The Explorer Attitude: What it means to Enjoy the Journey towards Success (a perspective for and from a Newbie on Steemit)

Enjoying the JOURNEY towards success is about celebrating SMALL PROGRESS with detachment from specific results.

Enjoying the journey means you don’t seek that ONE specific formula or ingredient, but about experiencing ingredient after ingredient until one understands the big picture of the situation, one gets a global perspective rather than staying stuck in solving one specific problem. This is the explorer’s attitude.

The lack of enjoyment comes from the fact that people get FIXATED and stuck on the symptoms of a problem without seeing the conditions, the context that creates it. This means the perspective is too NARROW which provides SCARCE resources for solving the problem. As a result, one sees maybe 1 or 2 OPPORTUNITY or POSSIBILITY to get unstuck and solve the problem.

With only 1 or 2 options available at hand, one has to face the LIMITATIONS of his conditions (from the environment or from his own experience and knowledge) which means one has to come up with MORE options in order to overcome them. But, since there are no more options, usually one gets STUCK with solving the problem.

This increases the level of stress and frustration which causes you to RESIST the situation. This is the moment when ONE problem becomes the WHOLE world because there is nothing else in the mind. So, the problem gets magnified and one finds so many reasons and evidence that go BEYOND the FACTS, beyond what is rational.

As a result, REALITY becomes STATIC: there is only the NOW and the problem. If you perceive reality as static, well there must be something that moves and it will be your emotions: one gets stressed, in panic, one gets the URGENT feeling to do something, anything. So, in a STATIC reality, one must DO something. As a result, we get a small business owner that is running in all direction and solves problems, handles things with multitasking which further increases emotional stress and leads to physical exhaustion.

One focuses exclusively on short term thinking, improvising for immediate results. He totally dismisses the PAST and fails to see in the FUTURE as there is only the NOW. At this point there is no reason to ENJOY the process. If someone comes at you DARING to tell you that, probably you will snap at him in a second as there is a general LOSS of HOPE and faith.

Enjoyment requires flexibility and flexibility is possible when one SEES in his mind a MULTIPLE pool of possibilities which are given by the multiple FACES of reality as you can move and switch your perspective from one face to another. This understanding can be metaphoric or specific by having certain skills.

This means one has a GLOBAL view of the situation where that ONE particular challenging problem is included too, but it represents just ONE face of reality and not the whole reality. Thus, the perception, the FOCUS is NOT limited to that particular problem as it narrows the opportunities to overcome it.

So, when you see the multiple faces of reality, you will understand that reality is not static and you wont feel the urge anymore to DO something. You will actually SLOW DOWN because you will SEE the MULTIPLE perspectives of the SAME problem, you will see the contexts and factors that influence your problem. Thus, you will slow down and take the time to figure out the proper order of the elements that will solve the problem without you pushing directly on the problem itself.

In this way you get detached from a specific outcome, you get relaxed, you become flexible as you try different ways before getting the right combination that will solve your problem.

So, the movements reverse: you don’t longer see reality as STATIC by getting STUCK of FIXATED on the problem, stressing out and running in all directions to solve it. You start to see the MOVEMENTS in a dynamic reality with multiple faces and you STOP to observe it and try to figure out the right order of things. So, when you starting seeing reality as MOVING and CHANGING environment, your tendency will be to get centered in order to observe it and your emotions will tend towards STILLNESS. Hence, you will have a peaceful state.

This is actually what staying PRESENT means which is the ability to see the dynamic of a moving reality that surrounds us 360 degrees.

For example, I am in this kind of situation right now as I am relatively new to Steemit and I haven’t figure out yet what is the “secret formula” for getting up votes and more dollars for my posts in an ethical way.

But, I am in the explorer phase where I still build up my GLOBAL view of Steemit by adding multiple observations, FACES around what makes a successful post.

So, far I have noticed that there are many poor articles that receive no upvotes and also many poor articles that receive many upvotes with many dollars. There are very FEW that provide good quality content both in the “no upvotes” category and in the “many dollars” category.

So, as a newbie, I think it becomes difficult for me to be SEEN in this whole POOL of dollars and upvotes hunters.

But this is just a PARTIAL perception of the reality on STEEMIT. As long as there are people who make money ethically from Steemit, I will just have to find out how by building on my GLOBAL perception about Steemit and adding multiple observations that eventually will make sense of all these getting upvotes and dollars thing.

In time we will see how this perspective changes.

Good luck!
Mihaela