Steemit 101 e-Book Update, Plus “Congratulations on Your Introduction. Now What?”

This is a double post, 2-for-the-price-of-1, twice as nice. First, let me give you an update on the Steemit 101 e-book that we released yesterday.

• Downloads are BOOMING! We’ve doubled yesterday’s total already today. Please tell everybody it’s free for the rest of today and tomorrow (Friday).

• We have 20+ great reviews (and more if you count the editions in other countries outside the U.S.- thank you Canada, Germany, and the UK) – need some more reviewers, please! No paid reviews, please, Amazon has taken down several reviews already – they must be suspicious that so many people could get this excited about a new book and site! Also, make sure to review the book and not just the site; it’s okay to do both.

• Please tell some more people to download the free book; we’re about to crack into Amazon’s Top 1000 downloads. With your help, we can do it today!

• Ads will kick in soon. When the free giveaway ends, we’re aiming for Amazon Category Bestseller status in 1-3 different Kindle categories. Then Amazon will promote it more for us, sending e-mails to customers who have bought similar titles, etc.

• We authors are putting 100% of the book royalties back into promoting the book and Steemit. On behalf of all of us, thank you for helping us get this book into more peoples’ hands. We hope to help a lot more people discover Steemit!

And now, here’s my new article for everyone.

Congratulations on Your Introduction. Now What?

So your #introducemyself post went really well. The community loved your story and responded with a genuinely warm welcome (and not just from Wang). You earned fifty dollars or maybe a few hundred, including a STEEM Power stake in the future growth of this site. Now you’re wondering what comes next.

Here’s a short quiz. Should you:
(A) Take the money and run?
(B) Check in once in a while to see if this is the next Google or Facebook? or
(C) Keep posting on Steemit and see where this journey leads?

You’re right, (C) is the best of those choices, but it’s the cream of the crap. The quiz is flawed because there’s no great answer. Let me show you why I think the best answer is “(D) None of the above”. We can do better.

There are two kinds of people, those who are creative and those who have been told they aren’t creative. Which one are you?

You spent an hour or two penning an introduction, the first real writing you’ve done in years. You gave a heartfelt introduction, explaining your life and interests in an honest and personal way. (Or maybe you faked half of it, which only proves you’re creative!) The Steemit community responded in kind by welcoming you and rewarding you with plenty of upvotes.

Now you’re staring at the amount of money listed on your post (which fluctuates with the market cap) and wondering if this whole thing is a dream. You sure fooled them, didn’t you?

Maybe other self-doubts are creeping into your head, too. The introductory post was one thing, but what’s your second act? When you write a more substantial blog post, will you be exposed as a fraud? An amateur? Do you really have what it takes to write a thoughtful, valuable post that gets upvoted? What if you make a mistake and lose your credibility?

None of these should stop you. Don’t talk yourself out of being better.
Every day, people talk themselves out of becoming better. They fall back into dead-end jobs/relationships/lives when the alternative is to cover frightening new ground. But what if that new ground is only frightening for a few steps? What if you have encouragement from a supportive community along the way? What if that journey turns out to be a fun learning experience?

What if you get paid for it, maybe not as much as you did for that introductory post, but you make actual money for writing, something most writers only dream of doing? And maybe you do even better with the next one, or with one post out of every three? What if you start to develop a following, some fans who look forward to reading your posts, not only to upvote them, but because your posts inspire them also? It’s okay; they don’t have to be as long as this one. I’ve been upvoting a lot of shorter posts lately if they’re good.

My Story About Confidence

Here’s a little known fact about me. Donkeypong’s real name is Tom Janowicz and I used to teach English as a Second/Foreign Language (ESL and EFL). I did it for a little while in the United States, but mostly in other countries that bordered the Pacific or South China Sea.

I wasn’t a very good teacher. I didn’t like to use textbooks. The vocabulary lessons were tedious. In reality, I barely learned English grammar well enough to use it myself, and I didn’t really know the rules well enough to explain them to someone else.

Mostly I just talked with the students. And that turned out to be enough. Because I soon realized that language wasn’t their biggest need.

They needed me to help them discover confidence. And I needed them for the same reason.

I was shy on my first day of teaching and for a while thereafter. I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I’d try things that were utter failures, falling flat, but I’d pick myself up and try again. My students had it even worse. They had grown up speaking different languages (not English) at home. Most were afraid to try speaking English because they knew they would make mistakes. If you’ve ever tried to learn a foreign language, I’m sure you know the feeling. They were showing a lot more courage than me, simply by being there and trying.

That’s what kept me there more than anything, just knowing they needed the lessons, and needed me in some way.

A lot of these students were underprivileged. No one ever gave them the tools to succeed: a good education, encouragement, and a sense of self-worth. More than a few of them were pretty scared to even be in the same room as a blue-eyed, white American. They’d never had any meaningful interactions outside their own culture.

I hadn’t really ventured beyond my own culture, either. Some part of me knew that I needed to reach out in a new way. It was one reason I wanted to travel and see some other parts of the world. The only way I could afford to pay for travelling was to teach. So even though I didn’t have any experience teaching, I took the money that was offered, and I resolved to give them everything I had. It turned out to be a transformative period in my life also, not just for the students.

I taught month-long or semester-long classes for several years. My classes went from being quite awkward to becoming popular. I’m not sure I became a better teacher, but I got a better understanding of what I could do to help. My nervousness faded when I thought of the classes not as presentations, but as sharing. My own confidence increased when I found that I was good at something. If not teaching, then I was getting better at helping them learn.

Pretty soon, in every class, the students were speaking fluently by the end of our time together.

No, it wasn’t a language miracle. I didn’t say they were speaking English fluently! The word fluent has a second meaning also, which I know because I just looked it up again. The second meaning is “the ability to express oneself easily and articulately.” ^^That described my students perfectly by the end of a course.

With 90% of these students on Day 1, the biggest obstacle was confidence. And I’ll be honest: If someone wasn’t a great English language speaker on Day 1, they weren’t going to suddenly be a lot better at English a few weeks later. I did try to teach them the language, I really did, but it wasn’t my strong point. The reason I succeeded as a teacher wasn’t that I was good at teaching. Somewhere along the line, I became a good confidence-builder for others. That helped gave me a sense of self-esteem as well.

When every teacher you’ve ever had wanted to hit you over the head for making a mistake in the vocabulary tables you memorized, it must be a big change to have someone tell you what you’re doing right. I made a point of finding each student’s strengths, encouraging them, and drawing them out until they proved themselves and were recognized by the whole class.

When they believed they were good at one thing, they couldn’t wait to try something else and show me they could do better. Everybody is good at something. We had some of the top students in a class trying to compete with what the worst students were doing well at.

And those ‘worst students’? They came in with beaming smiles on their faces and couldn’t wait to tell me about their day, a new movie they’d seen, or their opinion on an important issue. Each day, they were practicing a bunch of English, their fluency improving. We forged the kind of human understanding that transcended any culture or language. I never succeeded in teaching them much grammar, and I have no idea if their accuracy improved or not, but I helped them believe in themselves.

For those students, confidence was a drug that made them want to learn and accomplish more. And when I began to realize that I was having a positive impact on them, I felt a lot better about myself. Try, fail, learn, try some more with mixed results, fail again, get up and put even more effort into it, don’t just work hard, but work smart, and you WILL succeed.

If I could wave a magic wand and help everyone on Steemit get to that place, that zone where my students were growing, I would do it. And if you think I can help you, please look me up, and I’ll be glad to try. In the meantime, here are some steps toward building confidence that I have found quite useful. We all go through periods where we have a lot of self-doubt, and maybe one or more of these can help you overcome that.

Confidence Tips

Here are five tips for improving your self-confidence.

1.) Tune out your negative thoughts. Most people have many more negative than positive thoughts. Your bad thoughts do not necessarily represent reality; most of them are just noise. Put them aside and focus on the good ones. That’s a key to creating success.

2.) Exercise. Go for a run, go for a swim, lift some weights, or do a few minutes on the elliptical. It gets the juices flowing, boosts your endorphins and other happy chemicals, and gives you a sense of accomplishment. That’s confidence right there.

3.) Make a plan to create something. And then do it. Know your goal before you begin working. There’s nothing wrong with writing something creatively, because you never know where it might end. But have an end goal in mind. And then don’t drop the project until you’ve accomplished it.

4.) Clear your desk and put on some killer music. This is two tips in one. Having a clear desk is not essential; some people work great under an epic mess. But cleaning up is a great metaphor for organizing your thoughts. You’ll feel better about yourself. And then you can put on some rocking tunes to get you in the mood. Heavy metal, rap, reggae, jazz, truck driving country, whatever you like to listen to. Just make sure it is positive and up-tempo.

5.) Just say, “F--- it! What’s the worst that can happen? Really, what IS the worst that can happen? A downvote? Not many upvotes? Like others, I’ve had some clear misses, not only popular posts. Here’s an analogy: Experts say that the hardest thing to do in professional sports is to hit a baseball. A really good baseball hitter only gets a hit 2-3 times out of every 10. Don’t be afraid to swing and miss a few times. You’ll punch some winners also. So join me and yell right now, as loud as you can, “F--- it! I’m gonna do this!” If you don’t like to swear, then just roar like a lion.

Screw the mistakes. They can make you better.

‘Fear of failing’ is the biggest confidence killer. Saying this isn’t enough; I know you need to see it and believe it. But here’s my advice anyway: Don’t sweat the mistakes or missteps. Those are not failures; they’re learning opportunities. Supposedly, Thomas Edison tried (and failed) about 900 times to invent the light bulb. What if he’d quit after the third time? I don’t care if you trip once or twice or three times on that new ground. Try, fail, learn from any mistakes, and put your best effort into your next attempt.

Choice (D), Revealed

Think outside the box. All of us are creative in different ways. Trust in that creativity that people said you didn’t have. If life is a multiple choice exam with three answers you don’t like, then cross them out and write in a fourth one. If I were to answer the question of what you should do next on Steemit, I’d go with something like, “(D) Give Steemit all you’ve got, embrace its opportunity, and put your creativity to work…for fun and profit.”

Damn, that sounds like a book review!