Happy Friday (and National Sponge Cake Day) everyone!

Preface: Welcome to another weekly round-up post from our growing community of bloggers, writers, vloggers, podcasters, and other fellow creatives. To be straight to the point, each and every week we hand-pick five top posts from a pool of the highest voted user-submitted/created posts in the community and include them in this weekly round-up blog post, along with the newsletter for all of our e-mail subscribers. As per our submission rules, posts shared can not be re-posts, or older than 1 month (31 days), meaning that all of the following are fresh and recent! Tune in every week and you will gradually become a better and more insightful creative over time!

Shaunta Grimes captures the top spot with week with her insightful and relatable piece about the “10,000 hour rule” in life, and how to get really good at something, such as writing, you have to put in the time and gain the experience. While some people may be a natural at certain skills, they are not born with success—they get most of the way with hard work, like the rest of us.

Taking home the digital silver this week is Sonia Simone of CopyBlogger with her compelling piece about the immense power of Call-to-Actions in web writing, especially blogging. Masterfully persuading readers to take action can go a long way in the long journey to the top.

Rounding off the podium is Laurence MacNaughton who takes a unique look into 6 rules that Arnold Schwarzenegger rigorously lived by in his heyday. And just look where that took him.. to exploding into a household name around the world.

Up next is a Medium piece by Owen Williams that looks into the problems and burdens of AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages, a website publishing technology developed by Google with its mission to “provide a user-first format for web content”, espcially for mobile/smart phones.

Last, but definitely not least, is a lengthy Q&A on The Creative Independent with writer, actor, director, and comedian (what hasn’t he done!?) Ryan O’Connell. It’s an enlightening read and comes with many real life examples of obstacles that he personally had to get through, many of which we can all learn from enroute to our own success destination.

So without further ado, here are this week’s (Aug 17 – Aug 23, 2019) most valuable posts from the /t/BES creatives community:

? 1.  You Don’t Suck, You Just Haven’t Put in the Time (Mirror)
“No one is born good at anything but bodily functions. Obviously, someone who writes for an hour a day is going to be a better writer than someone who spends an hour a day really thinking hard about being a writer.”

? 2.  How to Be a Copywriting Genius: The Sneaky Trick You Must Learn
“The secret, masters-only technique to compelling your readers to act is to… Ask them. There’s nothing magical or tricky to getting someone to do something just by asking them, right? And most copy doesn’t do it.”

? 3.  6 Rules to Pump Up Your Writing
“A decade ago, Schwarzenegger presented his “6 Rules of Success” in a now-famous commencement speech at the University of Southern California. And these rules just might hold the key to your success as a writer.”

4. Google Is Tightening Its Grip on Your Website (Mirror)
“I tie my fate to Google’s whims and am along for the ride no matter what it tries to force. Every news publisher I can think of faces these challenges today and will come to the same conclusion: Get AMP, or get left behind.”

5. Q&A: On Creating a Space for Yourself
“It’s not a one-size-fits-all journey, especially with writing. A lot of it is being there at the right time in the right place and hitting the zeitgeist at the right moment. It involves things you really, really can’t control.”

That’s all folks! You can view all the rest of the community’s top submissions (10 more) here.

Be sure to tune in next Friday for another great weekend reading list that will make you a better and more informed blogger, writer, and/or content creator! If you have anything awesome to submit that others might enjoy, feel free to do so — it might even end up on next week’s top five!

And don’t forget to help others find this nifty resource by sharing it around! Huge thanks!

PS: Run a blog, vlog, or podcast, or any other creative endeavor? Start an accompanying homebase/community (like ours) on Snapzu (a social sharing platform for bloggers/creatives) and utilize it to help you dominate your social media game using the immense power of content CURATION, and effortlessly create and send out awesome routine round-up posts/newsletters like this to help grow your audience (and newsletter) 3x faster. It’s free! More info here.

Header image credit: Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash