The past six months have flown by, and I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my journey so far. I also thought it would be a helpful exercise as I have had a few medical students ask about freelance writing/content creation in recent weeks.

I have distilled these into three key takeaways for those wanting to start content creation.

(If you are interested, check out my reflection piece from three months ago too!)

1. Find your group

This is easier said than done. I would say I am still hunting for mine. I have a group of people I speak to often, and we are all kind of on this entrepreneur/medical school/content creation type path, but it’s not quite there yet, I think. Simultaneously, I am interested in digital health and medtech, whereby I recently attended the BiteLabs Demo Day, which was an incredible experience. Now in that room, I truly felt like I was with a group of people I was most alike - people doing something unconventional and taking the odd route (hint: The Pathless Path). So it is a tough one.

If you want to start, get with a group of people online or with friends and do it together if you can (but don’t let it hold you back or stop you from starting). It’s so much more motivating and fun. One of the LinkedIn creators I follow raced to 100k LinkedIn followers with one of his friends, and I thought that was pretty cool. They both pushed the boundaries of content creation whilst adding a competitive element to it and sometimes that’s just the kind of drive you need to overcome challenges.

2. Copying others is natural

This took me a while to realise and come to terms with. I was focused on creating 100% unique and original content at the start until I realised it was nearly impossible. You can’t come up with original content until you consume content, and I was not consuming anywhere near enough when I started. I certainly don’t think I am still consuming enough content.

It’s essential to realise content creation is broadly ‘learning how to say one thing in 1000 different ways’. There’s only so much you can do that hasn’t been done before. The real value is your take on topics etc. and that’s where the originality and uniqueness come from. I love Ash’s take on it. Thinking is hard. So when you start, if you feel like copying other people’s ideas, that’s completely fine - try to give your own spin or take on it. You will get better at it over time.

3. Growing a newsletter is hard

This is me speaking super practically. If I had to go back and start again, I would probably start by podcasting or creating YT videos. The reason is that those are types of ‘long-form’ content. Those can then be easily turned into other pieces of content to stack, such as shorts/reels, a newsletter edition, and text-based and carousel posts for all the various social media platforms. That said, I would start the newsletter at the same time as you start your long-form content.

Growing a solo newsletter from scratch isn’t easy as you can’t repurpose it as easily. A newsletter is a great supplement but insanely hard to use as the primary content source. An email list is generally considered to have the best ROI if executed well in marketing, which explains why it’s so gruelling at times 😂.

I hope this has been useful to anyone who’s been gearing up to get started and certainly gave me a good chance to reflect on my journey so far - more notes taken on Day One 😉