I recently took a trip back to the community college I attended before transferring into the four-year college I currently attend, and while I was there I had a conversation with one of my former English teachers that made me remember why I write for Odyssey. We never actually talked in depth about Odyssey or anything like that during our conversation, mostly we just geeked out about English courses and essays, but even so, I realized that I had let Odyssey consume me, and not in the right way.

I had been a creator for six months and a Contributing Editor for two months at most when I was promoted to Editor-in-Chief for my school's Odyssey community, and somewhere during my integration as our team’s new leader I got swallowed up by metrics and Monday Morning Debrief emails and forgot the real reason I write for Odyssey: because I like writing and feel my voice and the things I have to say are important.

If you write for Odyssey, and especially if you are a Contributing Editor or Editor-in-Chief, I implore you to always remember the real reason you write for Odyssey, the reason you decided to become a creator in the first place. Your reason might now be the same as mine, but your number one reason that you write for Odyssey probably isn’t just to get page views—a mindset I was consumed by over the past several months. For you, writing for Odyssey might just be fun, or you could be doing it because it’s work experience in the field you want to go into, or because it will look good on a resume and will keep you creative. Whatever the reason, remember to look beyond your page views.

Now, this is where I run the risk of sounding hypocritical, because I am absolutely not saying that you should just stop sharing your articles and engaging in a social networking plan. No, you should absolutely continue to do those things, but what you shouldn’t do is let the desire to have an article do well cloud your creative voice.

Maybe you’ve had a couple relatively popular articles like I have, and if so you’ve probably noticed a theme. Yup, lists do really well—surprise surprise—and so do controversial articles, response articles, and articles regarding current pop culture trends and college life. It’s really easy to try and solve the equation of a popular article in an attempt for success. “A+B=C, and C did really well as an article,” you’ll find yourself saying. “If I can just write all my articles like C, then I’ll get lots of pageviews,” you’ll say. You might be really successful with this tactic, no one can say for sure, but what I can tell you is that you’ll kill your creativity by forcing it to fit into a box.

Yes, it’s fun to write a couple of articles that you know are surefire successes, but after a while your creativity is going to call you to create something really funky and out there, something that does not fit into your equation. If all you’ve been doing is writing those “A+B=C” articles you’re not going to know what to do with this crazy idea you just got.

Particularly if you’re an Editor-in-Chief you’re probably familiar with a mantra that you spew at your creators every week that goes something like, “Don’t let your article die with one share! You have important things to say and I hate to see your articles get so few page views, so make sure you share your article in X, Y, and Z so your voice can be heard!” It’s important to realize that this is more than just a way to encourage creators to share content—we are all creators and we all have important things to say, and we should all want to share our articles because we think our voices benefit the world, not just because we want page views.

Talking with my former English professor made me realize that all the essays I had written at community college, and most of my early Odyssey articles, were all about things that I really deeply cared about—things I thought were important for me to write about, not just because they were important topics, but because my specific voice was also important.

Keep writing and sharing your articles; share them on your Facebook page three times a week or more and spread them in all the Facebook pages and groups you can find. Put them on Twitter and Pinterest and Instagram and every social media you can get your hands on. Write articles that are important to you, and learn how to shape those funky ideas into articles with some semblance of success—I mean, the whole point of writing them is so people will read them—but please, don’t write articles just for page views, your voice is worth so much more than that.