Minnow Madness: A Phenomenological Report from a Steemit Newbie

I've been on steemit for a couple weeks now and I wanted to give a phenomenological report from the depths of minnowdom. I do this not because I think I have some special insight because I've noticed psychological patterns within myself that might be useful to discuss with other minnows as a learning opportunity.

One thing I've noticed within myself is a kind of madness, a certain expectation for how things should be vs the reality of what happens actually happens. My success in dealing with steemit hinges on how I handle these expectations.

I think all minnows come into steemit with dreams of becoming rich overnight - simply from being bloggers!

We see other people making serious money. The whales are so successful. Why can't that be us? We think to ourselves: if they can do it so can I!

But we don't often see how much work went into that success. We don't see all the hard work that went into content creation that wasn't rewarded immediately. There was probably a long slog. We also don't see all the failures: all the people who tried to be successful but weren't rewarded for their efforts.

Minnow madness is the delusional mindset whereby we expect to just skip the slog and get massively rewarded for everything we create.

We spend an hour or more crafting a post we are proud of only to see it make a few cents. We feel gipped. We feel like it's not fair.

But Steemit is not fundamentally about fairness. It's a competitiion. We're all competing for a limited resource. Some people are going to be successful where others fail. Some of that success will be luck - being in the right place in the right time. Other parts of the success are going to be from talent and hard work.

But it's up to us to develop the right attitude that fosters long-term success. For me that mindset involves patience, hardwork, and consistency. It's a kind of "if you build it they will come" mindset. Otherwise you're setting yourself up for psychological frustration and entitlement.

The right attitude is to not go into the process feeling entitled to success. That is minnow madness in a nutshell.

I don't profess to have any of this figured out but these have been my observations from minnow world.