Much like you @carlgnash, the first time I was curied was a fun/confusing moment for me.
Perhaps unlike you, I knew (inherently) that I sucked and there was no legitimate reason for 100+ people and 100+ $ to land like magic on my post. I spent an inordinate amount of time searching around for bugs/problems with the steemit platform in an attempt to learn more about the mistaken votes/cashish going on with my post. I thought maybe if I could find the mistake, I could give the funds back. I never did find anything. So, I kicked my computer for being so stupid and not providing me with an answer.
Well eventually I started clicking through all of the people that voted for the post, landed on the curie page and read about it. A small army of people focused on finding awesome content and elevating it in order to help improve the quality of the first decentralized-social-network-bloggy-whatever-this-steemit-thingy-is? Fuck yeah! I'm on board. I immediately apologized to my computer and started working on another post. Go curie!