A tragedy in the making

12 hours after getting home from Poland, I am sitting waiting for my next training delivery to start. Needless to say, I am a little worn out. But, this is life and the way it goes at times.

This shot was taken in Verona, Italy - the home of Romeo and Juliet. A romantic setting for a tragic love story and at times I feel like I am living in in my own Shakespearean tragedy - minus the incest, murder and performed with a much duller wit of course.

Most of my content is derived from my life and I think this is also why so much of it is Steem related, as over the last two years I have come to spend a lot of my free time on Steem, and I haven't really a great deal of free time to spend. So, Steem has become my entertainment, my meditation and my source of learning and as a result, a lot of my thoughts are Steem-centric.

I remember when I used to play the first release of Ghost Recon with the scope sight being a cross-hair in the center of the screen. I would stare at that point for hours on end and even when I looked away and in my dreams, there it was, the reticules closing upon the target. When we focus on something it is all we see and when we create habits based on our focal point, we are going to narrow our sight quite heavily as the edges of our vision blur further the more attention we pay to the center.

For me, it has been Steem that has taken my focus and the edges of my vision have blurred also,. however I sometimes wonder if this is a narrowing, or an expansion. I do not watch the news, read a newspaper, game or watch a long list of shows and, I am better off for it. I know this because once upon a time I paid attention to altogether different things.

We hear the term "attention economy" often and how valuable it is yet, we look at it as if we are external from the system, and we are not. We all have attention and where we choose to place it is going to determine many aspects of our lives, and especially the things that we care about the most, the things that affect us. If we neglect to pay attention to influencing factors, we become blind to what is pushing or pulling us and therefore, will affected, we are largely helpless.

I think that one of the compelling aspects on Steem is that here I have a much greater sense of control over my actions and behaviors as I have more insight and tools available. While this is a smaller ecosystem than my full experience, as Steem expands to include more tools and possibilities, it can integrate more heavily into my world and this means, I can slowly gain more control over other aspects of life also.

This is where I keep harping on about ownership of property and therefore experience as the more of our lives we own, the more ability we have to control our personal resources. It isn't just the "material" owning of experience of which I speak, it is also the psychological and emotional. For example, if you unable to control your own emotions, are they yours, are they owned by you?

This is what ownership means of course, control. And while I have no care to control others, I do want to be able to control whatever resources I own - whether it be my car, or the ability required to drive it. One of the scariest things in this world for me is the potentiality that one day, I will no longer own my mind, that the tools I have available to recall or process are no longer under my control.

One of the most exciting things about Steem is having ownership of my resources, my Steem, my Resource credits, my posting content, my voting and downvoting behavior, the way I comment and engage and of course, what I support toward the future of Steem.

As a Steem owner, the direction that steps into the future is dictated by the community but what is truly interesting about the process is that while all are bound by the immediate blockchain code, everyone is able to go in their own direction due to the decentralized ecosystem. Some can win, some can lose, some can create, others destroy and while some will try and fail, others will try and succeed and - everyone can benefit.

Even those who fail in a Steem business are not bound to living a life of Steem destitution and this is especially true if their attempt to create still left them with some Steem Power and, a community that respected the try. A failed project is not a failed person and for most who succeed in this life, it is not accomplished on the first go.

Learning to fail well means being able to absorb the emotions of failure, and then have resilience and tenacity to get up and try again, and again - and again. This doesn't mean beating one's head against the wall though, it means learning from the failure and understanding that whatever was tried was not fit for the conditions, then adjust.

I find that so many people build the narrow habits and forget that because everything is moving, what they may have been successfully doing earlier is no longer suitable for the changed environment.

Haejin is a good example of this on Steem, as while he has been able to do what he has done for two straight years with little to no resistance, times have changed. He could quite easily stop posting the crap he has and instead curate and help the platform and still take 50% return - instead he decides to retaliate. Now, if this was about defending his content, I would agree with him - but this isn't. This is about the conditions where he was able to take 100% changing to where he no longer can.

He misses oldsteem in the same way a slave owner misses slavery. Times were better for the slave owner when they didn't have to pay the cost of the work performed and on Steem, the cost of improvement is the rewards gained by those who deserve it. Who is deserving is up to the individual placement of stake, as is the choice of who is not.

When we are bound by our focus and desire to have an outcome that the conditions do not support, we are caged, prisoners of ourselves and tied to focus on achievement rather than understanding of the environment. From that position, we can miss opportunity that could redirect our focus and bring a greater contentment than before.

While Haejin focuses his energy on gathering as much steem as possible and attempting to punish those who are in his way, he is likely missing the chance to help make his holdings much more valuable by supporting those who are driving for the growth and uptake of the ecosystem. Because he is compelled to maximize stake, he is caged, and the Steem he holds he is forced to use in retaliation rather than by choice to place.

Those who downvote him are free to downvote, they are not compelled, it is a choice. If Haejin instead supported a range of content creators that added value to Steem, all downvotes would stop.

Emotional control when applied to the things we are trying to achieve will mean that we are able to better read the conditions and adjust for them in a way to achieve our goals. In the case of maximization of Steem stake, while 100% was possible but is now frowned heavily upon, 50% will get to the same point - it'll just take twice as long.

The difference is that in that time the distribution improves, the ecosystem for participants performs better, there is encouragement for creators, more interest and variety for consumers, more users for developers and a higher value for investors at all levels. With a combined vote of 21 dollars between Rancho and Haejin that used to take around 1000 Steem a day, the lack of emotional control doesn't see the changed conditions and therefore are compelled to retaliate and take zero instead of the 500 they could get.

Greed, power, corruption - a Shakespearean tragedy.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]