It's hard to believe that it was 1 year ago today that I first heard about Steemit and decided to join the platform! As they say, time flies when you're having fun.

To celebrate, I thought that I would share some of the highlights from the past year - as well as some of the lessons that I have learned.

_{Original Source : CC}

Highlights

Community interaction

Steemit is not just a one-way street of fire-and-forget blogging, there's a vibrant and friendly community of people interacting; from simply voting on content that they like, to commenting encouragement and praise on other user's posts that they've enjoyed. Every day people are creating human connections through Steemit.

The Blockchain-backbone underpinning this online community has allowed the freedom and at the same time provided the incentive for users to experiment with the types of content that they create on the platform - and how this allows them to connect with a disparate and diverse set of users in different ways.

Here are some of my favorite interactions on Steemit over the course of the past year:

• Naming one of @papa-pepper bunnies. This is when it first hit home just how special, unique and collaborative this platform is. I've never met @papa-pepper in real life and yet here we are crowd-sourcing names for his new bunnies. A fantastic and engaging idea.
• Contests: the way that Steemit works lends itself very well to hosting short-lived, simple contests and this has led to a proliferation of them. Personally, I've taken part in and enjoyed a lot of contests including
  • @bola's 'Guess How Many?' and 'Sentence Unscrambler'
  • @riosparada's 'STEEMIT WORLD LOTTERY' and 'STEEMIT TUG-OF-WAR'
  • @fibra59's 'Meme Challenge'
  • @uwelang 'Beach Wednesday'
    This is just a short list of an ever-growing number of ideas.
• @papa-pepper took the contest even further with his 'steem-pocalypse' choose-your-own-adventure style game that he runs. This is how I got to know @okkiedot better - as we formed the team "Team Raccoon City Ops". Unfortunately we fell foul of a savage pack of dogs in Round 2 of day 4 and didn't survive to the end of the contest.
• I also helped @karenmckersie choose which one of the banners that she had created she should use as the footer of her post. A great example of reaching out to the community to get feedback.

My Posts

Here's a quick summary of my personal highlights as a content creator on the platform:

• Largest number of votes: my post talking about a Blockchain Hackathon that I attended at the start of this year - with 207 votes! ⬆️
• Largest payout: my #introduceyourself post; my first Steemit post worth $619.34 at the current price of STEEM 💰
• My top pick: my thoughts on how Blockchain will impact industries like 3D printing. I truly believe in the potential in Blockchain-technologies to have a lasting impact on a number of industries - including manufacturing - and in this post I explain how I believe Blockchain can be used to not only incentivise and monetise creation of new 3D printed objects, but also how it might tackle issues that technologies such as DRM have tried to address in the past. 🔮

Lessons learned the hard way

I would also like to share some more about my personal journey in this community, this year, and a couple of words of wisdom that I think will be helpful to others:

Learn from others

The next time someone's teaching why don't you get taught?

To quote Run DMC from his song It's Like That: "The next time someone's teaching why don't you get taught?". There are plenty of very successful people on this platform that are willing to offer advice and help to those getting started or that find themselves in a rut, so don't ignore them - heed their sage advice.

If you are just starting your journey or languishing with your own personal Albatross, then here are some really great resources for you:

• Most recently @papa-pepper (74) has been publishing some great videos in his "ADVICE FROM PAPA VIDEO SERIES" that are very helpful.
• @jacor's (69) recent article is concise, offers some good advice and includes some other good links; it focuses on solid fundamentals of building your reputation and gaining followers.
• @dragonslayer109 (70) has produced a number of great posts with advice on improving your writing.
• @arash (43) no long seems to be active on the platform, but his series "Grow on Steemit , Useful tips to creat a great content" [sic] is quite dense, but contains a lot of good pointers.

If you have read any other good posts offering advice to newcomers or those stuck in a rut, feel free to link to them in the comments below 👇

Don't just stand on the sidelines

You only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow
This opportunity comes once in a lifetime (yo)
_{Eminem – Lose Yourself}

I can be quite a perfectionist and shy at times; the downside to this is that I don't post very many articles because I'm too worried that they won't be good enough. When I first started creating posts, I suffered from anxiety that I would return to the comments section (back then you didn't get notifications) only to see a torrent of bile and hatred similar to what you see in the comments on YouTube videos. But do you know what, I've never received one nasty comment - only kind words from people that I've never met before. This encouraged me to stick with the platform and keep contributing to it.

My advice to everyone is to take the time to read people's posts and respond with meaningful comments and encouragement; it may mean more to them thank you think and it helps to make Steemit a more friendly an interactive community.

Write with personality

And I'll see your true colors
Shining through
_{Cyndi Lauper - I see your True Colours Shining through}

Creating content is not only about creating something that is valuable to others but in the process letting your personality shine though. For example, here are some people's posts that I've come to admire because they really have lots of personalty:

• @meesterboom injects a certain amount of surrealism in the posts he creates.
• @clayboyn's posts amusing, rhyming poem-comments
• @trevor.george produces funny, creative writing, write-ups detailing his team's journey through the steem-pocalypse adventure.

Milestone

Just over a week ago (14th March) I was very pleased to hit the milestone of level 60. I had been sat at a respectable level 59 for around 2 months. During that time, I personally felt like I had upped my game and started contributing on the platform more, but day after day when I logged in I was still sat there at level 59. For me, it seemed like reaching level 60 was a very steep climb and might be my undoing - I think that this had something to do with Hardfork 18 and the resetting of the reward pool around that time - it didn't, however, break me; I kept posting, commenting and voting and finally I'm glad to see that I made it.

So onwards I go to level 65. I'm sure that reaching this milestone will be equally as tough, if not tougher than reaching level 60 was; as Steemit gets more and more popular, the competition is growing more fierce for votes, but I believe that this is good for the platform and me as an author

I said you got to work hard to want to compete
_{Run DMC}