Bone Fish, Minnow, Dolphin, Orca, Whale. How do I get there?

As you are swimming around the STEEMit trying to find your place, you have probably heard of the terms Minnows and Whales. As in real life, minnows are very small and whales are very large, everyone wants to be the whale. The whale in the STEEMit world is a floating blubber load of STEEM and wealth and just the droppings would satisfy most minnows. But, before you can become a whale, you need to build up from a minnow (or just short cut and drop a few thousand dollars into STEEM).

The first thing you need to understand are VESTS.

A VESTS is like a stock share. Think of it as an inVESTment in STEEM. When you earn STEEM and Steem Backed Dollars (SBD) from Author and Curration awards and you turn them into STEEM or STEEM Power, you are creating VESTS. You are buying shares in STEEM. Of course, there are already a lot of shares in STEEM, so every share bought, the entire share pool is diluted. I'm not going to get into that and the 8% inflation rate of STEEM. Just that you should read my SBD to STEEM a Market vs Conversion Discussion and possibly think about using only Conversion for your SBD to STEEM and that you should be putting your STEEM into STEEM Power until you get to past the 500 STEEM Power level.

There is a calculation to determine how much VESTS you have, but it depends on how much STEEM you have and the price of STEEM. For example; at this writing, I have 338,659.372171 VESTS and my STEEM Wallet is worth $212.99 with 3.566 STEEM and 163.827 STEEM Power.

As you can see below, I have slowly piled up my VESTS as I earned rewards and kept them, instead of cashing out.

@me-tarzan keeps track of the Daily Vest Values, because it changes due to price, rewards and power downs, etc.... He also provides a bunch of other great charts.

How to tell how well you are doing by the type of fish you are.

Now that you know that VESTS are basically how well you are doing in with rewards. You now can assume that the more STEEM and STEEM Power you have, the more VESTS and the bigger the fish you are.

You can check your VESTS on SteemDB.com/@yourusername or SteemD.com/@yourusername.

One quick calculation. You will see things as 1MV, which means 1 Million VESTS. That's the starting point of greatness. So, everything is determined from there.

At this writing time; current VEST to STEEM to DOLLAR break down is.
1 MV = 1M VESTS = 483.874 STEEM = $575.810

Woah!! What is this other name? Hero? Super Hero? Legend?

Well, this is the term used when you check to see the distribution of Membership Levels and Activity on SteemD. It also gives you the dollar level needed, if just want to jump to the next level by buying enough STEEM. You will notice that there are a lot of people who ARE NOT WHALES.

If you want a visual of what you are, you can use Steemit - Board of Honor to see what type of fish you are, your vests and basically how you are doing in the Awards area. The Awards are just milestones, but you can use them as goals.

Clear as mud!

Look, don't worry about being a small fish, just worry about providing good content, whether that is in Articles or Comments on other STEEMian's posts. That's what it is all about. And when you do good, you get rewards. And when you save and build up your rewards, you grow. And after a while of growing, people start following you around, just hoping that you'll spit a little STEEM their way from your blowhole.

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Let the positive energy sing!

More Power to the Minnows!!