I wrote 30 essays in 30 days
Here are the results (full breakdown):
I posted 30 long form pieces in 30 days on Twitter and Substack as a public experiment and challenge. Some very interesting things happened.
Nobody really read the first 17 pieces. But on day 18, I went viral.
After that, everything snowballed. In the first 17 days, I got a combined 158K impressions on Twitter. But from Day 18 to 30, I got over 3,7M views.
Today, I’ll share behind the scenes of this experiment. The numbers, the flatlines, and what a month of publishing into silence actually built.
If you want to start from Day 1, click here to read the first essay.
I published the first article of this challenge to an X account with just shy of 20k followers. But my account hadn’t posted for the last 6 months. Which meant the account was... basically dead.
In fact, six months of silence is long enough for the algorithm to forget you exist, and long enough for the 20k thousand people who followed me at some point in their lives to quietly get on with those lives.
So when I say the first eighteen articles did nothing, understand that I mean it structurally. They landed in a room where nobody was standing.
Then the nineteenth popped off, and every single number after that followed. Let me give you the numbers first, because they’re what you came for, and then I’ll tell you what actually happened underneath them.
The Twitter numbers
Followers
Followers, day 1: 20,000 (dead account, six months without a post)
Followers, day 30: 25,100
Eyeballs
Total impressions across 30 days: 3,8 million
Combined views, articles 1 through 17: 158,000 views
Views on the one article that broke: 217,000 views
Best performer: 768,000 views (read article)
Worst performer: 2,700 views (read article)
Engagement
Replies: 324
Likes: 8,100
Retweets: 1,600
Shares: 3,500
Bookmarks: 19,700 (!)
I also posted every single article as a newsletter on my Substack (on an entirely fresh account). I got some pretty interesting results there too.
One note before we dive into those numbers specifically.
I did import my existing 30,000 subscriber email list onto Substack, so the numbers below reflect purely what new traffic came with that list excluded.
Substack Newsletter
Subscribers, day 1: zero subscribers
Subscribers, day 30: 1,089 new subs
Average open rate: 44.31%
Highest: 57.58%
Lowest: 39.20%
Money
Revenue directly attributable to the challenge: close to nothing.
A product plug here and there, but nothing serious. I was building the audience and the archive, and I let the monetization sit this one out.
On the revenue side, this was an entirely deliberate choice and I’d do it again, no doubts. I’ll share more about why further down.
Overall, I find the Twitter results to be satisfying, with Substack underperforming slightly compared to my expectations.
Seventeen essays, still no results
Here is the part of this experiment that I think most of you could learn from. For the first 17 days, this challenge looked like a spectacular waste of an otherwise pretty great month.
I was sitting down every single morning for hours, writing a unique piece from scratch, editing it 5-10 times, publishing it, and then sitting in utter despair watching it die in front of an audience of double digits.
Seventeen straight days of flatline.
What I had initially was a mess. Some ideas. Some half-drafts. Some tweets I’d written that were secretly essays and had been waiting years for me to notice. A few finished pieces. Every one of them still needed a morning of real work to become something I’d put my name on, and thirty days is thirty mornings, and there is no version of this where you get to coast.
I won’t lie to you. On day twelve I did run the math on quitting three times. The case for doing so was strong. The data said my work had no real audience, my account was clearly beyond saving, and I had both products to build and clients to serve (who actually paid me).
Every reason to stop was true.
For those seventeen days I was adding to a pile that nobody was looking at, and I kept going for the stupidest possible reason available, which is that I had told everyone here on Twitter that I would do it.
Then the eighteenth article landed and the snowball (finally) started rolling. How I Became The Most Disciplined Unproductive Person Alive did numbers the previous seventeen had not done combined. 217,000 impressions to be exact.
And here’s the part I certainly did not expect and still find slightly unfair: the next one performed even better than the one before it, and the one after that better again. The numbers stopped being a series of independent events and started being a slope that the snowball could finally roll down on.
What changed is that there were finally seventeen articles standing behind article 18. That’s the lesson in itself, and it’s by far the least romantic thing I’ve ever written:
The nineteenth article was simply the compounding effect kicking in.
And as much as I hate to say it (I know, I hate clichés too)...
Consistency was the key.
Three things this experiment taught me
The first is that the metrics lag the skill by weeks. My writing on day eighteen was dramatically better than my writing on day two, and there was no number anywhere on my screen that reflected it, because the pile was getting better in a room where nobody had arrived to notice.
If I had optimized for vanity metrics and trusted the analytics dashboard, I would have quit while I was still improving. That’s the most common trap, and it’s the reason most people stop at exactly the moment they become worth reading.
The second is that a daily deadline kills the polish loop. I credit this one to @vitaliidodonov who taught me that constraints produce better outcomes.
I’ve spent most of my life stuck in polish-to-paralysis, doing one more pass on a piece that was finished three passes ago, telling myself it was craft.
Publishing at a fixed hour every day removes that option entirely. You find out fast that the version you were about to sand down was already the good one, and the pieces that traveled furthest in this challenge were written under a deadline so tight I had no time left to make them safe.
The third one goes a little deeper. Eighteen days of publishing into a silent room is the only honest test of whether you’d do the work without the reward, and I got a pretty clean answer. I would. That sounds like a small thing until you have never actually been tested on it, and until then, everything you believe about your own discipline is a rumor.
The thing I didn’t really plan for at all
Thirty essays is a body of work.
That sentence looks obvious written down now, but it did not occur to me once while I was writing these essays. I actually went into this to grow my account. I came out of it with intellectual infrastructure, which is the only phrase that does it justice, and which I’ll write a proper piece about soon.
Everything in this pile of articles is now raw material for something else.
Every essay in the pile is four threads, every idea is ten tweets, and every framework in there is an email sequence, a video script, a chapter, or a product spine.
And the part that matters more than any of that: I’m actually proud of it.
I don’t say that about most things I’ve shipped. Thirty pieces of writing exist now that carry what I actually think, and they will still be there in five years, ten years, or even twenty years, working for me, while the tweets I wrote this morning have already been incinerated by the 2 second attention span spell we’re all somehow trapped under.
The account grew, sure.
But the intellectual infrastructure is the real asset.
How to run your own experiment
Pick a unit a stranger could count. “Thirty articles in thirty days” is auditable by anyone with eyes. “Write more this year” has an exit the size of a football field. Choose something you could publicly fail at.
Budget for the flatline before you start. This is the one that matters. Decide, today, in writing, what you will do on the day the numbers tell you to quit, because that day is coming and it will arrive with an excellent argument. Mine was day twelve. Yours will be somewhere in the first three weeks, and the plan cannot be “feel motivated.”
Ship on a fixed clock. Set the hour. When the hour arrives, the piece goes out in the state it’s in. This is where the polish loop dies and where your real voice starts showing up, because a rushed writer is an honest one.
Post the score, especially when it’s embarrassing. Day 14 of 30, twelve views, still here. That post is worth more to the people watching than any of the work sitting on top of it, and it welds the exit shut.
Treat every piece as inventory. You are not publishing an article. You are adding to a pile that you will mine for the next two years. This reframe alone makes the silent weeks survivable.
Why you should make it a public challenge
Let’s also address the elephant in the room now that we’re at it.
Why put yourself at risk of posting this as a public experiment, only to fail in front of everyone? It’s a good point really. Heck, there is even real research to back up that I technically should have kept my mouth shut with all this.
Peter Gollwitzer, a professor and psychologist at NYU ran a set of studies on what happens when people announce their goals, and the finding was ugly: participants who told others about a goal and got acknowledged for it worked less on it afterwards. Saying it out loud gave them a taste of the feeling they were chasing, and once the feeling arrived, the hunger left.
Derek Sivers built a whole TED talk on this. The advice that came out of the research is simple: keep your goals to yourself.
I believe that research. I’ve lived it. I have announced things at dinner parties and felt the applause land in my chest and never touched the thing again, and if you’re honest, so have you. There’s a specific flavor of person we’ve all met who has been “working on a book” for six years and has never been happier.
So the objection stands, and it deserves a real answer.
Here it is. Gollwitzer’s participants announced an identity. They said some version of “I’m going to be a writer,” and the room said “wow, a writer,” and the transaction completed on the spot. The applause paid out on announcement. Nothing was owed.
What I did was announce a count.
All 30 articles, in order
I’m writing 30 articles in 30 days just to see what the f*ck happens
Products die, operators compound, so the thing worth documenting is the person behind the work, not the revenue behind the screenshots.
You think you want to be an entrepreneur... but you don’t
You haven’t started because your identity is quietly protecting you, and the fix is becoming the entrepreneur before the business exists.
Everything you want sits behind a wall of boredom, and you’ve spent decades training the exact reflex that makes you flinch away from it.
Everyone saying ‘information is cheap now’ is about to look very stupid
AI killed searchable information, never earned knowledge, and the stuff that was never written down just became the scarcest asset on the internet.
Why no one will read this article
It was never an attention crisis, it’s a thinking crisis, and AI made the appearance of understanding so cheap you can’t feel the difference from the inside.
You don’t need a unique idea to get rich
You don’t need a unicorn, you need a proven model and someone two steps ahead to reverse-engineer, then you become the most unique version of you running it.
In low-tax cities you don’t save money, you pay a different tax levied on your identity, collected in status purchases, compounding into a life you never actually chose.
Success is a solvable equation
Success is Ambition times Identity times Leverage times Creation, and because it multiplies, any single variable at zero zeroes the whole thing, so find your zero.
The guru model freezes you inside the version of yourself that made the sale, so being known for how you think is the only position that can’t be replaced.
The Art of Setting Brute Force Goals
Motivation isn’t found, it’s generated, by a goal with an emotional anchor and a real deadline, and once you have both, motivation becomes irrelevant.
Everything you’re building will leave you empty (unless you fix this one thing)
Achievement is a spike that resets to zero, and without an anchor in something larger than yourself, every goal you hit leaves you emptier than the last.
Your focus isn’t broken, it’s being stolen by design, and you can’t out-willpower an environment built by thousands of engineers, so redesign the environment instead.
Everybody is winging it (and why that’s the best news you’ll ever get)
Everyone above you is improvising and hiding it, the gap you read as qualification is mostly distance and reps, and movement was the qualification all along.
You’re not free. You just escaped
Freedom is a three-level climb from yourself to your people to strangers, level two carries a deadline you don’t control, and the climb is meaningless if you treat the present as a tax on the future.
My country pays $1,000/m to attend University (I still didn’t go)
The check isn’t free, because money that arrives whether you produced anything or not teaches you the wrong thing during the exact years your identity sets.
Life’s a video game. Here are the 10 cheat codes you need to use:
The cheat codes are public and always have been, and what almost nobody can do is run all ten at once, because the full stack requires becoming a different person.
Money is a battery, not a destination, unconverted money is dead money, and the actual reward of building anything is the moments you create for the people who shaped you.
How I became the most disciplined unproductive person alive
I was optimizing the container and ignoring the contents, and optimization without direction is just spinning in place, efficiently and impressively and nowhere.
Anxiety is the distance between your mind and your body, so stop isolating presence into a twenty-minute session and turn every mundane moment of the day into a rep.
Your biggest disadvantage was always your biggest advantage
The head start is real and it hands you a ceiling and a fear of falling, while having nothing forges the one thing that can’t be bought, and you were told it’s what’s holding you back.
Who Do You Think You Are? (The European War on Ambition)
The voice telling you to stay small isn’t yours, it’s borrowed, installed by people protecting you with the only tool they had, and a borrowed ceiling is the easiest kind to walk through.
Money does buy happiness (but not in the way you think)
Happiness is the absence of worry and money is a deletion tool, but only if you denominate it in freedom instead of identity, and every euro becomes a key or a mirror.
Your gut is a living model trained on every rep of your own life, running faster than language, and you’ve spent twenty years being taught to overrule it for a stranger’s frozen guess.
How to Be Responsibly Reckless
You’re running two clocks at once, one that assumes you live to a hundred and one that assumes you don’t, so be ruthlessly patient with money and ruthlessly impatient with time.
The #1 skill nobody talks about (I learned it at 10 from video games)
A language isn’t a skill, it’s an operating system you run your reality on, and learning a second one is the same as discovering there’s more than one way to be a person.
Everyone should build a High-Profit One-Person Empire™
Bigger was never the answer, so build a business small enough to run alone, keep 95% of what comes in, automate 95% of the work, and treat the creator as the asset.
There’s one model that not even Claude Mythos can beat
The frontier model has no stake in your life, can’t read what was never written down, and hands you the median answer, so on decisions that are actually yours, your gut still wins.
Disappear for 90 days (The Ghost Protocol)
You’ve known what to do for years, the bottleneck is that you keep trying to change in front of an audience that votes for the old you daily, so leave the room and come back.
Steal the hours nobody owns (Loopholing)
Your calendar is full of claimed blocks and unclaimed seams, and loopholing is reclaiming the in-between time of a schedule you can’t change, because stolen minutes outwork free hours.
This article :)
What the pile is worth today
Thirty articles at roughly two thousand words each is sixty thousand words, produced in a month, by a man whose account had been dead for half a year.
The nineteen thousand ghosts came back. Some of them, anyway, and enough of them that the room has a hum in it again for the first time since last year. And if you’re sitting there with a dead account (or no account at all), thinking your situation is worse than mine was, I’d gently point out that a dead account and a new account are the same account. Both are rooms with nobody in them. Both fill the same way, which is one piece at a time, for longer than feels reasonable.
You are going to publish into silence if you do this too. That’s the job, and it stays the job for longer than anyone tells you, and the only people who ever get out of that room are the ones still writing on day nineteen.
Build your body of work.
Your future will thank you.
- Pascal
P.S.
For thirty days this ran daily, and daily was the right speed for a challenge like this. It’s the wrong speed for a newsletter though.
From here, Becoming goes out a few times a week.
Here’s what you’re subscribing to. Becoming is my letter on the inner game of building a one-person business. Ambition, identity, money, and the strange work of becoming someone you don’t want to escape from. It’s the operator’s side of the story, which is the side almost nobody writes about, because the build-in-public genre documents the product and ignores the person building it, and I believe the person is the only asset that compounds.
A few times a week, you get:
The essays. Very long, very honest, and riddled with ideas that are built useful rather than clever. The 30 above are a fair sample of what to expect when you join.
The systems underneath them. The frameworks, mental models and ideas I actually use, written up properly rather than teased or paywalled.
It’s free.
And it will continue to be so for now.
P.P.S.
If you’re still here, just know you’re one of the real ones. You’d be surprised how many people can’t even finish a long form piece of content that’s just half of what this is.
So... to thank you for your dedication, I have a special gift for you.
I compiled all the 30 articles into a database, with exact data points (engagements, impressions, open rate e.g.) on each of them + created a CustomGPT so you can chat with that exact data yourself.
This is my own personal tool to look at not only what articles performed better than others, but WHY they performed. Or said in other words, a shortcut to future virality based on real data.
You could ask things like:
What did the breakout article do that the others didn’t?
Why did the worst performing article fail so bad?
What can I learn from these 5x articles?
Or whatever you wanna ask lol.
If you want access to the full case study + full dataset + CustomGPT to analyze this experiment by yourself, just reply “LFG” to this email right now and I’ll personally send you the link to grab this for free. No strings attached :)
Things I work on outside this, in case any of them are useful:
@iampascio on Twitter, my profile where I post my experiments and numbers
@xgrowthpascal on Twitter, where I’m going from 0 to 10k followers in 3 months
@creatorpascal on Twitter, my personal brand where I share essays just like this one (currently doing 30 essays in 30 days. This is day 30).
Thanks for reading Becoming!
Becoming is my letter on the inner game of building a one-person empire. Ambition, identity, money & the strange work of becoming someone you don’t want to escape from. I send one to two editions a week, each focusing on actionable implementable steps that you can take + the philosophy behind why I do what I do.
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Great piece. I enjoyed the candor and your reflections on day 17. Cool little experiment
Fantastic experiment and summary article. Thank you for sharing. Some serious food for thought here.