I've had the idea for this post in my busy.org drafts menu for around 4 months. After listening to a podcast (The Ground Up Show) today, I felt motivated to finally write this post.

A friend once told me to not look at Steemit like an investment or money-making opportunity, but a community. Nowadays, I could not agree with him more. At the time I was posting to steemit nearly every day and was quickly running out of good, valuable content.

At one point, I stopped posting because I just couldn't justify the time I was putting into it every single day.

let's get personal

By posting every day, I burned myself writing too much. I didn't burn out, I just burned myself enough to realize that, by continuing, I will burn out. So I stopped posting for quite some time. This moment of realization let me think a bit about what I was doing — or what I wasn't doing.

What I wasn't doing was bringing any real value to the steemit platform. I was writing to write, not to offer value.

I followed the numbers and drove myself mad. The posts I had "worked hard" on were not getting the attention I felt they deserved. And boy did it hurt. What I didn't realize at the time was that those posts didn't offer any real value. They were just... words on a screen.

so how did I recover

It was simple, really: I didn't. Like a roguelike game, I started over. Only thing I could bring with me was knowledge of the previous round.

I started taking more time for each post and trying to make them better. I read them through multiple times, I restructured them to make more sense, I managed the flow. I was actually starting to enjoy writing again.

learn from my mistakes

Before you get too serious on steemit - find what your core values are. Do you like singing, dancing or even making movies? If you find it interesting and put your soul into it, you have a good candidate for a core value.
Of course, you won't find your core values after 5 minutes of thinking. It will take time. It won't be easy. But once you do find the core values, your life becomes a bit easier.

Passion shows, and so does disinterest.

Take time for each post and don't just push "content" out of the door.

conclusion

After reading this post, the most likely case is that you will still make the same mistakes as me. I just hope that you will remember how to "start over". Good luck, traveller.