Scoreboard watchers.
Scoreboard watching, one of the best ways to certainly lose a game. In the middle of a game, staring at the scoreboard only distracts you from the task at hand. It's easy to get emotional about the score, (when it's up or down) however, the only sure way to raise the score is to keep playing the game. The game for Hive? Complete the toolset + market said tool kits to buidlers. Buidlers? Content creators, app makers, entertainment consumers, investors, your brother, or sister, everyone can buidl.
Momentum. One of the best ways to end the day better than you started it is to gain momentum each day. To gain momentum each day you need to push in the same direction every day. Momentum picks up due to consistency. Pick a direction, and push in that direction every day. It seems on paper to be an easy task, however, in practice, things are not quite so easy.
Most people fail in the middle of the journey. When the work needed currently outweighs the short-term payoff, the gut-check I call it. They pick a direction, push every day for a while, then quit when they don't get what they wanted in a timely manner. You can see this in lots of walks of life, most things within reason, esp physical health, which can be achieved with daily consistency by most people. However, with consistency comes laws of diminishing returns, you can only become so healthy, or so rich, at the top of said category comes a ton of daily consistency with little to even no rewards, just maintenance (staying the same is the payoff, red queen game.) This means you work based on will, not dopamine rewards.
So we know that path is long and requires daily consistency. If we take a step back from Hive and look at the path in which we started, even counting the steem testnet days. Every step or misstep we took as a community, all of that knowledge is the result of daily usage, daily caring, daily consistency. The great thing about a strong community, is on the days you feel you can't push, you have others there to help push for you and pick up the slack.
We have achieved a decentralized community without any premine or founders reward to steer governance. We have a fully operational and highly utilized DAO. We have a sidechain where we can create tokens and communities. The list is long and the knowledge is great.
We take this same perspective, instead of looking back on what has been accomplished, we can see from the path taken where we are likely heading if we were to keep pushing every day. We are in the driver's seat when it comes to a scaleable web3 experience. And the long drives can sometimes feel like you're not gaining any ground, but paths eventually lead somewhere, and it's impossible to stay in place if you stay in motion.
Great opportunities usually come wrapped in some kinda horrendous packaging. Its called balance, you see it everywhere in life. The same can be said about bad opportunities, except in reverse. For crypto, this could be seen as a gem with a low market cap, with the law market cap being the horrendous packaging. (this applies to all investing, aka buy low sell high.)
No matter what happens on the scoreboard, you keep building, you keep fighting and you keep playing the damn game. As long as your "whatever" has mindsets of never quit, you'll always be surprised even with your wildest expectations at how far a group of humans can really get with consistent momentum.
With all this said, the free market will tell you what's wrong with your product in its own way. Market cap is a very flawed metric because the mass hivemind invests in a very flawed way. It reminds me of poker when "GTO" became all the rage and everyone was using expensive computer software to calculate ranges to get GTO strategies to play vs their opponents. This is fine and well in a perfect poker game, but poker, like investing is far from perfect and your perfect GTO range goes out the window with JimBob6969 raises 72o from UTG and check-raises you all in with air. You can't prepare for chaos with a strategy, you can only be prepared by experiencing it yourself, no amount of writing formulas on paper can prepare you for hell. So next time you ask why Bitcoin, Hive, or any other legit project is sitting idle while coins like burger and pancake raise 100% in a day, think back to good ol JimBob6969 and his 72o and you'll start to understand what we are dealing with. JimBob6969 is not a winning poker player, and the same can be said about the overwhelming majority of investors.
Fast with little research. This is why scams thrive while great projects may sit patiently waiting to be discovered. Because scams appeal to the mass hivemind of your retail investors, quick easy money. Learning about Bitcoin or other cryptos with a great use case, well that's why Bitcoin wasn't really known globally until it surpassed 10k for the first time, then every uber driver became a crypto investor. It wasn't because they learned about Bitcoins tech, it's because they heard of Bitcoins price increase.
So the game is pretty much this, buidl a real strong product with a good use case. This is the basic step, as all scams eventually go down the drain, what is left are the products with a community heartbeat. Defi didnt blow up because of the amazing technology, you're average investor has no clue about any of the tech (sushi gaining 500mil 24 vol on unaudited code for example) - we used to have Warren Buffets aka value investors, now we have crackhead investors chasing the quickest buck. This is why market cap is flawed for long-term success, what is up now can certainly be down and vice verse. The true metric of investment is how many hodlers of last resort do you have. How many people will work on the protocol no matter what?
Bitcoin has plenty of hodlers of last resort, the same can said about ETH, but that's mostly due to the premine (founders would be the hodlers of last result there) - very very few projects have these types of investors and the ones that due have the highest chance to be around in 10 years. If a community lead project is around in 10 years and if you can't stay in place if you stay in motion, that means we will be much further from where we currently are, for better or worse.
I've always liked to process more than the outcome. I love the smell of cookies when it's baking, the process of enjoying the meal to come. Once the cookies are eaten and you become full, the process of wanting cookies is temporarily over. The current moment isn't quite as exciting as it was prior to the cookie ingestion. If you love the process you never loath the current moment because you know you won't be here long, you're in daily motion, learning, aware of the task at hand. Stay hungry my friends.
