This month of September, I'll have made at least $700 on Medium.

I could tell you all sorts of ways I was able to get to this point and make this much in my six months on Medium, as if I were giving you cheat codes to the fountain of youth.

The truth is, though, that I don't know shit. The biggest factor in how much I made is luck.

Medium is a petri dish, textbook experiment of the false promise of the American dream. While some people get lucky and "make it" from rags to riches, the majority of others don't, and have to survive with the same if not slightly better circumstances they had when they started. On Medium, even if one person makes $1000, there are probably 1000 more people that make less than $5. The gig economy world has only exacerbated that inequality.

Yes, I consume as many articles about how to make money on Medium as the rest of you do. I did publish every day for a while, and wrote a lot, diversified in topics that I don't normally write in. Sometimes on weekends, Medium is my job, and I grow as frustrated as you do when an article doesn't get curated or my stats are stagnating on a certain day.

I don't take my failures and shortcomings on the platform personally. I don't even know if I can realistically call not getting curated or barely getting any views for an article a shortcoming because I wrote the article in the first place, and the process was God's gift in rewarding me. I'm much better off in my day-to-day life writing about my life, culture, faith, politics, and interests than not doing so.

Writing is that something I look forward to every week that allows me to put my life into perspective and gain awareness and insight into my job, experiences, faith, and relationships.

And so I don't take my successes personally, either. I have gotten published in OneZero three times, and that's no credit to my aptitude or creativity as a writer. The truth is I've read many other articles, particularly from friends on the platform like Erik Brown, that probably deserve to be published in Medium publications like OneZero better than I do.

The truth is that the first article I got published on OneZero was a huge stroke of luck, too. I wrote an article about electric scooter culture in American cities, and my own experience getting injured on one. OneZero wasn't even the primary publication that I thought would take the article. I thought Elemental would be the much better fit, and I submitted to OneZero just for the heck of it.

And there it stood in my drafts folder on Medium, two and a half weeks later. Neither Elemental nor OneZero had written back to me about my submission. I posted my other articles in that time in Medium Facebook groups that provided me with community and support for my writing. I decided to give up on the article and submit it to another local publication, just glad that I tried, when a day later, it still wasn't published, and I received an e-mail in my inbox.

It was a OneZero editor reaching out to tell me they wanted to feature the article on the publication and give me a $250 guarantee. Words couldn't describe how excited I got when I saw the e-mail.

But I couldn't have done it without my community. I couldn't have done it without readers. And the fact that the editor got to the article just before I was going to publish it somewhere else reiterates my starting point: I got lucky.

Maybe you can say I was patient, but I wasn't. I was just about to give the article away and hope it did well enough on its own. And because of my ongoing relationship with the editor, I have been able to exchange pitches and get two more articles into the publication.

I'm lucky too because I am not a tech writer by any stretch of the imagination. I love writing about relationships. I love writing about my Christian faith, and can probably come off as one of those Bible freaks in my articles that a lot of people have aversions to. I love writing about education and my city of Baltimore, and how people in a city are supposed to live together.

But I don't like writing about technology, and I thought the article about electric scooters was only loosely about technology. I made money and gained more successful on Medium just through that one factor: luck.

I didn't want to engage in the articles of "I Made Money On Medium By Doing X," yet here I am doing the same thing everyone else was doing. I was inspired and motivated by two prominent Medium writers and their alternative takes on success. Zulie Rane describes the one element people leave out when they're selling guides on how to gain success: luck.

Nobody wants to hear you got lucky, because that means they might not get lucky when they try to copy your success. Nobody wants to tell you they were lucky in the first place, because they won't be able to sell you their success.

That quote in itself changed my perspective going into so many of these articles on making money on Medium, as well as my view on success itself. What completely helped turn the tide for me writing this piece was a piece of Kitty Hannah Eden, that the many articles selling and advertising how to achieve success manipulate the currency of hope. For the audience articles like the one I'm writing, it's about greed, "cult of me, in short. Me, the product; me, the brand; me, the life advertising campaign for self-made success." And that cult of peddling ourselves as businesses and products leaves out the fact that we need community, and we need each other to simply survive as a social species.

So I don't want to sell you anything or teach you the magic hacks to breaking Medium or any other social media website. What you need is luck, and what you need is other people and a community to get you encouraged in the times you feel like giving up.

Luck is something that we can influence, but not control. Yes, the usual advice like "write everyday" is instrumental to tilting that luck in a way that gives us hope, but my favorite quote is "a life is what happens when you're waiting for the moments that never come," from Lester Freamon in "The Wire".

At some level, you just have to accept that what you deem success may never come. As much as I value Medium and the community it has graciously given me, Medium isn't my life. I'm a full-time Baltimore City teacher that spends over 60 hours a week between being in the school, teaching, lesson planning, and grading. I'm a Christian that believes, deep down, that things will never be perfect in this life, but the next one. I cherish spending time with my friends, family, co-workers, and kids so much that I can never see Medium as the end-all-be-all.

So luck may come. It might not come. I'm not bragging when it has for me, and I didn't complain when it didn't because life is much more important to me than Medium. And so I urge you to focus on life while you're waiting for the things that may never come.