Yeah, probably.
By the end of October last year, a welcomed increase in earned SP pushed me within 104 of my first 1,000. Not halfway through November, I hit the 1,000 earned SP milestone. It felt good, mainly because for the first nine months of 2018, it felt like a fairly grueling kind of process. Grind, grind, grind—hope something happens.
And in doing so, I probably lost out on some more SP because I had to take breaks. I couldn't just keep posting and watch as hardly anything appeared on what I'd published. If not for the curie curation trail and then a dozen or so other folks who consistently saw fit to upvote what I wrote on a regular basis, as well as take time to comment, I don't think I would have made it beyond the halfway point, or Minnow status.
But then I discovered Musing, and immediately things took off there, until it didn't. That ride of SP lasted only a few months. Then, it was back to the grind.
Normally, I would wait for something like this until my next monthly report, but in thinking about it, I had more to say than what should wind up in a statistical post. With twelve days left in March, I'm within shouting distance of 2,000 SP, and I just thought it was significant, if only to me. Being so close now is mainly due to how well November, December and even January went, but February and now March has helped, too.
As of this moment, I'm less than 60 SP away, and have over half of that already in the works (barring something unforeseen), so while I'm not celebrating, or calling it, I guess I'm saying it's near. Be it by the end of March or the first week or two of April, I will be at 2,000 SP, with a chance, perhaps an outside one, of reaching 3,000 earned SP by the end of the year.
I don't know. The old cliche, I guess. If I can do this, so can a lot of other people. The SP has not come from any one particular source, at least not for very long, and it's not been without some consistency, or sometimes, a desire for consistency on my part. My posts don't seem to distinguish themselves as much from any other (as much as that pains me), so it's not like something special or extraordinary is happening here.
And maybe to add to the significance, I'll just say, I've done it without self-upvoting (on purpose, anyway, and all were removed), without bidbots (though a few have been bought on my behalf), and without any organized, real or imagined circle voting (though as mentioned above, I do have folks who regularly upvote my stuff).
I've done it without any major or ongoing delegations (I've had a couple of smaller ones for short periods of time—people are very generous around here), or through leasing my SP out. I've received some contest prizes, I've been given some SBI (the tenth of a penny variety, I think, that's also rather hit and miss, which is more than fine), and I've done it without joining any kind of initiative or organization other than the Curation and Engagement Leagues, and the Minnow Power-Up League, both of which are contests based on what participants are able to accomplish week to week.
Oh, and I should mention the foodfightfriday folks, since they've been a part of where I'm at, too.
In other words, I've done it as much as a person can, I think, without any of the workarounds that get people riled up, and I've done it while keeping within the confines of STEEM itself, rather than spending at least some of my time on Discord.
I guess this could sound like I'm bragging, and that I did everything entirely alone. Neither are the case, and hopefully I've enumerated how I got here without naming everyone that has been a part of this journey and in so doing, inevitably forget someone.
The intent here is to say to everyone who feels like it can't be done, or that the odds are against you, that even so, yes, it's possible, and you don't have to do much more than comment and curate a lot, post, and get involved with a contest or two.
Oh, yeah. Well, there is that.
I'm sure it's in the thousands, and I've been a fool this whole time for not spending my hard earned STEEM/SBD so I could try to get my posts somewhere on trending where someone might actually see it. Or that I've been wasting my stake by not self-upvoting.
That's fine. If I were in it strictly for the earnings, I think I'd play the market, rather than working at this around 12 hours a day. But I enjoy creating, I enjoy the camaraderie and conversing with new people, and I like the idea of doing it on a platform that's not selling my data or consumption habits to the highest bidder. Frankly, I've never been so involved in any form of social media, and liked it as much, as I have here. Believe me, there's been plenty of ups and downs so far, but I keep coming back.
I invested. I put in fiat. I could have been way smarter about that, but when you're battling bandwidth and then what you're upvote is worth, you need to do something about it. So, I started buying sooner than I really should have, but thanks to way lower prices, I've been able to drop that buy average, with earned SP, well below $1 USD.
Unless things turn around and go south again, way south, like less than $0.05 USD, I'm not likely to invest above what I've already done, so from here on out, earned SP becomes that much more important.
At the end of November, I wrote that my account value in USD would be $1 million if STEEM was near $176. Well, it's obviously still nowhere near that, but in the intervening four months, that magic number has dropped from $175.831 USD to less than $155 USD.
