Aspirations of the intangible kind

I've seen so many people write about their Proof of Brain journey and aspirations and it almost always seems to go something along the lines of...

'I joined the platform so many months ago. I currently have 500 POB or 100 Hive or 50 Leo tokens for arguments sake. My plan is to grow this to 1000, 200, 100 in the next (insert number of months). I therefore plan to write at least 1 article a day, and hope to get noticed by a whale or two...and one day become one myself'

Ok, perhaps that last bit about whales is made a bit more subtle...but it's there, more often than not, in the subtext. It's just how this platform seems to have evolved or at the very least, directs the misguided perception of it's "value" to newcomers joining it.

When I first joined a little over a month ago (although it feels like I've been here forever), I felt like an intruder, an alien in a very foreign world. The Hive and it's related communities seemed to me a minefield of locked doors requiring special key access wherever I turned and it took me about a week or two to get to the point that I could do some basic navigation around the system without the need for constant handholding and support. @jaxsonmurph knows all about this lol and was my wonderful mentor and support during those first few weeks, and has continued to encourage and inspire with the initiatives being introduced to the platform. I received support from @leprechaun when I was stuck powering up and others like @calumam have given me great feedback, encouragement and support and been an inspiration to follow.

I initially read these POB journey type articles in the hope that I would glean some understanding of what the platform was all about, how to go about using it, what to aspire to...Now, I don't bother much anymore. I am honestly not interested in how many tokens Joe Soap has or how many he/she wants to get in the next 2 months, 6 months or year. That is not my journey. I don't mind if they share it, but it just does not personally hold much meaning to me in isolation; without the context of the full framework of community engagement. I personally have no interest in trying to stalk whales or appease their interests in the misguided hope that this might induce them to follow me, curate me, or upvote me. It's certainly nice when they do find and read my articles and see value in them, and I have great appreciation for their promotion, support and encouragement, no argument there, but I realised quickly that those who focus only on the tokenisation element of the platform, can lose themselves somewhat along the way, treading a very narrow line chasing tokenised rewards at the expense of adding real value to their own being and to those around them; that a narrow approach to measuring one's worth on the platform would simply promote the wrong behaviours and an ethos that was not at the heart of community. So a strategy for success in Proof of Brain that does not venture beyond the realms of bean counting, is not for me. Don't get me wrong, I will still read people's journeys that they post, if the article grabs me from the outset, and I can see from a quick scan that it has more than just a discussion of financial token value to offer. I also appreciate that some may write these articles purely to keep a record of where they were at token wise at various points of their journey, and therefore publish it to the blockchain simply for perpetuity sake :-)

Now...I get it, I mean, it's really great being rewarded for your efforts and the rewards on Proof of Brain, and other Hive communities like Peakd and Leo, come in the form of author and curation reward tokens, which do have immediate monetary value, but which also have longer term, big picture staking value to benefit both yourself and others as well. There is nothing wrong with having financial aspirations both for yourself and for the community, and I don't think anyone can deny that they are also here, present on the platform, partly for those benefits, but I wonder if we could take a step back and also measure our success on this platform using different metrics? I wonder how each person's individual perspective and success in the community might differ if we also used non-financial KPIs to assess the true underlying value of our engagement; an assessment of how our actions support and drive the values behind Proof of Brain instead?

Just because something is a certain way, doesn't mean it has to stay that way or continue to be perpetuated, and I see many examples across the community of longer standing members trying to do their bit to keep this community on track. It is also wonderful to see that their ethos has filtered quickly to some of the newer members who have joined the efforts to fight the good fight, to keep the community primarily focussed on the intangible value of engagement, with merely an eye kept on the construct of tokenisation. The more I looked around, the more I found exciting opportunities for engagement such as @jaxsonmurph 's Favourite Article of the Day, @calumam 's Word of the week, @elricmoonslayer 's Random Thought of the Day, @wiseagent 's spreadingpob, and the @inkwellprompt, to name but a few. I am sure there are many more, but these are the ones I tend to support most, with the latter being a new discovery that I plan to explore further, but then again, I haven't been here long enough to find every engagement contest out there that may be of interest to me. Please do hit me up in the comments if you know of others you personally love, as I am sure it will benefit not just me but anyone who takes the time to stop by and take a read.

I enjoy writing to prompts as they push me outside of my comfort zone and force me to try new things, and these contests promote fabulous opportunities for community engagement and exposure to diverse perspectives.

I love to read across the spectrum of the community. My interests are so wide, so varied and I am never too shy to venture into an article about something completely different, or an unfamiliar genre, if the title catches my attention. I will also dip and sometimes dive into that article that's been sitting around for a few days with hardly any views, as not everyone is a master of the art of headline grabbing narrative. We are all on our own journey of literary growth. Most people have something important to say, if you just listen, and a good proportion of those add real value if you just give them a chance and lend them your time.

So, I've been giving it some thought:

Firstly, to be absolutely clear, I am not dissing those who measure their success in tokens. I'm sure that most of you who have done well, have achieved success through the relentless pursuit of POB's true values, and your accumulated tokenisation value is simply evidence of those efforts, and it it through your own curation, that you share your weighted value in the community with others. For some, the importance of gaining financial remuneration may be critical to survival, or to the support of their family, or to the achievement of the goal of escaping their day job and being able to support themselves financially through their passion for writing, and so a keen focus on token accumulation and value is important to them, and I respect that. But for those starting out or perhaps struggling on Proof of Brain, or those who may have become a little lost along the way, I truly believe that everyone should be setting themselves Proof of Brain goals that go beyond the mere value of tokenisation. Goals that measure the extent to which we uplift and support new authors, the extent to which our ambition for the platform stretches us as individuals, to reach out for the holy grail of attaining the level of engagement required to truly experience the uniqueness of the community, it's diversity of opinion, interest and perspective. We need to measure the range of unique interactions that we have across the board including who we interact with, the genres we explore and the diverse interests on offer. After all, we are not merely here to earn tokens, we are here to grow. We are here to learn. I feel like I may be beating a dead horse on this theme as I've rolled it out before, but it's important and warrants attention. As human beings, we are here to learn the art of engagement, the value of community. If we do not have the metrics to measure that human growth experience, then all we are doing is pocketing tokens.

So my strategy for getting the most out of Proof of Brain, as an author, is endeavouring to write from experience, write with passion, write about what is meaningful to me; all the while exploring new genres and perspectives and pushing myself outside of my comfort zones. When it comes to my creative works, it is me and my values and my pursuits whom it should represent, and my writings should not prostrate themselves or pander to the interests of others, just to earn tokenised rewards.

As a curator, my goal is simple. Read as widely as possible. Lend my eyes to the works of as many different members of the community as I can. Mix it up and explore a blend of different genres each day. I haven't done any statistical analysis of my curation but I know from the joy that I gain constantly from interacting on this platform, that I am on the right path and that if I can keep my eye on Proof of Brain's true purpose, if I can remain true to myself, I don't need to focus on the tokens, as they will take care of themselves. It reminds me of the well known tagline from the film, Field of Dreams. "If you build it, they will come." The most important thing about community, after all, is community, and we can only build relationships and grow the strength of the community, through continuous positive engagement.

So it makes me really happy when I see engagement projects on this platform. They come in the form of daily and weekly contests as already mentioned. They come in the form of community members making calculated decisions to improve the diversity of curation such as the POBLeus Project curation trail, the Engagement Project, @clixmoney 's dcc curation initiative, Ecency, and those who as individuals simply change the way in which they structure their account token distribution so that author rewards are increased to those who are deserving and here I give as an example @onealfa . I am not going to write a comprehensive list of all of those involved in these various curation projects; there are so many leading the charge and providing support behind the scenes. Suffice to say, the community has some solid foundations upon which to build, and architects working tirelessly to realise their design aspirations to improve across the board.

We can only exist as a community because we act and behave as a community. Without that we are nothing more than random strangers pursuing self interest alone, passing like ships in the night.

Photo credit:
Valeriy Ryasnyanskiy