How Writing on Linkedin for 100 Days Transformed My Career Forever?

Introduction

In 2020, I read a book called The Power of Habit and challenged myself to try something new. As someone who’s an introvert and felt shy about sharing my thoughts, one of the habits I wanted to work on was speaking up more.

I read the book in a few days, and one of the key points it pointed out was that the best way to do something is to tell everyone else about it.

Apparently, the social peer pressure helps. So I decided to write on LinkedIn, a space where nobody really knew who I was.

I made a random challenge to myself that I would write on the platform for 100 days straight. Sure, it was a weird challenge, but I figured it’d at least help with finding a job as an unemployed university student.

It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

Day 1

Pressing post for the first time was a spooky experience. It feels like everyone is going to judge you for saying anything, even though most people are just casually scrolling through their feed.

I made it public to everyone that this would be a 100-day commitment by ending every LinkedIn post with the post number. First one down and 99 more to go.

1 of 100

Day 2 to Day 10—What do you even talk about?

After the first day I regretted the challenge. It’s like forcing yourself to go to the gym when you really don’t want to.

My biggest challenge was that I had 0 idea what to write about. Sure, nobody really knew I made this self-inflicted challenge to myself, but it would hurt my ego to suddenly give up.

I forced myself to come up with something, and I ran with random things that happened to me that day.

Things like getting annoyed waiting in line for the cashier, struggling with math homework, and my life living at home.

I literally had no direction with my content, but I just had to keep going with the challenge.

10 of 100

Day 11 to Day 30 — Cater to the platform

After 10 days of posting, the post button suddenly stops getting scary. It was just hard thinking about a good idea to post about.

I had to catch myself why I cared about the audience reading my content. It felt like if I was getting ignored, then I was doing something wrong.

With 10 days worth of content, I noticed the post about struggling with math did a little bit better than my other posts. I wouldn’t have known it at the time, but having a struggle and trying to overcome it is a relatable story for everyone.

If I wanted to get noticed a little more, I focused my topics on challenges I had in life. Building healthy habits, waking up early, finding a job, and making friends.

Talking about problems is easy, and not all of those posts did well. But it gave me something to write about every day.

Of course, I always felt like I could be doing better.

30 of 100

Day 30 to Day 50—People are following the journey.

After writing for 30 days, I started to see comments from people talking about how they just binged my random posts from every other day.

That gave me the sense that people were interested in the journey, even if they’re not clicking the like button. Giving everyone a clear goal to follow along gave my audience a reason to come back to see what I’m going to write next.

The problem with this was that it made me feel pressured to live up to the expectations to write engaging content. Talking about problems helps, but I noticed some problems were better topics than others.

The most popular topic was about finding a job.

I started to shift content from my daily activities to posting about what the job market has been like for me. Little did I know it would resonate with a lot of people who also struggled with the job market.

It was nice for everyone to have someone they could relate to and voice the struggles of being unemployed.

Suddenly I became known as an aspiring software engineer who was eager to learn more. It was great… until I started to burn out.

50 of 100

Day 51 to Day 80—It wasn’t fun anymore.

Nobody wants to eat the same thing every day. Similarly, talking about the same topics can get boring, especially if nothing new is happening.

I shared stories about how I was struggling with the job market, but that was the end of it. As relatable as it was, I felt like I needed to make it more interesting for myself.

This is backwards from what most content creators will tell you because if something works, don’t fix it. Just farm it.

I didn’t know this was the common content creator mindset, but I didn’t want to be boxed as the job struggle guy, so I talked about all the cool things you could do with software engineering.

I was a computer science major after all, so I thought that instead of talking about problems, I could teach people what I’m learning. Maybe it’d help someone else.

My following grew, and what I didn’t expect was that I was getting reached out to by recruiters. They saw some of my posts and invited me to interview with some really large tech companies.

I will say that marketing your skills makes it easier to find people interested in them. All I needed to do now was to close out the rest of the 100-day challenge.

80 of 100

Day 81 to Day 99—Pressure to keep improving

Every day I felt pressure to make a post that would outperform the last. More people are following the journey; more readers are leaving comments.

It was a result of writing about popular LinkedIn topics and iterating on every post I was writing on.

But the social pressure was intense because it felt like there were so many eyes on my content for the first time. It was the first time anyone saw anything like this on LinkedIn.

After running out of my own ideas, I made the brave decision to look at what other people were writing. I needed their inspiration to think about what I could write about.

It got troublesome. I couldn’t write about the themes other authors addressed on the site, like handling B2B sales or leading an engineering team. So I fell back on what I was experiencing.

Stress, anxiety, and other challenges I was facing in life. I wanted to share experiences that were important with other people again since that’s what I enjoyed the most.

It nearly got me to the finish. But I had no clue how I would top off the 100th day.

99 of 100

Day 100 – Thank you

To everyone who followed me on that trip, I decided the best way to send it off was to thank everyone who went through the experience with me.

From the inner torment of being uneducated about what to write about to improving on every piece, it was a journey most people couldn’t conceive going through.

From what I observed about writing on LinkedIn over 100 days, I discovered that software engineering topics fared incredibly well. The more I touched on certain topics, the more recruiters would point out without even studying my résumé.

Although I’m not in that industry anymore, I could always go back to it if I wanted to find another career as a software developer.

Greetings, Bassam