Missing trains and skin in the games

Do you ever feel like you are far behind, missed a golden opportunity, lagging? I do. I have felt it often in my life and in general, it has been true and the person to blame has been myself. Even though I sometimes see trends forming, I am not risk-taking by nature and if anything, quite risk averse. For some, this may be viewed as a good thing but, I see it as one of my flaws. One way this presents itself is that I don't throw myself into something early, even if I see potential in it.

I have often thought, what if I was in at Steemit early, what if I had arrived in mid-2016 instead of early 2017. Even though impossible to actually know in hindsight, if I had followed the same trajectory starting 6 months earlier I have very little doubt that I would be a lot more whale-ish by now and, I would have put more of my own funds into Steem. I was here for 6-7 cent Steem, the problem was, I didn't know what that meant at that time. Taking my starting point back 6 months would have meant that I did know.

It took me 4-6 months to really get my head around this place and begin to learn what I needed to learn. I still have a long way to go of course but it was around summer 2017 that I really started applying and investing myself. If that had started from my day one, I would have known in March that it was time to invest but the reason I didn't invest was for two reasons, risk and reward.

Money was very, very tight last year after various complications but, I would have been able to scrape a few hundred euros together easily enough. 200€ would have bought ~4000 Steem at that point. Using that as a starting point instead of zero would have fundamentally changed my position here. If I had been here 6 months earlier, I would have likely had a great deal more than that already accumulated. The risk for me based on the knowledge I had was too high and based on the knowledge I had, I didn't know of the potential rewards to come.

They say knowledge is power but, it is actually what one does with that knowledge that has value. When I started here, my knowledge was poor, my processes bad, I acted as I thought I should without first understanding the ecosystem and I was much, much more idealistic about it all. I bought heavily into the idea that content matters and still to this day, it plagues me. There was no power to be had from the knowledge I possessed about the platform, only what I brought into the platform through my own experience.

I still think content should matter but those that really understand the platform know this not to be true. While I was developing content, they were finding loopholes. While I was trying to engage, they were maximizing. It is not that I missed the train, I just got on at a different station, on a different train, on different tracks.

But, I am not unhappy with my progress and many may even be envious of my position. Not that it matters to me but, I think anyone who started when I started could be in a similar position. In fact, because of when I actually started learning and developing consistently, anyone who started around summer last year could be in a similar position but, did they know that then? Were they ready to take the risks for the rewards?

What about those who started in November or when SBD broke the peg? Did they have the knowledge of the way the system worked to take advantage of the situation or, was it too risky, better take the rewards and run? There was a time that I was very likely to think that way too but now, I am a little more risk-welcoming and even if the Steem social experiment fails, the knowledge I have gained here has value in and of itself which means I will be able to more quickly identify, learn and act upon other systems in the world, real and virtual.

This is just a ramble of a post but a lot of people think that they too have missed the train because they currently aren't getting the rewards they want or, they look at accounts above them and think they are entitled to the same position. There is no space for entitlement here in my opinion and those who support the entitled should cut it out. But, there is still a long way to go, many stations left and several trains to come. A lot of opportunity for those who learn and work.

Last night I crossed the 4000 follower threshold which doesn't mean much considering many are likely dead. Just because humans tend to like round numbers and I am no different, I transferred a few hundred Steem in to power up so now I have 20,000 SP. It has taken a lot of work to get here but it has also taken a great deal of risk from my perspective and that is something I am content with, I have proven to myself that I don't always have to play it safe.

Yep, it might come back to bite me very hard but, I am okay with that. Skin in the game.

Taraz
[ a Steemit original ]