Lately it's been getting easier and easier to convince people to sign up for Steemit and given the influx of new users, I'm not the only one finding this to be the case. The problem I've been coming across now is people wondering how to get started generating high quality content. It's for these people that I hope to create a series of posts that will help accelerate their learning curve on this totally unique platform.

Disclaimer: These are my personal opinions and views. They do not represent the official positions of Steemit Inc. or any employees thereof

Limitations

In Robert McKee's seminal work on screenwriting, Story, McKee highlights the importance of genre as a purposeful limitation on one's creativity. The idea is that being able to write about anything can itself be a problem. I remember in school my least favorite assignments were the ones where the teacher effectively said, "Write about anything." Limitations help us organize our thoughts and then being forced to maneuver around those confines is what leads to creativity and innovation.

In a recent talk Simon Sinek (probably one of the greatest presenters in the world right now) makes a similar point. He says, "I firmly believe that innovation is born out of the struggle. Innovation is born out of the resourcefulness that you're forced to figure out because literally, the vision is way beyond your grasp."

Now it might sound like I am making contradictory points here, but I don't think I am. "Vision" and "resources" are two sets of constraints that help you to innovate/create. Steem is a distributed database that can store any content, that enables people to register their rating of it (through an upvote), and allocates rewards to content creators (in STEEM) in direct proportion to the ratings given to their content by the crowd. Steemit.com is intended to be the broadest possible window into that content. It is intentionally without constraints, and so it falls on the content creator to impose constraints on themselves. But what constraints? Should one arbitrarily restrict themselves to one type of content? This is one common assumption. Another common default is to limit oneself to creating content that the creator thinks will be "popular." See posts about crypto doing well? Write about that.

The Dangers of Following

But in my experience, the first constraint (restricting oneself to one type of content) is unnecessarily narrow, while the second constraint is without question the path to hell. Not because you shouldn't try to make content that people like, but because people only get to choose from the content with which they are presented. If, for example, there is a lot of cryptocurrency related content on a particular platform (cough cough) then odds are that some of that content is going to be good and receive a lot of upvotes. But the fact that cryptocurrency related content is top trending absolutely does not mean that any cryptocurrency related content will do well. In fact, quite the opposite.

With so much competition in a genre it may very well be more difficult to achieve success within it, not less. And so if you go this route you may find yourself saying, "I worked really hard on my content, content like mine does really well, in fact, far worse content than mine does well, therefore this platform is unfair and I'm done." And so an opportunity to get paid to write about whatever the hell you want is squandered and with it the opportunity for real personal growth.

The Crowd is a Fickle Mistress

This is why I say that this route is the "path to hell." The only thing worse than pursuing it and not achieving success, is pursuing it and having some success because the crowd is a fickle mistress whose inner workings are a total mystery and if you manage to get in its good graces for a moment, the odds of you staying there are zero if your only guide is your own limited perception of its infinitely complex wants and needs.

The Ultimate Constraint: Your Own Vision

This is why I believe that "Vision" is so important. Of course, I'm not the first to say that but it's not something one can hear often enough. That being said, stressing the importance of vision is often little help at all. It too is infinitely broad. "You need vision." "Ok, what should my vision be?" "Whatever you want it to be." "Thanks for nothing."

What is Vision?

It's a tough question, and so to help you with the answer I will point you to one of today's best thinkers (and tough SOB himself): Professor Jordan B. Peterson. In the following video Peterson does perhaps the best job I've heard yet of explaining what exactly "vision" is in a manner that actually enables a person to develop one for themselves. In it he says, "The way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim. It isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy, as you all know if you've ever attained anything because as soon as you attain it, the whole little game ends and then you have to come up with another game. It's Sisyphus. And that's ok, but it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives us because it collapses the game."

My Father's Porsche

When we combine Peterson with Sinek what we get is that "Vision" is the thing at which you are aiming that is so big it appears impossible to attain, but that's ok because it's the progress toward the aim that matters. To give you one anecdotal example, my father always dreamed of having a Porsche. That might sound pretty shallow, but he was a poor kid from Brooklyn, the son of immigrants, who grew up with nothing. Besides, he never did wind up getting a Porsche or a Ferrari or anything like that, despite eventually achieving a level of success that gave him the ability to buy many a Porsche. One day I said to him something like, "Dad, you've been working hard for decades. You've provided for me and my brother, plus multiple other families. Get an effing Porsche already!" To which he responded quite matter of factly, "But if I got a Porsche, what would I have to look forward to?"

Service to Others

That never made sense to me until today. Now the truth is my Dad did have a Vision that was much greater than just a car. When he took over the real estate business he started with my grandfather he promised that he would make sure that not a single one of his descendants would ever have to struggle to make ends meet. In other words, his real vision was one in which he was serving others. The Porsche was just the little carrot he gave to himself.

Sinek again explains:

"My aspirations have a lot less to do with me these days which not unsurprisingly has been the greatest asset in my own career. It's not unusual to expect that when you give to others, that others look out for you. The reason to give to others is not so that they will look out for you, it is an unintended byproduct. There has to be sincerity in the giving."

I think the Porsche was just a little prize he wanted to promise himself to keep some skin-in-the-game; a little piece of self-interest. He never did get a Porsche, but when my Mom expressed interest in a Tesla Model S, he got her one of those ... and it's faster than some Porsches :) While he has met with tremendous success, and has provided us all with so much, he is still constantly thinking about what we might need in the future, what negative circumstances could befall us, and what he can do to make sure we have the help we need if and when that day comes. It's an impossible task, quite frankly, which is exactly the point.

Finally, Persistence

"Persistence" is another one of those words you hear bandied about a lot that often provides little practical guidance. "You have to persist!" Grind it out! Why? Succumbing is so easy. Oh, and don't tell me what to do, if I want to quit I will bloody-well quit! And guess what? Sometimes quitting is the right thing to do. Persistence isn't something you should do, it's something you need to do if you want to work toward your vision. It's what you do when you are really and truly pursuing the right vision. Do you think Elon Musk never wanted to give up? Do you think it was his "grit" that kept him going? Or do you think it was the fact that he chose the biggest challenges in the most exciting fields ... for him! People think the fact that he chose two areas that no one thought could be disrupted (automobiles and aerospace) made him crazy, when it really was just a symptom of the fact that he was truly pursuing his own unique vision. That's the kind of thing that allows you to persist through both of your companies nearly going bankrupt.

"Persisting" is not something that you have to do, as much what you do when you choose the right vision. Therefore, if you pick a sufficiently grand vision, that involves service to others, toward which you can persist through success and failure, then you will be able to make progress, which is really what it's all about anyway. Your vision is not the end, it is the means to the end that is "progress."

Jordan Peterson, once again, brings the point home:

"I wanted to talk to you about what you are as a human being and also as an individual, but also what you could become and that's actually the crucial question in the domain of clinical psychology in particular because a lot of what you're doing with people as a clinician is trying to figure out who they could become. You have a problem. Your life isn't what it could be. Fine. Let's see what it could be like if we changed it. We figure out how to change it. But that's gotta be a negotiated dialogue, right, because I don't know what the hell you should do with your life. I could help you figure it out maybe. We can talk about it, but you are the person that has to decide if the things that you are aiming for get you out of bed in the morning because that's at least one of the crucial issues. So you've gotta specify the goal. And then you gotta specify the transformation processes and start practicing them. And you have to understand that you're going to be bad at it, but that doesn't matter because "bad" is fine. Persistent is what you need to be. If you persist -- with tiny improvements -- if you persist, you win."

Aim at something. If that doesn't get you out of bed in the morning, aim at something else that does. Something big. Be of service to others. Be bad at it. If you fail, the people you've sincerely served will have your back. As Hemingway famously said, "The first draft of anything is shit." So make shit, but also make get a little better every time. Make progress, persist, and you win.

Thank you for reading.