Bye, Bye Medium, A Retrospective (Part 2)

2020, The Year My Blog Was Most Active, The Year I Gave Up On It

Note: This is the second in a series, where I’ll look back on my four years on Medium in an attempt to understand where I succeeded and where I failed so that my next blog, which will be on Substack, will be even better. It’s also kind of a “Best of” collection, where I’ll be sharing links to and comments about some of the posts that are my favorites. You can read part one here. In it, I cover what led me to Medium and some of my mental health challenges.

I planned a massive cross-US trip and a book about it in 2020, but ended up grounded in Japan. (Photo: Author)

My 2020 Vision

I entered 2020 on a mission. I was going to become a professional content creator, pushing English teaching, which I’d done for the previous 15 years in Japan, mostly to the side.

To accomplish that mission, I had three projects.

First, I was going to transition from WordPress completely, fully committing to Medium. In early 2020, I took an online class created by a popular Medium writer and because of my belief in myself and what I learned, I thought I’d be able to make a good portion of my living off this blog.

Second, after pondering the idea of starting a podcast for several years, I was going to start a podcast that would, by year’s end, take over Rogan and…