Analysis Paralysis for Creating Shareworthy Content

How I'm working to get past overthinking and start becoming a member of the Steemit Community

When I first came across Steemit, I fell in love. What an amazing platform. Blogging, creating, commenting, sharing… and getting paid for it! I had ideas… grand ideas, on how I was going to come out swinging and become a Steemit household name. I was going to put all of my knowledge to work, create some amazing articles, and share it with the Steemian community in hopes that I just might make a name for myself and get paid in the process. That was over a month ago, and I have one post to show for it. So what the heck happened?

Analysis paralysis happened. This isn’t something new for me. I’ve dealt with this for as back far as I can remember. By nature, I’m extremely analytical in *everything* that I do. Sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I have to stop what I’m doing and back away, even for what some would consider the easiest tasks- shopping for shoes, picking out a package of chicken, ordering from the menu… this list goes on. As a teen, it was a week-long process that would take multiple trips to the store with my saint of a mother just to pick out a few new t-shirts, a pair of jeans, and a new pair of shoes. Is it the right fit? Is the collar stitching too wide? Does the neck of the shirt slope further to one side than the other? How many shirts do I have of the similar color? Does the pocket seem too low? Yeah, it’s definitely too low. We need to find a different shirt. A mild form of low latent inhibition mixed with OCD made life miserable.

Thank God my brother was an asshole awesome and forced helped me to create coping mechanisms to deal with daily life. I honestly don’t know where I would be without him. But that story can wait for another time. This is about content creation, and how I’m experiencing the same thing with it.  

Before creating my first post, I wanted to learn the ropes. What was earning people money? What do people want to read? Which tags were paying out the most, and why did some seem to grasp the attention of hundreds of readers more than others? Are people sticking to a singular topic that they know about, or are they posting about completely random, sometimes one-off, topics? All the questions that I had to know the answer to, in order to be successful, soon overwhelmed me. I had to take a step back.  

Luckily, yesterday I came back to my senses and hopped on Steemit. With my mind at ease and a fresh outlook, the first post that I saw, “Will Steemit Takeover Facebook” gave me my answer… at the end of the day, people are treating this like any other social media account. This doesn’t need to be a stereotypical blog that will keep people coming back for a particular volume of content. Sure, maybe I’ll gain a few followers because of particular interests that I have, but that doesn’t need to be its sole purpose.  So to the few followers that I have… first of all, I thank you for giving me the chance to share various posts with you. Secondly, I’m sorry for what’s to come. I still have no idea what I want to post about. I’ve created and deleted probably 20 different pieces that I felt weren’t worthy of being published. I want that to end though. I want to put myself, and my content, out there.  

So here’s to overcoming analysis paralysis, and creating something special.