Great article — but I would argue it depends on your quantifiable measurement of success. I enjoy works by most of the writers that you have highlighted, but that doesn’t necessarily make them successful writers — in some cases they are very prolific, in other cases they have a huge following, in some cases they earn lots of money — but writing, like all art, is subjective. Who is better, Doug Hyde or Vincent Van Gogh? You don’t have to answer that… it’s a trick question.

An alternative story of success is the writer on Medium who was too terrified to put a piece of poetry into the public arena, until the day they did — and they day someone else read it and clapped. The alternative success story is that writer who wrote something so touching that they altered someone’s life or way of thinking. The alternative success story is that someone who against the odds made a friend here from the other side of the political spectrum and made the world a slightly better place. The alternative success story is the writer who puts something on here that changes the course of history with its insight. Those are different kinds of writers who don’t meet this model of success.

Advice on how to succeed at Medium is almost exclusively focussed on how to get more people to read your work, how to write more work, and how to monetise it. I’d argue that success can theoretically come in all shapes and flavours — and people should seek to define their own base line of success rather than apply an arbitrary standard that often demoralises the remaining 99%.