After reading @tripode's entry for this challenge and taking into account she's an amazing example of consistency and that she as well invited me to join, I realized I have mixed feeling towards this topic, so I found this a good opportunity to talk about it, I told her I might join the challenge and that I've been thinking I should set organizing myself better as my 2021 goal.
One of my life goals is to become a full-time content creator/blogger that makes a living of it, and I've been trying to work on this more seriously since the quarantine started, but I haven't done it properly because of certain things – mainly the chaos I've been facing during the last months of 2020 that have me always fighting mostly myself as well as making me aware of how important consistency is.
The story starts 3 years ago, joining the blockchain was the beginning of taking writing more seriously, I wanted to do excelent articles/essays and to be rewarded based on my content quality; I've done my best writings thanks to being here and that led to many changes in my life, both personally and profesionally, my writing has improved a lot since I've been here and money was a great incentive, and all of this is something I'm very grateful for.
At first I was very consistent, I joined on December 2017 but I started posting on February 2018, and this was after deciding I would post from my smartphone because I didn't have internet where I was living, so after some whinning I decided I'd write my stuff on my laptop and then would transfer the file to my phone so I could post it using its internet data, it took me two months to decide lol.
Right after, I kept myself very consistent for a while, then things got complicated among other things and I had to leave the place where I was living, I went to my parent's place till I finally left the country by the end of 2018. Then on 2019 I wasn't as active as I wanted because it was a really difficult year, I was starting all over again in a new country and had so many struggles that I just couldn't focus on writing; it wasn't that I didn't want to but I was so busy with real life that I couldn't give time to it, plus the rewards weren't as good as they were in Venezuela anymore, I was lacking that monetary motivation I had before.
However, I must mention that during that first year on the blockchain when there were a lot of dramas among several groups and many were giving too much energy to kind of silly issues, as we were still very young as community, I used to feel very frustrated because I felt I wasn't getting as much rewards as I thought I deserved and therefore the visibility I wanted – as I mentioned before I've always wanted to be rewarded based on the quality of my content and I'm the kind of person that wishes her work could talk for herself (something I later realized isn't that easy), and I think this contributed to me stopping to post for a while/dropping the consistency, which I reckon now was a stupid thing.
A list of ideas I haven't done completely because I'm a mess lmao.
Now, I made a comeback on 2020 after quarantine started, the pandemic gave me the opportunity to keep on trying, and not only I was a different person because of all the struggles of 2019, but also I started to realize something about Hive that I hadn't realized before and which is key to success: beyond being a place to post your content, Hive is a social network, that no matter how good your content is, if you don't make real connections you won't get as many rewards you'd like to.
I learned that when you do things thinking more of the connections or impact these things will have/make, and above all with love, the rewards (monetary or not) find their way to you; and that when you do things for the love of it, you just don't care about the money anymore. I can confirm what many here say "You come for the money and stay for the people". This past 2020 I made some improvements regarding my content and consistency, but even though I was more aware of how things work I still hadn't got to the core social networking part of it.
To be honest, I'm not the most social person you would know, even though I love Discord and meeting new people I know I'm not so good at it, and maybe as @starstrings01 told me the other day on @smi-le server: I'm just lazy to socialize, he left me thinking a lot about it and maybe he's right. I'm not the kind of person that will talk to people individually but on group chats instead, and during the first months of quarantine I found pretty nice groups where I found pretty nice people to chat with, such as @msp-waves shows that saved my life so much by helping me keep myself sane lol.
Though, on June I found a new job, this job helped me get more consistenly posting for a while as I stopped worrying about surviving lol and got a routine again that helped me organize my days, but... my social interactions diminished. It's really hard to blend life with Hive! Then, after a few months I lost this job and dropped my writing consistency one more time, BUT met the amazing @whatamidoing who gave me the opportunity to be part of the Cross Culture Community team by having my Untranslatable Words series on their main account, I met @tripode who became one of my closest Hive friends and got me in her amazing server @smi-le full of initiatives that have helped me with the engagement and the "what to write" everlong problem, I met @nineclaws who also became a (recently 🎉) Hive close friend that we enjoyed bringing into the platform, and many other people I wasn't expecting to get to know during crazy 2020!
So, it seems the only problem I haven't been able to fix so far is finding a balance between posting consistently and my social interactions, which in my opinion is where the content creation success lies. Even though 2020 made me realize I want to do this for real, my never-ending (lmao) struggles with survival don't let me focus on this in the right way, but I know that I'm not the only one who is struggling with this, that struggles will never dissapear and that there's no other way than just keep on fighting and working. Today I'm grateful for having a clearer vision of what I want and that I just prepared two posts in one day! lmao 🤦♀️
I hope to express and execute all the ideas and plans I have consistently, to keep on pursuing that precious balance and to keep on documenting on this blockchain all of this journey.
Thank you very much @tripode for inviting me to join this challenge, I feel relieved now lol. This challenge was created by @starstrings01 and you can read his post here. I now invite @antoniojoseha to join!
Thank you very much if you made it till here! :)
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