Successes and failures 2018 - A look back through the year is easy with my favorite blockchain!

This article was motivated by the Blocktrades contest – these sorts of incentivized ‘homework assignments’ are a pleasureable challenge to complete – even with a full life of other tasks to get done. A look back at the lessons learned, the accomplishments achieved as well as things left undone.

I personally try not to view failures negatively, instead I try to fail forward, learning the lessons of each and adding to my sense and knowledge. Rarely, though, do I blog about my failures, preferring to put a positive spin on my blogs.

_{Tropical South Florida and Bamboo!}

Looking at it from the realm of sustainability, we see successes and failures in all three aspects, social, economic and ecological.

In 2018 we become something like ‘migrant workers’, and we were able to live, help, work and study in 3 different places throughout the Americas. We successfully visited a lot of different family and friends from Wisconsin, to Florida, to Colombia, and were generally able to help them all in different measure.

One of our biggest failures, after successfully agreeing to work with @c0ff33a by sending coffee to him to produce a Steem Roast, was our inability to actually ship the coffee. The nation has declared coffee a national patrimony under the jurisdiction of The Coffee Federation, and has made it very difficult to export coffee, even charging very high tariffs for unroasted coffee shipped outside the country.

We are working on ways to turn this failure into a success, learning all that we can about exporting and the Coffee Federation’s requirments. We will work hard to bring you all a Steem Roast in 2019!

_{Delicious dried in the fruit coffee!}

We also, though there has been some progress recently, have also failed to bring coffeesource.net back to life. Currently I am using a version of the web app locally, and have been working to get it updated and posted on its brand new domain name! We will be posting about this tool more in the coming months – this is another very high goal for 2019.

In terms of economics, we are still looking for sustainability by advancing our skills, working smart and hard, as well as investing in future projects. At the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, steem seemed poised to take care of much of our financial needs. While 2018 has seen us successfully accumulate more Steem Power than ever before, achieving Dolphin Status officially, we also look to 2019 as a year to continue seeking financial stability.

_{Subtropical Florida Hugelkultur!}

In all things, success and failure come hand in hand, and we must learn from them both in order to continue plotting our course through this journey called life. We play our part and try to do our best, continuing to prioritize and operate according to our values – serving the Lord, becoming sustainable stewards, leaving everything better than we found it – including society and the planet Earth itself.

Prospero Año to all!