I made this up: "The must dangerous butt in the world is actually a stick; a cigarette stick!" Then, i will tell them, "you want to stop smoking? Get on steemit!"

And to a drug user, who relishes heartily, the possibility of stopping drug addiction, i could say; "come try a new addition; get on steemit!"

And to a janitor who is broken because he feels tied by circumstance, i could say, "come be a steemian-janitor and see for yourself, that a steemian-janitor has an edge of a janitor-janitor, once the steemit effect kicks in".

Am taking things to extremity? 

Well, that wasn't the point all along! Among other things, my point all along was:

Success is different things to different people and so is success on steemit!

So, instead of trying to measuring other people's success, to rate ours by; why not we ascertain what "success" is to us instead and use that as our measurement for "success"?

Well let's proceed!

There is a ton of reasons to be on steemit and i tell you, if your measure of success on steemit is the heftiness of the wallet; that may not be "success" to the brother steemian next to you. 

Case Study:

1. Some have a 636.82 bitcoin somewhere and can be here for leisure. "Leisure" may be success, for them!

2. @samstonehill has always wanted to dent true stories about his "dad's passing" into the permanent steem blockchain, since government and media have tried to whitewash and hide the real truth and accomplishing that, may be "success" for him.

3. Some simply are here for privacy sake! Yes, there is a privacy/anonymity paradigm integrated into the model of steem and though the blockchain is bare, privacy is very core for some and very much "success", once attained.

4. Creating un-eraseable legacies with time-stamps, for generations yet unborn to perch upon and find a fixing, is "success" for me. I did created that, somewhere on the steem blockchain long ago and did similarly, with a repository of steemians' legacies more recently.

5. Creating a steem dump, so that even this dump, is cherished and dug by all the great minds and institutions of the world as they seek the piece that completes their puzzle; is "success" to me!

6. Reshaping boring internet with my pieces and love, without worrying about whether IP will affect my possibility to rank, may be "success" to me.

7. Hahaha, I used to tell a friend @lagosnewyorker when we were much younger and we would try to brainstorm the way forward:

if money distribution was as easy as a text message, then you add automation and targeted, organic or even just general traffic (myriads) to the equation, then "quality of the idea" begins to matter less, for you can get generate millions even for doing nothing. 

Now seeing these old notions conceived only in my mind, play out in full-blown action on steemit among steemians, can be "success" to me.

8. I encode my innovation ideas and encrypt them into the lines of my posts, to keep these dreams alive in dream-bits (sandbox) and to get unadulterated feedback from a community of loving reputable great minds, so as to go and reform my whitepapers and attain an eventually solid road-map. "This is success to me!"

9. If i build my own nation on steem, without jurisdiction; boarder-less, hence VISA-less. This is "success" to me.

10. To sit leaned against my parapet, in front of a large @steempi enabled hyper-tech TV, watching steem-roll; steemians, in hyper-active happy state; "this can be success to me!"

11. If i am able to patent my ideas on the steem blockchain with time-stamp and before thousands of steemian brothers, then tell me this is not a measure of success if, when google takes me to court in USA (i suppose), i am also able to have them transport thousands of steemian eye-witnesses with me all the way to USA for free. 

And, "5,000 eye-witnesses" having my back, in any supreme court, before any human judge and we will overwhelm the entire court proceeding with steemian beauty and turn it into my winning party, and google reps dancing SEKEM one-sidely to their home, while singing:

He surpassed google, he surpassed google; let him be!

 Overall 

On steemit, there is an endless variety of things to mine and its not the token that is constant! The only constant thing is the "mining with minds" aspect. So;

How about the mining that results in other things like; services, brotherhood, connection, opportunity, personal growth and development, vision, mentality, life etc 

How about the mining that has involved mining other steemians' brains, by constructively sourcing out what is in it? 

How about the mining that has involved mining yourself; you know, finding yourself out through steemit? 

How about mining favor? How about mining out cure for HIV? How about the mining that involves the art of winning the trust of fellow steemians, brotherhood etc 

Aren't these all success too?

And finally, how about "learning"? Isn't learning the ultimately earning; e.g i went from knowing nothing about crypto to knowing something about crypto. Then i got into blockchain and started to understand its underlying concepts, then into some linux and some python then etc. Look at further testimonies:

In the words @ghulammujtaba:  

 I was a slave, used to work like an animal, 18 hours a day! Resigned from my jobs in January and April 2017 and started my own business that failed. Fortunately, I found Steemit while going through a blog, checked it and immediately signed up. 

My life before Steemit was aimless, I never knew what I wanted to do, infact my father didn't allow me to do what I wanted to do. After I got my login details, I saw some posts in the trending sections that made a lot of bucks, I thought to write on same topics that can earn me a lot of money. Wrote two or three filthy posts but then I asked myself "WTF I am doing?" You don't like writing about BTC or health or crypto world, write what you like, write what you think and let the world know that you're special with no skills.

Thanks to someone inside me who gave me the idea of writing about ordinary people, started a series "Untold Stories of Unsuccessful Persons" and posted 19th episode of this series.I always wished to draw and do some programming stuff but as I mentioned above, my father put some restrictions on things I loved, so thanks to Steemit, who gave me courage to start learning these skills at the age of 30. Just drew @exyle portrait on illustrator yesterday and it's just fine. Learning web development as well and will be a full stack Wordpress Developer after 4 months. I haven't killed my dreams yet.

So don't be discouraged or measure your efforts by what others do, for we have varying paths. This is general life talk!

Already wasted 18 years doing this, will never do that again to me for sure! 

Now compare 18 years, to months on steemit, in terms of learning and ultimately, earning!

Back to the basics #untalented

In the last post, we concluded that secret to success, even on steemit, may lie in the first basic simplest solution. Many times however, we jump to the nth solution first. 

So let's go back to the basics a bit, in this next contest/movement themed "#untalented: The snapshot of my blockchain before after joining steemit.

Let's all participate again by means of full-blown steemit posts that we can share home and abroad, offline and online.

Ofcourse for this contest; "flaws allowed"! So you can afford to be playful but make sure to 'feel'. You can use personalized variations for the title but try to unveil the same message. 

One aim of #untalented is to stir steemit growth as well!

So for this contest, try to recall life before steemit, then conclude by telling us about life now as a steemian.

Through this journey, try to see if there is a merge between the snapshot of your blockchain before steemit and the steem blockchain, for success may lie in this marriage.

Contest Specifics

1. Write a full-blown post describing the snapshot of your blockchain before you met the steem blockchain or steemit. (Tell us your vision, goals, aspirations, daily routine, your type of person etc (Flaws allowed! So relegate all reservations.)
2. Conclude your post with a shareable meme, describe you just before steemit and defining how much better you are now, since finding steemit. (Meme should contain YOU or any recognizable avatar/illustration/selfie of you and it can be 2 seperate memes or two in one. It can even be a bizarre drawing if you want). Note: the meme should contain (www.steemit.com) 
3. Create a meme easily here!

e.g this was the snapshot of my blockchain, just before i found the steem blockchain:

Before:

After Joining Steemit:

Final Notes

This is #untalented, so flaws allowed! In this space, relegate reservations, for there is no "average", there is no "bum".

Plus every participant wins something; no losers!

#untalented is also very much aimed at steemit growth as it does the world good to join steemit too. So i admonish all participants or non-participants to do well to share some of these entries onto other social media outlets. 

Where it is too cumbersome to share a post URL, participants should share their memes.

For a start, #untalented will span out a ton of contests/initiatives that will playfully, stealthily instill or re-instill beauty into us and assist with making us the best version of ourselves.

According to me, the best version of YOU is a gift to humanity everytime.

Then once we are all set to go, we will enter the fun part, were #untalented will dish out contests/initiatives that will help us find ourselves by attempting newer things. 

In general, #untalented is a home or a tag that can be used anytime, contests or not; e.g if you are in a state of finding yourselves by means of your posts; not to confident of your talent; not sure if your talent is talent or if you are feeling down in your self-confidence and need a push, solace, love forgiveness etc. 

Also share the best of your gifts/talents under #untalented. #untalented is a branch of @steemgigs and the steemgigs community already has close to 700 of the best steemian talents.

We will end up creating history by creating together, "the best version of human", with each human fully mined, till even our flaws are precious gems and our saddest stories; testimonial teachers!

So before we go to the fun part with #untalented, we want to fix some pertinent things, so that even the fun and merry moments can have utmost deep-lying up-building impact upon us and others. 

It is one thing to laugh to every joke and it is another thing to laugh at jokes, only after you have applied the joke to its full use. One laugh comes out bulkyly; the other one comes out in spurts, in moments, and even when it starts to fade, it lingers in tiny little cute pleasant-looking hearty "smiles".

One is processed, the other is reaction to a stimuli.

We want to get to those deep-roots, that is why we attempted to tap into it by the very first contest "Who you are".

#untalented is world reaching, thus, we hope that you try to reach out, even to non-steemians with these pieces of you & other amazing steemians, after you have been marveled by yours or their awesomeness.

Remember the twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn share button underneath each valuable entry and please let's share offline; online; home and abroad.

Your Boy Terry

@surpassinggoogle

 

My community effort is part of what i do as a steemit witness, thus, the use of the hashtag (witness category).

If you would want to vote for my witness, click here, then type in"steemgigs" in the first search box! You don't need voting power to vote for a witness! 

Or

Consider choosing @surpassinggoogle as your proxy, to help you with choosing your witness votes. To do this, visit https://steemit.com/~witnesses then type in "surpassinggoogle" in the proxy search box as seen below!  

  Join us on Steemgigs community on discord to contact me directly: https://discord.gg/wWrnSXK and join SteemGigs on Facebook!

Everyone has something to offer!

Done me by @sunnylife with love!