How I Made 7 Articles, 3 YouTube Videos Every Week, In My Fantasy

A story about fantasizing that actually works.

Minh-Phuc Tran
4 min readOct 24, 2020

A year ago, I came across an article by Tim Denning about how he wrote 3–4 articles per week every week, and he was earning a 6-figure.

A couple of days later, I saw Matt D’Avella YouTube channel. His video is so cool, and he was making thousands of dollars on Patreon.

Having always believed in my talent for everything, I opened Superhuman, composed a resignation letter, and sent it to my boss exactly one day after. I officially started my content creation journey.

Since then, I have been consistently creating content, specifically 7 articles and 3 YouTube videos per week every week.

Oh, almost forgot. There are also 3 podcast episodes per week every week.

As you can see, I’m creating double the amount of content that Tim and Matt were creating. So obviously, I’m making triple their income because of the compound effect in content creation. You know.

Let me tell you more about how I got started.

Umm…

Sorry. I’m embarrassed. I don’t really know.

Stop imagining. Show up, please!

In case you didn’t get it, the above story is all imaginary.

This article is how I’m getting started. I quit my job 3 weeks ago, and yet I’ve been imagining and fantasizing all the time.

If you are (or were) in a similar situation, you know you are not the only person, there are other people, at least me. Instead of feeling bad and ignoring the reality [again], write it down, acknowledge that it is a problem that you need to solve. I did that, and let me tell you my solution.

You’re probably thinking: Show up. Yes, it is to show up that every successful creator started to become successful, but showing up itself isn’t a complete answer.

Showing up isn’t easy, because it is boring and not satisfying.

For the last 3 weeks, I’ve said to myself “I need to show up” probably ten times, but I didn’t do it because it wasn’t fulfilling, it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place in my imagination.

How to show up satisfyingly

It is always easy to sit on a chair, watch others’ success stories, fantasize that we were them, and still feel satisfied. It isn’t our fault. It is how our brain works. One of the best feelings in the entire world is the feeling of getting better at the things that we are interested in, and the easiest way to get there is by fantasizing.

Fantasizing makes us feel like we got what we want without having to fill the gap in between, which painfully exists in reality.

Because the feeling of being in our fantasy is so good, it is too painful to accept that there is a [big] gap between our presence and the perfect world that we have been virtually living in.

One solution for this is to just acknowledge that, be resilient, resist the pain, and slowly get to the point you want. It works sometimes, but it is difficult near to the point of impossibility for most people.

A more viable solution, instead of assuming that we’re resilient enough, which itself creates another gap for us, is to shift our fantasy close to our presence.

“I’m the one who shows up on Medium” — Let this be your fantasy.

👇🏻

Give your brain the freedom to imagine that you were showing up on Medium.

Go into more details about what you were writing in that satisfying world. Don’t make it too complicated, though. You have control over there.

Hit publish.

Feel good.

Get back to reality. Open your computer, immediately!

Do exactly what you did in your imagination. Don’t look back until you hit publish. Your fantasy is to publish an article on Medium, not to receive a lot of appreciation.

Hit publish and you closed the gap. 🙌🏻 🍻

Photo by Kats Weil on Unsplash

It was exactly how I wrote this article.

The same practice can be applied again and again to keep slightly moving your presence and your fantasy together. Every day, you redefine your definition of “showing up”, imagine it, and do it. The secret is to make your fantasy a little closer to what you ultimately want every day but keep it less than 2 hours from your presence. It shouldn’t be to have 100 claps or 1000 subscribers, because you won’t be able to control it. Train your brain to be satisfied with what you already have control over and keep advancing it, other parts will come eventually.

Keep fantasizing and keep showing up for whatever your fantasy is! 💪🏻

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Minh-Phuc Tran

Software Engineer. Documenting my journey at 𝐩𝐡𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐦𝟗𝟕.𝐜𝐨𝐦