UNTALENTED 2.0: BEFORE AND AFTER STEEMIT

(A friend and I early in the year)

BEFORE

A man with a dream is a man on a mission, and my mission was simple; make money and have fun while doing it. I was aware I wasn’t the desk job type so I outlined my interests and pin pointed the ones that could realistically make me money in Nigeria.

Making movies was my first bet, but I had no camera and the only filmmaker I knew was untrustworthy and quite frankly not very good. I tried getting on some movie sets but after a while I realised I had two real options; get a camera and do this shit myself, or write a script and get someone to work on it with.

I started with the latter.

After writing a feature length script at the request of a certain new production company I had my script rejected, even after bending the story to meet their several guidelines. I was discouraged and disappointed but I didn’t give up. I wrote another script, this time for a short film about the falsehood on social media.

I met someone who was building a production portfolio with another even newer company, he passed my script over to the director who praised it severally, but he said he was too busy at the moment to work on it and would reach out to me later. After reminding him twice and getting the same busy excuse I realised if I want to get shit done I would need to do it myself.

From that moment on it has been a mission to get enough money to get the equipment I need. After a while I had a number of disappointments, and I was also writing music and there was no money for recording either. I was getting really discouraged.

Then an old friend reached out to me, after talking for a bit he told me about steemit. Apparently a friend of his had bought an iPhone from the money he made off the platform. And all I had to do was write. I thought it was too good to be true, I mean I write on a normal day, maybe not too often but I mean, if I was going to be making money off it I could write every single day and have enough money for a camera in no time.

And that’s what I did.

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AFTER

I wrote every day when I first joined steemit, and on some days more than once, but the revenue wasn’t streaming in as I had expected. I was a little frustrated again; I mean I had done what I was supposed to right? Why was the SBD not strolling into my wallet? And I kept seeing the big bucks roll in on the trending page.

After going around for a bit on discord I realised it’s not so easy to make the cheese, and steemit is not a quick money machine. Eventually I started to appreciate the steemit community and the fact that I could draw many inspirations from the awesome users on this platform(like @surpassinggoogle who started this untalented trend).

I haven’t yet come across any platform with the kind of support and sense of community steemit shows, it is very impressive really. So even though I’m not yet making the money I set out to, I enjoy the steemit environment and draw inspiration from it.

Reading about other people’s experiences made me realise my mountains are not as big as I thought they were, and taht helped me rekindle the drive not to give up. Now I just released a song and hope to get a camera before the end of the year.

Sweet sweet progress.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with a step.

As long as I keep trying I know I will continue to thrive and overcome obstacles, and the farther I go, the more steemit gets interwoven with my story.