I give myself an overall D for my achievements and failures for the year 2019. There were a lot of things I did not get done or flat out failed to reach the goals I wanted it to. It was quite a hectic year of so many downs and a couple of ups.

New Year’s Resolution 2019: Get Shit Done

Last year I wrote up a resolution with quite a few things I wanted to accomplish in 2019. I had also quite a few things that were not listed on it or where added throughout the year.

Read More Books

• Fail

I wanted to get back into reading more books in 2019. The goal was quite low just 1 hour a week of reading a book.

Between all the content I read online, emails, mail, and everything else. The last thing I want to do at 3 AM when I have 10 minutes to think is to read even more. So I used that as a lame excuse to allow weeks of not reading turned into months.

At this point, I don’t even know where the book I was reading is at. I think I was on page 30. Disappointing but nothing I’m going make a mad dash to try and finish out before year-end.

3k Followers on Steem

• Fail

I started off the year around 1420 followers and I’m currently at 1560. That is quite a depressing amount of growth.

I’ve never been big on following a lot of people or following people back. I’ve also started to put more effort into elsewhere to reach other goals. So things like commenting like I use to do back when I started have not been much of a focus these days.

I’m still highly engaging in my own comment sections. I still think that is a key role a content creator should play.

I am also not someone looking to follow for follow. I like to keep my feed in a manageable state where I don’t miss things often.

There are lots of things I could have done to be more aggressive in gaining more followers such as what I’ve mentioned above. Ultamently I felt my time was better put into other efforts. It becomes quite apparent a few months in this goal was set way too high.

Starting A Business

• Fail

I had quite a few businesses and things I wanted to start up in 2019. This was quite a disaster year for me on that front. Some stuff is still in the works so I don’t want to go into too much detail.

I knew going into it most were never going to see the light of day. Many where ideas and beyond a couple of rough outlines it was clear that further investment into them would not have been worthwhile. That is just the nature of the beast when it comes to entrepreneurship.

One thing I was hoping would have turned into something more was getting into game development. I knew before even getting into that I would be jumping into a massive rabbit hole that would require quite a few years of my time.

I even started up the account @enjargames as I would have liked to transition into running something on the blockchain at one point. I was going to make posts from time to time on small updates regarding the project. I didn’t want to years from now just show up with a game made. I wanted to show the project was dedicated to being in the Steem ecosystem and we started by just posting about it.

The first goal of the team I had assembled of friends who understood this was just a pet project and weekend kind of deal. Was to make a discord bot. The second was to join a Game Jam event to make a quick game that had assets that were provided that followed certain rules.

Both of those goals failed. I myself also lacked the skills to try and carry the project forward. So I mostly spent time checking out and writing some very basic programming stuff in JS, C++, and Python and a lot of other ground laying work.

Everyone involved including me just ended up being too busy. I knew going into it would be quite the time commitment. I also did not have the funds to pay out of pocket to make me more than friends get together on the weekend profit share kind of deal.

I was expecting to learn and deploy what I learned at a quicker rate than I was able to. I still feel rather disappointed with my ability to learn to program and demonstrate it by making something.

Garden (Growing Plants)

• Success and failure

This year I wanted to grow quite a few things in my garden such as tomatoes, peppers, herbs and so forth. With the end goal of making salsa with almost everything homegrown.

• I had at one point an almost ten-foot tall tomato plant.
• Some of the herbs died while others like parsley where enjoyed from spring to winter.
• Some peppers failed like bell peppers while others like Tabasco produce more than I could use

I ended up writing about this weekly and did a final recap a couple of weeks back along with links out to all posts for my 2019 garden.

As far as the salsa still most of it was store-bought so it was a half win. Perhaps next year I’ll get closer to my goal.

Test Out More Dapps And Tribes

Splinter Lands

• Success

While this was a rather odd goal to have I wanted to see more of what Steem had to offer. This leads me to some interesting places. I discovered some things I did not enjoy doing like writing Steemhunt posts. The short format was just not for me. I used that as a learning experience and reason to go out exploring more.

I played a couple of games on the Steem blockchain in 2019

• SplinterLands (Steem Monsters)
• NextColony
• Brosino
• DrugWars.io

I also gave trying out a few different Tribes. I’m rather glad I did as I had some decent success in some of them. It has been nice seeing my content trend on front pages in different tribes. Such tribes included Steemace, palnet, battle. There were also some I stopped using due to tag space and feeling my content was performing better in elsewhere.

One thing I didn’t get to try out this year was Dtube. Back in the day I tried making YouTube videos and was never good at it. I ended up not wanting to put effort into trying out video content again and instead focused on written content.

There were also just some random apps I tried out. In the end, I’m glad I did. Just saying to one site and dapp even does not give you the full experience of our ecosystem.

Spend Less Time On Steem

• Fail

I wanted to become successful enough on the Steem platform where I did not feel like I had to grind 7 days a week with creating content, engagement, being active in communities and so on. There were parts of the year where I found the right balance and other parts where I have to admit I have an addiction to Steem.

I also wanted to reduce what was not working out for me here and put efforts elsewhere. I feel throughout the year I gave quite a few things a couple months’ worth of my time. If I was not happy I moved on. Which I did a number of times.

There were also weeks and even months where I was spending over 60 hours a week pouring every moment I had into things here on the platform. I did not want to accept that I could not make things work and turn them into what I wanted. They become quite unhealthy for me and almost sent me to the edge of burnout. Thankfully I finally learned to let some things go. More on exactly what that was in another section.

I still only want to spend about three days a week on and around this platform which I went way over in 2019. I need to find a healthy balance for my own sanity.

Increased My Social Media Numbers And Influence

Twitter

• Fail and mild success

Part of my 2019 plan was to move beyond the 7-day cycle and outside of our bubble. My plan for that was to grow myself more on the outside. With how small the overall community is getting from the bear market we are in we need more effects outside and embracing social media and other places seemed logical.

While I had hoped by now to have 1k Follower on Twitter I’d rather take the few active and supportive followers I have out of the 200+ I have right now than some massive amount where I don’t.

I could have done a massive amount of following for following, been more aggressive on following everything and a bunch of other tactics to grow my Twitter following. While those numbers would have been important to some companies I was hoping to work with hence the 1k goal. I could get that number in a month if I really wanted to they just would not be an engaging group of people. Twitter also has systems in place to try and prevent abuse and I rather not risk getting shadowbanned or other measures against me taken.

I did end up getting rejected for not having enough followers for a program I had applied for due to my low Twitter follower amount. I did write about applying and the reasons why I wanted to get into Epic Games Support A Creator Program. They sadly did not take my following on Steem into account. There always next year if the program is still around.

I’ve talked about this a lot more including going into my numbers In October. Things are still on the up and up for me on Twitter and my last 28 days, I’m at 69k impressions and 39 added followers. I had a bit of a following out where I lost around 20 at one point but it did not take too much effort to move on and keep growing.

Another place I have put focus is trying to grow my Steam Curator page (it’s a gaming platform for those not in the know and not to be confused with Steem.) Growth over there is quite stagnated and I tend to just use it for finding out when a game I have a review on is on sale so I can tweet about it.

Since you can only write up a tiny little snippet about a game they also give you a spot to link out to a review. I have over 50 game reviews listed over there all linking back to Steem. I was hoping by having that many would have increased my following and traffic to my content.

It’s not the ideal platform for doing so since I’m at the bottom of every curator game review page with my low follow count. Perhaps one day it will pay off. If not I’ve found other uses for those pages. I still have the odd chance of driving some traffic to my content on Steem.

While I was a lot more optimistic at the start of the year where I would have ended up. I also understand these things take time and can have a snowball effect. I’m just glad I started when I did before it becomes the “cool” thing to be doing so.

4 Posts Per Week

• Does not matter so much

Sometimes I just have goals that are in place to try and keep me on a schedule and from slacking. This happens to be one of them. While I’ve had weeks where I was not around to make any posts. With many others where I wrote fewer than four. For the most part, I at least get a post or two out a week.

Just remaining active during the “slow” times to me is more important than trying to reach some number of posts per week. It’s just a number and content should be posted when it’s ready not when you need to make a quota.

I’ve also seen far too many people burn out trying post three times a day or just daily. I want to remain around for the long term. That means not overdoing it and pushing myself to the burn out stage. If I don’t get a single post out in a week I’m fine with that.

At Least 10 Full Game Reviews

• Success

I knew going into it that I set the bar quite low. There was a point where I felt I was not creating enough game reviews and I wanted to make sure I at least got a few out. This was also a way to ensure I keep moving in my gaming content direction for the most part.

While I believe I created over 50 game reviews in total in 2019. I don’t see a point in taking the time to count them all. There was a lot. My gaming index is busting at the seams with content!

This one I more than hit and than some.

Other Stuff Not On My New Year’s Resolution

While New Year's resolutions can be great and all to get you started. One should not limit themselves either just to once a year planning. There were quite a few other things I accomplished in 2019.

Become A Dolphin

• Success

One of the biggest achievements was becoming a dolphin. It took quite a lot of different sources and efforts to make it happen. I go into it far more in detail in the post The Making Of A Dolphin!. Like really into detail just so people can see what it takes if you are not just buying 5k Steem off the market.

SEO

Ubersuggest

• Unknown how successful

A big thing this year I wanted to put a lot of focus on is trying to increase my SEO and start to build things up. Trying to do something like this on Steem is a bit like walking in the dark since we lack metrics to give true insight and you have to guess.

I have this year written a couple of posts that ranked really well on google search terms not only for longer terms but ones that should have some traffic behind them in the future. Now if I can keep those rankings is another thing.

A lot of what I was targeting were not big games today. Many were indie or games I’m expecting to have a massive increase in traffic and players over the long run.

I spent a lot of time researching this topic. Talking with others on what they are doing regarding it. I’ve also taken a look at not only what the so-called gurus claim but what they are doing. As a result, this has caused me to change quite a few things over the past year.

Most of the content I write nowadays gets a little bit of research into SEO done. I tend to use a free tool like Ubersuggest where I look into key terms for a topic, questions, and anything else I can gleam. It’s also how I try and keep track of a couple of posts.

I’ve ended up changing my titles a little bit here or there. This has had a major impact on how I write my intros for what will show up on research results. It has even caused me to change my approach to how I handle screenshots and photos.

It’s quite hard to judge for sure what success if any it has. I by no means have a top overall viewed or searched for post on any of the front ends in the Steem ecosystem that I’m aware of. This is something that might be unobtainable but it won’t keep me from attempting.

Solving The Break-Even Problem

Steam

• Fail

For a while in 2018 and into part of 2019 I took over leadership and was leading a gaming community. My main goal over time was to find a way to help amazing game content creators on Steem break even on their cost of games.

While you could boil it down to a simple math problem; such as, If someone had an author reward per post of 1$ and a game cost 60$ they only need to make 60 posts to break even. In practice, most don’t produce content on a single game for 60 days let alone weeks.

In the end, I was quite focused on SEO and hoping people would try things out like promoting content on Twitter among other things. That really was not well received. It was a small community and many in there spend a great amount of time creating amazing content and don’t have time for much else.

I myself could not find a short term solution to solve the gamers long term budging issues without acquiring a lot more traffic to content. So I left and a former founder found others to replace me. Who has since turned the focus back into just curation and not all the other stuff I was trying to work out.

I ultimately failed at my goal. I myself could not do what I wanted to do for others. This sparked quite a long year of me trying to work things out for myself. Where I would often write content about those failures or successes.

A large portion of this post you could say was all leading up to my inability to solve this issue.

Final Thoughts

I had more failures than success in 2019 which I more than expected to happen. I was hoping at least one of my successes would have been something big enough to make up for everything else that was not working out. Which was not the case for 2019. Some years just help build up future success for others.

Information

Screenshots and photos were taken and content was written by @Enjar.

This is my entry into CONTEST! My 2019: Achievements and Failures