Before I joined Steemit in 2017, I spent years writing about technology on Blogger. I can still remember the horror of clicking the button to publish that first post. I didn't want anyone to see my early efforts at blogging, as I didn't want my mistakes to be made public to my co-workers and friends.
Working up the courage to share that first post with (hopefully nobody at the time), was scary yet exhilarating. Here I was FINALLY on the web mistakes and all! :)
And trust me dear reader, those early posts were HORRIBLE! lol! I was so proud of that crap at the time, but looking back years later, I could see that I still had a long way to go in order to improve myself, but becoming a better writer is a journey that begins with that first step, right?
The point about "going live" for me was to push past that initial fear and force myself out there. The fact that I was posting directly to the internet meant I had to take this hobby more seriously than I did when I was just writing and saving the practice posts to my computer.
Sometimes I'd even write an entire test post and then delete it like those skilled Tibetian Buddhist artists who create intricate and stunning sandpaintings of beautiful sand mandalas, which are then destroyed shortly after they're done. The beauty is in the journey to the finished piece which illustrates the lack of permanence in life, and is contemplated only for a short time.
Slowly but surely, I got a little better until it was time to publish.
Why We Create
Two things spurred on the creation of this post: 1) The completely unnecessary hand-wringing over upvotes and the token price, and 2) why we create in the first place. I picture some of you fingering yourselves worry beads over the Bitcoin price (since $HIVE tracks with that), upvotes, and the latest swings in the $HIVE token price instead of getting down to business and writing to build the platform.
You have no crotrol over ANY of that. Concern yourself with what you CAN control; becoming a better writer.
Good lord, if I created content here based on the upvotes, I'd never share anything at all. And if I spent all day consumed about the (very) cyclical crypto market itself, I might as well hide myself away in a gated compound and await the zombie apocalypse.
You see, the one thing I learned during those first years as a new blogger is that the more you write, the better you get as a writer. You HAVE to be willing to push past those writing mistakes that we all make as new (and even experienced) bloggers.
We didn't have ChatGPT when I started out, no way, you had to create each post by hand. People say I'm a good writer, but it took years to get here and I still make mistakes, and all I see are those mistakes. Sometimes I'll go over a post I wrote months or even years ago and go, "how in the hell did that boo boo get past me?" and have to fix it on the spot.
The upvotes (or lack thereof) are another matter as well. There were no upvotes on Blogger, NONE. Just imagine, we were writing for a platform for free and we didn't even own what we were creating.
Think about that for a moment.
I see Hive as a massive structure so large that one cannot see the end of it. It stretches endlessly along the horizon, and each post is a new brick being put into place. The quality of the writing informs whether you're adding a strong brick or one meant to crumble into dust. The more I write, the better I get, and the more solid each brick becomes in creating a foundation for others to build upon.
And if this platform goes the way of MySpace (it won't), I still have the tools that I learned along the way, and can port them over to whatever comes next. You're not just building a platform here, you're also constructing a writer as well. Becoming a decent writer is a journey, and it all begins with taking that first step.