After selling 10,000 STEEM today, I had to face the sad reality - back when I started on the Steem blockchain, I could have got the same amount of Bitcoin for 200 dollars. Those 10,000 tokens took me a couple thousand hours and over a year to earn, writing multiple times each day. While the 200 dollars was a handful of hours work, or a week or a month of takeout. Of course, like most people, I didn't buy-in back then, because of a couple reasons, the largest being that I had no idea what all of this was and by the time I did, it was already heading toward All Time Highs.
I am not upset at any of this though, it is just a strange way to think about what has happened in the cryptosphere over such a short time. Those 10,000 Steem for a brief moment were also worth 40x more or about, 80,000 dollars - that would cover a fair whack of the renovation budget today.
It is easy in hindsight to say the, "woulda, coulda, shoulda" kinds of things, but this doesn't bring in the alignment issue when it comes to the timeline. The fact is, I didn't do differently, I did just what I did and that is likely the best I could have done knowing what I knew and being who I was at that moment in history. Overall, I think that while the money would be useful now, it doesn't mean I would have used it well back then, as I don't know what I know now either.
At the moment, it kind of feels a bit like late 2017 again, with the alt market getting popped up all over the place, with some pretty massive pumps on some coins. While I am hoping that HIVE follows suit eventually, I am simultaneously hoping that it will have an increasing floor as the community starts to back it and stabilize the foundation. I think that there is a good chance of this happening as quite a few took their Steem earnings and extended their HIVE stake, with many of these people being those who were working toward a successful Steem community earlier.
The last three years have been quite an incredible ride though and I have been able to get myself involved in all kinds of activities that I never thought I would. With the benefits of the writing aside, I have also changed my relationship with money and while I definitely struggle, I do not see it as such a scarce resource a I did earlier, it is just that earlier, I wasn't willing to work the way I work now. An alignment problem.
Don't get me wrong, I have always worked hard, but I think that the hard work gave me a sunk cost fallacy mindset, where I overvalued what I had because of the effort it took to have it and therefore, was far less willing to part with it, far less risk taking. Instead of seeing a dollar earned as a dollar, I saw a dollar earned as a dollar plus my time and effort. Financial economics doesn't care about my time and effort, it is far colder than that - behavioral economics might though, as it will factor in how I feel about money, my relationship with it and how these are going to affect my decision making.
When we change our decisions, we change our path and they lead on to outcomes we wouldn't have had otherwise. It doesn't mean that the outcomes will all be better, but being a little more attentive, reflective and active, will hopefully lead to decisions that are more aligned with the current circumstances, and while not perfect, hopefully closer to what would have been done when using hindsight to look backward at this time.
Closing the gap between what I do now and what I would have done knowing what I will know in the future, is part of becoming wiser, isn't it? Wisdom isn't about how much you know, it is about being able to use what you know at the right time - to benefit by bringing knowledge and action into alignment with conditions.
Will I be wiser this time around or repeat the mistakes of the past? Most likely, it will be a mix of both plus, there will be new mistakes made. As I said to someone today, the road to right is paved with a lot of wrong.
Otherwise, I would be right there already.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
