My 2019: The last 2019 Showcase Weekend: My Steemit Journey So Far

I haven't been on Steemit for very long - less than 4 months in fact.

But the #my2019 competitions created by @anomadsoul are too good an opportunity to review my time on Steemit, and some of the creations that I am happy with on this platform.

Given that I have only been on the platform for a relatively short time, selecting three of my favourite posts should be relatively easy.

I came to Steemit with the goal of practicing my writing skills for blogging, and to develop content that could easily be re-used for a blog that I would then monetise.

In time, however, I discovered that Steemit is quite an enjoyable platform to develop content on given that there's a well established community here who can be very supportive and encouraging to new content creators.

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The Journey Begins

My first ever post on the platform is actually one that I am very proud of. I wanted to highlight to the Steemit community that I came here after exiting a very dark period of my life. And that my purpose in coming here was to document how I was working to recover from some very challenging times.

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The post is called "The Journey Begins" and the thing that I like the most about this post was that I was able to write about how depressed I was feeling about my recent failures without really stating in any level of detail what it was that had happened to cause me to be in such a dark place. The post itself isn't particularly long, however it describes very well how I was feeling at the time that I wrote the post.

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My Financial Demise

My second post titled "My Financial Demise" is also worth mentioning given that this post describes in more detail exactly how I came to be in such challenging circumstances and my plan to slowly work my way into a more positive and financially successful situation.

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Unsurprisingly, given what brought me to start documenting my journey on Steemit, my first couple of posts are quite dark and depressing. I discuss items such as my wife coming very close to leaving me, which is in no way an exaggeration. My wife and I have had conversations about this on numerous occasions, and it was very much a potential outcome for a period of time. And I completely understand why she felt this way, I have put her through a lot over the years, and she is an incredibly patient and loving woman to have put up with all the stress and frustration that I have created.

Thankfully, my wife and I have become closer throughout this journey and are in a very good place now. She has forgiven me for the disaster(s) that I brought into our life (and in all honestly never completely held me to blame) but is also very thankful at how hard I have worked to get us on our way to being financially independent once again.

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The experts are deceiving you

And finally, my final post that I will mention here is my first post to receive any real recognition from the Steemit community. This post is titled "The experts are deceiving you" and describes how entrepreneur "gurus" can influence a person to believe that going into business is much more risk free and simpler than the actual reality.

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I describe in this post how I listened to a multitude of entrepreneurship podcasts before purchasing my business and how I quickly came to realise that many of the topics discussed in these podcasts were much more complicated than these "gurus" make them out to be.

By no means am I stating that these podcasts were the main reason for me going into business, or that I didn't properly assess the risks before going into business for myself, however I simply wanted to discuss how these "entrepreneur gurus" are over simplifying the reality behind going into business for one's self and that their content should be viewed with some heavy skepticism.

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There are other posts that I have created so far on Steemit that I am quite happy with. For example, my last entry in the competitions organised by @anomadsoul is a post that I am quite pleased with as it shows that I have progressed from quite a dark place into a much more positive place today. It's also a post that provides an update to show that I have made some significant progress towards becoming debt free after my business failure, and that my wife and I are much happier now that we are living back in our home town.

However, this @blocktrades competition only calls for summaries of three posts that I am happy with, and so I end this post now. Thanks to @anomadsoul for creating these competitions, they have encouraged me to look on the past 12 months and contemplate how much progress I have made in this time and how happy I am now in comparison to the end of 2018.

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I hope you are all having an excellent end to 2019, bring on 2020!

Shared on twitter at: https://twitter.com/ianbwill/status/1210565959137681408