Comparing myself to my nearest peers

I had a bit of a difficult time on Steem the other day. I was feeling rather down about my performance within the community. I strive for excellence from myself, and I often don't measure up to my own standards. This was one of those days. I suppose, like many, I often tend to blame my tools for my inadequacies, or blame my circumstances, or blame other people. But very often it is none of the above, and the "fault" lies with my own unrealistic expectations of myself. Sometimes I just need to take stock and compare myself on a more reasonable and level playing field.

To cheer myself up a bit, I did what I often do, as an Aspie, and I delved into numbers and facts. Rather than comparing myself against those of you who have been here on the Steem blockchain for many months (or even years) longer than I have, I decided to compare myself to my "peers"; to those who joined the Steem ecosystem around about the same time as I did. That way I feel like I'm comparing apples with apples.

I started out by locating the specific block on the Steem blockchain in which my account was created. I found that it was block 23,127,533 which was created in the wee small hours of Friday 8-June-2018 (UTC), which equates to just after midday in my local timezone here in New Zealand, where I'm UTC+12. I then did a search for the phrase "steem create account" in that block, and discovered two other accounts which were created in exactly the same second as mine was. I started gathering some information in a spreadsheet.

After recording what I considered to be the pertinent facts, I continued to the next sequential block and performed the same search, and the next block, and the next, recording information about every account creation which I came across. My comparison eventually spanned 24 blocks, covering a timeframe of 1 minute and 12 seconds from the moment my account was created on the Steem blockchain. Many of those blocks didn't contain any account creation activity. Of those that did, I found some interesting results.

Within those 24 blocks, I came across 23 newly created accounts (mine included) with delegation from Steem Inc. Of those 23 accounts, 15 showed no evidence of any further activity on the account since it was created, almost 2 months previously. Four more accounts showed minimal activity, and the remaining 4 (including my own) showed normal levels of activity up to (or near to) the present day. That definitely puts me well within the top quartile of active accounts from amongst those that I sampled!

Sure, this may all seem like a pointless waste of effort to most people, but it really helped me at a time when I was feeling low. This is the type of thing I do quite often, finding solace in numbers and facts. It is part of my uniqueness as an Aspie.

I am a proud member of the AUS & NZ Discord server. My thanks to @cryptonik for making me this cool #TeamNZ banner. Kia Kaha!

This post is part of my first attempt to gain the WEEKLY AUTHOR award on the SteemItBoard.com website.

^{_{The textual content of this post is licensed as a Free Cultural Work using a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, which grants all the four freedoms listed in the definition of free cultural works, including: ① The freedom to use and perform the work; ② The freedom to study the work and apply the information; ③ The freedom to redistribute copies; and ④ The freedom to distribute derivative works. This license places three key restrictions on those freedoms: ⑤ 𝐍𝐨 𝐃𝐑𝐌 𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐏𝐌: You must not restrict access to the work using technical measures, or otherwise attempt to impose limitations on the freedoms above; ⑥ 𝐀𝐭𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: You must give proper attribution to the author (𝓣𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮) and retain the license notice; and ⑦ 𝐂𝐨𝐩𝐲𝐥𝐞𝐟𝐭: You must release derivative works under an identical or similar license.}}

^{_{IMAGE CREDITS:
• The image used for the post thumbnail is a remix by 𝓣𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮. It includes the wall-316700 image created by PublicDomainPictures. It also includes the fishbowl-148939 image created by OpenClipart-Vectors. It also includes the goldfish-24454 image created by Clker. All three of these component images have been released under a Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) license.
• The image used for the horizontal rule separators throughout this post is an original created by 𝓣𝓻𝓲𝓼𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓵𝓦𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮, using the red, white, and black triskellions, inspired by Māori tukutuku panels.}}