adding additional benefits for the learner.

Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explains: “I don’t think just porting material to some new format is the way to go. I think what we need to do is explore what is the gift that this new platform can offer us.”

So what will it take for the metaverse to truly transform how we learn?

2.2) Disrupting How We Learn

To revolutionize how we learn, the metaverse needs to offer experiences that go beyond immersion. Here’s what this could look like:

Work as Marie Curie’s lab assistant during her discovery of radioactivity. You could also run any chemical experiments that would be too dangerous for any classroom, like melting aluminum or smashing a flower that’s been frozen with liquid nitrogen. You could test gravity by dropping a feather and a hammer under Earth-like conditions, on Mars, or under the sulfur rainfalls on Venus.

In a metaverse that builds on experiential learning, you’re not simply watching a 3D movie. Instead, you can interact with your environment and experience changed conditions and get live feedback based on your interactions.

You can learn high-risk skills such as driving, performing surgery, flying, sailing, skiing, or firefighting in virtual environments. Instead of reading books on public speaking, you can practice in real settings with an actual audience — and receive feedback given your performance.

Disruptive learning experiences in the metaverse go beyond immersion and virtual field trips. The learner’s experience changes based on the questions asked and the decisions made in hands-on, minds-on virtual environments.

Through deliberate and repeated practice opportunities and feedback loops, learners can benefit from more engagement, confidence, and application.


“Are you going to try to make something that’s good for people, just like junk food, or you’re going to make something that’s healthy […] .Let’s make it good. And let’s not go down a rabbit hole that is going to be dangerous for children.”

— Dr Kathy Hirsh-Pasek

Image by Freepik

3) These Companies Are Already Disrupting Learning

As you know, the metaverse is more than Meta (formerly Facebook). There’ll be many metaverses.

Against the backdrop of metaverses and learning, these companies are operating on the edge of transforming how we learn.

3.1) Roblox — An ecosystem to disrupt teaching and learning

Roblox is a platform for virtual gaming experiences, and they already have a metaverse. As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16, and plenty of educators are using Roblox.

Roblox aspires to help 100 million students learn by 2030 and intends to offer an ecosystem of educational experiences that are both fun and engaging. One prominent example of this is Project Lead The Way, which offers STEM educational learning experiences in an engaging, hands-on classroom environment to PreK-12.

Source: Roblox

3.2) Labster — Science for High School and Higher Ed

Labster, a company founded by educators, scientists, and game designers, builds on learning science to offer virtual labs, science simulations, and interactive learning environments.

Their simulations could enable the described Marie-Curie experience by giving students access to a million-dollar laboratory with highly immersive learning experiences.

What excites me most about Labster is its evidence-based product development. In fact, the company conducted 11-peer reviewed research studies to inform product development and improve learning outcomes.

Use a realistic and high-tech hologram to observe the structures & important organs in our new Female Reproductive System: Gross Anatomy #simulation: https://t.co/9t7NvlZBxR #edtech #STEMlearning #STEM #labster #scienceeducation #virtuallabs #virtuallearning #education #eduverse pic.twitter.com/BoxuuEqTkT

— Labster (@labster) July 11, 2022

3.3) FundamentalVR — Medical training for professionals

FundamentalVR focuses on teaching healthcare and medical training through mixed reality. The company patented a haptic intelligence engine to deliver high-fidelity physical interaction and offer cross-platform multi-user VR.

Plus, FundamentalVR partnered with Microsoft’s HoloLens. They created experiential learning experiences you can practice surgery with colleagues from around the world.

FundamentalVR partnerned with Microsoft’s HoloLens.

3.4) Immersive learning for workforce re- and upskilling

There are a number of companies operating in workforce re- and upskilling. Three of the most promising ones include:

Talespin, a platform for XR workforce learning. Talespin offers a no-code authoring tool for immersive soft skills content, as well as off-the-shelf learning content on emotional intelligence, critical thinking, communication, and leadership development.

Mursion, a platform that provides immersive simulated practice for social-emotional skills in the workplace. In 1:1 immersive training simulations, learners can practice difficult and high-stakes conversations.

Unimersiv, a platform for VR educational experience. It offers, among other things, training solutions for corporations, such as forklift and excavator training.

Unimersiv’s Forklift VR Training example

“We challenge those creating educational products in the metaverse to partner with educators and scientists to ensure that children experience real human social interaction as they navigate virtual spaces. Children’s agency is supported as they explore these spaces.”

— Center for Universal Education at Brookings

5) The Metaverse’s Three Key Challenges

The metaverse can bring many benefits to the education world, such as overcoming obstacles that prevent you from doing something in real life or experiencing truly experiential learning with people from across the world (for example, through holoportation).

And yet, there are a couple of things to keep in mind when building a metaverse that’s great for all learners.

5.1) Diverse content developers to build an inclusive metaverse

Virtual worlds reflect the visions of the people building them. For now, the metaverse is mostly built by white male developers.

We’ve learnt from other technologies about the risk of built-in bias when they’re only developed by a dominant group (for example, gender and skin-type bias in facial recognition software).

To unlock the metaverse’s full potential, diversity must be part of its very fabric. One way to do this is to have development teams with diverse ages, genders, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, health status, physical attributes, sexuality, and other important factors that characterize us human beings. Learners and educators must be given agency in the design process. Excitingly, the World Economic Forum announced a new initiative to build an equitable, interoperable and safe Metaverse.

5.2) Hardware to enable access for all learners

The World Bank states that the metaverse could potentially democratize education, by “bringing people from geographically dispersed locations and varied economic backgrounds together to learn, in a cost-effective, flexible, and quicker duration.”

However, to fulfill this promise, all learners need access to the required infrastructure and hardware. For instance, while the price of a VR headset dropped from $500 in 2016 to $300 in 2021, the devices enabling immersive metaverse experiences are still reserved for resource-rich countries and households.

Initiatives, funding, and government support will be essential to make hardware accessible for all instead of increasing an already wide digital inequality divide.

5.3) Governance to ensure privacy, safety and security

How can all users feel safe and secure in the metaverse? Learning researcher Sirkka Freigang reports that the challenges we have encountered on social media platforms will likely be present and amplified in the metaverse.

Terri Horton highlights that significant vulnerabilities such as issues of corporate surveillance, access to worker biodata, privacy, data security, mental health impacts, identity, and reputation theft can have overwhelmingly adverse effects on organizations, workers, and society.

If left unregulated, the data generated in the metaverse — even in educational contexts — can be sold for targeted marketing, nudging, and influencing consumer behaviour.

This means that metaverse governance will be a multifaceted challenge that requires particular attention to interoperability, privacy, safety, and security.


Calls to Action & Conclusion

The metaverse has the potential to revolutionize learning. Whether it will live up to its potential is yet to be determined — which also offers the opportunity to develop education technology based on principles from the science of learning.

The future might be better than we think it is, but we need to create a vision of what we want instead of simply doing what’s possible.

Perhaps, by 2035, young learners will look back at the web3 and metaverse developments from 2022 to 2030 similarly to how we look at the internet’s development between 1998 and 2006.

If you want to learn the skills you need to co-create the metaverse, check out these resources:

  • Roblox Studio offers learning resources to help you navigate through the most popular metaverse gaming platforms.
  • Coursera’s Virtual Reality Specialization will teach you about the hardware and software needed to create immersive 3D worlds.
  • Udemy’s Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Metaverse Business course will teach you how to create business ideas from scratch that will allow you to jump in the metaverse wave.
  • Web3 Blockchain Bootcamp offers training for javascript developers that want to learn the fundamentals of web3 technologies.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe to my Learn Letter for free. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: Ideas, technology

These 8 Unusual Strategies Helped Me Write Consistently For +2 Years

August 22, 2022 by luikangmk

And build a loyal online audience.

Photo lya Pavlov on Unsplash

Writing consistently is the most important yet hardest part of building an online audience.

If you’re starting out, you’re writing in the void. You feel as if nobody is interested in your work. You start to question why you’re even spending the time on it.

I’ve almost given up hundreds of times. I’ve spent months in the process, not knowing whether my writing will ever attract readers. I’ve written 40 articles before my first story went viral back in 2020.

Fast forward two years, and I have an email list of +4K subscribers and +27K followers on Medium.

Most writers give up when they don’t see much traction. If you really want to build an online audience, don’t be one of them.

If you can keep writing when no one seems to bother about your work, the odds are high that you’ll attract an online audience one day.

In the last 2 years, I’ve kept writing and improving. The strategies below are the ones that have helped me the most. They can help you stick to writing too.


1. Knowing that attracting an audience isn’t linear

Most writers hope that after they’ve published their first or second article, people will read it. For all of the about 50 successful online writers I’ve talked to in the past two years, this was not the case.

Sinem Günel helped me start with the right mindset — don’t expect anything all before I’ve written and published 100 articles.

I wanted to give myself that range to try, fail and figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Because the thing is, success in writing isn’t linear. If you keep writing a lot, you’ll likely experience sudden growth. One of your articles will get traction and tens of thousands of people will read it.

Having the idea of exponential growth in the back of my mind saved me.

I know it feels lonesome to keep writing when nothing happens. You can get anxious, stressed, and desperate. All your feelings are valid.

But if you hang in there and keep up with a consistent writing practice long enough and keep learning and improving (with the strategies outlined below), more and more people will discover and read your work.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

2. Knowing your why

The second thing that helped me become a consistent writer was knowing why I write.

My why changed.

When I started, I wrote a very vague why in my bullet journal: “I want to be a writer. I’ll sit down and write every day.”

Some weeks in, I learned more about what really motivated me and added: “I write because it’s the best learning habit. I want to support others. I write because I want to make a full-time income through writing.”

It doesn’t matter why you start but knowing the reason why you want to spend time writing will help you stick with it in the long run.

You have a lot of competing priorities in your life — your job, hobbies, friends, and family. So why do you want to spend your precious time writing online?


3. Write what you’re curious about

Initially, I forced myself to write about topics that were popular on this platform at that time — productivity, finance advice, and relationship habits.

My writing motivation vanished. Sitting down to write became harder and harder. I almost stop.

It wasn’t until I allowed myself to follow my curiosity that writing became joyful again.

If you’re passionate about a topic, your readers will notice. Within the right framing (great headline, solid introduction, clear and reader-centric story structure), you can make even the most niche topic interesting.

For example, I was deeply fascinated by the Zettelkasten technique and how to apply it in RoamResearch. I wrote a guide about it. The article attracted +16K readers, led to 512$ earnings, and about ten clients that requested a 1-on-1 session to get coached on their knowledge management.

I would’ve never written that article if I hadn’t followed my curiosity.

I still stick to this principle. When I looked at my idea board on xTiles this morning, I thought, “What am I curious about? Which topic would I like to explore?” I then chose the metaverse and education.

Even though your niche isn’t among the popular topics, you can make it work by making it helpful for the reader.

If you want to write consistently, write about what you want to learn or think about.


4. Being your biggest cheerleader

Now, this advice might seem weird. But I’m sharing it because it’s one of the factors that has helped me a lot.

When I started writing, I prepared a motivational audio recording. I talked about why I want to be a writer and how it’ll feel once I’ve attracted an audience. I told myself what I must do daily to achieve this (sit down before work every morning for two hours no matter what).

In the first months of writing, I listened to that audio almost every day.

Self-recorded affirmations can become a powerful motivator. You don’t even have to believe in positive thinking, etc. Recording yourself can serve as a reminder, and anchor, to prioritize what you want to do.


5. Keep on learning

You can only improve your writing if you write. Don’t get lost in reading or learning about writing instead of doing the work.

But once you do have a regular writing habit, learning from the people who’ve already done it can level up your writing practice.

These are the most useful books I’ve read are about writing:

  • On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
  • Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott
  • The Art and Business of Online Writing by Nicolas Cole

Taking writing courses can further accelerate your writing skills. I took courses by Tim Denning, Sinem Günel, Niklas Göke, and Tom Kuegler. And I’m glad I learned from the people who’ve walked the talk.

But the most important thing is to sit down and actually do the writing.

That’s why I created the outcome-focused online course where you learn and write. In the Writing Online Accelerator, you don’t only sit in front of pre-recorded videos. You’re part of a highly-motivated peer group.

I and two other editors will give you 1-on-1 feedback. By the end of the course, you’ll have 3 high-quality articles online. If you want a free sneak peek into the material, subscribe for my free workshop here.


6. Build support groups and learn from others

To make writing less lonesome, reach out to fellow writers and start a group where you exchange ideas, help each other with headline practice, or even edit each other’s articles.

I’ve relied on multiple slack groups in the last two years, which have been extremely helpful in my journey.

Whenever you read something from the writers you like, tell them. Comment on their articles and share what you love about their work. Connect on LinkedIn or other social media platforms, offer help, and ask for their advice.


7. Have a metalog

If I had to name one tool that has kept me going and improved my writing it’s the meta log. It will support you in establishing a deliberate, consistent writing practice that will make you a better writer.

I’ve invented this tool to improve my writing while keeping my motivation. The meta log is rooted in metacognition, a skill essential for learning, according to educational scientists.

According to research, three steps are necessary for unlocking your metacognition: planning, monitoring, and evaluating.

I’ve built the meta log with these principles in mind, which can help you build a consistent, deliberate writing practice.

Here’s my template:

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

Fill a line every time you finish your practice.

If you use it consistently, you’ll discover a pattern and see which topics flow well and which are the ones you don’t prefer that much.

Three principles for using the meta writing log:

  1. Write this for yourself. It can be messy.
  2. The longer you keep collecting data, the more useful it will be.
  3. Bold your key insights to highlight your critical lessons.
My meta log from April 2020 looked like this. Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

Remember the essence

It’s challenging to write consistently in the long run. But you can build up your unique support system to help.

The following things kept me on my journey:

  • Knowing writing is exponential
  • Being aware of why I write
  • Reading and listening to my affirmations
  • Continuously learning and improving
  • Reaching out to fellow writers
  • Relying on my support groups on slack
  • Having a meta-writing log

Take what feels right and ignore the rest. Not all these things will work. Experiment to find a way that supports you to write consistently.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Ideas, inspiration, Writing

The Only 9 Tools I Use to Write Great Articles in Three Hours

August 7, 2022 by luikangmk

They will help you improve your writing process.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credit: Florentina Olareanu/Golden Hour Pictures).

When I started writing online, I thought you need the best equipment and tools to become a professional writer.

I got distracted by all the options for upgrading my work setup. I believed you would need to invest plenty of money to write great articles.

In the past two years, I experimented with all the popular options out there and settled for these ten. Most of them are free, and they help me craft an article in less than three hours. They can do the same for you.


1) This browser extension helps you not get distracted

Writing with full focus is a superpower many people lack. With distractions one browser window away, thinking and writing become a struggle.

In the beginning, whenever I didn’t know how to continue a story, I’d impulsively open a new tab with LinkedIn to distract myself. This wasn’t a conscious choice. Distraction just seemed to happen to me.

The following tool has been very helpful in overcoming the distraction habit. I searched for it after reading Cal Newport’s ‘Deep Work,’ and I continue to use it every day.

BlockSite Extension disables websites at the time you want. There must be many similar alternatives, but I use the free version and I love it.

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

What are the websites or apps that distract you from writing? Add all sites that prevent you from doing the work.

I block the below sites 07:00 am — 10:30 am every day so I can focus on undistracted creation time.

Blocked sites from 07:00 am — 10:30 am (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of BlockSite)

Depending on your schedule and work, the sites and timing will look different for you. Once you’ve found the right settings for you, you don’t have to look at it again.


2) An easy way to retain focus and motivation

Do you know that satisfying feeling of completing a task in the allocated time?

With writing, this is tricky. Because unless you define what “completion” means, writing has no end. Similar to an artist painting a picture, you can always improve.

You often can’t anticipate how long it will take you to write an article. Some are more research and thought-heavy and require more time; some (like this one) are easy to write because you already know what you want to say.

A cornerstone habit in my writing process is defining “done” and sticking to it. If you always finish your writing time with the feeling of “I should write more,” it’s tough to keep coming back to it and stay consistent.

If you write too much, it can ruin your motivation. I finish writing before I’m exhausted. That way I’m quitting at a point of deep satisfaction (by flow state and deep work) and I’m excited to get back to my desk and write the next morning.

In my writing world, “done” is determined by undistracted writing time. While I can’t fully influence how many words I type in a given time, I can determine how much time I want to spend writing.

BeFocused is the tool that helps me keep track of it. In essence, it’s a free productivity timer. You have quick and easy access in the toolbar, can track how many sessions you completed, and time your pauses.

BeFocused productivity timer in my toolbar (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of BeFocused)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

How do you know you’ve achieved your writing goals for the day? Set a realistic writing time goal. Then, stick to it.

I write three times for fifty minutes. When I sit at my desk (mostly at 7 am) I open my Spotify writing playlist (more on that later) and click on “start” in BeFocused. This combination signals to my brain it’s time to get into writing mode.

After each 50-minute interval, I take a five-minute break. I make myself a tea or coffee, walk around in my apartment, do some stretches, look outside the window, or clean some stuff.

If you can, don’t check your phone during breaks, but put it into flight mode in a different room.


3) What I do to get into a writing flow

Flow states are your sweet spot of peak performance. It’s where your writing magic happens.

And yet, I used to find it difficult to get into “the zone.” And once I was in there, it was a fragile state. I was annoyed by every distraction. I snapped at my partner when he asked me a question, I was angry at the postman when the doorbell rang so he delivered a parcel, I was even annoyed by birds.

It wasn’t until I bought noise-canceling headphones that my flow states became the new normal.

I got these ones from Bose. I know how privileged I am to be able to spend money on optimizing noise. Likely there are cheaper noise-canceling alternatives that do the same.

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

A steady noise input can help you ease into a flow state. I put them on whenever I start to write. I then choose one song from my Spotify writing playlist and put it on repeat.

Since I use these headphones I get into flow states wherever I am, even in the backseat of a car during a 3-hour drive or in a public park. They help me be in fully focused writing mode whenever I want to.


4) Collect and manage ideas with xTiles

When I started writing, I felt I had nothing worthy to say. I thought I’d soon run out of article ideas. Two years and 300 articles later, I know I was wrong about both.

If you don’t kill your baby ideas but capture them, you never run out of writing ideas. To capture and manage my ideas I use xTiles. It’s a merge of Notion and Miro that helps you keep a visual overview.

xTiles for managing my ideas (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of xTiles)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Collect every idea you have. This will help you save time in your writing process. You don’t start with a blank page but can choose out of an abundance of ideas.

I have a bookmark in my browser reading bar. Whenever an idea crosses my mind while writing, I type it down and add context or links. If I’m on the go, I do the same from my phone.

Your best ideas arise when you don’t expect them. The most important part is to have a capturing tool. With the right system, you’ll always have enough ideas.


5) The lifesaver for non-native English speakers to publish with confidence

“But what if my English isn’t good enough?” is something I often hear from students in my writing course.

I shared the fear. Growing up in rural Germany I never felt comfortable talking in English. But the thing is: many of your readers aren’t English natives as well. For them, it will be easier to understand your articles.

But if you’re still feeling insecure (which I definitely did), the following tool can have your back.

Grammarly suggests corrections for your grammar and word mistakes, helping you communicate effectively and as you intend.

Grammarly’s suggestions for this article (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Grammarly)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Use Grammarly once your article is ready to be edited. It will improve your articles and ease you from language worries.

I write my articles in Roam and paste them into a language formatting tool and into Medium drafts. I format my article in Medium (headline, subheadline, section headings, correct image attribution, spacing, and a call to action at the end) and then run a Grammarly check. I include all “correctness” suggestions and see whether there are useful hints for clarity, delivery, and engagement.


6) The power engine behind my idea-to-paper process

There are five steps to my creative workflow: seek, consume, capture, connect, and write. Readwise and Roam help me optimize the capturing and connecting process.

Readwise is an online service that imports all your article and book highlights into other software. You can do a ton of things with Readwise, but I mainly use it for importing my kindle highlights into my Roam database. Roam is an online workspace for organizing and evaluating your knowledge.

I used to have an entire workflow around Zettelkasten and Roam system and I still do.

How these tools help you write great articles fast:

I see the Readwise and Roam combination as my curated google. When I write an article about creativity I type # howtobecreative or # creativity I find any related book highlight, article, or personal thought. I tried Obsidian for a couple of weeks but switched back to Roam.

Once you have a clear idea-to-paper process you can write and create faster. You no longer waste time searching for sources. Instead of using my brain to browse through books and digital bookmark notes, you have everything in one place.


7) Increasing word variety with this free extension

Ever found yourself repeating the same word thrice? Especially as a non-native speaker it can be tough to come up with synonyms.

Power Thesaurus helps you expand your vocabulary and increase your word choice. It’s a fast, convenient and free online word bank.

Power Thesaurus helps you find synonyms (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Power Thesaurus)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Whenever I’m editing an article and feel as if I’ve repeated the same word too often, I highlight the word, click on the powerthesaurus icon and check for synonyms. If there’s a word I like, I use it.


8) Write powerful headlines with the free headline analyzer

Composing great headlines is the most underrated writing skill. You can have the most amazing story. But if your headline sucks, nobody will read your work.

The following tool won’t magically make your headlines click-worthy. And yet, CoSchedule can turn good headlines into great ones. The tool checks your word balance, clarity, reading grade level, and many other factors to calculate a headline score.

Coming up with a headline for this article (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of HeadlineStudio)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

After you’ve written a couple of headline variations, paste your favourite one inside the tool and start to experiment. You can use powerthesaurus (the tool from above) to come up with better words.

Once I have a +70 score and feel confident, I paste the headline into my Roam and start writing. I do this before I write an article as the headline will determine the structure.


9) Format your titles in the right way

Title case is the correct style for article headlines. You capitalize every word except articles (a, an, the), prepositions (in, on, for, up, …), and coordinating conjunctions (and, or, but, …).

There are some rule exceptions and luckily, you don’t need to memorize them.

For correct title case creation, I rely on the free Title Case Converter.

Title Case Converter for correct spelling (Credit: Screenshot by Eva Keiffenheim of Title Case Converter)

How this tool helps you write great articles fast:

Editing can become a never-ending process. This tool is one step inside my efficient five-step editing process. All you need to do is copy and paste the title to get the correct spelling.


In Summary

While these tools won’t turn you into a professional writer overnight, they will help you write better articles in a shorter time.

BlockSite, BeFocused, and noise-cancelling headphones help you stay productive and ease into flow. Software such as xTiles, Readwise, and Roam, optimize your idea-to-paper process. And lastly, Grammarly, CoSchedule, Title Case Converter, and Power Thesaurus improve your editing process.

But most importantly, use this article as inspiration, not as a blueprint. Pick the tools that seem helpful and ignore the rest. The quintessence to becoming a better writer is to write.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Editing, Ideas, inspiration, Writing

This Introduction Technique Can Make People Read What You Write

August 5, 2022 by luikangmk

A foolproof framework for great introductions.

Photo by Cookie the Pom on Unsplash

If you write bad introductions, all of your writing time is wasted.

People clicked on your article because you’ve written a great headline. But if you disappoint them with a lengthy beginning, they’ll never return for more. Instead, they’ll remember that your articles don’t deliver on your catchy headlines.

And the worst thing is that it won’t matter whether your main content is excellent.

You can be the most helpful writer with an engaging story. You can say the wisest words and give the best advice. But if your introduction sucks, nobody will read the rest.

Many writers don’t get the intros right. They ramble around life stories, unrelated facts, and unnecessary anecdotes until the reader is finally gone.

But writing a bulletproof introduction isn’t rocket science.

Copywriters created an effective tool to hook readers into an article. The PAS technique will help you write introductions that make people read your writing. And return for more.

In this article, we’ll look at the three parts of excellent introductions so you can replicate the process and make people read everything you write.


1) Porblem— Be very clear about the problem

Readers click on your article because they want you to solve one of their problems. They turn to you for advice, inspiration, or guidance. They won’t waste time reading your work if they don’t get what they want.

To be respectful of your reader’s time, start with their problem in mind.

The better you describe the problem, the more you can show that you understand it. And that’s how you can quickly build trust with your readers.

You don’t only assume the problem of your readers; you exactly know it. As if you’ve been reading their mind and saying: I know you have a problem, and I’m here to help you.

See how I started this article:

“If you write bad introductions, all of your writing time is wasted.”

If you’re a writer, you don’t want to lose a reader. I touched a pain point you’d want to solve. This is the Problem part of the PAS acronym.

Now you

What are you trying to solve for the reader in your current draft?

If you don’t yet have a draft, what solution are you aware of that can help people? The problem can be anything you’re good at and know a solution to. It can even be about writing emails or recommending books.

Pick a painful problem and write one sentence where you describe it as vividly as you can.

Here’re a few examples to inspire you in your process:

  • “Most people see email as a strictly transactional tool, using it only when they need something or owe someone something. That’s exactly why you should use it to stand out.” — The 7 Emails You Should Send Every Week to Get Ahead in Your Career
  • “Books don’t magically make you live the good life. You can read a book a week without changing at all.” — 3 Binge-Worthy Books for Life-Long Learners
Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 4

2) Agitate — Make the problem more painful

In the second part of the technique, you make the problem so itchy that your readers can’t click away without finding out the solution. That’s that Agitation part of the PAS.

This is how I did it in this article:

“And the worst thing is that it won’t matter whether your main content is great.

You can be the most helpful writer with an engaging story. You can say the wisest words and give the best advice. But if your introduction sucks, nobody will read the rest.

Many writers don’t get the intros right. They ramble around life stories, unrelated facts, and unnecessary anecdotes until the reader is finally gone.”

Here the problem becomes almost alive. It’s filled with emotions and specificity. The aim of the agitation is to make the readers feel that they desperately need to solve that problem. If they don’t, it’ll deeply affect them.

You turn the problem from ‘bad’ to ‘worse’ and describe why it’s so terrible.

You can think of the problem part as a fact and the agitation as the vivid emotional background that comes with it. In the intro of this article, the problem became terrible because the writer wasted time and their knowledge is lost.

You can describe what the problem feels like. Or, if it fits your context, you can add studies and statistics to show your readers the possible consequences and the scale of the issue.

Now you

Make the problem more specific and more emotional. In the Problem part, you described the issue. In the Agitation, it’s time to paint it with vivid colours.

Ask yourself:

  • Why is this problem so bad?
  • What will happen if the problem isn’t solved?
  • How can I make this feel more painful?
  • How can I depict a realistic scenario for the reader?
  • Which emotional words would fit the problem?
  • How did I feel when I faced a similar situation and didn’t have a solution?
Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 4

3) Solution— Here’s how you offer a way out

The last element of the PAS framework is the Solution. After building up so much tension, you must provide your readers with a cure.

Here’s how I did it in the introduction of this piece:

“But writing a bulletproof introduction isn’t rocket science.

Copywriters created an effective tool to hook readers into an article. The PAS — Problem, Agitation, Solution — technique will help you write introductions that will make people read everything from you. And return for more.

In this article, we’ll look at the three parts of excellent introductions so you can replicate the process and make people read everything you write.”

Remember that you don’t have to solve the problem in the introduction. You’ll have plenty of time for that in the main part. So be short and snappy.

Your task in the intro is to promise a realistic and accessible solution. Your readers should feel that if they keep reading, their problem will be solved. To take the solution one step further, you can briefly describe the outcome. Explain what will change in your readers’ lives after solving this specific problem.

Now you

After you’ve vividly described the problem, it’s time for resolution. Show the reader that there’s a solution, and your article will deliver it.

Be empathetic and offer your readers a way out.

Summarise the proposed solution promptly before entering it in-depth. You have the whole article to explain the cure for the problem. And if your readers will want to solve the problem, they’ll likely stay until the end of the article.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 4

Remember the essence

To write bulletproof introductions, you can rely on the PAS framework.

Describe the Problem and highlight the pain in the first few sentences. Start a new paragraph to push the issue further by making it more specific and emotional. Agitate until it’s almost unbearable. The readers should feel desperate to get to know the solution.

To ease the pain, offer a way out. Your article will be the cure for the problem. If people read the whole piece, they’ll have an implementable, straight-to-the-point Solution.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Writing

The 51-Minute Editing Framework to Feel Confident When Publishing Your Articles

August 1, 2022 by luikangmk

A clear blueprint to improve your writing.

Photo by Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

Have you ever spent hours editing your article, wondering when it’s finally good enough?

Most writers forget the opportunity cost of editing. The more time you spend editing your article, the later you start writing a new one.

I used to try to make my work perfect. I spent 10+ hours editing. In the end, I had an average article with a few hundred views. With that time, I could’ve written at least three new articles.

You can think of every new article you publish as a lottery ticket. The more you have, the more chance you have to go viral or semi-viral with some of them. And this matters because you need more exposure if you want to build an audience.

Fast way forward, and I have a structure that helps me know my articles are “good enough” within 51 minutes. I follow these exact steps to edit my articles, and when I’m done, I hit publish.

My work will never be perfect. But it’s good, and I can publish more.

Here’s my bulletproof editing process you can follow to save hours of work.


1. You’ll need to pay attention to this (1 min)

If you’d like to get curation on this platform, you have to use the title case format in your headings.

Format your titles with this free app every time you edit your work. Your maximum time investment for this step is 1 min.


2. Be the reader of your work (30 mins)

To put yourself in the reader’s role, read out loud what you’ve written. This way you’ll be able to spot inconsistencies in the flow of your work.

I know it sounds strange. My husband used to laugh at me when I was reading my articles loud at 7 am.

You might feel awkward about listening to your own voice. Maybe you’re insecure about your pronunciation, or don’t want the people around you to hear what you’re working on. It’s indeed hard to push your limits and start doing this exercise, but it’s powerful and will immensely help you.

Delete here everything you don’t need.

Helpful questions you can think about to make your work easier:

  • Do I repeat something? The shorter the better.
  • Does my logic make sense?
  • Is it reasonable for anyone looking at the evidence I’ve provided to come to the conclusion I’ve come to?
  • Is each paragraph/section directly related to the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it? If not, are they separated by a header or divider?
  • Does each paragraph’s opening sentence logically follow the previous sentence’s closing paragraph?

Push yourself to spend no more than 30 minutes on this step. Read your work only once.

This is the most challenging step of the whole editing process, and you might feel frustrated about deleting parts of your article that are close to you. To make this easier, I have my “editing graveyard.” It’s a document where I paste sentences and paragraphs I’d otherwise delete.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 5

3. Section headings are just like your headline (5 mins)

After you’ve read out loud your work for fluency and clarity, it’s time to take a look at your section headings and improve them.

To hook your readers in, it’s not enough to write great headlines.

Think about each of your section headings as mini titles. You still need to convince your readers that it’s worth their time to keep on reading.

In this part, for example, I could’ve just written: “Improve your section headings.” Instead, I opted for “Section headings are just like your headline” to make the title more engaging.

You can make your section headings more interesting by:

  • Using power words
  • Relying on metaphors
  • Implementing 1–2 of the six headline qualities

In a nutshell, great headlines:

  • Focus on the readers and deliver some benefit — If You Want to Be Rich, Spend Your Time Buying Assets
  • Are broad enough to attract a large audience — 9 Micro-Habits That Will Completely Change Your Life in a Year
  • Enable the reader to share it with others because the article either makes them look smart or helpful — The 7 Emails You Should Send Every Week to Get Ahead in Your Career
  • Bring some novelty in your point of view — Self-improvement has made me worse
  • Display either famous people or self-proof — Elon Musk’s 2 Rules For Learning Anything Faster
  • Evoke emotions — Today I Learned Something About My Boyfriend That No Girl Should Ever Have to Discover)

4. Polish your word choice (4 mins)

The rule of thumb of online writing is: the simpler, the better.

You can unclutter your writing by thinking of these rules:

  1. Active voice instead of passive
  2. Delete the word “that” 90% of the time
  3. Cut adverbs
  4. Simpler words and no jargon
  5. Cut the fluff

To master polishing your word choice, I use this article as a checklist. If you’ve done it a couple of times, you no longer need the article and do it by heart.

Don’t get lost in the details.

Every minute you spend editing, you don’t spend writing.


5. Don’t worry if you aren’t a native (5 mins)

My first language is German. In school, I was a below-average language student. When I started writing I worried my English language skills weren’t good enough to write online.

The thing is, there are countless tools non-natives can rely on to write with flawless grammar. I opted for Grammarly.

The tool improves your writing and helps you learn grammar along the way. I use the paid version, but you can do a lot with the free version already.

You can integrate the free version of the tool into your browser as follows:

First, you want to sign-up.

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

Second, add the extension to the browser:

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

Third, enable writing suggestions for the platform where you write

Source: Screenshot taken by the author

After integrating Grammarly into your browser, go through your text and implement the grammar suggestions. Focus on the correctness category (the red one) and ignore the app’s clarity, engagement, and delivery functions.

Not being a native can also bring benefits. You won’t fall into the trap of crafting fluffy sentences and using overly sophisticated words.


6. Follow the formatting guidelines (5 mins)

Most platforms have some formatting requirements.

Wherever you write, make sure to inform yourself about the formatting rules. You can either do this by observing the pieces and discovering similarities. Or look for the requirements either on the about page, in the submission guidelines, or the FAQ section.

Here’s what you need to pay attention to on this platform. You can read the bullets below or download this cheat sheet as a PDF to always get the formatting right.

Headline Optimization

  • Is your headline appealing enough? Does it make the reader click?
  • Your reader will always consider, “What’s in it for me in the article?
  • Use “You” instead of “I.”
  • No exclamation marks.
  • All initial letters are BIG.
  • Numbers are numerals: “5” instead of “Five”

Subtitle Optimization

  • Always write a subtitle. It can impress your readers and make them click on your story.

The picture

  • Always use an attractive picture as a heading.
  • Make sure it’s a high-quality picture, and you have the right to use it + mentioned the source/owner of the picture.
  • Use horizontal pictures — no vertical photos!
  • Don’t choose the smallest option for images — go for the bigger ones.
The correct formatting of a title, subtitle, and cover image. Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 5

Section breaks

Make use of section breaks to divide your post into sub-paragraphs.

Use subtitles

Use T1 and T2 title formatting to properly structure your text.

Use short paragraphs

Short paragraphs ensure a better reading experience. They help you to have more white space in your text, which is also a benefit for the reader.

Quotes

When using quotes, make sure you use the right quote formatting.

The end

Tell your reader what to do or why your post is relevant at the end of your article.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

To build your email list and grow your audience, include a CTA at the end of each post.

For example, the CTA of this article is: Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience? Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Tags

  • Always use the five tags.
  • Use a mixture of more & less popular tags that represent the topic of your article.
  • Don’t go too niche, and don’t invent your own tags!
  • If your goal is to become a Top Writer on Medium, make sure to use the same tags several times but keep in mind: the tag still. has to be a match for the story.
Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 5

Now You

After you finish writing your next article, set a timer to 51 minutes. Try to complete all six editing steps in one go.

Push yourself to read your work only once in each step. It’s hard, but if you’d like to publish more articles, you have to learn to work faster.

The more you’ll practice this, the easier it’ll get.


Before you leave

Now you have a bulletproof editing process you can rely on every time you write an article.

To refresh your memory, these are the steps you’ll want to follow:

  1. Format title in title case (1 min)
  2. Read out loud for fluency & clarity (30 min)
  3. Improve your section headings (5 min)
  4. Polish your word choice (5 min)
  5. Grammarly check (5 min)
  6. Formatting check (5 min)

But your most important takeaway should be to not edit for hours.

Perfectionism in editing can kill your creativity and consistency. It also comes with opportunity costs: the longer you edit an article, the later you’ll start writing a new one.

If you’d like to be a successful online writer, it’s not enough to make people read your work. You need to break free from platforms and build your community.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: Editing, Writing

Hope or Hell? A No-Fluff Guide to Understand the Metaverse

July 25, 2022 by luikangmk

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the inventor and other things worth knowing.

Source: Nike

More than half of all asked adults have no clue about the metaverse. A majority feel uninterested and indifferent.

But the question is not if you’ll use it one day, but when. If you’re among the 50,000 early adopters, you’re already using it.

I’m among the laggards. I’m not interested in escaping reality and feel resistant to immersing myself in a digital environment.

But I decided to stop being ignorant and instead understand the metaverse basics. So what follows is a no-bullshit guide for laggards (including me).

Source: Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY 2.5

How to Define the Metaverse

“How would you explain the metaverse?” Cathy Hackl asked 20 tech leaders.

What all answers have in common is the conviction that the metaverse will bridge the gap between reality and a virtual world.

But that’s where commonalities stop.

Tech leaders define the metaverse very differently, drawing on many emotions:

  • Fears: “At a time when technology is pulling us apart, this word literally says that in the future, we will live in separate universes.”
  • Hopes: “Owned by young people who care more about community than profit and use it for the good of the real and virtual world.”
  • Dreams: “Live digital universe that affords individuals a sense of agency, social presence, and shared spatial awareness.”
  • Expectations: “This is the next iteration of life.”

So if you can’t define the metaverse, you shouldn’t feel dumb. Experts don’t agree on one metaverse definition (yet).


“We are already in the MetaVerse, it’s just mostly 1D (text apps, clubhouse), 2D (Zoom, shared productivity apps like Google Sheets), 2.5D (games like Fortnite, Virbela) — 3D (VR/AR) is just in the development stages.”

— Forbes

Three Technologies to Understand the Metaverse

To understand how the metaverse actually bridges the gap between reality and a virtual world, you want to understand three things:

  • Virtual Reality (VR)
  • Augmented Reality (AR)
  • Mixed Reality (MR).

In essence, the metaverse combines these experiences within a shared and persistent virtual universe.

Created by Eva Keiffenheim

Virtual Reality — VR

VR is a fully computer-generated environment where you can immerse yourself in artificially constructed realities. To experience VR, you need some kind of hardware, for example, glasses, controllers, or body suits with detectors.

Virtual reality. Source: Canva.

Augmented Reality — AR

AR think Pokémon GO. You are in the real world while seeing objects from augmented reality. You can, for example, enrich your reality with new objects through your smartphone.

Augmented Reality. Source: Canva.

Mixed Reality — MR

MR is a mix of virtual methods and real-world spaces. For example, someone could create an exhibit either at a museum or a conference on mixed reality.

Mixed Reality. Source: Canva

The State of the Metaverse in 2022

I was among the naïve who thought Marc Zuckerberg introduced the Metaverse in October 2021.

But the Metaverse has a much longer history.

“Metaverse” first app have eared in Neil Stevenson’s 1982 novel, Snow Crash. Since then, different companies introduced VR machines, created VR glasses, or developed applications (such as IKEA in 2017 with their Place app).

History of the Metaverse. Source: Days Tech

When we now talk about the metaverse, there is a number of companies that work in that space. Here’s a non-exhaustive start:

Meta Platforms, Inc. (formerly Facebook)

According to Meta, the “metaverse” is an integrated environment that links all of the company’s products and services. Zuckerberg wrote that the metaverse will feel like a hybrid of today’s online social experiences, sometimes expanded into three dimensions or projected into the physical world.

Microsoft Mesh

Microsoft launched Microsoft Mesh, a mixed reality platform for digital collaboration. You can use Microsoft’s services through your smartphone or laptop without VR headsets. Through Holoportation, you can project yourself as your photorealistic self and move through a fluid, digital reality.

Roblox

Roblox is a platform for virtual gaming experiences. One can argue they already do offer an early version of a metaverse. As of August 2020, Roblox had over 164 million monthly active users, including more than half of all American children under 16.

Nike Creates NIKELAND on Roblox to connect, create, share experiences and compete. (Source: Nike)

Nvidia

Nvidia Corp creates an omniverse to connect 3D virtual worlds in one shared universe. Building on photorealistic rendering capabilities and advanced AI, Nvidia can create an industrial metaverse.

Siemens Xcelerator (left) and NVIDIA Omniverse (right) could enable full-design-fidelity, closed-loop digital twins. (Source: Nvidia).

“You could learn to do firefighting, skiing, etc from anywhere/time in the world and in a safe way”

— Gisel Armando CTO of Anything World

Where to Go From Here

The metaverse infrastructure is still under construction. When one looks at the examples, the metaverse appears as the internet in 1999 — pixelated and promising.

One can not tell yet whether it’ll be hope or hell. Technology is not ready yet for mass adoption. If you want to learn skills to co-create the metaverse, check out these resources:

  • Coursera — Virtual Reality Specialization, where you learn about the hardware and software needed to create immersive 3D worlds.
  • Udemy — Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality Metaverse Business, a course that helps you build business ideas from scratch to jump on the metaverse wave.
  • Web3 Blockchain Bootcamp, a training for javascript developers to learn the fundamentals of web3 technologies.
  • Roblox Studio offers learning resources to help you navigate through the most popular metaverse gaming platforms.

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: Ideas, technology

6 Principles That Helped Me Write Effective Headlines

July 22, 2022 by luikangmk

Over 2 million people clicked on my headlines after I improved them using these techniques

Photo by 43 Clicks North on Unsplash

If your headline isn’t good enough, no one will read your articles. Your content can be perfect. But you drive the audience into your writing through the title.

No one clicked on my articles in early 2020.

My headlines were as shitty as “The digital gap is increasing — we need to act now!” and “Out of your head and into your body in less than 5 minutes”.

I didn’t think of the reader when crafting my headlines, and I believed recycling older, but well-performing headlines is a great idea. I didn’t put time and thoughts into crafting the heading. Hence, almost nobody clicked on my words.

If you ever want to be a successful writer, you need to start working on your titles. Because if no one clicks on your heading, you’ll always have zero readers.

The good news is headline writing is a skill you can master.

Once you understand the components of successful headlines, you can create your own engaging titles.

But consistently writing headlines that make people click is more complex than you might think. It requires continuous practice and re-learning.

And yet, there are a couple of components that will help you craft titles that make people click. The following tips helped me reach 2 million readers in less than two years.

Considering just half of them, you’re already better off than 90% of all online writers.


Write clearly for the benefit of your readers

Online readers don’t have much time. They need prompt satisfaction and quick solutions.

That’s why great headlines focus on the reader’s benefit. They specifically answer the question: What’s in it for the reader?

If readers click, they’ll get something out of the article.

This seems trivial, but when you look around, you’ll see that most articles neglect the reader’s benefit. They read like journal entries and lengthy life stories where the reader’s benefit is hidden.

How you can apply this:

Every time you write a new story, ask yourself: what’s in it for the reader?

Provide your readers with a specific benefit that can bring transformation to their lives. To give you some concrete examples, the reader’s benefit is crystal clear in these headlines:

  • The Feynman Technique Can Help You Remember Everything You Read
  • How One Year of Microdosing Helped My Career, Relationships, and Happiness
  • The Shy Person’s Guide to Winning Friends and Influencing People

You can be explicit and use the word “you” to state that the article will be about the reader. As an alternative, you can guide the reader through an experience of your life that can help the reader as well.


Find an angle that attracts a broad audience

I love writing about education.

Yet I’m aware that if I write about Estonia’s education system, the article likely won’t go viral. There are simply not enough people who’re interested in the topic to such depth.

If you’d like to attract a broad audience, contemplate the breadth of your writing by considering what other people might find interesting about your chosen topic. While the title should be as specific as possible, it should also appeal to a large audience.

How you can apply this:

When crafting your headline, answer these questions: Why would many readers care? Who is this relevant for? Is my topic broad enough?

These articles appeal to a broad audience:

  • If You Want to Be Rich, Spend Your Time Buying Assets
  • 3 Binge-Worthy Books for Life-Long Learners
  • 9 Micro-Habits That Will Completely Change Your Life in a Year

While, in my case, Estonia’s education system can’t appeal to a broad audience, I can still write about education in a more inclusive way. People want to remember everything they read, and they’d also like to read books from which they can learn.


People only share specific kinds of articles

Would you share an article titled “How I Overcome My Emotional-Insecurity” on your LinkedIn or Facebook profile?

People only share stuff on the internet that makes them look smart or helpful.

If your article has the shareability quality, it’s more likely to go viral. Because if people share your work, more people will read it, and more people will share it.

How you can apply this:

Think about: Which angle is share-worthy for your readers in your article?

To make your readers look smart and/or helpful, craft headlines where you solve a specific problem for them. If the solution is useful, they’ll happily share it with their friends and colleagues.

You don’t need to solve the biggest life challenges of the readers. It’s enough if you can help them declutter their mailboxes.

These articles, for example, are broadly shared on the internet:

  • These 3 Practices by Bill Gates Will Change How You Read
  • The 7 Emails You Should Send Every Week to Get Ahead in Your Career
  • 11 Things Socially Aware People Don’t Say

Don’t copy the past. Share your spiky point of view instead

The reason why re-using old headlines most of the time can’t work is the lack of novelty.

What went viral last year won’t be popular this year. People want to read stories from angles they’ve never seen before.

To avoid repeating what has been said before, add your spiky point of view to the title.

As Wes Kao explains, a spiky point of view is someone’s unique, slightly controversial perspective that others can disagree with. It lays outside of the mainstream and brings fresh ideas to the conversation.

You can think about your spiky point of view as the unique way you see the world.

How you can apply this:

To discover your spiky point of view, ask yourself:

  • What is something I strongly believe but others might disagree with?
  • What do most people like but I can’t stand?
  • What is something that I stand by but isn’t (yet) accepted by the society?

You could also use structures such as:

  • Most people think X, but it’s actually Y
  • How I got Y (desirable result in your industry) without Z (conventional advice)

These headings did a great job at adding novelty to the conversation:

  • Self-improvement has made me worse
  • How I Quit Coffee After 15 Years Of Daily Consumption
  • My Life Became Richer the Day I Stopped Chasing Passive Income

Build on other people’s credibility

If readers recognise well-known names in a title, they’re more likely to click because those people already have expertise in their fields.

Readers didn’t know me when I had my first viral article, but they were for sure aware of Bill Gates. The advice came from him and not from me.

Yet, if you have a unique experience that can be useful for others, you can also add “self-proof” to your heading. Whether you built up a career, skipped coffee entirely, or just learned how to meditate and stuck to your practice for years, you can add self-proof to your work.

How you can apply this:

Rely on well-known names, or add self-proof if you’re an expert in the topic you write about.

To help your thinking, here are a few examples:

  • Tim Ferriss’s Recent Change of Heart Shows How Self-Improvement Can Fail You
  • Elon Musk’s 2 Rules For Learning Anything Faster
  • This is How I Made My First $30,000 From Writing Online
  • 12 Months Ago I Drank Ayahuasca — Here’s How My Life Has Changed Since

You’ll write great headlines if you do this one thing

People also click on a headline if it awakens emotions in them. Whether it’s curiosity, anger, or joy, if you can make others feel a certain way when they read your headings, you can also make them click.

This component is tricky, though. Be aware that half of your readers won’t like what you share if you’re controversial. Prepare that they won’t return and might leave angry comments under your work.

Feelings are powerful. Be aware of which emotions you want to transmit.

How you can apply this:

Use power and emotional words in your headings, such as:

Source: Coschedule

To give you some concrete examples, these articles awaken emotions:

  • An Elderly Mathematician Hacked the Lottery for $26 Million
  • Today I Learned Something About My Boyfriend That No Girl Should Ever Have to Discover
  • If Women Don’t Want To Be Treated as Sex Objects, Why Do They Dress Provocatively?

What to Keep in Mind

Writing great headlines is complex. Unfortunately, you likely won’t get it intuitively right; you need to learn about titles, and then you need to practice writing them.

And headline practice requires a lot of practice. That’s why we spend an entire 1.5-hour live session on headline practice in my online writing course.

To refresh your memory, these are the six components that make people click a headline:

  1. Reader first
  2. Breadth
  3. Shareability
  4. Novelty
  5. Social proof
  6. Provoke emotions

Don’t feel overwhelmed. Even though it’s challenging, headline writing is also a skill you can master.

For a start, focus on 1–2 components depending on what you write about. You got this.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Editing, Ideas, Writing

How to Master the Most Important Yet Underrated Writing Skill

July 21, 2022 by luikangmk

Write headlines that make people click on your work

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

People don’t click on boring headlines.

You can have the best content ever; if your title isn’t convincing enough, it’ll never get the attention it might deserve. Too many great articles are lost because of a poor headline.

If you want yours to stand out, you must start practising headline writing.

I’ve recently written about what qualities great headlines have in common. But this article will be about how you can master the skill of headline writing. Because it’s not enough to understand what a great headline can look like. To improve, you need to learn how to craft them by yourself.

So here’s how.


The exact flow of your complete headline practice

At the beginning of my journey, my headlines sucked.

No wonder I didn’t have many readers.

But once I started to put more time into my headline practice, this is what happened:

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

To get better in any skill, you need to practice it.

As Ayodeji Awosike put it:

I’ve written more than 15,000 headlines since I’ve started writing. Only one per cent of them are really good. Those one per cent of headlines I’ve written created 100 percent of my viral successes. Every single morning, I write down 10 ideas for headlines. […] I promise, if you don’t learn how to write good headlines, you’ll never have a career as a blogger. Never. So do I.


How and where to craft spiky headlines

There’s no secret sauce for headline writing: you need to put some work in.

From now on, try to craft ten headline variations for each article you write. This way, you train your mind to create headlines, and you’ll inevitably get better at it.

Implement 2–3 headline qualities into each of your titles.

In a nutshell, great headlines:

  • Focus on the readers and deliver some benefit — If You Want to Be Rich, Spend Your Time Buying Assets
  • Are broad enough to attract a large audience — 9 Micro-Habits That Will Completely Change Your Life in a Year
  • Enable the reader to share it with others because the article either makes them look smart or helpful — The 7 Emails You Should Send Every Week to Get Ahead in Your Career
  • Bring some novelty in your point of view — Self-improvement has made me worse
  • Display either famous people or self-proof — Elon Musk’s 2 Rules For Learning Anything Faster
  • Evoke emotions — Today I Learned Something About My Boyfriend That No Girl Should Ever Have to Discover

You can write your headlines on a sheet of paper, in Trello, in an excel sheet, or in any other place you feel comfortable. Opt for a tool you’ll want to rely on every single time you sit down to write.

I use RoamResearch for my headline practice. This is what it looks like.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

When you’re ready with your ten headline variations, choose the one you’d click on.

The thing is, the practice isn’t as easy as it sounds. You’ll get frustrated by not having enough headline variations. You might see that your titles suck. You might want to stop the practice. And your feelings are valid.

But practicing is the only way to improve. Writing ten headline variations for each article enables you to grow exponentially. While most people will write only ten headlines for ten articles, by that time, you’ll have written 100 titles.


Get more eyes on your work

If you’ve written many headlines and struggle to choose the best, you can ask for some help. Don’t hesitate to share your work with some friends, family members, and also fellow writers.

You can even organize a slack group for headline practice. In the Writing Online Accelerator, my students form groups even after the course and work together.

When I started to write, I did the work for myself. I wrote to fellow writers, and we started a Slack group for accountancy and writing practice. Every time I struggled with my headings, I asked my peers what they thought:

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

The only tool you need to master headline writing

In the last step of your practice, you’d want to further improve the headline you’ve picked. You can do so by replacing words with synonyms or adding power words, such as genius, unexpected, mind-changing, and so on.

CoSchedule will help you with this. (No need to buy the full version).

The platform analyses your titles and gives you a score. Anything under the score of 70 needs more work. Above 70, you’re good to go.

All you need to do is copy-paste the headline of your choice to the “Write your headline here…” window. If you’re not yet content with the outcome, add the updated version of your heading to the same place and reanalyze it.

The free version of CoSchedule is more than enough. You don’t need to subscribe to the pro version.

To show you an example, the title below says, “This mind-changing concept shows it’s never too late to become your best self.” I’ve got a headline score of 74, which is good, but it can still be better.

An alternative, “This mind-changing discovery shows you’re never too old to become your best self,” already has a score of 75. With one more tweak, “This mind-changing discovery shows you’re never too old to become better,” the score is 76.

Yet, if you don’t like the version that has only a slightly higher score, you can still decide on a headline with a lower score, given that it’s above 70.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 2

Don’t stop here

Your writing starts with the headline. You convince people to click on your work with the headline. Then you hook them in with your introduction and main part.

But you encourage them to stay and come back for more with your Call-to-Action at the end of each article.

Yet most writers don’t have a CTA and don’t start building an email list from day 1. They lose hundreds of readers who’d be genuinely interested in their work.

In this free 5-week course, I exactly show you how you can set up your writing for audience growth.


Remember the essence

Writing great headlines takes time and practice.

To create outstanding titles, you’ll need to spend more quality time with your potential headlines.

You can apply this by getting a sheet and adding ten headline variations for each of your articles. The practice is hard. Whatever you feel, your emotions are valid.

If you want to take your practice one step further, ask for the opinion of others. You can do so in a slack group or via 1-on-1 messaging.

Improve and finalise the best title version with CoSchedule.

Without great headlines, you’ll have a hard time attracting readers.

But if you put in the work and practice, you’ll be ahead of 90% of the bloggers.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Editing, Writing

How to Easily Find Your Writing Niche for Growing an Audience

July 21, 2022 by luikangmk

You can find it at this intersection.

Source: Canva

“How can I decide on my writing niche?” is a question a lot of people ask when they decide to start writing.

The thing is, you don’t decide on your niche.

You discover it through writing.

The beauty of starting a writing career is that you can start anywhere.

When I started, I wrote about relationships, SEO, and intuitive eating. At the beginning of my journey, I believed I’ll be writing articles about romantic relationships.

It wasn’t until 50 articles in that I discovered my niche. And once I stuck to my niche of learning and education, my audience grew exponentially.

So how do you find your writing niche for audience growth?

In essence, you need to find the intersection of what you’re curious about and what people want to read from you. The following lines reveal how you find answers to both.

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 1

1) How to Discover What You Like Writing About

First, you want to experiment with as many topics as possible and monitor yourself.

When I started writing, I wrote about everything I felt curious about. Some articles felt challenging, while others seemed to flow naturally.

While I enjoy talking about relationship forms (I run a weekly German podcast with my partner), it turns out I hate writing about them. But if I hadn’t tested all the ideas, I wouldn’t have known now what I enjoy writing about.

How you can apply this:

Make an idea list with your answers to the following questions: What do you like to talk about? Where do you have work expertise? What topics evoke strong emotions inside of you? What are you curious about?

These questions can help you in the very beginning. Don’t forget you’ll only know what you enjoy writing about if you do the writing. Commit to testing and trying as many different fields as possible to gain clarity about your true writing interest.


2) How to Discover What People Like Reading from You

After you’ve written at least 20 articles on different topics, you can take a look at your statistics.

But not before.

In the beginning, focus on only two things — the number of your published articles and the hours you spent per article.

“Data doesn’t lie. But data is also a reflection of the external crowd, and not necessarily your internal compass.”

— Nicolas Cole

If you don’t already have many articles published, Medium stats (and for the record, any stats) won’t tell you a lot. You can’t derive meaningful data from five articles or a few hundred reads.

While some metrics are worth thinking about, others are negligible. The number of claps won’t tell you a lot. You also shouldn’t bother about the number of views or the number of your followers.

The metric “views” is a great indicator of the quality of your headlines. “Reads” show you how many people actually read your article after they’ve clicked on it. “Reading time” shows how much time people, on average spent reading our piece.

Source: Screenshot from my course Writing Online Accelerator, Module 6

How you can apply this:

Once you’ve published about 50–100 articles, look at the data. Your goal is to find patterns. Which headlines worked particularly well?

Filter your stories by views and reads. Are there any recurring topics in your most-read stories?

You don’t need to worry if your writing doesn’t appeal to a broad audience. You can write for a small niche until you pay attention to their needs and learn what they want to read from you.


What to Keep in Mind

Don’t worry if your niche isn’t straightforward for you. Most writers had no clue about their niches when they started, including me.

And that’s alright.

The beginning of the writing journey is a lot of experimenting. Don’t worry about your niche in the first year of your writing.

Try out the things that feel good to you. Experiment first, and analyze what people like reading from you only in a second step.

Above all, enjoy the writing process and reflect on how you feel while discovering different topics.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online, with a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Writing

I Used to Run out of Writing Ideas. This Repeatable 3-Step Process Helped.

July 5, 2022 by luikangmk

A straightforward approach to ideation so you never start with a blank page.

Eva Keiffenheim (Credits: Florentina Olareanu/Golden Hour Pictures)

Every great article starts with an idea. But while ideas are your entry ticket to writing, they can also be a barrier.

Lucky people feel overwhelmed by their abundance of ideas. Others find themselves uninspired, staring at the blank screen.

I was among the latter.

When I started writing online I was sure I’d soon run out of ideas. I feared I’d quickly use up the good ones. I felt uncreative and as if I had not much worth sharing.

It took me months to understand how wrong I was.

Creativity is practice. With the right process in place, you’ll never have to run out of ideas.

The following three-step process is my writing fuel. It has helped me publish more than 300 articles, and reach over two million readers. This structure can help you never again struggle with ideas.


1) What goes in will come out

Most writing consists of living your life and consuming content. Only some part of the process is actually sitting down, writing, and editing your work.

And most importantly, the former determines the latter. How you live your life informs your writing.

Most people mindlessly consume content. They scroll through the jungle of ever-growing content. Occasionally they’ll stumble upon interesting ideas, but mostly they consume trash.

On the internet, consuming trash content is the default option. Unless you work against it, you’ll find yourself in the doom of social media and daily news cycles.

A couple of years ago, I spent two hours a day scrolling through Facebook, reading through newspapers, or listening to news podcasts. It wasn’t until a smart friend told me to replace news consumption with reading books, that things changed.

Digging deeper than the often superficial social media posts will increase your understanding of the world. And it will also help you become a better writer.

By avoiding mediocre content and consuming the greatest inspirational resources, you’ll find yourself writing better articles. Because what goes in will come out.

How to apply this:

Which content are you regularly consuming that’s not adding value to your life? Replace it with better stuff.

Go beyond the content everyone else is reading. There are Goodreads, Gatesnotes, and so many other best-selling lists that suggest what you should be reading. Most of these lists contain books from authors with the best marketing strategy or the broadest social media reach.

If you look at human history, the chances are small that the greatest books were created in the past decade. The fundamental human problems seem to be the same in all ages: Justice, love, virtue, stability, and change itself.

Search, for example, through the appendix of Mortimer J. Adler’s classic How to Read a book. Alternatively, ask the smartest and most inspiring people you know which type of newsletters, books, or online articles they read and listen to.

I asked my students at the Writing Online Accelerator to add their most-inspiring resources to an inspiration board. (Click here to get the full board free).

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

2) How to program your mind to come up with ideas

There’s a crucial thing to keep in mind when it comes to ideas: Don’t scare them away.

Be gentle on how you treat your ideas and monitor your thoughts.

If you label your ideas as ‘bad’ without noting them down, you hinder your ideation process. You don’t give your mind the safe space for the ‘good’ ideas to arise.

There’s no such thing as a ‘bad idea’. Here’s how to transform your thinking.

My idea is worthless =► Every idea is valuable.

Don’t judge your ideas while writing them down. Ideas are like raw diamonds, and you don’t know how they’ll turn out until you’ve written the article.

This has been written before. =► This has not been done by me.

Yes, your idea exists in some form on the internet. Unless you’re doing ground-breaking scientific research, many people have written about your idea. But don’t let that hold you back. You’re the best at living your life. You can add your unique perspective to the conversation.

I don’t have enough ideas. =► I have plenty of ideas.

In the beginning, you won’t have an abundance of ideas. But if you let yourself be inspired and treat your ideas well, they’ll arise. The more you create, the more creative you become. The best ideas and connections will arise once you flow into the writing process.

How to apply this:

Say yes to any idea that strikes your mind. Stop worrying whether other people have written about a topic.

You’ve not written about it yet, and that’s the only thing that matters. Don’t be scared to write about the same idea twice or thrice.

You’ll become more specific every time you write about it. Lastly, trust the process. You’ll have more ideas with every article you write.

“Most things have been done, but they have not yet been done by you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

3) Have one tool to capture your ideas

Once you’re aware of the ideation process, it’s time to capture and store your ideas.

There’s an insane amount of tools you can choose from. At the beginning of my journey, I used Trello. Then I switched to Notion and I experimented with an excel sheet. For a while, I settled for Milanote. Milanote was visually appealing to me, I could use it via my phone as well, and it is searchable.

In April 2022 I discovered xTiles. The platform combines all features I was looking for. It’s a mixture of note-taking and a whiteboard — as if Milanote and Notion had a baby.

My current idea board xTiles (Screenshot by author).

How to apply this:

Experiment, and choose a tool that feels good to you, and where you really going to capture all the ideas. It can be a google sheet, a journal, xTiles, Notion, or any other tool you like.

When choosing your tool, think about: Do you know how to use it? Do you like how it looks and feels? Will you use it every day?”

When you write down your ideas you communicate to your brain that it’s worthy to generate more ideas. If you have ideas and don’t follow them, you teach your brain you’re not doing anything with them. You’ll doubt your ideas more and more. So say yes to all ideas that come to my mind and capture them in a single place


Remember the essence

To never run out of ideas, you’ll need to:

  • Consume inspirational content
  • Treat your ideas well: there aren’t any bad ideas
  • Capture your thoughts: every time an idea comes to your mind, save it on your idea board

Ideas are the magical place where your writing starts. Steal my three-step process to always start in idea abundance.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Ideas, inspiration, Writing

3 Teaching Principles to Help Your Students Achieve More

July 3, 2022 by luikangmk

Science-based strategies your students will thank you for.

Source: Canva

I worked hard when I was a teacher for 100 students in a secondary school. But I didn’t use evidence-based methods. I did what everybody else was doing, unknowingly replicating methods that don’t work.

And many popular methods don’t work.

There’s no evidence for the learning styles theory — the belief students learn better through their preference for auditory or visual material.

Eliminating fact-based learning or direct teacher instruction is one of the worst things to do. Factual learning is a precondition for acquiring twenty-first-century skills such as problem-solving, creative and critical thinking.

“When one looks at the scientific evidence about how the brain learns and at the design of our education system, one is forced to conclude that the system actively retards education.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

Evidence-based teaching strategies aren’t part of most teacher training. On the contrary, many educators rely on ineffective teaching techniques.

This is the article I wish I had read during my time as a teacher. There are two key resources I used for writing it:

  • Visible Learning, a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement in school-aged students. The author is John Hattie, a distinguished education researcher, and this work is the result of 15 years of research.
  • Seven Myths About Education, a thoroughly researched book by Daisy Christodoulou, a former teacher and Head of Education Research, Ark Teacher Training.

What follows are science-based principles for teaching and increasing student achievement.


1) Give This Kind of Feedback

Since the beginning of behavioural science, we have known that feedback is vital for academic achievement. And yet, the variability of feedback effectiveness is massive.

“The key question is, does feedback help someone understand what they don’t know, what they do know, and where they go? That’s when and why feedback is so powerful, but a lot of feedback doesn’t — and doesn’t have any effect,” John Hattie said in a recent interview with EdWeek. “

So what exactly makes feedback effective?

  • Ditch lengthy, hurtful, or personal feedback. Instead, be clear about what you want your students to achieve, know and do.
  • Focus on the future. Students want to know how to improve so they can perform better the next time.
  • Provide concrete steps. Help students understand where to go next.

The following chart is a helpful template you can use. It is differentiated between three learner stages (novice, proficient, and advanced) and provides you with phrasing examples.

Source: Brooks, C., Carroll, A., Gillies, R. M., & Hattie, J. (2019). A Matrix of Feedback for Learning. Australian Journal of Teacher Education, 44(4). Retrieved from https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ajte/vol44/iss4/2

2) Teach High-Impact Learning Strategies

Different meta-analytic studies (such as this one or this one) evaluate effective strategies for learning.

Researches find that learning strategies help your students achieve higher academic results. Specifically, the following three learning strategies have a high impact on student learning (high impact equals the average effect sizes across different meta-studies).

Elaboration — integrating with prior knowledge

Research shows students learn better when they connect new knowledge to what they already know. Help students link what they’re learning to prior knowledge.

For example, ask your students a couple of questions before they begin to engage with a new topic.

  • Does it confirm what you already knew?
  • Did it challenge or change what you thought you knew?
  • Is it similar to related things?

Outlining — identify key points in an organized way

Outlining supports students in organizing, clarifying, and structuring information and ideas. There are different strategies for visual, written, or combined outlines.

Source: https://www.evidencebasedteaching.org.au/learning-strategies-you-must-teach-your-students/

While many strategies have their own research behind them (e.g. mind maps), research shows the overarching strategy is impactful for student achievement.

Retrieval — cement new learning into long-term memory

Learning and memory need two components: the learned information itself and a so-called retrieval cue that helps you find the learned material.

Retrieval is a powerful learning strategy because when you recall a memory, both it and its cue are reinforced. With every additional retrieval, you strengthen the connection and can access your memory faster.

Here are two easy-accessible ways to bring retrieval into your classroom:

  • Brain Dump. Set a timer to 5–10 minutes and ask students to write down everything they know about a specific subject or concept without using any assistance. Then, ask your students to find out what their neighbour wrote down. Finally, turn it into a whole-class discussion.
  • Low-stakes quizzes. Prepare tests that won’t be graded for the start or the end of your lessons. You can also use Kahoot or Poll Everywhere.
Source: https://www.learningscientists.org/retrieval-practice

3) Harness the Power of Direct Instruction

Remembering my own school days, I demonized direct teacher instruction. It seemed passive and boring.

When I became a teacher, I thought it’d be best if students discover knowledge on their own through a learning environment that’s designed for them.

Paulo Freire, a leading advocate of critical pedagogy, talks in his widely cited book “Pedagogy of the Oppressed” about the co-construction of knowledge. Teachers are students, and students are teachers.

He writes, “Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction SO that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”

Freire goes on to explain why teaching facts to students prevents understanding. Other educationalists, such as Russeau, join his reasoning.

If you’ve read about 21st-century skills, you will likely have stumbled upon sentences such as an “education that requires you to memorize facts will prevent them from being able to work, learn and solve problems independently.”

Daisy Christodoulou analyzes that Ofsted, a school inspection service that influences teaching practice in the UK, sees “teacher-led fact-learning as highly problematic.”

But all of the above is wrong. Again Christodoulou:

“They argue, correctly, that the aim of schooling should be for pupils to be able to work, learn and solve problems independently. But they then assume, incorrectly, that the best method for achieving such independence is always to learn independently. This is not the case.”

“Teacher instruction is vitally necessary to become an independent learner.”

— Daisy Christodoulou

John Hattie’s evaluation of over 800 meta-analyses comes to the same conclusion. Teacher instruction is the third most powerful influence on achievement.

“While the final aim of education is for our pupils to be able to work independently, endlessly asking them to work independently is not an effective method for achieving this aim.”

— John Hattie

So how does direct instruction work? John Hattie explains:

“In a nutshell: The teacher decides the learning intentions and success criteria, makes them transparent to the students, demonstrates them by modelling, evaluates if they understand what they have been told by checking for understanding, and re-telling them what they have told by tying it all together with closure.”

One example I do in my writing online course is the “I-Do, We-Do, You-Do” model. I explain why we learn something and how we define success; I then model the desired skill by doing it myself, we then do it together in a plenum before students go off themselves to breakout rooms or working time and apply it for themselves.


In Conclusion

About a hundred years ago, Benjamin Franklin seemed to have said, “Tell me, and I forget. Teach me, and I remember. Involve me, and I learn.”

Hundred years later, most teachers and students are still unclear about the best learning methods.

But thanks to the science of learning, a mix of cognitive and social psychology, neuroscience, and educational sciences, we do know a lot of what works and what doesn’t. The above strategies can help your students achieve more.


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🧠 Learning Hacks Tagged With: education, How to learn, learning

How Change Starts Within Yourself

June 30, 2022 by luikangmk

Personal transformation is systemic transformation.

Eva Keiffenheim and Romana Shaikh / Credits: Dominic Regester

Last month, I had the privilege to interview Romana Shaikh at Salzburg Global Seminar — Education Futures: Shaping A New Education Story.

Romana Shaikh is the Chief Programming Officer for Kizazi, which partners with local NGOs who work with government schools to design, implement, and codify breakthrough school models for a deeper purpose of education. Romana is committed to creating and enabling a thriving life for every child.

My questions build upon insights from the global research A New Education Story — Three Drivers to Transform Education Systems. Romana’s perspective connects to the three drivers, purpose, power, and practice, and sheds light on the mindset shifts and actions needed so that all children can thrive.


In your work as an educator and leadership developer, what have you learned about power as a lever for system change?

All systemic oppressions that exist on the outside have an impact on each of us on the inside. Even though I was a speaker at this global conference, able to talk about what I wanted to talk about, I am aware of being the minority in the room — as an Indian Muslim Woman.

A few months ago, at home, in India, “indianmuslimgenocide” was a trending hashtag on Twitter. The increasing violence against Muslims, the increasing felt sense of hate and otherness, has created a sense of powerlessness, of feeling like a victim. There is a fear in my mind, in my body. If I express my voice, what is going to be at stake? Am I going to get attacked for this? Will my family get attacked? Will I lose friends?

Even though my work has afforded me many privileges and so much power, there is this part that continues to feel powerless. Do I really have power and agency in a system that sees me through a single lens of being Muslim? A system that discriminates against this one part of my identity? That fails to see me in my wholeness.

Whatever you do in life, if some parts of your identity are those that are not the majority, you are always looked at differently. The system treats you differently.

That’s why to understand power; you need to understand identity. I saw all these different identities or parts inside me and how different identities shape my experience of the world in a particular way. Many systemic challenges stem from how we perceive our own identity. And more so from the way, others perceive us, which gets shaped by social norms and the access we have in the system we grow up in. The personal exploration of my identities, and the impact that they’ve had on me, helped me begin to see these patterns in the world more clearly.

Before, it always felt like, “oh, this is just something that happened to me”. But what I’m experiencing is not just my experience. Every other person who shares some shades of my identity, some intersections, is probably experiencing the same thing. So, “This is not just my problem. I’m not the only one who’s gone through this” was a big insight. I’m not the only one who has to fight this fight. There are other women and Muslims who’ve experienced the world the same way i have, many have experienced worse. There’s a pattern there.

And then, once you recognise this, acknowledge this, and understand this pattern exists, you begin to question, “why is it?”

When you begin to really drill it down, at one point, you will come to more universal constructs of our identity — gender, race, religion, caste, class, and sexuality. In different parts of the world, there are different constructs. Seeing these in daily interactions in life gave me a lens that helped me to see patterns in the inequity in education.

The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?


Can you share an example of this shift in perception?

When I was at Teach for India, I was leading our program. I saw classrooms across urban cities in India and later some rural parts of India as well. Over the years of visiting government and low-cost private schools that were all providing an English medium instruction, I recognised patterns that enable real progress for children. But there were also some schools and classrooms that were just not making the same progress. Academically these classrooms started lower than others; there was more dysregulation or ‘acting out’ of children in the classrooms. Different teachers tried and tried but still failed.

When we started looking outside the classroom, outside the school, we began to see more patterns. The poverty was more extreme, the exposure to violence was higher, the sanitation was poorer, and often there was a larger Muslim population. All this information painted a complete picture of how things are today.

As I’ve looked at data across the country, specifically for Muslims in India, I’ve begun to understand that Muslims in India have been systematically oppressed — Only 17% of Muslims complete Grade 10 compared to a 26% national average, almost one-third (31%) of the Indian Muslims are living below the poverty line, till date, Muslims are denied housing in many parts of the country furthering the geographical segregation which in turn, leads to Muslim ghettos that then continue to have limited access to healthcare, education, or government subsidy.

More recent studies have shown that the Muslim child is most marginalised because of the added political marginalisation the community experiences. So as a Muslim child, there are fewer people around you that have benefitted from education, there is more discrimination you face on a daily basis, and more of your family has been in multi-generational poverty.

You can’t just say ‘it’s a poor person’s problem. The system has made them poor and the system is maintaining that poverty.

With this acknowledgement that so much is at play when you work with children from marginalised backgrounds, the narrative about high expectations in education is one I find quite unfair today. We’re saying to children, “I have high expectations of you; you need to get here.” But then, we’re not giving children any chance to get there. And it’s not just language, it’s the way we see the world, we keep seeing the need for students to work harder than their privileged counterparts.

Anyone who is growing up marginalised knows they have to work harder. The question is, what is the rest of the world doing about it?

Romana Shaikh — Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

Romana, you said acknowledging the shared parts of identity started within yourself and continued through a sense of shared experience.

When you talk about ghettoised Muslim communities, it sounds as if starting on an individual level is insufficient because of a larger systemic injustice. What do you think is needed from a systems perspective to be fairer to children in these contexts?

Yes absolutely. Rising from the personal to the systemic is very important. But you can’t have systemic change without a personal change. We have to acknowledge that it’s not right to demand and expect the same things from all children. Because no child starts at the same point.

Before you replicate any school or education system, you have to contextualise. At a systemic level, we need to ask, “What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?” And since I’m part of the system, I would need to change for my system to change.

What’s needed here? And how does my system need to change to serve that?

So let’s ask what is needed here. Let’s acknowledge that a child brings into the school and classroom their experience of marginalisation, of poverty, of oppression. A child who works to support their family needs something different from school than a child who is bullied because of her religious identity. A child who is growing up in a single-parent household has different needs from the adults in school than a child who is raising their siblings. All the intersectionalities of their identity are part of their experience which they bring into class.

Then let’s ask how my system needs to change to serve these needs. Our education system has for far too long been a “one size fits all” that focuses very narrowly on a cognitive kind of education — one that’s all about knowledge acquisition and retention. Our children need and deserve more than that. They deserve to be seen and responded to as whole human beings. So when a child doesn’t complete their homework or falls asleep in class or struggles to retain information or doesn’t believe education is important for them, we have to pause and remember everything that contributes to the life this child experiences.

And then, we will realise how the design of schools with their grading systems, their rules of discipline, the rigidity of curriculum and their notion of success need to shift to truly honour and empower each child. This requires us, as adults in the system today, to redefine the values and structures of the school system itself.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems; we are human, we are whole, and we carry our whole experience with us everywhere. We learn what’s socially acceptable and how to express ourselves in school. So even education needs to see itself in relation to the whole system, in relation to the social system and to the economic system. Then you begin to see the bigger picture and what needs to shift. But this process is not easy.

It’s acknowledging that an education system is not separate from other systems, we are human, we are whole, we carry our whole experience with us everywhere.


Apart from your experience in teaching and school development, you’re also a trained psychotherapist. Based on your insights in trauma work, where do you see the need for a shift on a practice level in the classroom?

My biggest realization during trauma work is that if there’s one thing that’s universal, it’s trauma. It needs the least contextualization. I get goosebumps thinking about it.

The events that traumatize us are different across cultures — but we’re all human and how we experience trauma is very similar. What makes you sad and what makes me sad, maybe different. But sadness for you and sadness for me, feels the same. Because that’s how the body works. And the body is, again, something that’s so fundamental, which none of us learn to take care of. In most education systems — and in what I’ve seen across Africa, Armenia, and India, — you’re taught biology, but you’re not actually learning your own biology.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

Trauma happens inside our bodies. It stays there and gets triggered by different incidents in our daily life. We see it playing out in our classrooms every day in the bodies and faces of teachers and children. Every time a child (or an adult) reacts in a way that feels disproportionate, or gets too confused or too scared, that is a sign for us to know there’s more going on in the body-mind than what we can see.

The high-stakes nature of examinations, the achievement orientation, the vast syllabi — we all have a childhood memory of school that has shaped some belief in our personality. At a fundamental level, the way we see children and in turn, treat children needs to shift. We need to see them as whole human beings, each unique in how they will grow and each bringing in a unique story of stress, strength and resilience. And this work needs to start with the adults in the system. They too, carry their own intersectionalities and stress, strength and resilience into the school.

Trauma is a much more prevalent experience than we’ve acknowledged in education.

Our education systems need to create space for us to learn about our own human-ness. How our body works, how our mind works and how we can take care of ourselves and each other.

So would you say a shift in practice towards more social-emotional learning can be a way to bring this knowledge about our own biology into classrooms?

Yes, and no. Much of our systemic injustice is rooted in a lack of social and emotional capacities. And while it’s great that social-emotional learning is becoming the new big thing, I worry it will be compromised into our existing assessment and curriculum structure.

Our generation today and our elders had so much trauma. They didn’t learn to love, to live, and to be healthy — They experienced war, conflict, fights for independence, fights for social justice. And those fights have not ended. We’ve inherited that trauma, it’s in our collective consciousness. There’s a reason we are so scared to share, to trust, to love freely. There’s a reason we’re asking about the cost of returns on feeding a child. No parent would do that. We are biologically wired to nurture. Something has gone terribly wrong.

Social-emotional learning and trauma informed teaching can be a part of healing and working with it. But we have to be mindful of how to integrate it.


How can we meaningfully integrate social-emotional learning into practice?

We must recognize social-emotional learning is not a subject, but a way of life. It’s not a means to an end. Education is about the present and it’s about all of us, young people and adults.

If I’m a teacher, coming to school in the morning, and having a fight with my family at home, and carrying that with me, do I have to pretend everything is fine or do I get a morning meeting to check-in?

In Seroond schools in Armenia, we’ve seen how conversations have changed. There’s no pretending anymore. Teachers take 15 minutes in the morning and start their day with a check-in: “Hey, how’s everyone doing? Let’s check in with each other and with ourselves.” We need to give ourselves that permission to be human.

To include social-emotional learning in pedagogy and practice, it has to be done together and for everyone. In India, the Simple Education Foundation learned this quickly during the pandemic. They started wellbeing circles for their teachers and their families. In a regular virtual gathering, each person shared how they are and give and receive support from each other. The teachers didn’t need training on how to care for children. They needed the space to receive care for themselves.

In Sierra Leone, one of the most important things our local partner National Youth Awareness Forum has done is bringing families to the school. There are school management committees with families to co-determine the purpose and practice of schools. They’ve asked families “What do you want the school to do?”They’ve shared responsibilities of managing the school with families.

Initiating a dialogue within communities is a powerful lever for change. Because we’re in this together. We’re all doing this for our space. This is our planet, our country, whatever that unit is. And so social-emotional learning is about really integrating it into the way we live, into the way we relate.

You’re the chief program officer at Kizazi and you work with local partners around the world to catalyze innovation in school design to increase opportunities for all children. In addition to India, Armenia and Sierra Leone, where do you see community-inclusive education transformation?

One really good example is the Aspire Connect Transform microschools from Egypt. The school’s founders created a network of microschools that strives to create young ACTors throughout the continent who transform their communities for the better.

They have a very strong inclusion policy. Moreover, they’ve broken age barriers and taught in a small group, multi-age, and in multigrade settings. Curriculums are designed around cultural and national identities and a sense of belonging. Another example in this school in the US that has redesigned itself around the whole child. –

Another excellent example is Dream a Dream, an organisation that empowers children and young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and thrive in a fast-changing world.

In India, an organisation that focuses on social — emotional learning in government schools — Apni Shaala and supports teachers, families as well as children in developing practices that support wellbeing. There is a school network — Akanksha Schools that has a holistic vision for children, it puts values and character education at the heart of their work.

There’s work that I haven’t seen myself, but I’m aware of through the trauma studies that can be a real resource for us to begin to integrate into our work with teachers and families — Some excellent networks offer resources and trainings for parents & educators — The Attachment and Trauma Network, for example, places a great focus on the role of attachment and the quality of relationships a child experiences with the adults in their lives.

Touch the future, though created for parents, has great resources and insights for educators. Especially the resources that talk about the critical role of play in a child’s development.

Thank you, Romana, for taking the time and for sharing your perspective.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: education, Ideas, inspiration, life lessons

The Simple Hack for Audience Growth Many New Writers Miss out On

June 24, 2022 by luikangmk

How to set up your writing routine for attracting a large audience

Eva Keiffenheim — Credits: Emanuel Schi x Entrepreneurship Avenue

“What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?” is a question I get asked a lot.

And while many things come to my mind — how to write headlines, engaging introductions, or a clear idea-to-paper process — there’s one particular knowledge nugget that has changed my writing journey ever since.

I remember the advice as if it was yesterday because it seemed so hilarious and terribly wrong.

And that’s exactly why the tip was gold and the best writing advice I ever received. It’s the things you don’t know you don’t know that can make all the difference.

So let me share with you what my writing mentor shared with me early in my writing journey:

Start building your email list today.

Even if you just published your first article. Even if only five people subscribed to your Medium account. Trust me. Today is the right time to start your email list. One day your collection of your follower’s emails will become your biggest asset.

Because platforms, such as Medium or LinkedIn, change. Emails don’t. Your follower’s email address is their most permanent online identity. Once they sign up for your email list, you have the permission to reach out to them directly. You’re no longer dependent on algorithms.

Even if you have just published a few articles, asking your readers to sign up for your e-mail list is a must-do. Here’s how you can do it fast.


The exact steps you can take to set up your e-mail list in 20 minutes

Done is better than perfect. You don’t need to first compare all available mailing tools out there. You don’t even need to know what you’ll be sharing with your email subscribers.

You can export your list and set a topic later on. All you want to do early in your writing career is set up a minimum viable version.

Here’s a three-step process you can follow to have a first version ready in about twenty minutes of your time.

1) Pick an email provider and sign-up for it (5 minutes)

The list of mailing providers is vast and I wasted a lot of time comparing and trying different tools. But again, you’re not looking for the perfect solution but for the option that’s good enough.

I tried Mailchimp and Substack but ultimately chose Convertkit because it offers email design templates, a strong community, a lot of tutorials, and plenty of functions. Plus, it’s free for your first 2,000 subscribers. You can create your Convertkit account here.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 3

2) Choose a pre-built landing page on Convertkit (10 minutes)

It can be tempting to obsess over the design and “your brand.” But every minute you spend on design, you don’t spend writing. And you need to write to become a better writer.

So be pragmatic about the design and content. Keep in mind you can change that later when you’ve found your niche.

For now, the most important part is to have a landing page for collecting email addresses.

You don’t even need to state the frequency of your newsletter just yet. And you also don’t need to worry if you’re unsure about your newsletter’s content.

I didn’t send a single email until six months in. But when I knew what I wanted to write about, I sent out my first email to 400 subscribers.

So here’s how you create your landing page in 10 minutes, step-by-step.

Step 1: Choose a template from 50 pre-designed landing pages. The key purpose is to collect your readers’ email addresses. (3 min)

Step 2: Add your content. No worries if it’s only a “Wanna keep in touch? Subscribe for free!” one-liner. (2 min)

Step 3: If possible, add a picture of yourself to make your site more personal. (3 min)

Step 4 (Optional): Adjust the design: if you prefer another font, bolded or italics style, or another color, you can adjust that with Convertkit. (1 min)

Step 5: Link the landing page to the CTA that you put under each of your articles. (2 min)

The most important thing to keep in mind for setting up your landing page: Don’t get lost in the details. Set a timer for 10 minutes, and build your minimum viable version.

Here’s an example one of my students set up in the Writing Online Accelerator, Module 4.

The landing page of Maria Leis

Add a Call-to-Action underneath every article (5 minutes)

Even though you won’t see the benefits until your first written piece goes viral or semi-viral, this step is critically important.

If your article goes viral without a CTA that leads to your landing page for collecting emails, you’ll miss out on the most important opportunity to grow your subscriber base.

If I didn’t have a CTA when my first article went viral, I would have missed out on hundreds of people who were genuinely interested in my work.

Again, your CTA doesn’t need to be perfect yet.

Until 2021, my CTA was a generic “Want to connect? Subscribe to my email list.” If people like what they read, they’ll still subscribe.

Here are some stepping stones you can use to formulate your CTA:

  • “Want to improve X? My newsletter will help you create the Y you need to move towards a Z future.”
  • “Get access to exclusive X content. Subscribe to my free newsletter here.”
  • Want to stay in touch? Subscribe to my email list.

But a simple “Let’s connect!” or “Say hello here!” would also do the trick.

Don’t be afraid to start with a generic CTA. You can adjust your CTA after figuring out what you want to do with your list.


What to Keep in Mind

Platforms change. Emails don’t.

Many writers miss out on this vital growth tool. They don’t set it up early, and when they finally experience the long-desired growth, they miss out on hundreds of subscribers.

Don’t be among the people who miss out but build your email list from day one.

Follow these steps to set it up fast:

  1. Register on Convertkit
  2. Choose a landing page
  3. Add a Call-to-Action underneath each of your articles

Don’t wait until tomorrow. Even if it feels counterintuitive, set up your email list today.


Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: advice, Writing

How You Can Write with the Right Mindset to Fuel Sustainable Growth

June 23, 2022 by luikangmk

And create a solid base for your online writing journey

Credits: Salzburg Global Seminar/Katrin Kerschbaumer

When I started writing in March 2020, I felt like quitting all the time.

I had no idea how to write stuff people want to read. I didn’t know how to write articles on a consistent basis, and I tried and tested a lot before I got into a solid writing habit. It was a real roller-coaster ride.

The reason why I still pushed through when nothing seemed to work was my mindset. In the following lines, I’ll share every thought that can help you stick through on your creative journey.

Since March 2020, more than 2M people have read my work and I’ve supported more than 40 people in my learner-centric, cohort-based writing courses, the Writing Online Accelerator.

This is how my mindset created a solid base for my writing journey. And how to make it work for you as well.


Why do you write?

To build a consistent writing habit you want to know your why. What’s the reason for your becoming a writer?

Do you write to make more money? To learn something new every day? To have a hobby you enjoy? For growing an audience and building an online business? Is it making an impact on people’s lives by sharing what you know?

While there are no wrong answers, knowing your why can be your fuel.

When I started, I had several whys. I wanted to learn a new skill. I wanted to clarify my thinking. And I wanted to have a voice. My whys changed during the years. Now I write because I love to learn. I love the fuzzy feeling I get when I enter the writing flow states. I love the freedom to work from anywhere. And I love the opportunities writing has created for me.

Now you

What are your best answers to the questions below?

  • Why do you write?
  • What’s the underlying reason for your journey?
  • How does writing fit into your life?
  • What’s your long-term goal with writing?

Your why will likely change. But knowing the reason why you want to take the time to write can be your biggest asset.


Success in writing isn’t linear

I worked with Sinem Günel as a writing coach and one of the most helpful lessons she shared with me was the following: Success in writing isn’t linear but exponential. You have to write up to 100 articles without expecting anything in return.

Most writers give up too early before they experience exponential growth.

Don’t expect to go viral after your third article. It took me 40 pieces to reach 100,000 people. Exponential growth will surprise you when you keep improving. Writing isn’t a sprint: it’s a marathon. Don’t expect overnight success, but build a solid habit you can stick with.

I feel you.

It’s soul-draining to write in the void until you experience exponential growth.

You’ll feel lonesome in the vastness of the online world. You won’t get any external feedback because no one will care about your writing. For a while, no one will even click on your work. You’ll be one more person who creates noise in the already crowded parts of the internet.

Then very slowly, people will start to come. They’ll comment and reach out to you and actually read your words.

But until then, writing online is damn difficult.

Hang in there. If you’re committed to writing consistently, readers will notice you.

Source: Screenshot from the Writing Online Accelerator Module 1

Now you

A specific, measurable, time-bound, and realistic plan can help you stick through.

To create a plan, answer the following questions:

  • How many articles will you publish in the next 6 weeks?
  • When and where will you write?
  • When do you enjoy writing the most?
  • When are you most productive? What might prevent you from publishing consistently?
  • What are your strategies to overcome your barriers?
  • If you stop publishing consistently, what will you do to get back to the habit quickly?

Prepare for an emotional roller-coaster ride

The journey of writing can feel like riding an emotional roller coaster.

Sometimes your writing flows; sometimes it flops. Sometimes your best articles won’t get any traction, and your worst pieces will be read by thousands of people. Sometimes you’ll be able to finish an article in one sit, while other times, you’ll struggle to put a single paragraph onto your screen.

You’ll feel your ideas are great. Then you’ll think they’re terrible. It’s all part of the journey. Your feelings are valid.

Make peace with the hard times and have a clear goal that keeps you on track when writing doesn’t feel easy.


What to Keep in Mind

90% of the people don’t stick to writing. They give up too early and expect overnight success when in reality, writing isn’t a sprint but a marathon.

To stick through until you’ve achieved your personal “why”, these are the four mindset snippets that can keep you on track

  • Know your why
  • Make a plan to stick through until you’ve reached exponential success
  • Know that all creators go through a shared emotional roller-coaster ride

Ready to accelerate your writing journey and build an online audience?

Subscribe for a free 5-day course on how you can set up the single most important thing writers usually forget to attract a large audience online. With a total time investment of only 20 minutes.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: Ideas, inspiration, life lessons, mindset

A Powerful Mental Shift to Lead a Happier Life

June 13, 2022 by luikangmk

How you can overcome confirmation bias and make better choices.

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

“We laugh at people who still use Windows 95, yet we still cling to opinions that we formed in 1995,” psychology professor Adam Grant writes.

Cognitive scientists call this thinking pattern confirmation bias. Once you form a belief, you rarely question it again.

A 2016 study published by Cambridge University Press suggests the more intelligent you are (with intelligence equated to quantitative reasoning capacity), the harder you struggle to change your opinion.

Human brains love shortcuts to save mental energy. Evaluating disconfirming evidence takes up a lot of energy. So most people don’t do it.

And worse, most of the time, they don’t even realize their close-mindedness. As a result, they make important life choices based on outdated beliefs.

Why is it that most of us are bad at updating our worldview? And how can we overcome the psychological bias most people remain unaware of?


This bias lets you see what you expect to see

It’s a summer evening in 2017, and the first time I enter a yoga studio. The air smells woody, and the dimmed lights make the room look cosy.

Yet, my inner world is as far from cosy as it can get.

I look at the other model-esque people on their mats. With matching outfits and perfect bodies, they look freshly printed from an Instagram feed.

I feel uncomfortable and insecure. My downward facing dog must look like a crumpled grasshopper. The teacher glances at me, and I can tell he’s hiding a smirk. The hour-long class becomes inner torture.

I step out of the studio, deciding that was my first and last yoga experience.

I knew it! You are lucky to have a flexible body, or you aren’t.

What I didn’t realize back then is how confirmation bias tricked my mind.

I looked for evidence that confirmed my insecurities and beliefs about yoga.

I filtered out any information that contradicted my worldview.

I didn’t notice other people’s imperfections, their struggles, or the teacher’s supportive glance.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to search for, interpret, and favour information that is aligned with our pre-existing beliefs.

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”

— Robertson Davies

How confirmation bias affects your life

A person feels lazy during a home office day. He opens his LinkedIn, sees everyone else’s work achievement posts, and thinks, “I knew it. I’m such a lazy loser.”

Another person is on the train home from a day hike with her mum. She opens LinkedIn, sees the same posts, and thinks, “I can tell these people are not happy. I’m so grateful I chose to work less and spend more time with my family.”

Confirmation bias means we look at the same information and perceive it differently. We interpret facts, so it fits into our current understanding of the world.

“Whether you go through life believing that people are inherently good or people are inherently bad, you will find daily proof to support your case,” Rolf Dobelli writes in The Art of Thinking Clearly.

Confirmation bias affects your perception of reality, most of the time without you noticing it.

“The confirmation bias is so fundamental to your development and your reality that you might not even realize it is happening. We look for evidence that supports our beliefs and opinions about the world but excludes those that run contrary to our own.”

— Sia Mohajer

How you can overcome confirmation bias to make better choices

No single magic formula can uncloud your perception. But the following tools can help you overcome confirmation bias.

Build a challenge network

Connect with people you disagree with. Adam Grant says you should build a “challenge network” rather than a support network.

You do need both. Keep cheerleaders in your network, but also look for thoughtful critics. Tell your coworkers and friends you value honesty over consent.

You can also build a virtual challenge network, for example, through Allsides, a website that features information from all sides of the political spectrum.

Ask the right questions

Don’t ask questions to get validation, but ask questions you have no answers to. Dare to ask the questions that reveal your knowledge gaps.

If a person’s opinion doesn’t make sense to you, it’s because you’ve not understood the root of their belief. Keep on asking to get the full context.

While ego-boosting questions feel more comfortable, learner’s questions help you expand your understanding.

Foster intellectual humility

Remain aware of what you don’t know. What are your areas of ignorance and fixed beliefs your hold?

When you read a book or an article, ask yourself: “Which sections did I automatically agree with? Which parts did I ignore? What if I thought the opposite?”

Build your identity through character traits rather than opinions

Value personal character traits, not opinions. Label yourself as a curious, humble learner searching for knowledge instead of labelling yourself as an expert in a specific topic.

This mindset shift gives you the freedom to disagree with your former self.

Changing your opinion when presented with evidence or arguments is one of the most valuable skills you can have in the 21st century.


Confirmation bias is a natural part of how our brain works, and the goal isn’t to completely overcome it. And yet, being aware of it will help you make better life choices.


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to the Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🎯 Better Living Tagged With: advice, inspiration, life lessons

I Asked a Guy Who Studied 20 Languages About the Best Way to Learn

June 13, 2022 by luikangmk

How you can become a better language learner.

Photo by Fernando @cferdophotography on Unsplash

Mathias Barra is a polyglot. He has studied about 20 languages and is fluent in six.

But Mathias didn’t grow up bilingual. Nor was he a natural talent. “In Spanish classes at school, I didn’t listen at all,” he told me last week.

How can you transform from an average student into a polyglot? And what are the best approaches to learning languages?

The interview is well worth your time, but if you’re in a rush, skip to the key point summary at the end.

Mathias, how many languages do you speak?

I’ve studied about 20 languages, and I feel comfortable in six languages. In order of proficiency, these six languages are French, English, Japanese, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese.

So what about the other 11 languages?

I typically don’t list them as I don’t have the comfort level as in these other six. For example, I’ve been learning German for a while now, but I don’t consider myself able to hold a fluent conversation. I use your podcast as a listening practice.

How did you become a polyglot? What’s your learning approach?

This has changed over the years, as my goals have also changed.

My first language was English. I learned it in school. But I wasn’t a good language student. I took Spanish and Latin classes but didn’t listen or learn.

I had this friend who was fluent in English. And I asked him, „How did you do it?“ And he told me he learned English through pure exposure to tons of TV shows. So I did that for a year, and I watched hundreds and hundreds of hours of English. First, with French subtitles and after two months, with English subtitles. Then, I disabled them completely.

For Spanish, I had classes in high school. I was pretty bad at it. At one point, I did a six-month internship in Spain. This allowed me to transform the bit of knowledge I had from high school into active knowledge. ​While in Barcelona, I also learned Catalan.

Japanese was the language I approached in the most organized way. I learned it out of pure interest. I studied a bit on my own and had two years of evening classes. I studied 300 characters in about a month and took a university exam. I also studied grammar patterns, watched anime and Japanese dramas, and read as much as possible in Japanese.

At the same time, I studied Korean. After about two months, I took intermediate evening classes. I started way behind everybody, but I watched a lot of Korean stuff. I studied with different textbooks and went to Korea for two months, which unlocked everything.

And I learned Chinese mainly by working on an Assimil book, a collection of books with bilingual texts and not much grammar. I watched tons of Chinese TV shows and movies, especially the Voice of China with subtitles in Chinese. And after three months, I had my very first Chinese conversation without any problem.

You said you like studying grammar. How do you do it? Can you be specific?

This has evolved over the years, and I’ve not always done it like this. I now focus on patterns I actually want to know.

I usually go through standard constructions, for example, the language word order. Is it Subject Object Verb or Subject Verb Object?

I learned standard sentence structures such as I want to, I think, I could, I can, I should, and so on. And I learn a few keywords, such as FANBOYS (For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, So).

Then, I use technical elaboration to make these sentences my own. I take one simple sentence and expand it. Here’s how it goes.

  • I go to Germany
  • I go to Germany next month
  • I go to Germany next month because I study German
  • I go to Germany next month because I like German and I want to study German

I elaborate with as many grammar patterns as I can.

Once I’m satisfied with a very long paragraph, I take another topic and reuse the same grammar patterns with new vocabulary, so I can really cement the knowledge of those grammar patterns.

So when you do this, do you have a textbook or Google Translate next to you? Or do you recall things from your memory?

It’s pretty much a bit of everything you said and depends on my proficiency. If I have a comfortable level in the language I try to do it all by heart with no support.

Google Translate is not always right, so I sometimes also use a platform called HiNative to ask native speakers whether my paragraph is right or wrong.

Mathias uses HiNative to get answers from native speakers. Source: HiNative Landing Page

Which tools do you use to learn a new language or to improve existing skills?

On HiNative I ask questions such as „Hey, is this correct?“ Or „Can you pronounce that sentence for me or check whether my pronunciation is correct?“

And then, I use Anki, a computerized flashcard program. I use it not for single words but to focus on context. For example, I make sentence cards or cloze-deletion cards.

Then I still use Journaly, a platform that allows you to type a text that natives correct.

And then there’s radio.garden to listen to any radio in the world. I use that to have background sounds of the language I’m studying at the moment.

What I like on top of these tools is Slowly, a language tandem exchange that sends replies in the time a letter would take.

Collect stamps from across the globe through language tandems. Source: Screenshot from Slowly.

If we look at language learning from a meta-perspective, what’s the best approach? Immersion, active conversation practice, learning vocabulary by heart?

Before you start, you need to be clear about your timeline. By when do you want to have achieved which type of skills?

Many people online rush into language learning. But I think it’s better to take your time. The most important thing is to find some activities that you actually enjoy in the language.

The best way to study languages is not to limit it to study time, but to make it part of your life, for example, through exposure.

Learn basic Grammar and practice with a tutor or a partner through iTalki. You can also record yourself for HiNative to get some feedback. And you can use Speechling to work on listening comprehension.

In essence, there’s no single best way to study languages. I approach every language I learn differently. In Thai, for example, I rely on written stuff while in German I use more audio input.


The most important thing is to find some activities that you actually enjoy in the language.


Can you share examples of how you integrate language learning into your daily life?

I don’t have a routine for language learning anymore. It’s part of whatever I do. For example, whenever I watch something on Netflix, I always use Language Reactor. The free browser extension adds dual language subtitles and a pop-up dictionary.

Watch Netflix with double subtitles. (Source: Screenshot of Language Reactor)

I also have background music from Radio.garden or listen to a podcast. Right before our call today, I listened to a Chinese podcast.

I also hang a lot of stuff on my walls and keep looking at specific words. And I write my diary entries in Korean.

I put my phone in a different language. Right now, it’s German.

And I regularly chat with friends in their native language, which helps me practice without actively trying.

I recently started studying two languages at a time, rather than one. In this way, you can alternate whether you want to do A or C. While progress is slower, you can alternate between the language you feel like learning.


I don’t have a routine for language learning anymore. It’s part of whatever I do.


How do you prevent yourself from forgetting a language?

First of all, I accept that I’ll forget stuff. But I regularly review my Anki decks, keep talking to friends in foreign languages, or schedule intense study periods for certain languages.

For example, last year, I had an intensive Spanish period where I binged, watched a Mexican TV show in Spanish with Spanish subtitles and read a Spanish book.

What are the most common mistakes you see most people making when learning languages?

The worst mistake is that most people rely upon Duolingo as the only method. The app is great because it makes language learning more approachable. But too many people think it’s enough.

And the other mistake is learning a list of common words. It’s not useful. You might not need many of the words and don’t learn with context. Even if you know all the words but don’t know how conjugation or clauses or genders work — how are you going to make sense of all of it?

It’s better to construct your own sentences. Write the word down that you want to know and practice with it. That’s what makes your studying time more useful.

Duolingo is one of the reasons so many people fail to learn a foreign language.

— Mathias Barra

Thanks for your time Mathias. How can people learn more from you?

I write and publish on Medium (Mathias Barra). And I run the average polyglot newsletter on Substack where I write seven bullet points about language learning and cultural differences each week. And I tweet regularly.

Learning a foreign language is fun but it's damn slow work.

Focus on speed, and you're bound to give up.

— Mathias Barra (@mathias_barra) December 13, 2021

Key Takeaways

While there’s no single best way to learn a language, mixing methods does help (hint: Duolingo is not enough). Tools that can help include HiNative, Journaly, Anki, Slowly, iTalki, and Speechling.

Combine studying on your own and in structured settings, such as online communities on Discord or iTalki. Learn grammar by elaborating on standard constructions.

Find activities that you actually enjoy in the language and make it part of your life, for example, through:

  • watching a Netflix series with subtitles, Mathias uses the Language Reactor extension)
  • reading a book in the language you’re learning, Mathias loves easy readers
  • listening to radio shows or podcasts in the language you’re learning, for example, on radio.garden
  • switch your phone settings to another language
  • write your diary in the language you’re learning

Whatever you decide to do or not do, enjoy your language learning journey.


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🧠 Learning Hacks Tagged With: advice, How to learn, learning

How to Never Run Out of Writing Ideas

May 25, 2022 by luikangmk

Creativity is a choice once you manage your ideas.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

When I started writing, I felt I had nothing worthy to say and that I’d soon run out of ideas. Two years and 300 articles later, I know I was wrong about both.

Everybody has something worthy to share.

And creativity is a choice.

The following lines reveal how you can have endless ideas and what to do with them.


“Most things have been done, but they have not yet been done by you.”

— Elizabeth Gilbert

How to Train Your Brain to Have Endless Ideas

After I had published my first three articles, I had no ideas left. I faced most writers’ biggest fear — a blank page.

Luckily, I soon learned how to always have ideas at your fingertips. These are the two creativity principles I’ve used ever since.

Don’t kill your baby ideas…

In the beginning, almost all ideas are shit. They lack substance, examples, research, or anecdotes.

That’s why new writers judge and discard their ideas very early. In fact, too early. Ideas need time to mature.

If you kill your ideas when they’re still at the baby stage, you’ll never know how they might have turned out.

And, even worse: you tell your brain your ideas are worthless. It will soon stop generating new ones.

What you want to do is to be neutral towards any idea that crosses your mind. Acknowledge it’s too early to know whether the idea is good and continue with step two.

…but capture them.

Every idea is worth capturing. Because you’re now telling your brain, it’s worth generating new ones. Your brain will become your best idea supplier.

The challenge?

Ideas come when you don’t expect them.

Most of my ideas come while I write another article, meditate, go for a run, or have a conversation with friends. That’s why you want to have a clear workflow for idea capturing.


How to Pick Your Idea Management Tool

When you look for a tool to capture your ideas, you want it to fulfil three key criteria: Do you know how to use it? Do you like how it looks and feels? Will you use it every day?

Source: Writing Online Accelerator

In the beginning, I spent hours looking for the best tool. But comparing tools can distract you from actually doing the work.

Let me save you some time by demonstrating what worked and what didn’t work for me. My idea boards evolved from an unhandy Trello to a still unhandy Notion, to a more flexible Milanote, to xTiles.

My idea board on Trello: March 2020 — July 2020. With every new idea, it felt more chaotic. (Screenshot by author).
My idea board on Notion: August 2020 — December 2020. I had the same “growth” problem as with Trello: endless vertical scrolling. (Screenshot by author).
My idea board on Milanote: Jan 2021 — March 2022. I loved the flexible organization. But the search function was painful, and I missed Notion’s formatting tools (Screenshot by author).
My current idea board xTiles (Screenshot by author).

xTiles combines all features I was looking for. It’s a mixture of note-taking and a whiteboard — as if Milanote and Notion had a baby.

It’s not as rigid as Notion and Trello, I can visually organize information. And yet, it has a level of organization I missed in Milanote. Here are two examples:

You can add new cards anywhere and move the content around. (Screen recording by author).
You can expand and close cards as you need them so things don’t get messy. (Screen recording by author).

What to Keep in Mind

Your life is full of inspiration once you start looking for it. You can find ideas in conversations, books, movies, podcasts, and even in architecture or relationships.

But ideas arise when you don’t expect them. So the most important part is to have a tool to store them.

Once something strikes your mind, add the idea to your idea board. Add any helpful context, such as videos or next steps, to explore the concept even further:

Add to-dos and video links

Once you capture every idea, you’ll swim in a sea of idea abundance. And the more you create, the more creative you become.

Filed Under: ✍🏽 Online Creators Tagged With: Ideas, inspiration, Writing

How to Write Great Flashcards so You Can Remember Anything You Want

May 19, 2022 by luikangmk

Computerized flashcard programs make memory a choice.

Photo by David Cassolato from Pexels

How often have you read something thinking, “I should remember this,” only to forget it a couple of hours later?

Don’t blame your memory. Forgetting is part of how our brains work.

And contrary to common belief, our brains work not too different from each other (hint: learning styles don’t exist).

Recent advances in cognitive psychology, educational psychology, and neuroscience reveal how humans learn.

Here’s what our brains have in common and how you can make the most of it.

How to prime your memory to remember anything

Memory works in three stages: encoding, consolidation/retention, and retrieval. And you need to utilize all three stages to remember anything your want forever.

If you encode something, for example, through watching an online course but don’t practice retention and retrieval, you won’t be able to recall it when needed.

If you hear or read something just once, let’s say by reading a book or watching an online course, you’ll very likely forget it a couple of days later.

That’s the reason why most people can’t recall something from a book they read a while ago when they’d need it.

But you can hack your memory by interrupting your forgetting curve.

Forgetting Curves with and without spaced practice. (Source: Hannah Lenitz for Eva Keiffenheim).

Encoding knowledge into your memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

And it’s easy. Brilliant minds have come up with software and workflows that help you interrupt your forgetting exactly when you should.

Computerized flashcard programs, such as Anki or Neuracache, help you learn anything by heart forever. In my TEDx talk on mastering learning, I talk about the power of these programs.

You apply the effective learning strategy of self-testing and the software manages your forgetting curve for maximum retention.

“One-shot learning is not enough. Routinization frees up our prefrontal and parietal circuits, allowing them to attend to other activities. The most effective strategy is to space out learning: a little bit every day.”

— Stanislas Dehaene

If you can answer a question correctly, the time interval between reviews gradually expands. So a one-day gap between reviews becomes two days, then six days, and so on. The idea is that the information is becoming more firmly embedded in your memory, and so requires less frequent review.

Soon you’ll only need to test yourself on information for a few seconds once every one and a half years. Scientist Michael Nielsen has used this system to memorize 20,000 cards and estimates he only needs about 5 minutes of total review time for one piece of information over the entire 20 years.

In essence: spaced repetition memory systems make memory a choice.

But why would you want to remember something forever? There are use-cases that go way beyond exams.


Use cases for hacking your memory

You can learn and all countries of the world and impress your former geography teacher.

But you could also choose some of the following cases and make flashcards really useful for you.

Here’s what I currently use my memory system for:

  • Relationships, remembering birthdays, preferences, or experiences. When is Torben’s birthday? What’s Anna’s favourite meal?
  • Hobbies, memorizing anything that’s useful for you. What are the first three steps for beatmatching? What direction do my elbows point when doing barbell squats? What should I pay attention to in the cobra yoga pose?
  • Job-related information, for example from relevant papers, conferences, or conversations. What were my three biggest learnings from the Education Futures conference in Salzburg? What are the three actions for shifting power in education transformation?
  • Habit Stacking, anything you want to do after another habit. When do I practice Anki cards? Which mac command do I use when searching my browser history?
  • Random stuff such as favourite places or memory from a holiday, pokemon names, or reflections from your yearly review.

While there are many pre-written decks, you can now see why writing cards yourself is even more meaningful.

“Cards are fundamental building blocks of the mnemonic medium, and card-writing is better thought of as an open-ended skill. Do it poorly, and the mnemonic medium works poorly. Do it superbly well, and the mnemonic medium can work very well indeed. By developing the card-writing skill it’s possible to expand the possibilities of the medium.”

— Andy Matuschack and Michael Nielsen

Four rules for writing great flashcards

Creating the cards by yourself is an important part of understanding and committing.

Here are five rules you want to keep in mind when creating flashcards.

1) Decide whether it’s relevant

It’s tempting to memorize everything you read in books, but you really want to keep it relevant.

Create flashcards for anything that’s worth about five minutes of your lifetime. Because that’s the expected lifetime review time. Michael Nielsen has applied this system for four years and he says it takes < 5 minutes to learn something… forever.

The goal of remembering everything you want is not a self-serving purpose. You ultimately want to apply your knowledge in your day-to-day life; for your job, relationships, or decision-making.

If you try to learn something you don’t care about, you’ll soon stop learning altogether. So choose the stuff you really care about.

“Memorisation is really important, but you have to memorise the right things”

— Daisy Christodoulou
2) Keep the cards really simple.

One of the biggest mistakes new flashcards writers make is creating too dense flashcards.

Simpler is better — stick to the minimum information required, instead of overloading a card.

Here’s an example:

Source: SuperMemo — Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

The simpler the easier it’s to remember it and the more flexible you are in its application. However, keep in mind to always add the basics before you dive into the specifics.

Name the main theories of learning (behaviorism, cognitive, constructivism, humanism, and connectivism) before you go into the details of them.

3) Add personal context

Remember the first memory stage? Encoding works best when you add personal context and meaning to it.

Use your own words to describe a concept rather than copy and come up with personal examples to make learning easier for you.

4) Include real-world retrieval cues

Remember the second and third memory stage? Sorry to do this, but you know you remember best when you recall something from your memory.

So consolidation/retention and retrieval are as crucial as encoding.

There’s a difference between the availability and accessibility of knowledge.

Even if a piece of information is encoded and consolidated, you might have trouble retrieving it (known as the tip of the tongue phenomena).

To memorize flashcards in a way that you can apply them in your life, you want to add retrieval cues.

You can do that by asking questions that are similar to your real-world situations.

For example, instead of asking, what’s the mac shortcut for retrieving your chrome search history, I asked “When researching an article I haven’t saved yet on my Mac, which chrome shortcut do I use to browse through my search history?”


In Conclusion

Spaced repetition memory systems, such as creating flashcards with Anki, make memory a choice. You can remember anything you want, forever.

The goal of fact-learning is not to learn just one random fact — it is to learn thousands, which taken together, form a schema that helps you solve problems, think critically, and make sense of the world.

“Anki isn’t just a tool for memorizing simple facts. It’s a tool for understanding almost anything.”

— Michael Nielson

Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 🧠 Learning Hacks Tagged With: advice, How to learn, learning, memory enhancement

What Most People Get Dangerously Wrong About Building a Second Brain

April 22, 2022 by luikangmk

And how to fix it.

Source: MART PRODUCTION on Pexels

Knowledge management expert Tiago Forte writes:

“Your professional success and quality of life directly depend on your ability to manage the information around you. […] Now, it’s time to acknowledge that we can’t ‘use our head’ to store everything we need to know and outsource the job of remembering to technology.”

Tiago is partly right.

Note-taking systems can improve your life. A well-organized knowledge base can give you clarity of mind and save you time. RoamResearch, for example, reduced the time it takes me to write an article by 50 per cent.

And yet, Tiago is also dangerously wrong.

With the following insights from neuroscience and cognitive research, you’ll understand why the belief to outsource your memory to technology is terribly wrong and how your brain indeed can store everything you need to know.


How Your Brain Actually Works

You likely know your two memory types: short-term and long-term. The key difference? Duration and capacity.

Your short-term memory can only store about four to seven items for a very short time (15–30 seconds). It’s what helps you remember a phone number until you get distracted.

“Short-term memory is the brain’s short-term buffer, keeping in mind only the hottest, most recent information.”

— Stanislas Dehaene in How We Learn

If you ever felt your brain is juggling too many pieces at a time, it’s your working memory. Your long-term memory capacity is vast.

Learning expert Daisy Christodoulou explains:

“Our long-term memory does not have the same limitations as working memory. It is capable of storing thousands of pieces of information. This allows us to cheat the limitations of working memory in lots of ways.”

So if you manage to transfer information from your short-term to your long-term memory, you can store as much as you want for as long as you want.

This disproves Tiago’s claim. You can indeed use your head to store everything you need to know.

All you need is to transfer new knowledge from your short to your long-term memory.

How to Store Things in Your Long-Term Memory

You encode new information in different brain areas.

Some of your neurons respond to what you see (in the inferior temporal region), some to what you hear (in the superior temporal region), and others to the layout (in the parahippocampal region).

To transfer what you want to remember into your long-term memory, you need spaced repetition, learning scientists agree.

“Repeated recall appears to help memory consolidate into a cohesive representation in the brain and to strengthen and multiply the neural routes by which the knowledge can later be retrieved.”

— Roediger et al. in Make It Stick

Because when you recall a memory, you reinforce it and its cue. With every additional retrieval, you strengthen the connection and can access your memory faster.

To remember what you learned in high-school geography, you need to recall the material over increasing time intervals, first every few days, then weeks, then months, etc.

Got it? You’re ready to bust the second brain myth.


Why You Can’t Outsource Your Brain to Technology

Remember, you can only hold four to seven items in your short-term memory.

When you look something up (e.g. in your second brain on Evernote), you use up the limited space and not much capacity is left to process the new information or combine it with existing things, so you have new ideas.

​Daisy Christodoulou writes: “So when we want to solve a problem, we hold all the information relating to the problem in working memory. Unfortunately, working memory is highly limited.”

If you don’t memorise facts to encode them into your long-term memory, you’ll never have the same processing fluency and thought quality as someone who has. It’s as if you’re trying to win a race walking barefoot while the other person sits on an e-bike.

The benefit of remembering information is not in the knowledge itself but in the way you can deploy it. You build a mental structure that helps you develop new thoughts and knowledge through memorisation.

When solving problems, thinking critically, or generating new ideas, you don’t rely on your limited working memory capacity but on your basically unlimited long-term memory.

And that’s why the second brain belief is dangerous. When you outsource the job of remembering to technology, you’re neglecting most of your brain’s potential.

“Learning is dependent on memory processes because previously-stored knowledge functions as a framework in which newly learned information can be linked.”

— Radvansky in Human Memory

What to Do Instead

In essence, you want to find the most effective way to store everything you need to know in your long-term memory.

Imagine all things that are useful for you would be stored in your long-term memory, giving you an edge in every conversation, brainstorming or deep work session.

We know from learning science that transferring information into your long-term memory works best when you reproduce the same piece of information from your mind over increasing time intervals.

Remembering everything you want forever is not nearly as hard as you might imagine. Computerised flashcard programs, such as Anki and Neuracache, manage your forgetting curve and maximise your retention.

Unlocking the power of these tools works in three steps:

  1. Create digital flashcards. You enter a question and a corresponding answer for anything you want to keep in mind forever. (Hint: ask yourself whether knowing this is worth about 5–7 minutes of your life because that’s how long you will need to see a flashcard to remember something forever).
  2. Retrieve information from your memory. When the program shows you a card, you actively recall the answer from your memory. Look at the answer afterwards.
  3. Self-assess. The software asks whether you know the answer or not. Based on your self-assessment, the software manages the review schedule for you.

The goal of fact-learning with your real brain is not to memorise just one random fact — it is to learn thousands that help you solve all kinds of problems without you needing to rely on your restricted short-term memory capacity.


Where to Go From Here

Should you stop building a digital knowledge management system? No.

Tools such as Notion, RoamResearch, xTiles, and Evernote, can help you organise your research and your life.

But stop thinking of these tools as your second brain.

The assumption that you don’t need to remember anything yourself will prevent you from thinking critically and having great ideas.

Instead, build and augment your long-term memory through applying proven learning strategies.


Want to feel inspired and become smarter about how you learn?

Subscribe free to my Learn Letter. Each Wednesday, you’ll get proven tools and resources that elevate your love for learning.

Filed Under: 📚 Knowledge Management Tagged With: How to learn, learning

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Go to page 6
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

Categories

  • ✍🏽 Online Creators
  • 🎯 Better Living
  • 📚 Knowledge Management
  • 🧠 Learning Hacks
  • 🧱Transforming Education

Learner’s Letter

Sign Up for the free weekly newsletter to make your mind work for you.

Copyright Eva Keiffenheim © 2023 · Impressum