I've been virtually inactive on Hive this last week or so. Bad, bad me !
The truth is, I've felt a bit demotivated by things going on in the real world, and it's carried over into the online world and ended up with me feeling burned out and demotivated here as well.
So I need your ideas on how I can re-motivate myself. I want my mojo back !
To give you an idea of the kind of real life things I've been dealing with....
I bought a car just before Christmas. Previously, I've very much done "bangernomics", buying runners that might last a year or two and just running them into the ground. I buy cars with cash, but finally decided to get myself something I thought could be a really nice one that would see me out.
It took several years of saving and turned out to be the most expensive mistake of my life. Paying for several rounds of expensive repairs has wiped out my ready savings, and last weekend it threw up the kind of error that could cost more to repair than I paid for the car. So my drive is now adorned with a very expensive and non-running garden ornament.
At the same time, I've been trying to work out how to respond to the latest changes in Google's algorithm, which have hit my business hard. Basically, Google now fills the screen with AI-generated crap and has totally buried natural search. They want to keep people on Google rather than going off to independent web sites.
That's about a decade of consistent SEO work that's been wiped out. Google's suggested solution; throw money at them for paid advertising. It feels wrong to reward bad behaviour by giving in to extortion. So I'm spending my work time trying to come up with a marketing plan that has virtually zero budget until it starts generating results. It feels like re-starting the business from scratch. I'm open to ideas from anyone who has had something similar happen to their business and found a solution !
But not everything is bad. I'm not trying to paint my life as a complete mess. The biggest plus is that my wife can see that I'm trying to stay calm during a trough time, and is being incredibly supportive. More than I deserve, but I'm grateful.
So I'm going to try to be more positive, and post on Hive more. But I'd love to hear constructive ideas and mental tricks that you've tried and that work. The whole "just make yourself post" doesn't work for me; the easy option is to sit back and let the HBD interest keep rolling in, because I make far more from that than I do from author and curation rewards. Posting and curation isn't about the money (plus I'll never earn enough from Hive to buy a new car !), but I need to find ways to overcome my natural instinct to just doom scroll and upvote without interacting.
All ideas welcome !
