POSITIVITY | UPLIFT

A One Week Report On the Power Of a Positive Story

I have been pleasantly surprised with the results.

7 min readAug 30, 2022

It’s been one week now since I wrote ‘I Refuse To Write About Negative Things Even Though That Is What Makes Money’, and I have learned a few things in the process.

But before I get into that, I feel like I should provide a bit of a back story to this article.

August has been a bit of a tough month for me. My partner and I came up to Istanbul, Turkey after being in Africa for most of the past 2.5 years. We were excited to arrive but we were doing it on a wish and a prayer.

I won’t get into the details, but let’s just say that money has been tight. Moving from place to place costs money, that’s just the reality of traveling.

To top it off, my Medium stats were looking grim and I was a bit annoyed at the fact that August was looking like the first month that I wasn’t going to grow my income on the platform since I joined in January.

I started questioning my writing and wondering how I could engage people better.

Feeling a bit of financial pressure, I caved a bit and wrote an article about four ways that I make money online. Many people say to write about making money because money sells. Well, it didn’t for me! At least not yet.

I became a bit melancholy with it all and wondered if I even had a future with writing on Medium. I know that the 6-month mark of being in the Medium Partner Program is a bit of a tipping point for writers, at least that is what I have read. Many give up at that point because they start thinking that they are spending far too much time writing, and aren’t being compensated enough for it.

While I love to write and making money surely isn’t the only reason that I am doing this, I do need to focus my efforts on doing things that pay our expenses.

So I do have to be mindful of where I put my energy at times.

I started noticing a trend a while ago about the negative articles that were going viral. They are full of doom and gloom about the world, and people were eating it up.

After traveling for the past 5 years full-time, I have seen, firsthand, my own share of doom and gloom. We have witnessed climate change in action on numerous occasions, and we fed and brought fresh water to a starving village in Africa for 10 weeks, just to name a couple. I get that the world is not full of rainbows and unicorns.

I have seen it with my own two eyes.

I thought to myself, I could write about that. I could show people all of the horrors of the world that are happening. I bet that would make money.

But I realized that I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to go back to the same stories that everyone else was telling. I don’t want to add to the unending burdens that are being placed on society and humans these days.

I don’t want to be part of the dark cloud that is trying to take hold on all of our psyches.

Of course bad things are happening! Of course, they ARE real.

But really, is writing about it and telling everyone about it really helping? What are we accomplishing by posting yet another article about the world's tragedies?

People who sit behind their laptops ‘warning people’, are not solving ONE DAMN THING!

Instead, you could be using the energy that you spend on writing those things, by coming up with ways to solve these problems.

THIS is the POSITIVE outcome that I am after. THIS is what I was trying to get at with my article.

Honestly, I don’t even know how that article came to be. I woke up one morning and I marched to the eating area where we are staying with my laptop in hand. I was in a bit of a mood, and I just sat down and started writing. I didn’t expect that story to come out, it just did.

And it came straight from my heart.

I didn’t know if anyone would read it. Of course, we are told that positivity never takes center stage these days. But in no time at all, the comments and claps started rolling in and I was shocked.

Now, it has nowhere near gone viral, but it is my top earner for August. Plus, it is evergreen content, so I’m sure it will roll around in the interweb for some time to come, getting reads and claps here and there. I don’t expect to get rich off of it, but that isn’t what is important anyways.

What is important is that I have realized that positivity DOES sell! And I have learned that people APPRECIATE reading about positive things. One just has to go through the 61 comments on the article to see that.

So while my post wasn’t meant to necessarily uplift or encourage others, the result is that it did. Which is the most amazing part of all of this. It has made me realize that THIS is what we ALL need! We are craving good stories, we are tired of the crap that is being fed to us by the news and the fearmongers.

I’m not asking anyone to turn their head away from the problems of the world, but let’s start coming up with solutions. Talk to your friends and neighbors, and come together to brainstorm. Figure out what it is that YOU can do to make a difference in the world.

Maybe what you can do is write to spread positivity.
Maybe you have an opportunity to help a school in a developing nation get school books like my friend Audrey in Canada does for children in Uganda.
Maybe you have a medical background and you can treat underprivileged people in a poor community in some place that needs it.
Maybe you are a dentist and you want to volunteer to do free dental work for one week a year to those who can’t afford it.
Maybe you can simply volunteer for a day a week at your local soup kitchen.
Maybe you can bring water to the homeless people nearest to your neighborhood.
Maybe you can go help plant some trees.

There are so many ways that we can go out into the world to make a difference! We all just need to decide how we want to do it, and then get at it.

Focusing on the bad is literally getting us nowhere, and fast!

When we do things to help others, we feel good. Plain and simple. That vibration of feeling good will ripple out to others. They will want to know why you feel good. When they find out how you did it, then they will do it as well.

This is how we will make a change in the world! This is how we can make a difference!

To all of you who have commented and clapped on my story, I thank you. Not only did I uplift you, but you have also uplifted me. There is power here, we just need to harness it.

Some of you may have noticed that while I monetized my initial post, I’ve chosen not to monetize this one. I’m doing that because I am going to tag all of the people that commented on the post (even the negative ones) and I don’t want anyone thinking that I wrote this just to make money.

I didn’t, I wrote it to spread a message.

I believe in a better world and I know that we can make it that way together!

I appreciate you all!

Much love,

xo Jill

Thanks to these commenters:

Hi there, we are 2 Canadians, Jill and Chris from Artistic Voyages. We have been nomadic since 2017 living in numerous different countries, and experiencing the life and diversity of our planet on the ground and firsthand. We paint FREE murals in exchange for accommodation.

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POSITIVITY | UPLIFT

A One Week Report On the Power Of a Positive Story

I have been pleasantly surprised with the results.

Written by Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages

Responses (31)