Don't compete with yourself for likes and upvotes
That's an easy way to lose a bunch of motivation when it comes to writing and publishing.
If you've been writing for a while then you probably have at least one article that you're extremely proud of, but didn't do very well, and other articles that you wrote without thinking too much about them that received hundreds of upvotes.
Sometimes, that just happens without you doing anything. The articles you think are your best don't get any attention, while mediocre articles you write in maybe a few minutes get a bunch of upvotes and resteems and likes on different social media platforms.
I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly why that happens, but what I can tell you is that comparing your best work with your mediocre work, focusing only on the number of upvotes you receive, is not a good way to judge whether what you do is good or not.
The reason that's bad is because while success is often and mostly defined by the amount of work you put in and the quality of what you do, luck is also a factor, a pretty big one.
If you compare your hard work that didn't get noticed with mediocre work that got a lot of attention, without taking luck into consideration, that will completely ruin your analysis at times and make you think that you should focus on mediocre content rather than something better.
For example, I had many, many articles that I really liked writing in the past. I had huge articles I wrote trying to help people, or simply articles I wrote trying to share a story, either here or on other websites.
Most of those article didn't receive more than 20 upvotes or likes.
However, I had mediocre articles that I wrote in maybe 10 or 15 minutes, that helped me get quite a lot of money, simply because the right people found what I wrote and shared it or recommended me to some services like @curie .
That's not to say I'm not grateful - I am, quite a lot.
But if I were to look at the articles that made me the most money, and try to replicate the same quality, I would usually end up with mediocre and even bad content, all because I tried to replicate an article I got lucky with.
What you should always do is look at the work you're proud of, and try to create similar work in the future, even if you don't always get rewarded for it. Doing your best to create amazing things will not only help you make content that you're proud of, but it will also help you get better at what you do.
Writing mediocre articles will only mean that you'll always be able to write mediocre articles. Forcing yourself to write great things means that in time, you'll get good enough to
write great things constantly.
While rewards can be used to analyze how well your content is doing, that's not always the case. Not taking luck into consideration and considering our most rewarded articles to also be the best ones can lead to the wrong idea that mediocre content is gonna get you a bunch of money, which is, mostly, not true.
Receiving $50 every 6 months for a mediocre article isn't better than receiving $10 a month for a great one. Always strike for quality!
I can relate. I've been working on a short story series, and I got a Curie vote on one of the chapters, for which I was exceptionally grateful. But then a later chapter that I liked a lot more...little attention (comparatively speaking).
I was left scratching my head, perplexed.
I think you're right to point out the value of luck, and I completely agree with you that as a writer, you should push yourself to work better, comparing your latest work to your best work. Something else to consider, however, is that you're probably not the best judge of your best work. Everything you produce likely falls within a range of quality, relative to your ability. The hope is that by judging yourself against your best work, you can tighten that range and more consistently produce quality work!
Good point!
I didn't think about it before, but it may just be that sometimes, while luck does play a role, people just enjoy a certain article more than some new content you created that is, from a technical point of view, better than what you published before.
I guess everyone sees quality in their own way. For the writer the word "quality" may mean something, while for the reader, it may mean something completely different.
So it does make sense that while self analyzing your progress, you can sometimes be mistaken and look at some old piece of content that got a bunch of rewards, and associate that with luck, rather than people liking it because of a specific thing you did or a specific style you used to write that article.
With that being said, maybe improving our way of self analysis and trying to judge our work using different methods and looking at it from different angles can help us understand better why a particular piece of content got more attention than something else, and not think about luck immediately.
Thank you for reading and for leaving this comment, you gave me something to think about :)
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Thank you! :)
Cannot but agree, there are steemit profiles where the stories are worse than mediocre but they receive 300$ worth of upvote for every post. If you compare them and some good authors on Medium (or even here) the difference is vast. Yet they somehow still get loads of comments and stuff. I was a bit angry about that in the beginning but now I just focus on my writing.
I've also seen some groups here on Steemit where there just upvote every article of each other no matter what it is. But well, that's their thing. My aim is to get better at writing and possible find some interesting people, which I did. You @raikuhen are one of them along with @donna-metcalfe and others.
I know about those people, and sadly, that's just how things are.
Some of them use bots, some of them just ask others for upvotes, while others receive a lot of rewards for the simple fact that they have a lot of SP, and people upvote their articles hoping to get something in return as well, which usually doesn't happen.
It's how it is, and there's nothing we can do about it. Those who have a lot of money will almost always make more.
Focusing on getting better at writing is what ultimately matters. If this system stops working for those people, you'll at least have the skills needed to write great content, and that's what people will be interested in.
If Steemit goes down completely in the future, using another platform and knowing how to write well enough to get some attention fairly fast is also gonna be useful, especially if the systems that work here for some people won't work on those other platforms.
Mastering a skills is a lot better in the long run than making a quick buck now.
Thank you for reading and also for the nice words! :)
This is some real meditation here! We’ve all done it at some point. Luck indeed ! Hhhhm Let us use the Law of Attraction to attract more Luck while making quality content ✨🙏🏾✨
Yes, luck is a really important factor (sometimes, it's scary how important luck can be), and we should more often take it into consideration when doing something. There are days when we get rewarded just out of luck, and days when we receive nothing, because we're unlucky. It's not always our fault or merit that we get what we get in life. It's scary, but it's something more people should remember in my opinion.
Thank you for reading! :)
A sound advice that I wish has gotten through to every struggling steemian out there. I'm lucky that my best works do get notice when I do intend for the post to be noticed, like putting in more umpf to it than what I normally post. But it does get to me that some of my posts weren't meant to be noticed and just there to let people know I'm active get some decent upvotes. It's not a bad thing but it does make me consider how I should approach my blogs. Right now I'm just happy that people still bother to give comments to my posts compared to having bots leave their mark alone.
It can be extremely confusing. I sometimes find myself looking at my old articles and thinking "What the hell was I doing back then that got me so many rewards, and why can't I do it now?"
The truth is that my content nowadays is a lot better than what I was creating last year, and the rewards I got were sometimes my own merit, while other times, pure luck.
It's frustrating, and knowing other people have to deal with that makes me less worried. I guess we shouldn't be that surprised that old pieces of content get attention from time to time, sometimes more than our recent works. After all, what we publish doesn't go away with time, and people can revisit (or stumble upon) old content to see more of what we do.
But I guess that looking back isn't always good. Progress is not made by constantly thinking about the past. Progress is made by looking forwards, learning from mistakes and working.
Thank you for reading and commenting :)
Well said.
Thanks :)