I love being a content creator. As I've shared many times, there's something fulfilling about taking that blank page on a computer screen and creating something where nothing existed before.

The blockchain improves on the old model by making us all instant publishers no longer having to mail in manuscripts and receive rejection letters like Stephen King did early on in his writing career.

No, today we hit "Publish" and in a flash, it's online and ready for the world to consume. It's also immutable, so if as I joke, I ever get run over by a cement mixer, I know that my work will survive my almost comical demise.

Blogging for me is also deeper than that. As some of you may know, I've shared that as a boy I had a speech handicap that took ten years to overcome from the age of 10, till the age of 20.

During that time, I was shunned by my community due to my inability to speak properly. That forced isolation, led me into the world of books, and to writing my thoughts down due to being unable to verbalize them.

Thus my imagination was ignited and it helped to make me the writer I am today. They say that every cloud has a silver lining, and being ostracized by the rest of the neighborhood, made me a much more independent thinker and fertilized a rich field of creativity in my mind.

Through books, I could see beyond the narrow confines of the blinders-wearing members of my community, to the vast and much more interesting world that lay beyond.

Today I write on Hive and other places always mindful of my late grandmothers advice to never put all of your eggs in one basket. She grew up on a farm in the country and learned that lesson well.

For me, it's the effort to burnish those words, sentences and paragraphs into my own original work. Which unlike the foreigners who steal original content by native English-speakers on Hive, I know my work comes from my own brain and through my own effort.

Changing a word here, tweaking a line there. When you're writing and an idea is born in your mind: "Wait, I know a better way to phrase that! Let's try this." That's what makes being an original content creator so very satisfying.

No need to copy from anyone else. No need for Chat GPT. I am an originalist.

Create, Don't Copy

A platform can begin with the best of intentions and then be turned into something else as we saw with Steemit, and as Steve Jobs once said "It's good to have options." Steve shepherded Apple from Motorola to the PowerPC chip, through a seamless transition to Intel, and the company now reaps the benefit of it's original design of the Apple Silicon chips in 2020 which is now being copied by its "rivals."

That's a great example of creativity in action, and how a "small" player in the technology space can have a huge impact. Through innovation, Apple developed into a company known for creating original and aspirational products that everyone loves to copy, but that no firm can copycat quite right.

Take a look at this breakdown of the "Stevenote" where he introduced the MacBook Air for the first time to see the Master Innovator at work:

Everyone always praised Steve Jobs for his keynotes (known as "Stevenotes" at the time), but it was illuminating to read how he practiced those speeches dozens and dozens of times until they were part of his intellectual muscle memory.

He'd start out screwing up and making mistakes as we all do. But the difference with him was, he'd continue rehearsing again and again, innovating along the way until he reached the finished product at the end.

Turns out he was human after all, and if he can do it, so can you. I almost went to the Worldwide Developers Conference ("WWDC") in 2011, but tickets were just too expensive. Thinking that I'd head out to Cali in the Fall when the new iPhone 4S (the "iPhone 4 Steve" as some would end up calling it), would be released, and I'd have a chance to see him then. If I'd known then that that would be his last "Stevenote" I would have gone.

It's fine to be inspired by someone else's work, but you should always train your brain to grow organically.

So my question to you is: What will you create today? Will you slavishly copy someone else's work? Or, will you develop your mind into creating original content that you can be proud of and that will help you grow as a content creator?

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