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Streams of Gold

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@tarazkp
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I got a call from my neurologist today (it is weird I have a neurologist still) checking in to see how I am doing and let me know of next steps. Since everything is going as expected and relatively well, with the pain and symptoms I am experiencing considered normal, the next step for is the control MRI scan at the end of the year. However, he is now going to refer me to a neuro psychologist, as I again voiced my concerns about my processing abilities and my fears for how it is going to affect my work.

I have two jobs, one as an employee and one where I am self-employed, with both leaning heavily on my ability to think clearly, quickly and be able to problem solve across varied business domains. Take my ability to think on my feet away, and there is very little left to employee.

We all have our areas where we are the most competent and utilizing them well to create revenue streams that can provide for us is part of the game. Using them in ways that we actually enjoy is playing the game artfully. A lot of people want a job they love, yet do not consider their skillset and what it is capable of providing of value to the marketplace, making it hard to find that loved job.

It seems a lot of people fantasize about getting paid to do something that they are not necessarily very good at, like an author, even though they have never sat themselves down to see if they can seriously write well enough. Wanting to do something and being able to do something are two very different things.

It would be great if we all were able to do the things we love in life, especially if they are the things we are also good at, but the fact of the matter is, it is very rare to have the opportunities drop in our laps. In my own experience, the people who are able to do what they love have nearly always had to work their asses off and do a lot of things that they didn't love first, or simultaneously.

For example, one of my friends was a professional hockey player and played near daily from the age of five to his retirement in his early forties. Every day. From a young age, there was more than just hitting a puck around, it was gym work, strategy work, fitness work, stretching work, charity work... A lot of work. People wanted his salary and the glory of being on the ice as lead scorer for his team, but they definitely didn't want to do the 90% of what he had to do, so he could play the 10% of what he loved to do.

Today, someone asked if it was possible to have multiple revenue streams from the same core business and of course it is. Many businesses do this already in many ways with their core competencies, but also use secondary potentials for more income.

I see Hive in this way now, where we are able to earn HIVE in many ways, as well as extend that out to other tokens and NFTs if we choose. The more investment we put into the ecosystem, the more potential we have to draw value toward us and, if we extend laterally as well, we can have multiple incoming streams.

For example, I have a fair bit of HIVE and that allows me to earn on curation without doing much at all, other than consuming content I choose and clicking some buttons. However, my core competence and actually what led me to having that stake is through my writing and engagement on Hive, which I love doing so much that I don't plan on ever stopping. This at least for now, earns me more HIVE and it also keeps me engaged with the community in many ways too, which adds more value streams, with things like LEO, Splinterlands and all the other projects that arise.

For me, holding HIVE as stake is a risk, but it is also not quite holding in the traditional sense, as it is not only active like it would be in a DeFi pool, but also socially active as well, being able to push and pull value streams in many directions. Used well, it can bring in a range of values that aren't possible otherwise. It is very much like a skill being utilized for several jobs, like I do with my employed work and my self-employed work. The tasks I perform are quite different, the skills I use overlap heavily.

Finding something we are both good at and enjoy can be quite hard, as getting good at something usually takes a lot of resource investment, but investing is no guarantee of enjoyment. Of course, generally we invest ourselves into what we like, so there is more alignment in that regard, but there is no guarantee that what we like and are good at is going to be seen as valuable in the marketplace - which is why there aren't likely many millionaire yo-yo spinners.

Often, what has value in the market has so, because there is scarcity and need for the skill, meaning that the skill is likely hard to get and takes investment or a certain kind of person that is rare. If everyone could do it and it was fun to do, everyone would do it, meaning that there is no market scarcity and there is an endless supply of people willing to fill the job. The jobs that are the hardest to fill are the ones that require multiple skills that aren't necessarily often held by one person. For example, high technical and social skills. While many hold one of these, far fewer hold both, putting a premium on the position.

But, working out what we are good at and like, as well as what we are able to offer the market in order to generate an income is our responsibility, not something that just gets handed to us. If it was just handed to us, it would be more like the dystopia of A Brave New World, where while people are assigned jobs that they may excel in, the system doesn't care for their well-being, past keeping them productive.

I don't think anyone wants to be assigned a job based on their genetics.

Yet we are.

While I have worked very hard to have the skills I have, my propensity to hold them is not my own, with the majority of it coming down to me genetic predisposition that I have no control over. However, like wanting to and being able to are two different things, so to are having a predisposition and reaching the potential that the predisposition allows.

Finding what we have the potential to do and making the decisions on which directions we take are not always easy tasks and rarely come with ideal conditions, but it is still up to us to discover who we are and work out, just what kinds of value streams we can add to this world we inhabit.

Most of us spend our time working out how to best extract, and then wonder why we don't feel fulfilled by the work we do.

Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]

Oh, and the pictures.

It was raining this evening and I took these shots of the water running out of the downpipes. It was getting dark and I didn't want to use a flash, instead bumping the ISO speeds up. They are taken on an Olympus EM-1 MIII, using a 60mm 2.8 macro lens.

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