Why so serious?

One of the lessons I learned the hard way when I was younger is that you shouldn't care too much about what you get from content creation, because if you do, you will often get disappointed by the results you'll get and you'll quit.

I learned that five years ago, when I had a small YouTube channel focused on promoting music from unknown artists. I was doing okay, I had around 10,000 subscribers, and I was making some money at the end of the month.

However, I invested a lot of time and effort into promoting that channel, trying to make it big and get people to notice it, yet no matter how much I tried, a lot of people simply didn't care. They didn't watch the videos, didn't listen to the music and just ignored me completely.

I was really sad about it back then, because I cared about being successful, making a lot of money and sharing what I was doing with a lot of people. When I failed completely, I gave up and never tried to do it again.

Then I started working on design elements, publishing them on all kind of websites and finally, I started writing for Steemit.

Now, the main problem with this website is that, in a lot of situations, Steemit is similar to YouTube when it comes to getting people to notice you. You could spend years writing good content and not a lot of people will care, at least not as many as you'd like to.

This can be really demotivating for a lot of people, and I'm sure some writers already gave up trying, either here, or on websites like Medium, simply because they didn't feel like they could achieve anything. These websites are already filled with people who are a lot better and have a lot of followers.

But here's the trick that helped me get from nothing to something, the trick that still helps me make progress every day, even a little bit - I don't care about what kind of rewards I receive from what I do, and I just care about the content. I want to write because I like writing and sharing what I know or my opinions and thoughts.

Sure, I create that content hoping you'll like it, and hoping I could make a living out of it, but I don't look at success like my life depended on it. I don't take this thing too seriously, and neither should you.

You'll get successful if you work hard enough, sure, but it doesn't mean it will happen soon. I wrote over 500 articles on this website and I'm still receiving a few cents for everything I post. Is there any chance I will get big at some point? Maybe. Will it happen soon? Probably not.

This applies to almost everyone out there - the chances of you succeeding are fairly small, and that's not always because the content you create is bad. It's simply a matter of luck - the right people didn't find you yet, and you need to keep working until they finally do.

So here's my advice - stop being so serious when it comes to being successful, stop being so serious when it comes to creating the right content for people to notice you, and just focus on creating cool things for the sake of doing it.

This is the approach I took when I started learning Blender as well - could I get a job working with that software in the future if I get good at it? Maybe. Can I be 100% sure of that? Nope. So what do I do? I learn as much as I can and I try to create cool stuff and share it with you whenever it's ready.

Who knows, maybe one day someone at a company will see my work and will invite me to work for them, but that could happen after several years, and if I focus only on that, until it will actually happen, I'll be sad and miserable, feeling like I fail every time I don't get an offer.

Learn how to do the same, learn how to focus on what you do instead of the rewards, and just create nice things simply because you like to do that. In time, you will get rewarded, one way or another.