Your lips to God’s ears. Every person reading your article would love to be a big fish in the Medium pond of 230,000 writers.

While I agree with your premise that we writers need to learn patience, humility, and how to recognize what the reader wants, there are many roads to success.

People like Nicolas Cole became huge from writing on Quora and Medium, as big publications republished his work on their platforms and he started his own agency.

Other big fish on Medium have created a lucrative career here just from being social media geniuses.

And Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book, David and Goliath, which quotes scientific research indicating that some of our best and brightest get overwhelmed and depressed by competing at top universities. They end up giving up on their dreams, and choosing an easier career path.

But the studies show that those students who went to smaller, less competitive schools— and became big fish in their little pond — turned out to be more successful in their careers than 90–95% of the graduates from the most prestigious schools.