Inexperience is a superpower

Doing the work you dream of requires doing the work before anyone else asks you to.

I first started this blog when I moved to Hong Kong in 2018.

Up to that point I’d never published anything online besides Instagram photos. I’d moved overseas with a pre-med degree that no longer held my interest and a chip-on-the-shoulder drive to become a writer.

Luckily, because I didn’t have a clue how to make that happen, I had no choice but to focus on the verb (writing) rather than the noun (being a writer).

To borrow a term from investing, writing on the internet was the only way for me to “get off zero.”

So I worked a local English teaching job and spent my evenings and weekends writing. I published essays once or twice a week, documenting my observations as an expatriate in Southeast Asia.

The instincts of a beginner — someone who doesn’t even know enough to form assumptions — can be strangely powerful. Especially in an open-ended field like writing, a novice still has the boldness that conventional training usually dulls over time.

My early work (therefore, all subsequent work) would have turned out very different if I’d taken writing or journalism courses in college. Funny to admit now as a working journalist, but I didn’t even follow the news when I was a student.

To be clear, while something like starting a blog matches the bias for action I’d recommend to anyone today, my decision at the time did not come from a place of wisdom. Rather, my inexperience mirrored my lack of opportunity.

There was simply little else for me to do.

Without the knowledge of how people typically become professional writers, my 22-year-old self aimed for volume above all else. Creating a body of work for free, I thought at the time, seems like the best way to eventually convince someone to pay me to write.

To this day I haven’t come across a better strategy.

Again, particularly in creative industries, competence and confidence comes from building a tangible stack of work.

My advice to anyone who wants to do a certain type of work today would be do enough of it so that the evidence of your abilities becomes undeniable.

After about six months of writing online and teaching English, the right person read my work. He ended up offering me an editing job at a local newspaper to “anglicize” the writing of local Chinese reporters.

It took publishing some 50,000 words for free for someone else to bet on me.

In the several years that followed, I received job offers from places like Business Insider and The New York Times, and earned prestigious fellowships and awards, but nothing has come close to the feeling of that initial newspaper role.

That first break provided me with the most concrete example I’d had tying quiet, private work to outsized professional outcomes. It also taught me the most effective path to turn a side hobby into a day job is to stop treating it like a side hobby.

Priorities determine outcomes, and competence comes down to practice, after all.

This should excite anyone who wants to have a career based on a specific skill, like writing or programming.

Now, every career comes with challenges. Ambition can wane and life gets in the way.

That said, it seems true that the only real prerequisite to doing the work you dream of is doing the work before anyone else asks you to.

Have a great weekend,

Phil Rosen,
Co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Opening Bell Daily