Post #1 - The art of helping others

I stumbled on Steemit a week or so ago while researching cryptocurrencies on the internet. I’m one of those who believes Bitcoin has a shot at a multi-trillion dollar market cap so I continually keep an eye on all things cryptocurrency.

About a week after pouring through the ever expanding pile of posts on Steemit and trying to get my head around the concept, I decided to throw my hat in the ring and create an account. A week or so after that, I posted my intro, which netted 17 views, 14 responses, 10 followers, and about 82 cents worth of Steem thanks to the generosity of @byvt.

As far as I can tell roughly, 3 or 4 people read the intro, and the rest were trying to get another follower with $$$ as their ultimate goal. I get that. However, I don’t think things should bee all about money.

Create solid content and post genuine comments… the money will follow.

Some years ago I was involved in a very nasty airplane crash. I was flying canyons and valleys looking for stray cows my brother, who's a cattle rancher, had turned out in the Strawberry Mountain Wilderness area in Eastern Oregon.

The airplane I was flying, a 1957 Piper Super Cub, lost power and crashed in the mountains exploding on impact. I sustained significant injuries, including 3rd-degree burns to 75% of my body.

The story is a long and difficult one I will save for another time. Suffice to say, over the next 6 1/2 years, I endured 33 major surgeries, unending painful physical therapy, and financial ruin. My wife left before I was out of the hospital. In all honesty, it was more pain than a person should have to deal with in life.

As the years went by, I began to volunteer in burn units across the country acting as somewhat of a mentor to other patients who were in the process of negotiating traumas similar to my own. There were several people that helped me get through my ordeal including family, friends, surgeons, therapists, and volunteers. They challenged me, pushed me, encouraged me, motivated me and the like. This was my way of repaying them... Paying it forward as they say.

My endeavor ultimately culminated into a five-year stint as a volunteer at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio TX, where I served soldiers wounded in battle and their families. The Iraq war was in full swing, leaving no vacancies in BAMC's burn unit. Wounded soldiers arrived almost daily, and my patients were the worst of the worst. Traumatic amputations, severe burns, and traumatic brain injuries were commonplace, mostly the result of IED's.

My job was to provide education and support to family members and to act as a trauma consultant or coach to recovering military personnel. BAMC is a fantastic facility with top notch medical personnel who did a phenomenal job of repairing the broken bodies that arrived at the facility. I was able to bring an experiential component to the table that the hospital was missing.

A severe burn is something that's hard to relate to unless you've been through it. My patients would spend the rest of their lives with missing limbs, eyes, fingers and toes, as well as life altering disfigurement. One of my most damaged patients lost all four of his limbs all the way to his body, the remainder of which was badly scarred from an 80% 3rd-degree burn. It was the hospital staff's contention that learning to deal with the aftermath of a burn trauma is best taught by someone who's already been through it. So there I was.

Years ago, when I first started as a volunteer, I went out of my way to be kind and gentle to my patients, and employed my definition of "help", especially with children. After all, everyone was in tremendous pain and had been through so much. They deserved kind and gentle support. When I went to work at BAMC, my job got serious.

The medical staff asked me to design a system that would benefit patients on the burn ward, giving them a higher quality of life moving forward. As I drew on the experience I acquired over the years, it became clear to me that being a gentle, nice guy, who always encouraged patients, their families, and friends, was not always the best thing.

The truth is, in order to improve, and sometimes even to survive, many of them needed a heavy hand. They needed me to help them set goals, then push on them hard to achieve those goals. Physical therapy is extremely painful, and most of my patients had 12 to 24 months of it looking them squarely in the face. They needed more than just "nice".

Within a couple of years, I'd developed a formula that created significant results in both the speed and quality of patient recovery. I'd be happy to address the formula in a future blog post if anyone is interested. The point I want to make in this post, however, revolves around the concept of helping others, what it means and how to go about it.

Encouragement can be a good thing, but when applied by itself, without the balance of honest criticism, it loses some of its teeth. In my own situation, as it pertains to my efforts at BAMC, being a nice guy wasn't really doing my patients a lot of good. I didn't start seeing significant gains until I pushed very hard on most them, criticized their performance, and soundly employed the formula I developed.

So where am I going with this and what does it have to do with Steemit? As a community, I believe we should strive to "help" each other. To accomplish this, however, one must define what "help" really means. I assume that everyone in this community is generally like-minded in that we all desire to create an income via the Internet. Part of what we rely on is honest feedback and constructive criticism. We need to be challenged as well as encouraged, pushed on, as well as affirmed. If I develop and post content that doesn't read well, it does me no good at all for well-meaning members of the Steemit community to tell me how well it reads, just to get a follow.

As you interact with the Steemit community, I encourage you to be genuine in your reviews, comments, and feedback. Don’t make this all about money and do the “I’ll follow you if you follow me” thing. I challenge you to create content that genuinely provides value to the community and to render constructive criticism with a critical eye, with the intent of truly helping others improve their chances at success. Don't be the person who blindly upvotes posts that do not deserve it, rather, be the person who genuinely cares enough to respond with real thought and honesty.

I am eternally grateful to the people who pushed me, challenged me, motivated me and held me accountable during my own trauma recovery. The genuine help and dedication they showed me gave me a much better quality of life than I would have had without them, in spite of the pain and tears.

As a Steemit community member, you are in a unique position. You have the opportunity to contribute to the success of other community members through your genuine, honest, critical feedback, along with a healthy dose of encouragement and maybe a couple of bucks. Be that person.

Thanks for your ear...

Richard