Are you familiar with the adage "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room, whereas if you're the dumbest person in a room you're in the right room."?

This means if you're already the smartest among your peers, you won't feel enough motivation or pressure to learn more and to become better, because you are already the best and no one challenges you, while if you are the dumbest you have so many smart guys around you to learn from.

I don't intend to write a motivational post here, but I do lay the ground for what I'm going to say next.

Context

Steem blockchain is an open book! Everyone can see what everyone does and has done on the blockchain in the past. And once something is on the blockchain it's there forever, it cannot be deleted (if you delete a post or a comment, it's simply marked as deleted and hidden from view in steemit or other apps, but the 'deleted' content is still on the blockchain and can be accessed).

On various occasions members of the community will check you out.

Just don't think "I will only do this (whatever 'this' is) until I grow my account then I'll stop.". If you have such thoughts, give up on what you're trying to do, because everything is in plain view.

That being said, I'll start with

Reasons NOT to Follow Someone

• He or she followed you (or not) and wrote a generic comment asking to follow back
• If the account is a bot, make sure you use that bot and need the information the bot posts (I'll probably need to do some checking on this point myself)
• Person usually posts in a domain you have no or little interest in (for example, if you are interested in crypto news and the person usually posts memes).
• Speed-read a few posts or watch parts of the person's videos or photographs. If you don't find anything of value there you resonate with, don't follow!
• Person usually resteems much more than he/she posts. You can make a very few exceptions, otherwise your Feed will become irrelevant, and you'll miss posts from people you really want to follow. Related to the issue of missing out important posts, @ginabot is a tool on Discord you can find REALLY useful for various notifications. Thanks to @ilyastarar for telling me about it.
• When you have already followed too many people and you never really read what they post. You need to cleanup until you are comfortable with the list of people you follow and do manage to at least read if not engage with every one of them.

Reasons to Follow Someone

• I believe you should follow your friends from beyond steemit. Your are, after all, supporting each other in a new endeavor.
• You should probably follow the accounts of your favorite apps, tools, maybe exchanges (if they're on steemit). Their updates may be very important to you.
• You should find people you can learn from. You can even learn the same thing from different people in different ways. For example: some important development happens in the domain you are interested in. Someone breaks the news. You'd want to know that. Then, someone writes a small post or records a video explaining what this is all about, but without going into very sophisticated details. Enough for you to grasp the process well, but not deep. In the end, another person writes a huge post explaining all the little (almost technical) details. If you want to know them, you certainly will appreciate the third approach as well. Besides, there are more ways to interpret the same information, and even more ways to present it.

Final Words

Memes are funny! Sometimes really funny! But there's a limit of how many memes one can watch every day, without slowly turning his brain into gelly. I think... Uhm, it's getting harder... What was I saying?

There are numerous smart stemians willing to share from their wisdom and knowledge. Learn to appreciate them! And even more, feed your brain with the right kind of food and train it to think!

(image from Pixabay.com)