“Five times as many people read the headline as read the body.”
That’s a quote from David Ogilvy, “the father of advertising.” It applies to the copywriting world, as well as other forms of writing.
A good headline is like the welcome sign for the rest of your piece. People passing by will choose to read only after seeing a good headline. No matter how well written and insightful your content is, a poor headline will make people skip to the next piece in their feeds.
Apart from writing 10 headlines a day, the best piece of advice I’ve found to write better headlines is to look at YouTube headlines.
Following that advice, I sneaked into Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel. Here are the headlines of 10 of his most popular videos:
How I type REALLY fast (156 words per minute)
My evidence-based skincare routine
Why you’re always tired - 7 myths ruining your sleep
If I started a YouTube channel in 2025, I’d do this
The book that changed my financial life
What makes people successful?
How writing made me a millionaire
My honest advice to someone who wants financial freedom
My favorite note-taking app for students - Notion
The best book I’ve ever read about making money
Those headlines follow a pattern:
How I “action”
My evidence-based “action”
“Question about pain” - n “promise”
If I “action”, I’d do this
The “resource” that “outcome”
How “action” made me “outcome”
My honest advice to “audience” who wants “result”
The best “resource” I’ve ever “action” about “subject”
That’s a good starting place to write better headlines.
That advice assumes we all have a single true passion we can find within ourselves.
I’ve always had trouble finding that one true passion ever since high school. I got good grades in all subjects, with more effort in some than others. Picking one thing wasn’t easy based on grades alone.
I struggled to choose what to study at university. I had many ideas: joining the Military, studying Biology, or taking the Engineering route.
I’ve always had trouble finding one specific thing as a software engineer and solopreneur.
All that stress started to fade away when I realized it’s okay not to have one single true passion.
Embrace Your Multiple Passions
The first counter-advice to “find your passion” I found was by watching Emilie Wapnick’s TED talk “Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling.”
She shares her story of having multiple interests and struggling to answer “What do you do for a living?”
This intrigued me to the point of devouring most of the articles on her website.
The main lesson from Emilie’s work is to embrace our multiple interests and passions. She even coined a term for that: being a multipotentialite.
Based on the quiz on her site, I discovered I’m a mixed-multipotentialite: someone who balances two passions at a time instead of many unfinished projects. This realization helped me connect the dots.
I bought the idea of embracing my interests. But my first question was, “How can multipotentialites make a living? Who needs or hires them?” All the advice I had heard was to find one passion, one thing, or one niche.
Emilie surveyed her community and found four ways to balance work as a multipotentialite:
Einstein approach: A “boring” or “good enough” job pays the bills while you have something after hours. Einstein worked at the Patents Office while he started his Physics work.
Slash approach: A two-job career. I’m a “software engineer/writer.”
Group Hug approach: A multi-disciplinary job that allows you to combine your multiple passions or interests.
Phoenix approach: A seasonal approach, changing careers to follow one of your passions per season.
Don’t run from your multiple interests. Embrace them. There are always options to make a living from your multiple interests.
Don’t Be an Engineer, Be a Producer
My second counter-advice to finding a single true passion came from the book “Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein.
An ex-boss recommended it during one of our 1-on-1s. It’s also one of Bill Gates’ recommendations on his YouTube channel. Not that he’s one of my ex-bosses or that I had 1-on-1s with him.
Gunpei Yokoi’s story is the one I remember the most from the book.
He didn’t have a single interest. He worked as a maintenance guy for card-making machines at Nintendo back in the ’60s. He spent most of his first days there playing with the company equipment.
One day, Nintendo’s president saw him playing with an extendable arm and asked him to turn it into a toy. The Nintendo Ultra Hand was born. It saved Nintendo from debt and started the Research and Development department at Nintendo.
Looking for creative ways to repurpose old technology, Yokoi’s team was responsible for many of Nintendo’s successes over the years. The Game Boy was one of them. Yes, the Game Boy!
When asked about his approach, Yokoi said “I don’t have any particular specialist skills, I have a sort of vague knowledge about everything.” He had a range of skills.
Yokoi taught his team to be producers, not engineers. An engineer focuses on the details. But a producer knows how to connect things.
Instead of following a single interest, be a scientist who follow hypotheses, runs experiments, and tests and learns. Build a range of skills.
“Be a flirt with your possible selves. Rather than a grand plan, find experiments that can be undertaken quickly.”-Range by David Epstein
Takeaways
Don’t worry about finding a single true passion and following it for the rest of your life.
It’s OK to have multiple interests and juggle between them. It’s OK to change passions. It’s OK not to have one single niche. It’s OK to be a generalist.
Having multiple passions brings a sense of curiosity and a desire to learn about the world around us.
The world needs both focused frogs and visionary birds-deep-focused specialists and “above the trees” generalists who can see the bigger picture.
That’s what you need if you want to keep blogging in the long run.
I started blogging back in 2018. I threw up some words in a file and put them online. No schedule or intentions. Only when I adopted a writing schedule, I started to improve my writing skills and notice more pageviews.
Recently, I started to follow the POSSE principle: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.
My blog is my main hub. Anything I write online, in some shape or form, ends up on my blog. Recently, I created a new tag misc to organize my posts about other subjects apart from coding or software engineering.
Based on the type of content: tutorial vs opinion piece, I republish a shorter version on dev.to or republish on Medium, linking back to the original post.
Since often some Medium publications only accept original content, I publish there first and then the next day, I publish on my blog. Win-win.
I keep my raw posts on a note-taking app in Markdown. Since I use GitHub with Jekyll to host my blog, publishing a new post is a simple commit and a push. Or when I’m feeling lazier than usual, I paste the post content directly on GitHub.
For images, I host them on GitHub itself. I organize them inside a folder named “assets,” with subfolders named after my posts’ titles.
For my most recent posts, I’ve ditched images and banners and started to write shorter text-only posts. A decent headline and one main idea are good enough to publish.
To republish on Medium: I use the import feature. It works fine, except for code listings. I copy and paste them and add some emojis to highlight important lines of code.
To republish on dev.to: I use a template with disclaimers, intros, and CTAs. Then I copy and paste that template and only fill in the post body in the editor itself.
If you want to stay consistent and keep blogging, make it really easy. Reduce all the friction and automate as much as you can.
Show up. Consistency is king. Do something every day for one year.
That’s common Internet advice to master a skill and crush your goals.
Want to write? Show up.
Want to get in shape? Consistency is king.
Easier said than done.
Show up is good advice. But it’s only part of the full piece of advice
If you want to stay consistent, commit to the smallest action you can sustain in the long term.
At the start of the year, I joined a monthly reading club with some friends. In the first sessions, everybody showed up with their reading done. We were so enthusiastic that we wanted to read more, have online discussions, and write essays with our reactions. We even wanted to meet up every weekend.
But after a couple of sessions, somebody showed up without the reading done. And then, somebody else stopped showing up. And then somebody else…and somebody else. Eventually, we stopped our reading club.
We bit off more than we could chew. And like any plan, it didn’t resist contact with reality.
To stay consistent, show up, but with small actions
Want to write? Commit to writing less than 200 words a day.
Want to get in shape? Commit to doing 1 push-up a day.
Want to read more? Commit to reading 1 page a day.
And make it easy to finish your small action of the day.
Leave your writing app open.
Go to bed wearing your workout clothes.
Keep a book on your desk.
Small and easy-to-finish actions in the long run. That’s how you keep showing up.
That was the result of a study by the University of Texas, cited in the book “The Anxious Generation.”
In the study, they divided an undergraduate classroom into thirds.
One third left their phones in another room. Another third kept them in their pockets or bags. And the last third kept them facing down on their desks.
Guess who performed best at the end of some cognitive tests?
Of course, the third that kept their phones outside did best. And the other two thirds did poorly, with some differences depending on the tests. But they claimed that their phone’s presence didn’t affect their performance.
The mere presence of their phones reduced their cognitive abilities, even when they were silent or off.
If you have read Deep Work, you already know about monk mode. But to focus, you don’t have to go into strict mode and retreat to a cabin without reception in the middle of nowhere. Just ask your phone to give you some space. Leave your phone in another room, out of sight.
Now, while I’m typing this, my phone is in airplane mode, in another room.
So if you want to do focused work, leave your phone out of sight.
