The danger of getting OK at what you love

When I first started here many many moons ago, well about 45 from what I can tell, I had no idea what I was doing. I was a lost little red fish whose only experience was from posting some art on instagram and having used noise.cash for all of 2 weeks. Now as we know HIVE does not come with a manual, you dive in and learn as you go and hope some bigger fish come in and guide you. So I started writing small pieces here and there, found out about communities and broke all their rules in the process. I was not good, I was not even ok but I was learning. The first vote was exciting, the first time I cleared $0.02 and got a payout was a thrill, what I put there to the HIVE ecosphere had value to someone, it caught someone's eye and made them stop and hit a little button.

Now,many moons later, thanks to the variety of Hivers I have stumbled into along the way I have learnt and developed, evolved and grown. I have received a lot of guidance, support, and encouragement; more than I most likely deserve. This has allowed me to start to understand the rules and rhythms of HIVE, what is a community after, what are the big no nos and where will my ideas and random thoughts may best land and be received, I say start because I definitely still learning each and every day.

So I would like to now think I have become ok, I say this without hubris, I am not saying good I am saying ok, passable, satisfactory, all right, fine, acceptable, up to scratch. I can write a blog and it has a chance of landing and adding value in someone's eyes. And this is great... but it is also deadly.

Because now I have an expectation of myself. I have set a standard for myself, I know I can do better, I know I should be pushing myself to be better so what happens… I freeze, I wait for that one great idea and dismiss the smaller ones as not good enough. Where before I plunged in, throwing blogs at the wall and seeing what would stick, pausing on a walk and writing what pops into my head on my mobile and hitting send, now I started to pause, I wait, I doubt, maybe I'll wait until i get a keyboard in front of me, maybe it's not as good as I think, have I done better?

And the worst part was not realising I had slipped into it until I looked at my post history and started to see that the free abandonment in my blogging had slowly faded. Now I'm not saying my lesson learned are not good ones, in fact without it I would still be flailing way and righting snippets not sonnets, however what I realised is that as you get better at something you start judging yourself (at least I do), you start expecting more and more from yourself. This drive is good, it makes us better people and better artists, writers, singers. But only if it does not freeze us, I at least realised what it was I had to do...

Take the best I have learned, apply it, but always be bold in action. Keep pushing the envelope, have faith in what you write and believe in, courage that you have something worthwhile to say, but apply your learnings to it, to polish it and take it to the next level, to improve the message and story you're trying to tell.

Look I don’t really know where this is going but in my new commitment to myself to keep being bold;

“ I thought it, I wrote it, I polished it, I published it”

My art work was used here :)