I’ve always been the type of person to be driven by instant gratification, rather than think of long term effects. Snacks, sleeping in late, sex, drugs, rock&roll, you know the deal. Followed with poor heath, missed daylight and hangovers, both the alcohol induced and moral ones.

The hedonistic, instant gratification trait is something I’ve been actively changing in myself for the past year, and I’ve been getting better. I have more control over myself.

These days I am my own boss in a way, I can work when I want to, and play when I want to, but I have to be very strict with myself. I am now in a position to say YES to what ever outing or date that might come my way, because I have no obligation to be at work at a certain time. But what comes with that freedom, is also the responsibility. I need to make sure I am taking care of myself and not treating life like a constant holiday, it is not sustainable in the long run.

I’m always trying to find the perfect middle ground between working, and enjoying what life has to offer for me. I need to evaluate if an outing is valuable and necessary, or if my time would be better spend concentrating on work.

Play time is often rewarding on short term, and work time is rewarding on a longer term. Play time is also necessary to have more material to write about for work time, they live in a symbiotic relationship with each other, and I’m making sure they are well balances.

Payday every day

Working a normal job, you get your pay check once a month, at least in all the places I ever worked in. The time between pay checks is quite long, especially if you are living on a minimum wage job, like I used to be. You have to be really smart with your money and how much you can spend and when.

And I never was smart with my money, even though I knew in theory that I should have saved and really think hard before making any purchase, but I have impulses. If a said impulse stroke at the start of the month, at the end of it, I was counting the hours for the next pay check.

These days, as a full time Steemian, I have a pay day every day if I want to, and that has balanced my financed really nicely compared to my old ways.

For me, it a lot better to do the work today and get the payout from it in a week. It’s short enough a time to think ahead that I am motivated to work more actively and regularly. I always think a week ahead and remind myself that I’ll be disappointed in myself when there is no dollars coming in a week from now if I slack off today.

Potential

When talking about rewards on a cryptocurrency fuelled platform, we need to talk about the potential gains if you don’t sell everything immediately when payout is due.

There is the possibility and potential for Steem to rise to much greater value than it is today, but there is always the slight change that it will crash down to zero and never get back up. As someone who has been earning on the platform for over a year, I have seen Steem at almost 7 dollars, and at 0.7 dollars. At the time of writing, Steem is worth 0.88 dollars.

There is no guarantee that Steem will be worth anything in the future, but there is the possibility that it will be. So do I sell now, or do I wait and see where Steem goes. Someone else can argue about the probability of Steem going to 10 dollars, I won’t get into that.

Being a full time Steemian, what I do is I sell when I have to, even at these rates, to pay the bills and what not, but I also make sure I keep stacking some Steem, and also diversifying my overall crypto portfolio. I never keep all my eggs in the same basket. I want to make sure I try and sustain this lifestyle for as long as possible.