Day 8: Chronicles of a Struggling Beginning

     It has been a week since I accepted the challenge of @tarazkp to dedicate a minimum of one hour per day to develop content here. Eventually I'm going to express my impressions on that experience but this time I will take the opportunity to describe my situation before starting the challenge, and specifically since I joined Steemit because I only have two months on this platform.



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    At the beginning of my journey, as I mentioned a few days ago, I had a misconception of what Steemit was and how it worked, but one step at a time I understood how everything was here. In my introductory post in its english version I received considerable support which was an important stimulus to continue and I will always be grateful for those who found something of value in the first words I shared here.


     But after that I knew that it was just a push to motivate me to stay here. My subsequent publications had considerably low profits, actually I didn’t earn nothing in a couple of them. However, I didn’t get discouraged immediately and continued publishing on a regular basis. With a lot of effort I developed content according to my interests and spent days preparing every post (depending on its extension). But I was discouraged to see that all the time I spent was not rewarded.



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     I reached a state in which I lost interest in writing posts. This is where purist writers would call me out about writing for money and not for love of art. But the truth is that I did not enter here for the love of art, although I do enjoy writing I came to Steemit because I was told that I could earn money here, and there is nothing wrong with it unless I lost the peace and joy of writing in the process. In my case the disappointment and lack of interest were evidence that something wasn’t right.


     Another factor that contributed to my pause in content development was the realization that I could earn more by reading content from others and interacting in the comments section. Sometimes the vote of a generous author on one of my comments exceeded what I could earn in one of the posts in which I had worked so hard. Suddenly writing and developing a topic for hours seemed useless.



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     I felt dry, without ideas or motivation, so I took some time to read and interact with other users (and earn what I was not earning with my own publications). At that time I discovered quality content, especially content that made me think and reflect on my future in Steemit and what my vision should be here, my Second Awakening, as I named it in my series STEEMCEPTION (Part I y Part II).


    I have learned the importance of interacting with other users and building networks, building my base of followers every day and that the best way to engage readers is to write from the heart and force them to think and reflect with my words. To achieve the latter, I don’t need to spend hours researching exhaustively a topic and write an informative text about it, instead I have to be an observer of what is around me and let thoughts flow into words.

    It takes practice and discipline to be able to capture ideas like that. My return to constant and daily writing is the result of the #anhouraday challenge of @tarazkp and I am very grateful for that. I still earn more on comments, but I know the effort of daily content development will not be in vain.



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