Turning Frustration into Motivation following theft from my Steemit Account

in #steemit7 years ago (edited)

Over the last 24 hours, I experienced what I hope none of you who read this ever will. Someone else accessed my account, changed my keys, and withdrew 493 STEEM that I had just sent over from Bittrex. All done within minutes after my initial, terrible, mistake when making a transfer to Steemit from Bittrex. It was really gut-wrenching to helplessly see someone else start the powering down of my Steem Power without being able to stop it.

Luckily enough, the account recovery happened swiftly enough that I could change my keys again before any further damage was done (Although it did keep me up all night refreshing the email). Although I know there are many who have paid far greater prices for lessons learned in life, both physical and monetary, the completely unnecessary loss of 493 STEEM remains just as frustrating.

So what do we do when things simply suck and we feel beaten down? Well, I have always felt clever saying the following words to my own friends when they hit the wall:

The most useful ability you can have in life is the ability to turn frustration into motivation.

After all, if you want to succeed you’ll have to take on risk and with risk comes losses. What characterises those who succeed, more than anything else in my mind, is the ability to get quickly back up from the downs, to turn them into valuable lessons, and give life a punch back in return. To look at yourself and say "alright, this sucked. A lot. But what would suck even more is if additional losses are made by allowing this to further wear me down, to further distort my focus."

success-is-buried-on-the-other-side-of-frustration.jpg
quote by Tomy Robbins, Entrepreneur, author and life coach image source

I guess it's time to live up to my own fancy words. The human mind is an interesting thing. It can look at the mistakes of the past, and serve you regret and pain, or it can look at the opportunities of the future, and serve you passion, purpose and drive. Why not choose the latter?

I certainly will. This experience was terrible. Gut-wrenching. But there’s an opportunity there to let that frustration fuel my motivation to do better trades, write better posts, and build stronger relationships steemit than ever. After all:

We are traders, and we are steemians.

Thank you also to all the great people on @steemspeak discord, the @steemSTEM community and a number of people on steem.chat for helping me quickly perform the right actions in response to what happened, you know who you are. Thank you in particular to @illestbambi who immediately after I had informed our Discord channel of my situation, went on to publish an article on how to protect one's account. Both to help others avoid the same trap, and promising to help me recover some of my loss with its rewards. I hope you will check it out alongside his other material.

Although mostly a terrible experience, it also served as proof of the value the community around STEEM has. It is perhaps this, more than anything else, that make me believe that STEEM is destined for the Moon. And also why I am so happy to be part of a collective effort to make this platform increasingly awesome!

Take care everyone,

Fredrik / @Fredrikaa

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How did this happen? How did somebody access your account and keys and how could you prevent this from happening again?

@illestbambi made a very useful post about the whole ordeal that answers all of your questions, @fredrikaa himself linked to it in his post above:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@illestbambi/keep-you-account-secure-must-read-for-new-users

I appreciate that, ty. I am still curious how the account and keys were accessed in the first place? Seems crazy.

Yeah someone did a post about a whitehat hack they did, basically be careful about the public memo space. If you accidentally put your password in there, change it immediately!

Cryptogee

Hello @decentralization and thank you for your comment and for taking the time to read my post.

I really did two mistakes:

  1. I thought sending funds to a steemit account required the use of the public memo key as an ID for which account to send the funds to, not realising that an account name only was sufficient (I thought the memo field was obligatory)
  2. When making a transfer of 493 STEEM from Bittrex to Steemit I mistakenly copied the wrong key from the word file where I had saved the different keys, posting my main password instead of the public memo key (which was unnecessary in the first place) in the memo field and thus making it visible on the Blockchain (dunno if they saw it on my wallet, on Steemd, or just had a bot searching for it).

10 minutes later someone had spotted my error, changed all my keys, and sent the 493 STEEM I had just received to Blocktrades. At least I got my Account Recovery done very quickly, mostly thanks to a good community here helping me reach the right individuals, and knowing some myself that could help.

Anyhow, it was really awful, and I just hope I can help others not do the same grave mistake in the future.

That's awful. I'm sorry to hear that happened to you. It must have been very frustrating watching helplessly as it happened.

I have thankfully not had anything like that happen to me (except having a fraudulent charge or two on a credit card which is pretty easily fixed).

I do, however, completely agree about turning frustration into motivation. Currently I'm turning my frustration with a job I'm fed up with and have been for awhile into a relentless quest to start my own business ventures. Most will take at least a few years to really start generating income but as long as I see light at the end of the tunnel I'm just gonna keep on working towards self employment.

Steemit is a very small part of this plan and I'm not relying on it but I am here for the long term in hopes that someday this platform will explode in user numbers and the currency value will increase tremendously. It's more of a lotto ticket in comparison to my other plans. But sometimes those do pay off...

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Woahhh, well, nevermind, you can make it up in a day if this post gets enough recognition!

Another good, similar entrepreneurial quote by the richest man in China, Jack Ma after failing his exams, failing to get a job at KFC, failed at his college entrance exam, tried for harvard anyway, failed ten times, rejected from 30 jobs, and failed to get funding for his business: 'Rejection breeds obsession.'

His frustration was turned around, and he has since created the most successful company on the continent, Alibaba, and is now going global.

That would be nice ^^ although would probably take 10 posts like this to get it all back. Which of course then involves time spent which would have then instead resulted in other posts...

Yeah, we all have some moments like this. It's all about how you proceed.

I'm happy you have control of your account again. It can be frustrating and a lot to deal with someone stealing some your funds but it's a valuable lesson learned and now you're better for it. Your situation can help others from experiencing the same situation you went through so this type of information is way more valuable than the STEEM that was stolen from you.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

Thank you mate. Lets hope you're right. It's always better to take on expensive lessons when you don't have that much money on the line. Better now than later :)

@fredrikaa, I was a bit afraid that this incident would leave a bitter taste in your mouth and deter you from participating in Steemit, but I am very happy to see that you not only had the mental resilience to bounce back immediately, but also used this experience both as a motivator for yourself and as a useful warning for all of us.

I think it won't be long until you recover from the loss, your contributions here are very valued. Best luck and keep up the great work!

Thank you @irime :) I'm very happy to be here. This loss does nothing to reduce how positive I am about steemit and the warm feelings I get from getting feedbacks on my posts from people like you. So no reason to sob, but rather to make up for some losses by being even more positive ;)

Lets hope so!

I really like your Mindset @fredrikaa :) Sh*t happens but you always got the choice whether to stay down or whether you get up again!

Thank you @steembusiness . Well yeah, life only goes one way, forward. So with or without a loss like that, one can only look forward to the next opportunity, and be even more keen on taking that properly :)

Happy to see you back and with good spirits! I hope the shock is covered in the next days with the usual steemit great experience

Thank you metabs for saying that.
Yes I am going to go back in even harder than before. No reason to spend time crying over spilt milk. Losing 493 steem into thin air is depressing though as I can't get that back now.

Sorry to hear what happened to you, but I'm glad you recover your account.
In life, is not what happens to us, it's how we react!

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That literally sucks soooo bad>>

Man, that sucks. I heard the news yesterday. One can but wonder just how scary it must have been. Hope you do well from now on. Lessons are learned in this wild west like environment.