10 years of online writing will change your life
I went from "at-risk teen" in France to founder in the USA thanks to blogging
10 years ago, my life SUCKED. I was a 15 year old teen in the south of France, depressed, and up to no good. I remember sitting through a meeting where my teacher told my mom that I was going to ruin my life.
Yet somehow today I’m a published book author, I founded my own art organization, received an O-1 visa to live in San Francisco, among other pretty cool accomplishments.
I owe the start of this journey to the first blog post I published at 15yo; things have been compounding ever since, as I kept writing online. Here’s what blogging did for me.
Writing online helped launch my career twice
Launch one: how a blog post got me out of high school and working in Paris
Exactly 10 years ago, I wrote a blog post on Medium (the cool blogging platform of the time) about my experience as a high schooler frustrated by the French school system. I did it out of desperation and as an act of rebellion.
First and foremost, this post broke the script of my life and made me realize I was capable of doing stuff.
But it’s also thanks to this blog post that I landed my first job at 16 year old, upon dropping out of high school. I used it as proof-of-work when applying to education startups in Paris, and just like that, I moved out of my mom’s place in Marseille and started my new life in the capital.
If you dream of working in an industry you have no contacts in, write a thoughtful blog post about the space. You’ll set yourself apart from 90% of other candidates. Yes, even if you’re not a teen anymore!
What happened next is even wilder: opportunities started coming to me. My blog posts circulated in the Paris tech ecosystem, which led me to run a program for young entrepreneurs and artists (some of whom are now running a billion-dollar company or leading a renowned music career). I became a guest speaker at a French elite university, and a publishing house reached out because they’d been reading my writing. At 18 years old, I had a book deal and a whole team dedicated to bringing my education philosophy to the country.
Once you’re publicly associated with a topic, opportunities in that industry start finding you instead of the other way around. That’s the shift from one blog post being useful to a body of work becoming your brand.
Launch two: starting from zero in the USA
By 18, I’d been in every major newspaper in France and felt I’d reached the ceiling of what my birth country had to offer. So I went on a few side quests around the world, and eventually decided my next home would be the US.
Once again, I was starting with zero contacts. And like at 16, I knew my best shot at putting a foot through the door was online writing. So that’s what I did, this time on Substack and Twitter. The biggest change wasn’t the platform I used though, but the language! I had to learn to write in English, which felt like learning to write all over again. I wrote blog posts every week, often twice a week. I cold emailed founders I wanted to meet, asking to interview them on my newsletter as a way to show that I’m useful.
This work landed me a few grants, and I made it to San Francisco for the first time. Shortly after, I took a two-year writing hiatus, and yet, opportunities kept finding me. I landed consulting jobs, started Nautilus, and got my O-1 visa.
The playbook worked twice, in two languages, on two continents, starting from zero each time. This body of work compounded on its own over the years, to the point that it became a foundation that holds even when I step away from it.
I didn’t become a famous writer, and it didn’t matter
Two things are notable about my writing journey:
I didn’t build a big following
I didn’t become a Great writer
Most writing-advice tells people to optimize for audience growth and craft mastery. Neither of those variables mattered for me. I wasn’t prolific enough to build a following; and switching to writing in English from French means I don’t excel at writing in either language.
What made it work anyway, was knowing who I was writing for (people in industries I wanted to break into), consistency over years, and most importantly, publishing at all. If you’re reading this, you might be inside a bubble where half of your friends write on Substack; but let me tell you that the vast majority of people still don’t write at all, and you are definitely setting yourself apart if you do.
A thoughtful piece reaching even five people can be enough to completely rewrite your destiny.
To be clear: I’m not saying a bigger following or sharper craft wouldn’t have helped my career further. But if I’d been harder on myself about delivering on those, it might have killed my motivation to hit publish. That’s a trade-off that wouldn’t have been worth it.
Writing taught me to think better
Everything I’ve described so far is about what writing got me externally: jobs, a book deal, a visa, a life in San Francisco. But I wouldn’t have known to reach for those things had I not spent time refining my thinking through writing.
When you write something for yourself, you can get away with a half-formed thought. When you write something you’re going to publish, you can’t. You have to actually finish the sentence and decide what you believe.
That first Medium post wasn’t a career move. I was 15, frustrated, and trying to articulate something I’d been feeling for years. Writing it was how I figured out what I actually thought about the French school system, beyond just “I hate it.” The book I wrote at 18 did the same thing on a bigger scale: it forced me to turn a bunch of vague intuitions into an actual philosophy of education. Even the Substack pieces I wrote when I moved to the US were partly me figuring out what I wanted my American life to look like before I had it.
Writing online is journaling that happens to also build your future. The internal clarity and the external opportunities aren’t two separate things, they’re the same activity felt from different angles.
This is the part of writing online that I think gets least talked about, because the impact isn’t as legible. But in my opinion, it’s the most valuable part of the process. Also, writing encapsulates eras of your life in a way memory cannot. This hit me when my first blog post turned 10 years old and I re-read it for the first time in a while.
I’m hitting publish on this piece while wearing a Marseille football jersey in my living room. Through the window, I can see the American flag, carried by the strong San Franciscan wind. Still have to pinch myself that this is my life. It’s cheesy but I’m thinking of every single reader who ever decided to spend a few of their precious minutes learning from my experiences. Thank you to all of you.
Preview image: The Shell, Georgia O’Keeffe, 1934
Definitely inspired to keep going! I've been posting poetry online starting on Facebook and Tumblr in ~2015, now turning to Substack to fill my need for sharing long form text.