There was a time where I tried to post every day without fail. There was even a time where I was on a few big autovotes. I was guaranteed a decent payout on 2 posts a day and I didn’t take it for granted, I made sure that my work was worth at least the $20-40 usd I used to earn without fail every day blogging here.
I posted twice a day religiously for a while, thankful that I could build up some true crypto savings through sharing my art and ideas. It was really really nice but it felt strange when there was payout and no audience. I never felt like I didn’t deserve the money and it actually helped me become more generous with my Hive earnings, but I kept asking myself questions....
“How much of me do I expect people to pay attention to every day?” “Do I even want that much attention from any individual?” “Would I be posting this much if the money wasn’t there?” “Would this be worth my time if money wasn’t an issue for me?” “Is this truly what I want to be doing?”
The reality is that here at Hive, and even on other platforms, people have scattered attention and so as a “content creator” you tend to fall into two different categories.
The first is someone who the viewer swears by. They follow everything you do religiously and they do it for a variety of reasons. They may think you are just full of things to learn from and be inspired by or they might enjoy your work so much that they just stop by as part of their daily routine. There are also cases of addiction where people like some of your work enough and are just looking for creators to get addicted too. These are the people who refuse to find any fault with what you do. They like anything and everything and consider themselves fans.
In any case there are those people who follow everything you do and really care about YOU. They may even go out of their way to come directly to your profile to check on you.
Then the second kind are others who follow you on social media or on hive so they run into your work sometimes whether it’s by the algorithm or just because they happened to be online when you posted something.
I find the former kind of “fan” is becoming harder and harder to find and the latter is overwhelmed with a lot of different things they follow, so they may forget about you, not because they don't care, but because there's way too much going on..
Well, while it would be nice to find people interested in everything I make, I also want to make sure that I’m always worth their time. It’s an honor to have someone seek out what you are sharing with the world every single day or even once a week. I would like to make sure I’m not wasting their time or just encouraging them to become addicted to my content.
(It’s important to note that unlike some people here, I’m not just sharing blogs. I make music and write stories, and I also have a long form podcast and the occasional vlog. I also try to get conversations started and run a discord channel and hive community.)
How much influence am I expecting to have on people who follow my work? Well honestly speaking, I’d prefer they read my books and my podcast than read my blogs every day but blogs are a casual way to interact and they can be fun to make so I keep making them.
That leaves people with a whole lot of ME to consume, and I guess so be it?
I try to adjust the intensity of my output for the kind of audience I'm hoping to serve, the kind of audience I would be to me if I weren't me. If I want people to check out everything I make, that means I gotta stop doing it out of fear or lack. It's the idea of a lack of money that would make me post every day without fail, or the idea that my audience might forget about me.
On the other hand, I think it’s very important as an artist (not as a content creator or an influencer, that’s a different gig) to be constantly challenging yourself and doing things for the love of them though, and that’s why even when I was receiving the two autovotes of $20 usd a day, after a while I cut back to one post a day, and recently I’ve only been posting 2-5 times a week. Being consistent every day is a challenge I nailed already and so I moved on from that.
I’d rather focus on packing a stronger punch now and since I do more than just writing blogs, that means I have to let the blogs be supplementary to my other work. Perhaps many people will not read my fiction or listen all the way through my podcasts. That's ok. I still make very blog post with the intention of letting it support and promote my other work. I want to make it as worthy of your attention as I can, and to also be exciting for me to share.
This is not WORK for me. This is passion. I share out of passion and love. You may or may not catch it, but that's not the point. The point is that I give the best I have every day because that is the art that I seek to create.
I let my blog writings flow out of me without much thought to editing, not because I'm lazy, but because I'm practicing the art of flow, I'm trying to get better at just letting thoughts express themselves through my fingers instead of getting stuck in my head. This is part of my own growth, and I think that is some of the most valuable material that an artist can provide you with, their own artistic process so that you can learn from it.
I'm not saying that I'm a teacher and you are a student. I'm saying that each person is capable of inspiring each and every other person, and I'm trying to become as good at that as I possibly can.
Funny enough, I'm doing it for me more than I'm doing it for you, and funny enough, I think that is precisely what makes it valuable for you.
So I ask "Is it possible to offer too much value?" and the question itself may seem a bit silly at first, but it is to illustrate a point. The best work you can create is work that provides a value to yourself. It isn't about how much you create, and it isn't about how others perceive it.
The more you post, the less value it will hold through the lens of scarcity. Scarcity though is you creating for others because you seek to impress other people with them, or becuase you feel you need to in order to earn a living from your work.
To create out of true abundance is to create without regard for how much value you provide to others, because you are creating to provide value to yourself.
If we see ourselves as separate, this looks entirely selfish, but if we see ourselves as cells of a greater organism, there is nothing more altruistic.
Create what makes you feel inspired or what helps you grow. It can be a post a day or a post a year, a shitty painting or a masterpiece, whatever helps you move foreward. Create it without any expectation ehatsoever and it will be priceless every time. Create it for others and ultimately, its worth is up to them.
….Phew, I feel like I started channeling a bit too much for the scope of this post at the end there, I think I need to take a break. Let's see if this resonates with people or not, it feels a bit sloppy, mostly because the first and second half were written in two totally different states of mind.
It's all good though, this was of IMMENSE value to me. I hope you dig it ;-)
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