On the ups and downs of a model of max-it-out production on Steemit

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I am a Monopoly player at heart. Let me explain...

So this whole period of my life started last month when I discovered @mariannewest and the whole #freewrite community... that was the first time I considered creating content to publish on Steemit each and every day.

One of those freewrites was picked up first by @felt.buzz and @mariita52 and given #STEEMlove, and then a day later was picked up by the @ocd community and given WHALE amounts of that same love, which in turn led to @ocd deciding to include me in their Operation Slider Delegation, thus making me an instant minnow! At about that same time I also made it through the rigorous @qurator process.

So, there I was a new minnow -- found out from the #freewrite folks about #spud and #spud2, read @streetstyle's article, and jumped on in and powered up a BUNCH of Steem, which allowed me to seriously begin moving toward the goal of Operation Slider Delegation: to support minnows with delegation and upvotes until they reach minnowhood on their own earnings.

SO, there I was, with these huge grants of support ... time to enjoy the increased curation rewards, post three times a week (the minimum requirement to maintain support from Operation Slider Delegation), and coast on into true minnowhood...

NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Like I said, I'm a Monopoly player at heart. Say I had poured all the little money I saved from working into a little house. Just a little bitty house. I COULD live there comfortably, OR, I could maintain my present living conditions, rent that little house out for enough to make the mortgage payments and a little more, wait until the equity built up and then bought ANOTHER little house, rent that out to pay those mortgage payments and a little more, and repeat until EITHER I owned all those houses free and clear OR flip one or more for a bigger house, a duplex, or an apartment building.

So too the present situation for me -- not the time to coast when all these great Steemians have created such opportunity for me to advance, but the time to stretch out what I can do as a creative, while I have all this support! Time to MAX IT OUT, to create as much as I can within the confines of my other responsibilities! The first object is EARNED minnowhood, and repaying the good folks at @ocd -- during and beyond that, there are some other opportunities that I see and want to get at!

The ups of the max-it-out approach -- it is amazing how much you can do when you determine to do all you can, and the amount of work and audience you can end up with in a relatively short period of time. The further up about this as a creative is that the more time you spend generating ideas, the more you have available to work with everywhere, and the more you do, the more capacity you create in yourself to do more and better.

There is also the "hit" factor to consider: according to Eric Thall, author of *Making Music Make Money," there is a hit in about every 20 things you create. Create your 20 faster, and you find your hit faster; create sets of 20 faster, and you accumulate your hits faster as well. The two limits are time and good craftsmanship: no point in doing more than you can do well, but again, while doing more and more good work, the capacity for doing more good work increases!

Transition -- The other up of the max-it-out approach is just getting acclimatized to doing a high rate of good work. That will help when the inevitable change comes along ...

The downs of the max-it-out approach -- the first one is that it is NOT always possible. There is this thing called life. There are days when there is enough time to do three posts, and there are days when there is a struggle to do ONE. One of the reasons it is necessary to work those days when high productivity is possible is to be able to say on the hard days that "If I can do three, I can find a way to do ONE if I really try."

The other down: self-motivated high productivity is NOT supported away from environments built for that. Get into the habit of trying to do goodly amounts of high-level work every day, and you will find that the circles of emotional and intellectual nourishment that are sufficient for others will not be for you. You will also find that your need to focus, find that nourishment, and rest when not creating may not be understood or appreciated by those around you. You may need to cut back time you spend with others, and they may or may not take that well.

To me, the ups of max-it-out are bigger than the downs; even while a long way from earned minnowhood, and while waiting for Steem to be all that it can be as a cryptocurrency, the habits and capacities I am stretching out here are serving me EVERYWHERE. I do not think my life will ever be quite the same after this kind of effort.

Of course, it isn't real estate stakes ... people I am NOT spending as much time with right now would all be saying, "It's just not that serious for you to be doing all this work!"

My thinking: either through the habits and capacity AND/OR if Steem does all that it can, someday I'll get that little house after all, Lord willing ...

Photo Credit: Kristian Egelund on Unsplash