I used to be an idiot. One day several years ago I was hanging out in an Irish pub to watch the game and drink a beer. Across the bar was sitting a very beautiful girl that I could almost swear that she was looking at me. Either that or she likes darts, at least that’s what I thought since there was a dart board behind me.

So I decided to talk to her, I didn’t know if she liked me or not, so I decided that there was only one way to find out. I decided that fear gets you nothing and that shame was grossly overrated. So I chugged some Irish courage and walked towards her.

Halfway across the bar this thought crossed my mind: “Wait, what am I gonna say?”

I told you I was an idiot.

Immediately, all kinds of stupid pick-up lines started pouring into my brain and I started pushing them away. Then all of the sudden, the doubts started to settle in: Maybe she really likes darts, maybe I remind her of someone, or maybe she just thought she knows me from somewhere.

But I ran out of steps, and before I could think of something, I found myself in front of her, and I thought of nothing better to say than this: “Do I know you from somewhere?”

Yep, like a total moron!

“You gotta have to do better than that!" She said to me.

Shame might be overrated, but it’s painful nonetheless. So I told myself that these things happens to the best of us, and I was just about to walk away and she said: “That’s it? You’re gonna give up?”

What? I said to her.

“Is that all you have?”

“Well, it was either that or what’s your favorite dinosaur?”

She smiled…

Giving Up

Giving up has got to be the number one constant presence on people’s death beds everywhere. In fact, if I was the devil I would toss that fork away, turn the oven down and just start reminding people of all the dreams that they gave up.

That’s the cruelest thing in the world.

Across the pages of the timeless best-selling book “Think and Grow Rich” reads the story of a successful car salesman who in the midst of the gold rush decided to sell everything and buy a gold mine. Can’t go wrong, right?

At first he was doing ok, more than ok, he was making more money that he’d even seen in his entire life. That mine turned out to be the richest mine in Colorado. But then one day, all of the sudden, the golden goose was no longer dropping eggs.

They drilled and drilled but they were no longer able to find the vein, and just like that his dreams were collapsing before his very eyes.

At the first sign of struggle, his entire family that warned him about buying that gold mine in the first place were first first to put pressure on him. After all, anything new can be scary, so they started reminding him how they warned him about changing careers, about how he should have just sticked to what he knew.

After all the Darbys are salesmen and nothing but salesmen. Or so they said.

One cannot help but wonder, how’s that work exactly? So if the Darbys were clock-smiths then every time a new male is born in the family, a laser descends from the sky granting him clock-smithing abilities? And removing all other skills from his repertoire? Is that how it works?

So if there’s a Darby that decides to change his career and become… say, a milkman? Should we start looking for paternity tests?

But I’m digressing. Anyways, his entire family urged him to sell immediately, and sooner than later he succumbed to the pressure and he sold his mine on cents on the dollar.

Worse than that, he sold all the machinery to a junk man for a few hundred dollars, and took the train back home.

Three Feet from Gold

As it turns out, our friend was not familiar with “fault lines”, a common phenomena in Gold mines. Basically it goes like this: Gold - fault line - motherlode.

But here’s the kicker, the gentlemen who bought the equipment was sharp as a serpent's tooth. What he did is that he called in a mining engineer to look at the mine and do a little calculating.

The calculations later proved that he vein would be found just three feet from where the Darbys had stopped drilling.

And just like that, the junkman became a millionaire and the Darby’s well… That’s why the call it the kicker, because you can’t stop kicking yourself.

Tell me if this story sounds familiar, you log on every day, you do your best work but still can't see your post moving up the trending page. Maybe your posts are not paying off as you expected, at least not yet. So maybe you start thinking about quitting.

But what if this is just the beginning? What if steemit is right now at the same stages Bitcoin was back in 2011? Can you imagine the potential? And more importantly, are you sure that you wanna miss on it just yet?

Don’t Be Like Darby

“Every day of my life, I get somewhere between five and twenty emails from people who want to quit.

They’re usually coming to me as a last resort. They want me to convince them to stick it out. Often times they’ve been at it for something like eight or nine months. Or maybe they want me to validate that their instinct is correct, that they should quit.

But that’s not what I’m going to tell them.

Because in the grand scheme of things, eight or nine months is nothing. Even a year is nothing.

Nothing happens overnight.” - Gary Vaynerchuk