Changes Up Ahead

This time of year is a very busy time for me professionally and the anticipation of it starting has caused me some stress that I hope could be relieved by writing a bit about it. I have always struggled with maintaining balance in my life. Whether it be family, community, health or career there has always been at least one part always needing more attention which would shifts the status of others. It is as if tradeoffs have always been required for me at every step of my life. I am in no way a perfectionist but I strive to keep things in order so that none can become unhinged to keep my overall progress on track. I have found myself striving to do so much in the ecosystem as of late that it has led me to reflect on the right balance to ensure a longer term sustainable behavior. The result has been to look at how I can step back a bit while continuing to engage and add value along the way.

While I believe that my time here is well invested for the long term, I need to ensure that the other aspects of my life are well attended. Only that way can I continue to add value to the ecosystem by way of investments and sharing experiences along the way. The amount of time cannot be sustainable given responsibilities during this time of year but I have some plans on how I can adjust and adapt accordingly. My first and foremost priority is the time with my family and I can say that I have been true to that thus far so no apparent adjustments needed there. How do I know? I learned from a prior supervisor a practice that I do every once in while in that I ask my daughter, what she thinks is the most important thing in the world is for her dad is. I have fortunately consistently heard that it is her which aligns me to thinking I am on track.

However, my health is certainly not on track. Despite the grind I continue to have from a fitness perspective, ever since my successful 5K charity run, I have stopped the discipline of eating a balanced diet. Unfortunately, my genes are not made with the metabolism to be in favor of a lean body without both exercise and diet. Therefore, I have packed on more pounds than I feel comfortable with. My thought is to spend some more time on my fitness while also getting back on track with my diet once the holidays are over. I cannot force a change during the season given everything that will be happening the next couple of weeks; particularly because of the typical withdrawal symptoms I gets from reducing the sugars from my diet. I feel that an early morning walk while catching up on my #STEEM feed is a perfect combination to align goals going into 2019.

Another challenge I have is my daily goal of creating content to share with the community. I sometimes feel that I am forcing myself to post something to remain consistent. While I think it is necessary, it hasn’t allowed me the time to instead research more engaging content to share with the ecosystem. Therefore, I will be evaluating my schedule to potentially add some test themes in the short to medium term. Among the things I thinking about is potentially using different DApps to post content. For example, I have been intrigued with D-Like and the potential to share news 2-3 times a week with my opinion on the implications of it. Not sure yet, but an idea I have been considering just to remain active during the potential dry spell of content I may have due to other commitments. I think that exploring alternative ways to engage around the ecosystem is great way to also see the potential of the blockchain and the capabilities of building on top of the protocol in diverse ways but using the same underlying proof of brain concept.

While I expect to experiment across the ecosystem in the coming weeks, a couple of things I do not intend to change are continuing to support the community with manual curation as well as continue to enjoy my time playing @steemmonsters. I have thought of using my Steem Power to gain passive income during this timeframe but I think that the point in time we find ourselves in as a community it will add more value to continue distributing votes throughout the community by rewarding original content through curation. One activity I also intend to experiment with are Curation Trails. I think they are a number around the community that add value by supporting great content and given the opportunity present these days with accumulating Steem. I will be researching a couple that I have heard about but would love to here any suggestions. I will also continue with my weekly #introduceyourself curation posts as I continue to see great potential from new users entering into the ecosystem and actively engaging. I think that those that are entering now for the first time have a much better mindset and expectation relative to those that entered during the hype earlier this year. These users are the key for the future growth of the ecosystem as their experience could bring more growth that is value adding rather than subtracting as many in the past look to get value out immediately from their participation.

Source

Lastly, I have become very grateful from the experiences I have had on the ecosystem this year. The amount of support and engagement I have received is more than I would have ever expected when I first joined. In celebrating my upcoming one year anniversary, I want to give back to the community so I am think of doing different things to see how I can help motivate the community with my stake. I have a couple of ideas but would love to hear ideas from the community as well. I am looking closely at the already many giveaways that take place around the platform to get ideas. Since I do not have much time to really create and administer one, I will mostly likely select some from the community to provide additional rewards to. As I find them, I will give a heads up on how I want to support in case you are interested in participating.

As I start these experiments in the coming days or weeks, the one things I most look forward to is feedback from the community. I want to ensure that whatever I do here is creating and distributing value and not extracting it. While my main goal continues to be to earn as much as I can, I remain committed to reinvesting it all into the ecosystem and its community. Please feel free to provide any feedback during this process as it will help guide me to finding my best spot in the ecosystem. I will place great value in whatever I receive that helps me improve as a citizen to this great community! I look forward to continue sharing the journey forward!

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