Eight years of Grammarly, 24.8 million words later

Got an email from Grammarly recently.

I think Grammarly has one of the best nurture programmes in the industry. The weekly writing reports are genuinely fun to read. 💚

And I also can't believe I've already been using Grammarly for eight years.

Since June 2018, Grammarly has analysed 24.8 million words for me. To caveat, not all are mine, since I did do some editing.

I dug up an old email from September 2019. Back then, the number was 2.1 million.

Seeing the two emails side by side was surreal. And 24 million words is a difficult number to imagine. I started wondering where all those words had come from.

Becoming a writer

Nearly ten years ago, I wanted to make a living from writing.

At the time, this felt like a terrible financial decision. I took a substantial pay cut. I remember earning what was effectively intern-level pay while many people around me were moving forward in more conventional ways. Some people thought it was a mistake.

But I was happy with my job and wanted to make it work. I believed my income would eventually grow as long as I kept sharpening and expanding my skills.

I would spend hours wrestling with the craft: researching, interviewing, transcribing (ugh!), drafting, editing, and rewriting. I enjoyed the process as much as I could, which helped with the initial stress of learning, producing, and delivering. I just wanted to become better.

I kept practising...

Then, ChatGPT disrupted the content creation industry.

"Don't follow your dreams, follow your tools"

Recently, I watched a video by Hank Green called "Don't Follow Your Dreams, Follow Your Tools."

His argument is that dreams can ironically become limiting. We could become too attached to a specific destination, expend energy and miss opportunities that don't resemble what we originally imagined.

Instead, he suggests paying attention to our toolkit: innate interests, skills, values, relationships, and experiences, then asking what can be built from them.

Well, my dream did get me started. Without it, I probably would never have taken the pay cut, accepted the uncertainty, or spent so much time at work.

But I do agree with Hank. My destination changed, but the tool remained. Writing productively kept leading me somewhere helpful.

A decade building my life around words

I did not end up where I thought I would.

I wanted to be a writer.

Writing then led me to content creation, learning to write, edit, and produce for different formats, including infographics and “scrollytelling”, and eventually, writing for search engine optimisation.

Search led me to websites and user behaviour, which then led me to study up lead generation and analytics.

Along the way, writing also gave me opportunities to learn across PR and communications, tech and startups, email marketing, conversion, business operations, product marketing, and so on.

I was just following the thread in front of me.

Following the threads of time and effort

Over the past two years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about dance.

Dance (and music) is easy to identify as something I love. I look forward to my sessions. I can feel its place in my life.

I also know I’ve always loved to write.

For a long time, writing was how I learned. If I wanted to understand something, I wrote about it.

Eventually, writing became work, and I was proud and happy about that. But there were also periods when I stopped thinking about writing as a craft and started thinking about it professionally, as a deliverable. At times, I felt like a vending machine, paid to produce on demand, and I burnt out for a while.

Still, I believe the mark of a professional is the ability to consistently produce high-quality, useful work on demand.

When I first started, it could take me hours just to come up with three acceptable angles and headlines. Over time, through experience and thanks to tools like ChatGPT, I gradually got past that plateau.

I’d say I only truly learned to ideate and produce reliably on demand about two years ago.

Looking back, I was lucky enough to be paid to write for a living, and to live out that dream.

The Grammarly email reminded me that a younger version of myself took a risk on writing.

And somehow, all these years later, that thread is still running through my life (such as writing this blog).

As for dance and movement, perhaps I will follow its threads too. We'll see where it goes.

Thanks, Grammarly. 24 million words later, I suppose the evidence is difficult to argue with.

I guess I really did want to be a writer.