For the past few months I've been having quite a bit of luck here on Hive.
I've been posting regularly despite having a daily job that takes hours from me each day, but I've been enjoying it. One of the reasons for my enjoyment, besides feeling good about being consistent, was the fact that I was lucky enough to receive generous rewards for my work on almost each article.
It was both a feeling of surprise and happiness. I've been posting on this website since 2017 and I never had so much good luck for such a long time with my content. It made me feel as if people were actually reading what I posted, that they were interested in what I wrote.
The only thing that "didn't sit right with me" was that I didn't know for sure what the reason for my success was. Sure, I was moving forward, making progress, being rewarded for my effort, which was great, but I didn't know if it was the result of hard work or if I was just lucky.
Some people might say that it doesn't matter why things go well, as long as they do, and sometimes I can agree with that mentality. However, as a content creator, you should know why things go well so that you can continue what you're doing and move in the right direction. Not only that but knowing what you're doing well can help you figure out what you're doing wrong when things don't go the way you'd like them to.
For example, recently all the rewards that I would normally receive went down, and even though that doesn't bother me that much, and it doesn't really take away my motivation to write and post, it does make me wonder what the reason for this change is.
Is it the conflict between some of the people that were really generous with their votes that resulted in this decrease in rewards? If that's the case, then this situation is completely out of my control and there's no reason for me to even think about it.
Is my luck just running out? If it is, does it mean that all I have to do is to keep on posting hoping that I'll get lucky again, that people will notice me and reward me in the future? Is this even a good strategy?
Is my content getting worse? If yes, is this because I have way less time at my disposal to write and edit, and the quality of what I post is getting worse? Is it the topics I approach? The way I write? Am I making too many mistakes?
The reason itself doesn't worry me too much and I don't spend a lot of time thinking about it. Even when I was being rewarded for my work, and it felt good, I didn't think about it too much. I always thought that my job as a writer was to write, not to desperately chase rewards, especially since I couldn't control whether I would receive anything or not. I chose to focus on the only thing I had control over - how much I write and how much I post.
But as a general idea, not knowing what the reason for your success is can be very frustrating for some people, and even very confusing, when or if things start to go bad and you cannot figure out why that is happening, what changed, if anything did, or if you're simply very unlucky.
It's difficult to give any advice here regarding how to figure out what the reason for your "success" is, because it's not always easy to understand such a thing. It is, however, interesting to notice the fact that even though you might not feel the need to find the reason behind your good fortune when things go well, you might realize it's very frustrating not to know anything about it when things start to go bad.