Turning Frustration into Motivation following theft from my Steemit Account

Over the last 24 hours, I experienced what I hope none of you who read this ever will. Someone else accessed my account, changed my keys, and withdrew 493 STEEM that I had just sent over from Bittrex. All done within minutes after my initial, terrible, mistake when making a transfer to Steemit from Bittrex. It was really gut-wrenching to helplessly see someone else start the powering down of my Steem Power without being able to stop it.

Luckily enough, the account recovery happened swiftly enough that I could change my keys again before any further damage was done (Although it did keep me up all night refreshing the email). Although I know there are many who have paid far greater prices for lessons learned in life, both physical and monetary, the completely unnecessary loss of 493 STEEM remains just as frustrating.

So what do we do when things simply suck and we feel beaten down? Well, I have always felt clever saying the following words to my own friends when they hit the wall:

The most useful ability you can have in life is the ability to turn frustration into motivation.

After all, if you want to succeed you’ll have to take on risk and with risk comes losses. What characterises those who succeed, more than anything else in my mind, is the ability to get quickly back up from the downs, to turn them into valuable lessons, and give life a punch back in return. To look at yourself and say "alright, this sucked. A lot. But what would suck even more is if additional losses are made by allowing this to further wear me down, to further distort my focus."

quote by Tomy Robbins, Entrepreneur, author and life coach image source

I guess it's time to live up to my own fancy words. The human mind is an interesting thing. It can look at the mistakes of the past, and serve you regret and pain, or it can look at the opportunities of the future, and serve you passion, purpose and drive. Why not choose the latter?

I certainly will. This experience was terrible. Gut-wrenching. But there’s an opportunity there to let that frustration fuel my motivation to do better trades, write better posts, and build stronger relationships steemit than ever. After all:

We are traders, and we are steemians.

Thank you also to all the great people on @steemspeak discord, the @steemSTEM community and a number of people on steem.chat for helping me quickly perform the right actions in response to what happened, you know who you are. Thank you in particular to @illestbambi who immediately after I had informed our Discord channel of my situation, went on to publish an article on how to protect one's account. Both to help others avoid the same trap, and promising to help me recover some of my loss with its rewards. I hope you will check it out alongside his other material.

Although mostly a terrible experience, it also served as proof of the value the community around STEEM has. It is perhaps this, more than anything else, that make me believe that STEEM is destined for the Moon. And also why I am so happy to be part of a collective effort to make this platform increasingly awesome!

Take care everyone,

Fredrik / @Fredrikaa