Me: "I Should Write My Best Post Ever!" Inner Me: "No One Will Read It."

I have just finished up my first month on steemit and I have to say the psychological impact of the site was not expected.

I have been in crypto for some time and do my best not to promote the latest and greatest to friends and family. This was a lesson learned from Blackcoin, you may not have heard of it but it was the next big thing at one time. I did some research and invested under 2 cents and watched my money multiply by a factor of 100x.

Moon was the chant and I shouted it from the mountain tops, even got my dad to invest $300. After making him a paper wallet and sending the funds to it we waited for the profit. Then pop, everything that goes up must come down and Blackcoin was no exception. Reading through the forums I learned about things like FOMO (fear of missing out) and FUD (fear uncertainty doubt). These lessons were pricey but valuable nonetheless, little did I know my very concepts of "money" were changing.

After Blackcoin I was not much interested in crypto until I came across the Ethereum whitepaper. I was blown away and ready to shout from the mountain tops again. I watched its development and initial launch, even invested a bit under the $2 mark. Again my money multiplied, this time by a factor of 10x. I was back to promotion but with a little more hesitation than before. Ethereum also provided me an epiphany when a smart contract pyramid scheme automatically paid me out after the next tier filled in. To this day that is still amazing, smart contracts are pretty cool.

Unless you invested in the DAO, hands down one of the best and worst moments in crypto to date. The DAO was set to be the first decentralized autonomous organization and the first killer app of Ethereum. That is until a loophole in the code was exploited and $64,000,000 in tokens was stolen.

To be honest I was happy to be apart of this event and it will be a legend to tell one day. The community ended up coming together and recovering the funds via an emergency hard fork. This killed the project however and jeopardized the very foundation of what crypto was meant to be. @alexandermay put it well once saying the attack vector of Ethereum is just too large compared to other currencies. Not a death sentence, just means a lot of time is needed for testing.

This brings us up to current day and my recent cheer leading of Steemit. As some of you may know I have recruited several family members and friends against my typical crypto protocol. I cannot help but shake the feeling that Steemit is different and it has nothing to do with profitability.

I was very passionate in my twenties and blogged a lot about current events. My motivation was not for upvotes and comments but to document where I stood on current events so that later on I could have my told you so moment. Unfortunately I was working under the assumption people would figure out how much they were being screwed and do something about it. I kept these posts up for a few years until Rupert Murdoch admittedly broke Myspace and they got deleted.

At some point you grow up and stop living in an idealistic future, I think this evolution is a creativity killer and more time is spent trying to pay bills. Society works under the assumption that without that fear of death people would not be productive. This is not the case and if you told anyone their family would be fed and a roof put over their head, they would not simply sit there content. Everyone has a drive and passion, just typically don't have the means and resources to pursue it.

Luckily I was able to recover my old blog and the insights were priceless. It was exciting to see how events in my life shaped the way I thought and how some of it was still the case today. Though not my initial intent for writing it still had great value.

I signed up for steemit after the CEO of Reddit admitted to changing comments at the database level. Regardless of your political affiliations you have the right to your opinion. Its up to others whether or not they want to follow or unfollow you. No one should be able to edit you out of existence because they do not agree with your philosophies. It also impedes the progress of the collective, if people cannot express their feelings how are they going to be addressed?

My initial motivation to start blogging here on steemit after joining was purely monetary at first. I did ok on my intro and some other posts but started to notice some real world improvement in my cognitive abilities. Emails at work started to flow a lot better, be more relevant to the subject matter, and require less editing. I became more engaged in conversations and ability to comprehend and respond.

After a while I started to build a following and started to follow a few people myself. I noticed a theme of individuals either being spiritually progressive, technologically progressive, or some mixture of both. Those that were not, quickly got links and insights to get them up to speed. There is no shortage of advice or love on this site and that is a fact.

I realized that there were individuals of like mind in my real life that would jive well in the community. This in the end is what caused my break from protocol. I am glad that it was broken and the recruits have done very well, especially my mom @mojojo. If you have not read her intro post grab a box of tissues and give it a read.

That post is the reason for steemit, at least in my opinion. I learned things about my mother in that post that I did not know from being her son for more than 30 years. She now had a sounding board to deal with some personal issues that had been bottled up for a long time. Along with a whole community of individuals to comment and provide their support and insights.

Luckily this site is not a complete echo chamber and as more users join the diversity will grow. Hopefully the steem will be distributed better in time also, this is a delicate process and the current situation is understandable. I am excited for the future of steemit and intellectual growth of my recruits and myself.

Justify daily blogging however you need to and find the motivation. In time you will find your voice and place in the world and behind you will be a clear path as to how you got there. There is no way of predicting the future or knowing what value the words you are typing might hold in the future.

Let me know your thoughts and favorite steemit moments in the comments below, thanks!