When Raymond Hou (Raymond) reflects on his career, he repeatedly identifies the same central axis of transition: sustained Writing. He condenses this axis into breakthroughs in three years—2015, 2017, and 2019—corresponding to opportunities as a lecturer, a job at an international company and a TEDx talk, and an invitation from the Get App. What these three milestones have in common is that he did not proactively submit applications or pursue the opportunities. Instead, he first accumulated writing in public, and later the writing brought the right people and opportunities to him. Raymond calls this mechanism “my writing automatically works for me.” He uses it to explain how an ordinary college student without money or resources became a lecturer, digital-tools consultant, and content operator.
What Happened at the Three Breakthroughs
2015—Casual Facebook notes led to the first teaching opportunity. Raymond posted small learning notes on Facebook. These casual notes, together with his initiative in helping people revise presentations, led to opportunities to run paid presentation workshops on and off campus. This was his first paid course and the start of his freelance and teaching career. It is worth noting that the material behind this breakthrough was not carefully produced work, but a by-product of everyday learning.
2017—Medium essays became a job portfolio and brought an international company and TEDx. Raymond began writing long-form articles on Medium, focusing on digital tools and personal productivity. During the first year, each article had fewer than one hundred views, but he kept documenting his experience. The articles later became his portfolio and brought him a job opportunity at an international company and an invitation to speak at a TEDx conference on “The Power of Sharing” (he was invited twice). Writing had grown from “documentation” into “work that could be evaluated.”
2019—Writing while working in Beijing brought a livestream for ten thousand people on the Get App. After Raymond moved to Beijing for work, he continued sharing experiences from work and life. He unexpectedly received an invitation from the Chinese paid-knowledge platform Get App to appear on its “Knowledge Spring Festival Gala” livestream in Shenzhen, in front of ten thousand people. The company covered his airfare and a week at a five-star hotel.1 It was the first time in his life he had stayed at a five-star hotel. For someone who described himself as “an ordinary person from a poor family,” this was a setting he had never imagined.
Shared Mechanism: Writing Works for You Automatically
Raymond extracts a repeatable judgment from these three milestones: opportunities are often not won by direct pursuit. First create writing that is public, searchable, and able to travel across time and space; then let the writing attract the right people. He says that the three milestones “all came from my writing ‘automatically’ working for me and attracting the right people and opportunities, not from my actively pursuing them.”2 In his framework, this is what distinguishes writing from other forms of effort: it can accumulate and compound, selling the same unit of time many times.
This mechanism also explains his position on the barrier to writing. Raymond argues that writing is not a contest in literary style; at its core, it is clearly communicating what is in one’s mind to another person. People without experience should be more willing to write, because what they know is often more valuable than they imagine. The original material behind the three breakthroughs—casual Facebook notes, Medium reflections, and life updates from Beijing—confirms this: none was initially written to win opportunities.
Corroboration from an External Case
When analyzing the path of American writer Nicolas Cole, Raymond placed his three breakthroughs beside Cole’s journey. Cole began with a World of Warcraft blog and daily writing on Quora, first establishing himself through high-priced ghostwriting “services,” then moving toward “products” such as courses and books. Raymond points out that this closely resembles his own business path of “service first, product later”: first prove value and accumulate trust through freelance work and teaching, then build digital products that can scale. Both also share the leverage of “writing where there is traffic, then bringing readers back to one’s own platform.” This cross-case comparison raises Raymond’s three breakthroughs from personal circumstances into a pattern he believes others can reproduce.
Place in His Story
Raymond repeatedly cites these three breakthroughs in his content: in the The Super Individual’s Way of Working unit on “why writing is the best investment for ordinary people,” in his profile of Nicolas Cole, and in the “Raymond Hou User Manual.” One detail about the dates should be noted: across different texts, he gives both 2014 and 2015 as the start of his writing (2014 refers to first posting reflections on social media; 2015 refers to the first teaching opportunity). The framework of three breakthroughs consistently uses 2015, 2017, and 2019. This transition line is not a single event, but the main thread Raymond uses to connect Six Years at National Cheng Kung University: Changing Majors Twice and Extending Graduation, Writing Takes Off (2017–2018), and The Beijing Period (2019–2020). It is also an underlying skill that later led him to From Freelancer to Business Operator and Super Individual.
Sources
Footnotes
-
Raymond Hou, “Raymond Hou User Manual,” WordPress article, 2024-10-02. View original ↩
-
Raymond Hou, “Who Is Nicolas Cole? From World of Warcraft Player to Online Writer Earning Millions a Year: An Analysis of Personal Writing Monetization,” WordPress article, 2025-08-26. View original ↩