My Write of Passage
An honest reflection on how I became a Writer
This is the story of how I became a Writer.
It was five weeks of sheer agony. Individually, each week was a personal hell. Yet, when viewed as a whole, I found love in the entire experience.
🌱 Where It All Began
I’ve been following a guy named David Perell for the past year. He is known online as “The Writing Guy,” and for a good reason. David knows his stuff.
He wrote a masterpiece called The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online, which served as my Bible ever since I started writing on my blog last April.
David runs a flagship course called Write of Passage (conveniently abbreviated as WoP), which promises to 2X anyone’s potential through the writing process.
Sounds too good to be true, right? But I believed in it.
is a testament to what the course promises. He started a newsletter called Not Boring after joining Write of Passage’s first-ever cohort.He describes this newsletter as “the most fun way to learn about what’s going on in business.” But what I love most about it is that you can see how he enjoys writing every essay. He introduces playfulness in topics as serious as business, tech, and strategy.
Today, he now has over 215,000 subscribers and is earning around $3 million per year. So imagine this: Packy gets to do what he loves and is making a living out of it at the same time. How awesome is that?
His transformation amazed me, and I yearned for it too. I found myself daydreaming about who I could become after joining Write of Passage.
But then, I checked the price.
A cohort costs $3995, which translates to over ₱220,000.
The average salary in the Philippines is ₱535,200 a year, meaning that a single cohort is over four months’ worth of the average Filipino’s salary.
Our economic situation would never have allowed me to afford the course. Not today. Not next year. Maybe not even in a decade.
But I told myself, “Am I really going to let money get in the way of my dreams of becoming a writer?”
I thought about it, and the answer I have arrived at is a clear no.
I figured there must be another way.
💌 The Email That Changed My Life
A day before the registration deadline, I spent the whole afternoon crafting a cold email, carefully proposing an alternative to paying for the course and thoroughly justifying why I should get in.
After reviewing the email 11 times, I nervously pressed send at 8:18pm.
Two days have passed, and I still haven't gotten a reply.
Did my email fail to send? Did they see it but thought I was demanding too much? I was overthinking more than a guy who just confessed to his crush through Messenger.
I was ready to accept that this was an opportunity out of my reach. “At least I tried,” I consoled myself. But then, I received an email.
It was a reply from Dan Sleeman, the Director of Course Operations. He told me that they read my email and the Write of Passage team would love to support me to join the next cohort.
I couldn’t believe it. I got in.
Part I: Welcome to Write of Passage 🎉
On the 3rd of October, we had our first live session.
Before it started, I was wondering, “Is Write of Passage really that good?” But by the end of that session, I got my confirmation. It is that good.
The energy was roaring from start to finish. The Zoom chat was constantly flooded with funny and insightful comments. David and Co-Founder
were crushing it with the lectures. They combined unconventional wisdom with storytelling, making it impossible for you to not pay attention.You know how you usually get bored just 15 minutes into a school lecture? Well, in that live session, we were already 85 minutes in, and I was still glued to my laptop screen.
I struggled to take notes because it felt like every concept they introduced was a groundbreaking idea. For instance, they taught us how to “write music.” That is, how to write words that both look and sound good.
The premise is simple—vary your sentence lengths to create rhythm—but the way it impacts your writing is powerful.
More than the lessons, however, what stood out to me the most are the people. Over 400 students joined from 41 countries with me being just one of three Filipinos.
I met two people in our first breakout room,
and Samantha Law.Bud was a physical therapist for 22 years, and is now writing about health, well-being, technology, and the intersections between them. Samantha, on the other hand, is a copywriter with a background in psychology.
We had a great chat about why we want to write online, reflecting on what our hearts, minds, and wallets are saying about what we should write about. It was eye-opening to see how everyone had different motivations to write.
To say the least, I had a blast during that live session. But then, the time finally came to start writing.
Part II: Getting It Write ✍🏽
Coming up with a topic is hard.
So to get us started, the WoP team would provide a prompt we could think about each week.
Our essay prompt for the first week was: “Write an essay that answers a question that you frequently ask.”
I thought to myself, “This should be easy. I ask a ton of questions.”
But I was wrong. Terribly wrong.
I totally forgot how indecisive I was. A while back, I spent four whole hours roaming from one store to the next just to buy a single shirt. Why did I think I could decide on a topic so easily?
Thankfully though, we have Idea Gyms. These are 1-hour sessions that pair us up with a partner to brainstorm on possible topics. I attended the first one, and got paired up with
, an executive coach who works with senior leaders and founders.As one could expect from his profession, Amit asked brilliant questions. He provided clarity on what I want to focus on, and helped me step back on opinions which came off as too strong.
Eventually, I decided to write about the idea of a genius, as inspired by the words of Theloneous Monk: “A genius is the one most like himself.”
It’s a topic I was passionate about. I have experiences I could share and I’m genuinely excited about the idea. So writing the first draft should be a piece of cake, right? I was wrong again.
I junked my whole draft 12 hours before my self-imposed publishing date.
The feedback I got from peers and editors helped me realize that my ideas were scattered all over the place. I needed to take a different approach, so I decided to revise my draft with the urgency of the deadline in mind.
I used up a lot of mental (and physical) energy, but in the end, I managed to publish the revised piece—the first of many weekly essays.
Part III: I have to do this all over again? 😣
The Write of Passage Team knows their students very well. Their first advice for Week 2? Make the writing process easy.
Instead of writing thousands of words, they advised us to write 500. Instead of diving headfirst into research, they told us to do zero research and instead write about topics we're already familiar with.
David made the point clear. “Don’t write a half-court, underhanded three-pointer,” he said, referring to essays that have 2,500 words and dozens of jumbled ideas. “Instead, write layups!”
Me: “Yeah, that makes sense!”
Also me:
I could only let out a sigh for myself.
But I did try. It's just that every time I sit down to write, it always felt like I have so much to say and yet nothing to say at the same time.
It’s like being a shaken-up can of Coca-Cola, desperately close to bursting but not having a lid to let the liquid out. It’s frustrating.
This became the theme for me for several weeks, and writing became progressively more challenging each time. This baffled me because I always chose to write about topics I’m naturally interested in.
These are ideas I'm excited to share with the world. So I started wondering, if I'm truly passionate about these topics, why am I struggling to write about them?
Part IV: Death 🥀
By the end of the 4th week, I woke up with more dread than I usually did. I stared at the mirror, and staring back at me were a pair of lifeless eyes with dark circles underneath.
Typically, I’d make my bed, but this time, I left my blanket unfolded and my pillows scattered wherever they landed after I slept. I had my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs, longganisa, and rice, but I didn't eat as much as I normally would.
It took me a while to realize that my life has become messed up, and it is writing that’s making me miserable.
“But how can I possibly hate writing?” I argued with myself. “I’m given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to live my dreams of becoming a writer. I should be grateful, not miserable!”
But no matter how hard I denied the feeling, I needed to accept it was true. I despised writing to my very core.
In the middle of all the chaos inside my head, I heard a faint voice whispering, “Maybe you weren’t cut out to be a writer after all.”
Part V: Rebirth 🌿
After a day had passed, a question came to mind.
If writing was so hard for me, how come I never stopped doing it? If the act of writing was making me miserable, why did I offer whatever is left of me just to type a bunch of words on a page?
Initially, I thought that it’s simply because I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. But that couldn’t be it. The live sessions were recorded and the resources would always be available to me. So what was the true reason?
It took a lot of reflecting, but it finally hit me.
I kept writing because I was never alone through the journey.
Week in and week out, I’d write a lousy draft and submit it to Circle, our community platform, then people would check and provide feedback. I’d always brace myself for criticisms, but once I checked the comments, my eyes would instead light up.
Along with tactical feedback, my fellow writers would say positive things about my writing. When I worked alone, I always thought that my drafts were pointless and uninteresting. But my peers convinced me otherwise.
Seeing that I was doing something right gave me a healthy dose of encouragement. It was empowering, to say the least.
It replaced the pessimistic voice inside my head with a more supportive one, saying “Hey, you see that? You CAN become a good writer after all.”
So I kept writing. Even when it felt difficult. Even when it felt stressful. And even when it felt frustrating.
Then as I entered the final week of the cohort, something began to change.
Part VI: Write for Yourself 💝
Our 5th writing assignment was a curation piece. We were tasked to summarize the work of someone we admire. I wrote about Ali Abdaal, a YouTuber I’ve been following for the past 4 years.
Like usual, I was hesitant to start writing my draft because I knew it would be stressful, but I had to push through one last time in the hopes of ending the cohort on a good note.
On one Tuesday night, two days before the essay deadline, I hopped on a call with
, a friend I met during one of the breakout sessions.Harrison’s essays are always brimming with ideas you never thought of before. For instance, in one of his essays, he wrote about emotional niche-crafting, a way to view your niche as an emotional state rather than a specific topic. I found this to be brilliant because it allows you to explore more than one subject matter while still being specific enough to make your essays coherent.
But what I admire most about Harrison is his passion for writing. He always seems to enjoy the creative process. So I asked him how he does it.
He gave me the following advice: Be selfish when you write.
That is, start by asking yourself what you find most interesting about the topic, and then write about that.
“First and foremost,” he told me, “you have to write for yourself.”
I tried that out for my final essay.
And guess what? When I started writing about what I—and not other people—found interesting, writing felt easier. The words would pour out into the page. I was no longer a bottled up can of Coca-Cola. I was a free-flowing waterfall of wonderful ideas.
For the first time during the whole cohort, I genuinely enjoyed writing.
My Write of Passage 🪷
The course is called Write of Passage for a reason. It’s challenging and intense.
If you’re just starting out with writing, you’re likely to feel overwhelmed, which is exactly what happened to me.
But you know what? Once I finally got past all the struggles—all the challenges and hurdles that every writer must face eventually—I started to understand what writing is all about.
“A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” ― Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades
At the start, I expected Write of Passage to be the online course that would officially turn me into a Writer—one with a capital W. But while WoP transformed my life in many profound ways, it’s not the main reason I became a Writer.
“[You] become a Writer through a commitment to the process… when you earnestly show up to the page and write. And you write because that is what you have to do. A compulsion so primal as breathing—even when you become so consumed by the process you forget to breathe.” —
, Capital “W” WriterI started writing 6 months ago, and early on, I’d consistently write down “I am a writer” in my journal every day for three months. Deep down, however, I knew that I couldn’t lie to myself.
But something transformed in me after those grueling 5 weeks in the cohort. It all happened so suddenly that I never even noticed it until I had time to step back and think about it.
Today, I no longer believe that I could become a Writer. Because the truth is that I already am, regardless of what I or other people think about it.
A fact that is as true as me being alive is the fact that I am a Writer today and for as long as I will live in this world.
This piece became waaay longer than I expected it to be. And it’s definitely an underhanded full-court shot, not a layup. But I poured my heart out into the page, and I’m happy I got to speak my truth.
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My sincerest thank you goes out to
, , , and for helping me shape this essay into what it is now.And thank you to everyone at Write of Passage for forever changing my life for the better.
It was a joy sharing this cohort with you Linart! Thanks for sharing this reflection with us.
Great reflection. I appreciate being quoted!