I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. Like many starting out here, I initially obsessed with the whole idea of having followers. Look, 17 people are following me! Yow, 23 people are following me! More than anything else, it was a source of wonder and amazement. Why would anyone want to do that? In the immortal words of Zaphod Beeblebrox, "I'm just this guy."
The numbers kept growing, as did my incredulity. A while back I did a post when I hit 150 followers.
But then a strange thing happened on the way to the forum. I started looking at the names on the list. Who are all these people? Some of them I recognized as either people who I follow or who I don't officially follow, but do read on a semi-regular basis. I don't follow a large number of people myself (my Feed keeps me quite busy as it is, and I spend quite a lot of time on the New page), but I have bookmarked a bunch of other Steemians whose posts I read and comment on, again on a semi-regular basis. But many of my Followers were names that I didn't even recognize. I checked out some of their blogs and read and upvoted along the way. But I kept finding people who hadn't posted in months, or who had never posted. Um, okay.
And as my number of Followers continued to grow, I found myself to no longer be obsessed with the count. It passed 200, then 300, and I didn't do more Milestone posts. It finally dawned on me that having X number of Followers has little if any practical meaning. I've now passed 350, but if you go by the count next to the little eye icon on every post, I've never even come close to triple digits for the number of readers for a post, let alone upvotes. A post I did two and a half weeks ago at a point when I had over 300, arguably my most successful post so far, both in terms of earnings and upvotes,
My Encounter With a Naked Henry Kissinger: A True Story
has had, as of today, only 58 reads.
So I've come to the point where I'm no longer obsessed with the number of followers that appears on my blog's home page. But, like many people who've entered a 12-Step program with good intentions, it seems I've merely transferred my obsession to something else, a new path with new goals.
Instead of focusing on a number that seems to have no relation to how I might measure "success" (however that might be defined) on this site, and which I have no control over anyway, I'm going to focus on a number that is both a measure of "success" and over which I do have some control.
Steem Power.
It's an important number for so many reasons. Pretty much everything you do here depends on it.
I hope that it's a long time until I have any need or desire to powerdown. My numerical goals here (asides from my goals as a writer or as a member of the community here, subjects for other posts) will from now on be in terms of Steem Power. Right now, I have 935.952 SP.
Next milestone 1,000.
After that, the moon.
image credit: Pixabay
BTC = 1P535cxV1SXkPWj1GAqxv6PqHuaCBnsqJ2
LTC = LSQNA1bCUDXKBfN5bewzBngTczxDBxCQkL
ETH = 0xB86A902A1bedF3b47b20edB5f35218k7d1k91aA66F