Freedom is so important to me. I love to go, do, say, learn, and express myself any way that I like. It’s a basic founding principle for so many modern democracies yet there has been diminished expression of this principle in our freedom focused society. My sense of freedom of expression is a value I hold very dear to myself, yet in so many ways my expression is mutable and irresolute. Social media platforms, publishing sites, and data businesses all hold profit as a paramount priority while the focus on self-expression and the freedom to control one’s contribution to the digital world has been neglected.
Enter blockchain. This technology has put control back into the hands of individuals. From controlling one’s finances to immutable ledgers to trustless communications and so many more use-cases, the reliance on a managerial entity to facilitate your interaction with the digital world is no more. There is such potential to eliminate so many of the issues our world faces underlaid by corruption, fraud, theft, and the reliance on others.
I discovered this technology in 2017 and invested in Litecoin. I profited slightly and sold way too soon but the next few years of bulls and bears allowed me to step away from the markets and understand the technology behind the assets. In this time of my life I was also trying to understand more about myself and how I wanted to exist in my own life. So much introspection with my newfound understanding of blockchain combined to give me my own personal use case for blockchain.
Self-expression is difficult to categorize because there exists so many avenues of expression. Self-expression for me began with learning. I have always loved expanding my knowledge base and connecting more principles together to understand more about the world that I live in. For example learning to play an instrument early grew from my tree of knowledge a branch of creativity as another modality of expression. As I grew, I learned more and more about the physical world around me and my passion and main road of life became a love of learning.
My overarching academic goal for close to 10 years has been to go to medical school. Studying to become a physician is the peak of education for medicine; my largest interest. This pursuit is the most I can do to maximize my knowledge of the physical world which allows for a real-world application of my knowledge to best treat and help others. Putting my gained experiences and information into practice is the measured output of my pursuit of learning. Having this deep meaning behind medicine made it a large part of my life and who I wanted to be.
The past year has been my application cycle to medical school and in October I received an acceptance to medical school. Gone was the constant nagging feeling of not being able to become a doctor and accomplish my goal, gone was the eye-on-the-prize mentality of looking for more ways to achieve my goal, gone was a lot of who I have evolved into being over the last several years of striving for this goal. The hole of self-doubt that opened was one of yearning for meaning. Going from laser focused on a goal towards success put me in a limbo of motivation. Having achieved my goal of acceptance into medical school, I had almost a full year of nothing before the next chapter in my life started.
My personality is one that needs focus and so began a spiral of a search for motivation. I wanted to know what my motivation was outside of medicine. I needed to gain a new perspective on myself and how I saw my life unfolding. I desired, simply, an understanding of myself. To accomplish this, I isolated myself from many distractions and began to take on new perspectives, consume more information on my interests, and form opinions. The highs and lows of introspection are plentiful, but they teach you the importance of foundational understanding.
I gained an understanding of comfort. A lot of what our bodies does is seek out comfort and avoid discomfort. To be happy in life is to be comfortable. All anxieties, fears, maladies manifest themselves as discomfort and affect our lives accordingly. Thus, I saw removing discomforts as the first step to life-satisfaction. Easier said than done as we all have our demons that define us. But understanding your discomforts is key to removing them. Rather than focus on the negatives, I preferred to augment my comfort. My life was missing purpose and I associated purpose and understanding with comfort. So, to be happy I had to learn more and find my purpose.
I gained an understanding of what I love. I love helping others and sharing my knowledge. By being a mentor and teaching others information, I can expand the impact that that information had on me. Having an impact is what I love. Igniting a flame for learning and beneficence is what I love. This love has been intricately tied to my pursuit of learning. As I learn more information, I need to share it with others. It doesn’t feel fair to not share my understanding of concepts that I put in the time and my ability to learn. Making learning more streamlined and more efficient from person to person is how our education level shifts more and more upward as we become a more advanced society. I need to do my part to ensure that we are rising and bettering ourselves every day.
With my identified love of sharing information, I now needed to find an application to my life, or in essence, give it a north star to ground its path. I learned to write in fourth grade and I surprised a lot of people with my early aptitude to writing. It was so easy to just transfer my thoughts into organized sentences that exactly dictated my thoughts. Writing is a direct conduit from my brain to the readers, but it took me until recently to understand the importance. My focus on knowledge accumulation pairs perfectly with the tool of writing to convey meaning to others. Writing allows me to cement my thoughts to be eternally transferrable to others for their own analysis and interpretation. My opinions, information, and personality can all be read by you the reader, which add to and modify your assertions and views on every subject. This is the power and impact I have searched for and this is my purpose.
The ability to freely transmit and permanently store this information to any and all to see is a priority to my self-analysis. A blockchain platform such as STEEM is the solution and why I am so excited to begin writing on this platform. To write for myself and others benefit in a community setting that faces no censorship seems like the ideal means of recording my thoughts. For the sake of anyone else looking for something; about their self, their life, or purpose just know it takes time but that there is an answer out there waiting to be found. You just have to go find it.
-H
