A modern day retelling of the famous Aesop’s fable

One fine afternoon, when the hare and the tortoise were resting under a tree, the hare made a claim that he is a better writer than the tortoise. The tortoise, always very calm and composed, was not agitated — but very politely refused to agree. To prove his mettle, the hare challenged the tortoise and both agreed to undertake a 60 day writing challenge on Medium.

The rules of the race were pretty simple. They both would write for sixty days, and at the end of this period — the one with more followers, more reads and higher earnings would be designated the better writer.

The race for the writing supremacy started, and as expected — the hare made a huge head start. He started writing 5 articles per day. When he would be out of ideas, he would copy stuff from other websites and just reword to keep the content coming. To gain more followers, he used the “Follow-for-follow” method. All the accounts that had mentioned “100% follow back within 30 minutes” in their Medium account bio, were followed by the hare. As a result, the hare achieved 100 followers within 3 days and was able to apply for Medium Partner program. Soon he published, “How to gain 100 followers within 3 days?” — which got him even more views and money.

On the contrary, the tortoise was very methodical in his approach. He would sit down peacefully to write an article, often go to a library at times, and was focused on creating everlasting quality content. Even if he was not able to post content daily, he was confident of his approach. If he was out of ideas, he would read other writers on Medium and would try to gain meaningful insights and inspiration from the same.

Rather than following accounts for follow back, he followed accounts of some of the leading world leaders, thinkers and top writers including Barack Obama, Tim Denning, Jeff Jarvis, Ayodeji Awosika, Zulie Rane and many other budding superstars including Yana Bostongirl, Matthew Royse, Kristina God, Destiny Femi, Lipika, Niharikaa Kaur Sodhi. While the tortoise was trying to write articles on his own, he was also gaining a lot of insight by reading quality stuff from such wonderful, highly intellectual writers.

As the 30 day mark approached, the hare had written more than 60 articles, earned a lot of money on Medium, and also published an article, “Here is how much I earned on Medium this month 😄”. As expected, this article got him more views and hence more money. On the contrary, the tortoise was nowhere close to the 100 followers mark. His articles were very thoughtful and impressive, but were yet to gain the traction they deserve.

When the hare looked back at the tortoise’s Medium profile, he laughed at him, that he was way ahead of the tortoise in the race. The tortoise had yet not applied for Medium Partner Program. The hare thought even if he does not do anything for the next 30 days, the tortoise cannot beat him. Hence the hare decided to go on a vacation. He had already received the earnings from previous month in his Stripe account, and had enough money to spend.

The tortoise on the other hand, completely unaware of what the hare was doing, was always focused on his process — aimed at creating quality content, solving readers problems and spreading positive vibes. To all the readers who would comment on his article, he would respond to all of them, and value their feedback. Although far behind the hare, he soon developed a loyal readership. His first reader was Maria Iliffe-Wood and the readership soon included some of the best readers including Pierre. Autistic & proud., Denis Gorbunov, Dian Sage, Trisha Faye, Sarah Crookall, Janet Goh, Bruce Coulter, Alain Polo, Marta Henriques and many more, who continued to provide valuable feedback to the tortoise. The tortoise was always very grateful to each and every comment on his article. On the contrary, the hare had never bothered to thank any of his reader or take any of their feedback into consideration.

The tortoise kept writing, exploring different sides of his writing, and became a much better writer. He realized it is his philosophical articles that are appreciated more by the readers, and he wrote more of the same. His reads, followers and views kept on increasing. Some of his articles connected very well with the readers. As it happened one day, the tortoise got the top writer tag from Medium. Many Medium publications appreciated his work and approached him to write and edit for their publications. Not only did he cross the 100 followers mark, but in fact went much ahead. A few days ago, the tortoise just crossed 1000 follower mark, and is very grateful to his readers. Although he has not yet had any viral article, he is deeply content with what he has achieved so far.

When it was 5 days to the finishing line, the hare came back. He was shocked to see that not only the tortoise had crossed him, but was way way ahead in the race. As far as his account was concerned, all the “100% follow for follow” accounts, were supposedly operated by automated bots and Medium had decided to shut them down (and rightly so). All his duplicate content had been rightly removed from Medium. The hare tried all the tricks in the book to gain more views, even including click bait headlines with no content, but he could not reach where the tortoise was.

Finally, the 60th day mark came and the results were obvious. All the tortoises were way ahead of all the hares in the race.

Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine, got to know about this competition on Medium and himself appreciated the tortoise for staying true to what Medium is — “i.e. enlightening readers through original quality content and aimed at spreading positive vibes only”. He and Medium Staff decided the results of this competition should be shared with everyone, and subsequently displayed this as a “Staff Pick”.

As far as the competition was concerned, the winner was very clear, and the hare was dejected to see all of this.

The hare then went to the tortoise and asked him, “When you knew that you were way ahead in the race, why did you not stop?”.

The Silent Monk smiled and replied, “When I started writing, I only wanted to be better than you. But I soon realized, writing is all about being a better version of oneself — and that race with oneself should never stop.”

The hare understood what he was lacking, and was humble enough to accept this feedback. The legend says that the tortoise soon started a writing cohort to share his experience with all the budding writers, and the hare gleefully participated in the same.

Now, the hare also writes for the love of writing, and for the benefit of his readers. He is still waiting for his first Top writer tag, but the lack of it, does not bother him anymore 😃.

To all the tortoises out there, “For the love of writing, hang in there.”

P.S. To all the people I have tagged in the article, it was purely based out of context of the story, and of course your popularity on Medium 😄. If anyone of you would not like to be tagged, please just drop me a private note and I would remove that 👼. Thank you for your understanding.

If you liked this story, you might also like another fable:

https://medium.com/@thesilentmonk/what-a-dying-mice-wished-on-her-death-bed-the-cutest-little-love-story-of-two-mice-5891dd73d79

Please share your thoughts of what writing means to you and how you are utilizing Medium to be a better version of yourself.👏are optional.
— If you like reading animal stories, please refer to this list “Fables”.
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